[NMMC] Vince Maher opens the day

(This is a synopsis of talk given by Vince Maher, Strategist at Mail & Guardian, at the new Media Marketing Conference)

History:

Vince joined MG in Dec 2006, and was put in charge of Social Media strategy with a R0 budget. He literally had to create something out of nothing.

His team came up with a 3 step strategy for blogging

• host blogs,
• aggregator,
• create blog platform for their journalists

First project was News in Photos, which is a collection of galleries of existing photos. A New website had to be created because the team couldn’t work with main site for technical reasons. News in Photos introduced citizen journalism, and there are now all kinds of photos being posted by the public.

Next step was to build Amatomu. It took two days to develop into alpha, and another 3-4 months in feedback from community which resulted in tweaking the product.

Amagama (which allows you to set up a personal blog) was one of biggest failures because of sudden exodus of 80% of users.

Other projects:

• Thought Leader
• The Guide (yiza is a sub-brand, social network)
• 3 mobile sites (Mail Guardian Online, Thought Leader, The Guide)
• Job Connection
• New MG Online site
• Campus times, student community portal, about to launch.
• Weekly podcast, between the pages. 5000 downloads per week.

AMATOMU

There was no place to go to find out what is happening in blogosphere. Amatomu tracks statistics, builds chart, aggregates content. It was simple to build, php. Tyler Reed broke news of Amatomu, and Amatomu went from 20 to 300 users in two days. About 2500 blogs are tracked. 4.8 million click throughs thus far. Amatomu capitalises on egocentrism of blogosphere.

There are about 650 posts tracked per day.

The Top 10 tracked blogs are responsible for about half of traffic tracked by Amatomu, which means that probably, on a country wide scale the top 10 blogs are responsible for about a third of all blog traffic.

Amatomu is still in alpha. There is no back-end. There are no scalability issues. External API might be made available with time.

Amatomu was built by community. MG provided technology, but it responded to requests of community.

THOUGHT LEADER

Thought Leader is a run away success, and it is monetized successfully.

There are 70,000 unique readers, and 300,000 pages per month.

There are 10,000 newsletters subscriptions, but only 300 RSS feeds. (Email is best way to reach mass audience.)

Thought Leader is a group blog bulit on a customized version of word press, with customized permalinks with author’s name.

Reader interested in popularity. Want to browse by tags.

Wide advertising format. 300x 250 or 300x 600 formats. which have received good results.

Challenges of Thought Leader:

Getting people to contribute for free

Future launches: Business Leader, Tech Leader, Media Leader, Sport Leader in the pipelines in next three months.

All MG sites built in open source. Database is mySQL. All on same servers, 2 boxes with 2Gig RAM, which are sitting in London. Currently tracking 7.2 million page impressions per month. Cost R7000 pm.

Note: For photographs, videos and blog posts by Zoopy, the official social media sharing partner for the New Media Marketing conference, go to www.zoopy.com/newmedia.