Turning Free Content Into Revenue
August 4th 2010 Posted at Business Development
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In my post last week (Would you pay for Twitter?) I got a comment from a reader who asked:
“Here’s my question, if you are a business and offer a lot of things for free, how do you parley that into appropriate revenue without disengaging your audience?”
That is a very good question, and one that every business (or would-be business) should be asking. I started thinking about this a couple of years ago, posting this article (How Can You Measure the Value of a Conversation?) in October ’08. Here is the heart of the message:
Make money “because of”, not with
The “because of” effect is much more powerful than the “with” effect. One of the commenters on Jason’s post, Mack Collier (The Viral Garden), hits the nail on the head with:
…companies that are NEW to social media, wanting to use metrics and measurements that they are used to when using TRADITIONAL marketing methods to ‘get their message out there’. Their thinking is ‘how do we make money from this?’, whereas companies that have been active in this space for a while, such as Dell, understand that by PARTICIPATING that they will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of their efforts. Dell has been in the game long enough to see the impact that their efforts are making, and as a result have shifted away from the ‘how do we make money with this?’ mentality.
Attempting to DIRECTLY monetize social media efforts is the quickest way to ensure they fail. But companies that aren’t familiar with this space don’t know any better. In a few years, after more companies are more familiar with these tools, I think we’ll see them looking to INdirectly monetize their efforts, while putting the focus on SM as a way to DIRECTLY connect with their customers.
One of the best lessons that I learned from the SOBCon event that I attended in May was that blogging (and Social Media in general) should be treated like a business. That business is the marketing of your products and services & establishing yourself/your business as an authority. The goal of that business is to make money because of your blog (or Social Media efforts), instead of with your blog.
Let me repeat that for you – “by PARTICIPATING [you] will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of [your] efforts”.
If microblogging service Twitter was entertaining even the slightest notion of charging for its service, then it might want to reconsider. A recent survey of nearly 2,000 people found that zero percent – you heard correct – of respondents would pay to use the service.
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