Social marketing so far, since the introduction of the Web 2.0 concept, has been as consistent as elementary school yearbook photos. Some plans are hairy, stuff sticking out everywhere; some are skinny and sickly; others are goofy-looking and awkward. For instance, whereas Facebook is only now seeing the need to incorporate per-page advertisement, MySpace has so many ad spaces a house-bound lurker with epilepsy would get a seizure from all the pulsating Flash modules. But both are basically profitable, so no one bats an eye. Now, FastCompany.com, the online partner of Fast Company magazine, has launched their Web 2.0 version of their web site. What’s so different with this rendition of social networking? The answer is in the deployment, and FastCompany.com is looking like the jock-socialite of the 3rd grade.
The site opted to base its entire site design on a well-known open source content management system (CMS) and multi-blog portal called Drupal. The CMS is modular, which means functionality of different components can be put anywhere you can code it to be. Working on CMS projects in the past, my own experience is partial to Mambo and Joomla, but Drupal seems so much better as an open source option for an in-house development because of its coding simplicity. Dries Buytaert, lead project manager for the Drupal platform and a Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D student at the University of Ghent in Belgium, in a post dated April 24, 2006, described how this platform, along with community involvement technologies common with Web 2.0 endeavors, was going to impact mainstream media such as magazines with online presences: “I spent [since 2001] developing software that enables individuals to publish and share content on the Internet. Soon, amateur content providers will have very powerful tools to compete with traditional media[…] We are reshaping the future of news, information and journalism, and, if they want to avoid getting left behind, they have to position themselves at the forefront of citizen journalism, take part in it, collaborate with amateurs, and embrace new Internet technologies.”
Mansueto Ventures, LLC, owner of the Fast Company and Inc. magazine brands, treats FastCompany.com as a separate part of their assets, along with the Inc. web version, Inc.com. They recognize the difference in online publication as opposed to the linear and permanent tangibility of print media. Describing the FastCompany.com web site after its upgrade, Mansueto calls the site “the online destination for information and conversation about how innovation is reshaping the economy and the workplace”, an excerpt from their brand description on Mansueto.com. More important in this statement than what the site does is how it’s done; information is all over the web, but there are only select sites that deploy the conversational aspect of Web 2.0 effectively.
FastCompany.com was launched with all the conversation and social networking it could handle. Upon signup, users can add an entire, comprehensive, business-oriented profile that is accessible based on your privacy preferences (from open access to only your personal contacts). It reads much like a professional CV, with professional and educational history along with a biographical section. The contact info you add can even be downloaded as a VCard for insertion into your favorite mail program. You can add images, multimedia of your own, and even write a blog dedicated to innovations in business (or whatever else you want). Your profile, and blog, can be read by any RSS feed reader or inserted in a site that syndicates RSS feeds. You even have the security to receive only certain communications from other registered users, something Web 2.0 pioneer MySpace really should do a better job to filter.
That’s just the crust, though. There may be only small advances in features for communicating professionally and safely, but the process of interacting with others on the site is brilliant in terms of support for the site’s profit centers, namely new subscribers and online ad impressions. The trick will be sweetening these profit centers by offering something that is missing from most other non-tech publications: an interactive experience with both print and online media.
The premise to why this site, after all the other social marketing success stories, should be regarded as a higher achievement is based on the people that would get the most use from it, namely business egomaniacs. What better way to make a networking contact on the mean playgrounds of business than to impress everyone with how much greener your company can be than the other guy? FastCompany.com takes out of the equation the need to start the conversation, a key element of making networking contacts where most people fail. Instead of taking your contact out to lunch, why not get him to answer a community question on the impact green property development projects have on small business access to new office space? Once you have people interested in what’s being discussed, FastCompany.com needs to develop some ways to empower the print magazine with that knowledge.
For print publications, one of the hardest advantages of which new publishers must let go to really be considered socially networked is to allow readers to be part of the content. While you can take your time to edit and refine the quality of editorials written by professional journalists, the reason Web 2.0 has been so important to the development of the web is sort of calibrated answer derived from community involvement, such as the more stable software that tends to come from open source projects. Think of this as open source media, a publication that allows multiple users to come up with the answer to a question. FastCompany.com and the Fast Company magazine, with how they have deployed their site, are primed to combine each brand’s strengths to resolve some of their weaknesses.
Some options the duo has include magazine inclusion of community discussions, staff writers who summarize the conversations being conducted and add their own take on the subject, magazine ads that give the community more content related to the advertiser with a search keyword exclusive to the site, and letters to the editor that include emails or online discussions in which the editorial staff have been involved. The idea is to not only allow access to features on FastCompany.com, but allow users exclusive access to the magazine. The more you give away free, such as being quoted in a major national publication, the more people will get involved for the chance to get that free stuff. That’s good for readership, web site visits, and advertiser appeal.
To add to the social networking madness, Mansueto has also launched FastCompany.tv, a cross between a Newscorp online affiliate and YouTube. The site is less Web 2.0 and more on-demand broadcasts, but the potential, using Drupal and a little filtering of submissions, is huge for business vloggers. FastCompany.tv cannot yet open its doors to all submissions like YouTube does because, as anyone may notice in the sea of YouTube content, a lot of submissions are nothing more than people being stupid. To ensure the quality of the site, it’s better, until proper tagging methods can be developed, to offer its own streams to share and discuss. However, to survive in today’s low upload time for high speed Internet users and constantly growing array of video-content-related web sites, Mansueto needs to start opening the site up to include user-created content. This will also save some production cost; one of the biggest reasons why places like YouTube are perfect advertising profit centers is because no cost is needed to produce the content; people give you the content and you make money from the advertising, kind of like a pawn shop holding a really pretty ring so it can display it in the window, all the time selling other stuff in the store because people came to look at the pretty ring.
Mansueto has a pretty good niche market in business innovation. Its readers of Fast Company and Inc., along with the web deployments, are thinkers, networkers, and people who are passionate about going beyond just having a job. They have offered online features that will push them ahead of competitors like Entrepreneur Magazine and Forbes, but being a smaller publication also means pulling readership from the big guns. Being a publication that follows business trends, of course, does have its own strategic advantage.
