I missed the first half of The Guardian community manager Meg Pickard'stalk as I was interviewing Ben Self, but the part that I caught social media and how it is being utilised by publishers to make decisions about what the public is genuinely interested in. She again reiterated the point that it does not need to be complicated, but simple things like picking out comments and utilising them is a good way to engage. She cited Twitter as a good example of a service that has succeeded because it is simple. The Guardianitself has used similar principals, such as a service it created on Flickr called Message for Obama, which received 500 different pictures carrying message for Obama within a day. Within three days it was able to put a centre-spread in the physical newspaper, and was turned into a book within three weeks. Each contributor was given a free copy of the book, and while it did not make money, it generated a lot of PR for The Guardian.
"We didn't make any money, but we generated an enormous amount of goodwill," Pickard said. "We sold several hundred, but we had several thousand people linking to it on Facebook."
She also talked about what it takes for people with points in common to become a community, and she defined that as interaction. There is a wholly trinity of technology, people and editorial. She also talked about the transition from casual users to connected users, committed users and finally catalysts - the final category being the ones who represented less than 1 percent of the audience, but are blogging and twittering about you, saving stories on del.ico.us and creating pages on Facebook, that you need to find a way to engage with.
"They will bring in more of those casual users," Pickard says.
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