Traditional Media Steps Up to Social Networking
Rolling Stone is gearing up to launch its social network—an ambitious proposition considering they represent the old guard in music journalism. Crazy kids today (who get their music info from Pitchfork anyway) are likely content in their Facebook and MySpace camps. But those forty- and fifty-something R.S. mainstays—are they ready for this newfangled interactivity?
TechCrunch wonders:
The Rolling Stone audience may be too old to get into the social networking scene. [One j-school student] says only one person in her class actually admitted that they ever read the magazine.
Similarly, this June, NBC plans to battle the summer slump by launching a social network of its own. The placeholder site proclaims that it will allow “…all of our fans to connect with each other and interact with our shows in exciting new ways.”
Fans of NBC shows can already interact on designated show message boards. The Peacock is obviously preparing to take that to a whole new level.
Traditional and new media continue to cross-pollinate.
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Sara said,
on April 16th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Sounds a whole lot like the recently revamped & relaunched USA Today site…
I’m really interested to see if these catch on because this kind social network stove-piping seems so contrary to the things that draw users into social networking, such as the abilities to use a wide-range of media and “groups” to self-brand on one’s profile page, meet and talk to a diverse group of friends based on multiple interests, and access several different kinds of media and communities at once.
Does anyone have any insight/metrics on the success of this kind of company-specific social networking?
I’m not sure where the appeal would be in creating a profile on “Rolling Stone’s” site, rather than interacting with it and other “Rolling Stone” “friends” on MySpace (esp. since the mag already has a pretty active and interactive MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/rollingstonemagazine) by adding the mag as a “friend” and and/or joining “Rolling Stone”-centric MySpace groups and/or forums.(which don’t seem to exist yet…for shame, “Rolling Stone…)
The anticipated success must be based on a “casting-a-wider-net” demographics strategy, although, per “Rolling Stone’s” website, 57% of its audience is age 18-34, which falls right into MySpace’s demo (per October 2006 stats, more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors were age 25 or older–the bulk [about 40%] of those falling into the 18-24 range http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1019).
I think that while there’s absolutely no harm in amping up the interactivity and user engagement of “Rolling Stone’s” site, their strategy should also include efforts to amp up their efforts and activity on other social networking/bookmarking sties.