This session offered summaries of four reports written for the Local Media Association Innovation Alliance delivered with tips, tricks, tactics for success and examples.

1. The Hottest Opportunities
for 2012
September, 2012
Atlanta, GA
Shannon Kinney
Founder, GM, Client Success Officer
shannon@dreamlocal.com

2. What’s hot?
• Social Content Strategies
• Digital Agency: is it for you?
• Selling Social Media
• SOLOMO programs
• Event Marketing
• Think like a startup – low to no cost toolsets
and more

3. Social Content Strategies

4. Strategy & ROI
• Building brand awareness and
engagement
• Brand extension
• Content sourcing and curation
• Increased reach
• Social amplification

5. Strategy & ROI
• Social influencers (recruit and leverage,
build relationships)
• Incremental revenue / audience growth
• Gathering user generated content (ugc)
• Increase digital footprint
• Closely monitor your analytics!!

6. Ethical considerations
• How do you identify yourself?
• Separate personal and professional
Twitter feeds?
• How do you verify?
• What language is acceptable (WTF)?
• What, if any, opinions are OK?

7. Developing your content plan
• Why a content plan is important
• What’s in a content plan?
• Your voice
• Important brand messages
• What will be posted where, when
• Standards for your content mix (marketing and
promotion, conversation, listening) – balance is
CRITICAL
• Promotions / strategies for fan base growth

8. Content Distribution
• Develop a strategy per channel to maximize engagement.
Look closely at audience and optimum times/day for
posts
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• Blogs and RSS
• YouTube
• LinkedIn (Company Status Updates,Groups, discussions)
• Pinterest
• Posterous, Digg, Tumblr, Reddit, Delicious

9. Targeting
• By geography
• By topic or niche
• By columnist (if they
will engage with users)
• By category (advertising)

10. Challenges to overcome
• Need to master all channels and optimize your
content for them, invest the time
• Digital is different from traditional media
• Content is bite sized, photos and videos carry more
weight
• Social web requires monitoring
• Need to develop SOP to build into your workflow
• Develop strategy to work with and leverage citizen
journalists and UGC (blog hosting @ BDN)
• Requires good knowledge of SEO

11. Local Digital Ad Agency Model

12. The internet, and social media in
particular, have radically changed
the way people consume
information and the way
businesses promote themselves.

13. In this economy,
every business
is re-thinking all of their budgets,
and they will never return to the
way they once were.

14. The customer: Local businesses
• Increasingly, cannot afford traditional
marketing, but don’t understand options
• View online marketing, and Facebook in
particular, as an affordable and important
option
• Are too busy to keep up with managing their
marketing and their businesses, seek assistance
• Are hungry for solutions
• Social media can bring significant results

15. “You have to sell what sells…
There is a huge sweet spot
between a full-blown (high end)
agency and the very small stuff.”
Keith Wilson
Publisher of the Times-News and
The Times Digital Group Team

16. Times-News Digital Group Breakdown
• Most profitable service:
video production
• Billings average: 1/3 of all
digital revenue for company
• Separate P&L but rolled into
company total
• Double digit growth each
year
• Average rate structure:
$100/hour

17. Why Agency?
• Serving local businesses is core to your mission
and role in your community
• Maintaining the relationship as the trusted
advisor and partner is critical to your long term
success
• Filling the advertiser need and guiding them
through the process will solidify your position
• Solution-based selling builds trust
• Can ultimately sell more print

18. Go BEYOND the ad budget,
tap into the marketing budget

19. The decision:

20. In-house
• Need dedicated resources with experience in
digital, video, mobile, and social media
• Tight operational efficiencies need to be
developed to protect margins
• Average investment of companies we surveyed
$200,000 many newspaper companies have
invested several times more than that
• Need to stay on top of rapidly-changing trends
• Ability to quickly and nimbly scale

21. Outsource option: Dream Local

22. Selling Social Media

23. Solution Components
Core Offering Optional
• Video optimization, distribution,
• Online marketing strategy marketing
development • Photography
• Social Media channel • Mobile marketing solutions (sites,
enhancement and ongoing promotions)
management • PR
• SEO / SEM
• Reputation Management
• Agency level service (media
and SEO planning, etc)
• Email marketing • Event promotion (flyers, etc)
• Blog posting management • Print ad design
• Video development & • Web site & landing page
development
editing

24. SOLOMO

25. “Our local retailers suddenly understand that the entire
retail experience is going digital.”
“The challenge for most retailers in using social media
is they are too busy managing their business”
“We know offering our customers a way to expose their
business quickly and efficiently positions us as a true
marketing partner.”
Tim Anderson
Vice President of Revenue Development,
Savannah Morning News

26. Breakdown of SOLOMO program
• Set packages available, priced in local market
• Intense sales training
• Seminar event – several per day for 2-3 days
(event planning support from corporate)
• Follow up – make it fast! (If you can’t close
there, get appointment within 5 business
days)
• Contracts fulfilled at corporate in most cases

27. Social package includes:
• Setup on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, foursquare
• Social media dashboard – update multiple networks in one
place
• Reputation monitoring and alerts
• Competitive monitoring and alerts
• Best practices guide and help line
• Management available as an option
• …and more!

28. Local package includes:
• Google, Yahoo! and Bing map and place pages optimization
• Entry and hygiene of your business listing on 25+ online
directories to maximize your local exposure
• Standardize and enhance your business listing across major
search engines
• Premium placement on cjonline.com’s local directory

29. Mobile package includes:
• Mobile micro-site for your business
• Unique promotional keyword text promotions
• Unlimited text messaging
• Mobile subscriber database and management
• Appointment reminders and scheduling for subscribers
• Best practices and help line
• And more!

31. Summary of findings
• The Chattanooga Times Free Press has earned more
than $2.5million in revenue over the past three years
with an innovative event strategy
• Wide variety of events, most popular targets are
women and seniors
• Entire newspaper team (across departments)
supports the event team’s efforts
• Strong team and planning are required
• Deepens relationships with advertisers / sponsors

32. Leveraging a Newspapers’ Strengths
• Recognizable and trusted brand
• Voice in the community
• Market penetration
• Diverse portfolios
• Creativity
• Workforce
• Relationships with businesses
• Community Parternships

33. Revenue Sources
• Sponsorship sales
• Ticket sales
• Booth & ticket
sales
• VIP packages
• Premium seating
• Merchandise

34. Win-win
• Help advertisers grow foot traffic
• Creative and innovative solutions for
advertisers and sponsors
• Deepen community engagement
• Grow customer base
• Strengthen under-performing audiences,
showcase high-performing audiences
• Terrific marketing opportunity for paper

35. What you need for success
• Invest in your vision, create world-class event
• Intense planning and learning from the
experience
• Teamwork
• Strong partners (facility, meeting supply
company if needed)
• Solid marketing & promotion
• Effective sales effort

36. Think like a startup

37. “This isn’t about saving money, it’s
about accelerating innovation”
Senior Digital
First Media executive

38. Nimble Companies
• The Bangor Daily News: the team replaced an aging
editorial front end system with low-cost solutions, re-
organized and retrained their teams to become a digital
first organization, and has the results to prove it
• McNaughton Newspapers: transformed four of their
operations with low cost tools and eliminated technical
limitations from being placed upon them by vendors in
the process
• Journal Register Company (JRC): Launched the Ben
Franklin Project to transform their newsrooms and
introduce culture change throughout the organization

39. Summary of findings
• All found large cost savings, yet all stress the value
comes in innovation
• All had a desire to be more in control and felt that
they couldn’t get that control with their current
vendors and software
• Efficiencies were gained at each profiled company
• Digital-first publishing is now in place at each
property
• New and exciting initiatives were developed as a
result of using free/no cost tools

40. McNaughton Newspapers
• Replaced newsroom and web site
infrastructure with low-cost web-based
solutions
• Cost savings were a requirement, but goal was
to gain more local control and options than
vendor solutions could provide
• Become digital native “leapfrogging” then
digital first newspaper model
• Went from Baseview to WordPress via open
source project EditFlow

41. Key takeaways
• Innovation can happen with limited financial
investment – in fact, in these cases, forcing the
teams to work with less drove innovation – however,
focusing on expense control vs. opportunity misses
the mark
• To be successful in these endeavors, you must be
willing to re-think your entire process and
workflow, piece meal efforts will not generate large
results
• Companies both small and large can achieve
tremendous growth by adopting these innovative
strategies

42. Thank you!
Shannon Kinney
Client Success Officer
Dream Local Digital
shannon@dreamlocal.com
@shannonkin
www.dreamlocal.com
Facebook.com/shannonkinney
207-354-7073