Making Money from Content

This article is part of a road show presentation series I’m doing in Toronto for Intertainment Media, owners of Itibiti Systems. This post has been reprinted on the Intertainment Media blog.

Al O’Grady from Agoracom interviewed me about some current trends in social media. Nice little overview. See a larger version here.

For more, read 14 Successful Techniques for Building Your Industry Voice with Social Media. Plus, there are additional articles and coverage from my Toronto tour.

Earlier this week I wrote an article for Mashable entitled “5 Ways Companies Used News Trends for Business Success.” The article tells five tales of businesses that capitalized on industry trends and cultural memes.

Yesterday, on day four of my Toronto social media road show, I spoke with the Canadian online travel agency, itravel2000, who actually had to fight back against the traditional news reports that were actually hurting their business.

In February, the general news media was reporting on the drug and gang wars going on in Mexico. To the casual observer, the problems seemed systemic across the entire country, and as a result people stopped booking travel to Mexico. It got so bad that  itravel2000’s Mexico travel which usually accounts for 40% of their business dropped to 14%, said Brad Miron, VP Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, for itravel2000.

In reality, said Miron, the violence was happening alongside the U.S./Mexico border, about 3600 km from any of itravel2000’s vacation destinations. So to combat the negative mainstream press about Mexico, itravel2000 sent camera crews to Mexico to report on what was really going on in the vacation destinations, and they posted 90 videos on a custom blog entitled, “What is really happening in Mexico.com.”

In just two weeks, 50,000 people visited the blog, and their Mexico travel bookings returned to 40% of overall bookings.

Once again, itravel2000 is facing another Mexico news story that’s impacting their business – swine flu. Since they were so successful with their last blog, they’ll be launching another custom blog,  It’s time to go to Mexico.com (will be live July 29th) where video crews will follow a handful of families going to Mexico.

For more, watch my interview with Brad Miron of itravel2000.

Are you running into issues where either your business or your client’s business is scared to jump into social media because certain elements are unproven and it still feels like unknown territory? Some may feel comfortable with social media and have already made their mark, but for others it can be daunting as to how do you go about making your mark effectively.

It’s far easier to simply purchase traditional media which is a proven ground even if its results aren’t as stellar as they’ve been in the past.

After my presentation at PHD, I talked about this issue with Sandra Clark, VP Client Services Director for PHD in Toronto, ON. She echoed many of the concerns I’ve heard before which are “How do we measure this?” and “Do we know if this is even working?” With most clients looking at measurable campaigns that last six weeks, how do you convince them to jump into something for the long haul that you can’t guarantee necessarily audience or success?

Not every call into a call center is monitored and edited, so why should you want or try to do that with social media? This is the question to ask your clients if they’re wanting to go through multiple levels of approval at all levels of social media engagement.

Your goal should be to train staff on how to engage in social media in a way that answers questions correctly and stays within your corporate brand. That was the discussion I had with Daryl Stansfield, Digital Account Director at PHD, in Toronto, ON. I was happy that he mentioned having a previous financial client (see previous post about financial concerns in social media) that had a Facebook forum that was so successful that users started helping users.

After conducting a talk at Research Capital in Toronto, ON, I chatted with David Shore, SVP & Head, Technology Group at Research Capital and Alec Saunders, CEO of iotum, makers of Calliflower, a free to pay conference calling application.

Shore organized the event and authors the Web 2.0 Weekly, a newsletter covering the financial aspects of the Web 2.0 space. Looking for trends and investing opportunities, he follows this space closely.

Alec Saunders is an old friend who I’ve interviewed before in my “Be the Voice” podcast and he was part of my presentation. He successfully launched his unknown product by being passionate about blogging and podcasting. He’s got one other tip on getting recognized. Watch the video.

Today was my first day of a week long road show I’m doing in Toronto where I’m speaking at various companies about social media and specifically how they can grow their industry voice with social media and make money from it.

You can read the full article and other pertinent information here: “14 Successful Techniques for Building Your Voice with Social Media.”

My first presentation was at Raymond James Ltd., a North American investment firm. During and after my presentation, I got some of the standard questions such as “Who has time for this?” and “What about privacy?” But we also talked about the incredibly tricky situation social media presents to Raymond James and other financial firms. They face such a mountain of regulatory issues that they don’t even both engaging in social media.

I’m not a lawyer, nor an SEC commissioner, but we got to discussing the issue and there was some consensus that being able to blog online or engage in any kind of social media discussion would require creating a dividing line of what content you offer up for free that can be unregulated and what content do you charge for that is regulated.

Advice vs. information and opinion

This is the initial broadly agreed upon dividing point. Advice is actionable, regulated, and can potentially be liable. There are compliance issues with regard to communicating with customers. The question is can information and opinion that is given out to anyone whether they’re a customer or not, avoid being held to the same standards? It’s not actionable advice.

Attending the session were also some members of CHF Investor Relations. After speaking with them and some employees at Raymond James, I realized they run into many of the same customer service problems that other companies must contend with. For example, when certain investment news hits, the financial discussion boards and blogosphere are all abuzz. In turn, they get calls from customers asking their opinion on a certain story or issue. If the opinion is being communicated over the phone, why not just take that same opinion and write it up in a blog? Such a move will provide two valuable benefits:

1. Increase discoverability – If people are calling you about a certain issue, chances are pretty high they’re also typing that issue into a search query. If you provide your opinion on the matter, that opinion will start appearing in natural searches. Being successfully discovered is all about timing. If people are calling you about a matter at 12pm on a Monday, make sure you get your opinion out within the next hour or two. Don’t wait until Thursday next week. Your audience will have moved on by then.

2. Ease customer service – If you’re getting hammered with people asking the same question, it would be a lot easier on your entire staff if you just pointed everyone to the same piece. It will cut down customer service hours dramatically.

Here are a couple of good follow up articles:

Top 12 financial advisors using social media – “The New Rules of Investing” blog compiled its list of top 12 investors taking advantage of social media plus links to all their social media sites (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc.)

Financial Firms Turn to Social Media to Attract New Gen X, Y Clients – Story from Wall Street and Technology about how some firms are taking the leap into social media, most notably Wells Fargo and Zecco, to attract new customers that are going to inherit the assets from their current customers.