Publishers are constantly looking for ways to generate a large volume of mid-to-long-tail content, cost effectively.
Bloggers are a great way to generate content:
- they don’t demand a high price per post (since most of them are doing it part time)
- with blogging software, it’s easy to aggregate a large group of these people
- consumers connect well “person-to-person”, as blog consumption has grown over the last 10 years
The challenge with managing bloggers as content writers is
- managing scale
- keeping them motivated to write
- keeping them motivated to promote / market their blog
#2 and #3 are the biggest questions publishers face. There are multiple models for How To Pay Bloggers:
- Pay Per Post
- Revenue Share
- Traffic Payments
- Flat Monthly Fees
My recommendation is a combination of #1 and #3. This sets blogger expectations to generate a set amount of revenue, with the benefit of upside if they can generate traffic.
What is Facebook Connect?
Facebook Connect ties websites into a users social graph of real friends. For the first time, a developer or publisher can build great product and content, and then tie into Facebook by leveraging what friends the consumer has in making a personalized experience and — marketing to their friends. Content shared between friends gets clicked much more often than content pushed by a publisher (on a landing page).
Facebook Connect allows 3rd party websites to
Read & display a user’s
- photos
- name / basic info
- friends
Write & publish to a user’s
Benefits:
-
Traffic - 300mm Facebook users can share your content with their friends on Facebook [For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site]
-
Engagement - seeing your friends that are on the 3rd party site [sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content]
-
Registration - allow users to use their Facebook credentials, lowering the barrier to register. [sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.]
Stats above are from Facebook.
Examples:
- CitySearch - view your Facebook friends reviews, and publish your review to Facebook
- TechCrunch/Blogs - comment on a blog using Facebook credentials, and publish the comment to Facebook feed
- Vimeo.com - login with Facebook, video likes and dislikes publish to Facebook feed
-
Prototype (video game for xbox 360) Ad Campaign - once you connect with Facebook on their mini-site, the creative pulls in photos and other info from your profile to customize a trailer and insert you into the video games’ world. This is really cool - you should check this out if you have a second (you’ll need a Facebook acct).
- JC Penny Ad Campaign - beware of the doghouse - JCPenny and Saatchi & Saatchi built a mini-site that allows anyone to punish their significant other by putting them in the doghouse [http://www.bewareofthedoghouse.com/]
