Steph Stuff

We are about to embark on a whole new road at my paper. A road I’m very excited about.

Not only are things going pretty well with our Twitter accounts, and fan page and all of that basic stuff, but we’ve got our first Beat Blogger, and we’re about to enter the realm of monetizing this Social Media stuff.

We may try out slipping an ad into our twitter stream like the awesome Austin Statesman has done. I rather like this unobtrusive tweet done two or three times per day that actually offers something of value to the local area.

We’re also going to begin offering interested advertisers the option to have our in-house Social Media person (me) manage their online presence – for a price.

When I was thinking about ways to bring services like Twitter and Facebook to our advertisers, my first thought was to show them how to use it. Well that’s just stupid. There aren’t many local businesses here that have the time or inclination to jump into the social media fray.

But some of them know they should and that’s where we’ll come in.

We’re hard at work trying to define this potential revenue source and figure out the best ways to approach it. I’ll write more about it once we put move forward, but I’m so excited about it that I wanted to mention it.

In other news, later this month I’ll be part of a Social Media panel for Nebraska Travel & Tourism’s annual conference. It’s the first time I’ve done something like this and I’m nervous as hell, but thrilled to be a participant.