The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like a nod to newspapers, but you’re not really a news site. Do you consider yourselves a blog, an online magazine, an aggregator or something else entirely?

The reason we call ourselves an online magazine and not a blog is because we knew that when we launched, the business world was not completely familiar with the word “blog.”

In addition, our site features deeper and richer articles than a typical blog. All of our articles are at least 1000 words. We publish once a day, 24 articles a month, which is essentially the same amount of articles that are in a print magazine.

You’re the first person ever to tell me that we have a newspaper type of name. The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like it’s socially important, it sounds like it’s established and that it’s been around forever.

The site has a particularly memorable look, with its jungle-themed design and cartoon illustrations. Where did that come from?

The site definitely has a unique visual display. Our mascot is this little guy named Scout, named by our user community in a contest during our one-year birthday celebration.

I wanted to have a site that was visually stunning, looked very professional, and that when people came to it they just assumed it had existed forever. In reality, even though we have more than 100,000 e-mail subscribers, we’re only 22 months old.

Many of your headlines include a question, a number (“4 Tips,” “5 Steps”), or a “How to,” making them very SEO-friendly. How much do search engines factor into your editorial process? Do you create content based on what people are searching for?

No, we do not. We only get 15 percent of our 900,000 page-views per month from search. We do not try to make things that appeal to search engines. We don’t ignore search engines, but it’s not our primary focus. Our primary focus is to appeal to people.

I have a background in copywriting so I know what a good headline is. We write headlines that people want to share, that people want to click through on Twitter or Facebook to read.

SME went from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in 20 months, and it’s all from social media. Our articles have titles that are designed to really draw people to the content. We’re about people optimization, not search engine optimization. We’re trying to optimize for the human mind.

In your latest book, Launch, you discuss the “elevation principle,” which goes something like this: Great content + other people – marketing messages = business growth. Why are “marketing messages” subtracted from this equation?

Edelman did a study and found that only a third of people trust businesses, meaning that 66 percent don’t. In the book, I postulate that part of the reason is that people think businesses are just out to take their money.

Everywhere we go, all we see are marketing messages. It’s permeating our culture and people are tuning out.

If you want your content to be received as a gift instead of a lure designed to convert someone into a prospect, then you need to put away those marketing messages. I don’t say “don’t do marketing,” but what I do say is not to embed those marketing messages into your content.

If your content has ads all around it then what you’re doing is sending people away from it, or you’re telling the people that all you really care about is getting conversions, not providing great content.

You practice what you preach because Social Media Examiner is an ad-free space. Of course, that brings up an obvious question: How does Social Media Examiner make money?

You’ll only see one ad on our site, which is for our own events. Once people receive our content and decide to sign up for more via our e-mail list, then they’ve opted into a secondary channel, which I call the backchannel. Through that channel I can embed some marketing messages. That’s how we grow our business.

We send out a daily e-mail blast to 100,000 people, 6 days a week. Inside that e-mail we have a 70-word description of the day’s article with a link. Underneath it we’ll have ads; some are from sponsors, others are for our own events.

Our sponsors are mostly social media-related agencies. Anyone who wants to be in front of social media marketers is the ideal sponsor.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

There’s a sidebar on the homepage where you can input your information. We also have a cookie mechanism whereby first-time visitors are prompted to subscribe with a one-time pop-up.

Chris Brogan says that “e-mail is the golden ticket,” and that’s true because a large e-mail list is more important than followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. People have given us permission to communicate with them. E-mail is still the secret magic bullet.

Many other media brands have made the leap from print to web. You guys have made the leap from web to events. Any plans to extend the Social Media Examiner brand from web to print?

No plans. We’re new media in every way. Even our events are completely online. We don’t do anything in the old media kind of way. For me it makes no sense to go backwards. There’s a place for print, but not in my company.

iPad App by Ben Dodson via Flickr

Earlier this month media tycoon Rupert Murdoch made waves in the media world with the launch of The Daily, trumpeted as the first newspaper specifically designed for the iPad.

This daily publication is now downloadable in the U.S. app store with a free two-week subscription and the option to renew at 99 cents a week. While four dollars a month isn’t going to break the bank, the big question is whether an iPad newspaper is something anybody really needs.

When Apple’s groundbreaking tablet computer came out last January, many saw the iPad as the struggling publishing industry’s knight in shining armour.

But in the year since customers like me lined up outside the Apple store, traditional media outlets like the New York Times have found it difficult to charge a subscription fee under Apple’s strict in-app purchasing guidelines. So instead of redesigning the newspaper for the iPad age, legacy papers simply reformatted their existing iPhone apps for the supersized device.

While a few magazines have been specifically tailored for the iPad in the past few months (most notably Wired magazine and the iPad exclusive publication Project by Virgin), these are monthly publications that do not offer the scope and timeliness of my local newspaper.

Apple’s new in-app subscription policy opened up the door for companies like Murdoch’s News Corp. to create apps using a business model they’re familiar with.

At first glance, The Daily brings the best of print, broadcast and online media to the iPad’s rich screen. Once you start the application and load the latest issue, you’re taken to a home screen featuring a TV news-style video of the day’s headlines (or, if you prefer, an audio stream). Touch the screen at any point to interrupt the announcer and jump to the relevant article.

The articles themselves have several “touchpoints” that allow you to interact with the content and scroll through panoramic photos (I loved the picture of Egypt’s Tahrir square in the middle of the protest), sound clips, and videos. While the text downloads to your device, the video and audio stream from the Internet, limiting anyone who doesn’t have a 3G-enabled iPad if they’re on the go and away from a Wi-Fi connection.

As you’d expect, The Daily makes an effort to integrate social media networks like Facebook and Twitter into the content. While the Facebook sharing capability is still very raw, an article on Rihanna is complemented by the pop star’s constantly updating Twitter feed.

Of course, none of this is particularly new. Newspaper websites already have social networking widgets. RSS feeds, Twitter lists and existing apps like Reeder, Feedler, Newsrack, and Early Edition already allow us to customize and streamline the way we get our news. Why would I pay for something updated daily when there are so many 24/7 news sources available to me for free?

Perhaps it’s a matter of convenience. RSS and Twitter still require you to do quite a bit of legwork. It can be a pain to sift through your favourite sites and import them into yet another app. If you’re someone who prefers to have your news curated for you, The Daily may be the closest thing to opening the door and finding today’s newspaper on your doorstep. Or is that yesterday’s newspaper?

It’s very confusing. I try to explain to people that it’s a TVO show that’s not on TV. It used to be a CBC radio show about the Internet, but now it’s an Internet show about the Internet. It’s taken a winding path, but at the core of it is a really dedicated audience that seems to keep growing in one way or another.

It’s an interesting tale amidst the chaos of the media upheaval. Search Engine was a traditional radio show and the on-air ratings were really good. But the podcast ratings were extraordinary.

The show was doing this interesting balancing act of explaining Internet culture to whoever might be listening to CBC radio on a weekday morning, which is a very different generation from the podcast audience.

At the time when it was cancelled, it was the most popular CBC podcast. But then, at the height of the show’s success, and amidst all the excitement of what the Internet is doing to media, the show was cancelled.

How did you maintain your audience after the radio show was cancelled?

I realized that the audience that had grown around the show was the most important asset that I had as a communicator. It just seemed like I had been building it up just to drive it off a cliff.

I think TVO made a really savvy calculation, which is rather than just come out of the blue and say “Here we are, this TV broadcaster is now online,” they realized there are existing, dedicated Web audiences. CBC had this audience and didn’t know what to do with it.

TVO saw an opportunity to instantly have a very dedicated, very active audience associated with a new program that fit with their brand ideals. I had to get on the last episode and say, “This show is not ending, you need to re-subscribe to a new feed,” and we were able to retain a significant portion of that audience.

And in the year that has passed since then, we were able to build it back up to where it was. Last I heard, there are about 50,000 people listening every week.

What’s your relationship like with TVO?

It’s a really interesting relationship; they acquire Search Engine and I produce it independently. They release it under their brand, but the copyright remains with me, and that allows me to release it under a Creative Commons license.

It’s funny, because I used be to working out of the CBC radio newsroom, surrounded by all these veteran journalists, and I would be interviewing these strange blogger type people out of their basements. And I’ve slowly become one of them.

Let’s talk about the idea of the journalist as brand. Would you say that we’re living in a world where the media outlet matters less than the personality, or brand behind the content?

I don’t think of myself as a brand. I’m not against the term, but I think it’s become a stand-in for people saying, “What are my values?” You’re really just talking about your reputation, what you stand for.

What the shift from CBC to TVO taught me is that the person who signs your cheques is important, but perhaps more important, especially if you’re a communicator, is your relationship to your audience.

You only have this one, consistent relationship and you have to be really careful not to do anything to betray that.

I think it’s about time to bring out the M word: monetization. How does Search Engine make money?

Well, it’s public broadcasting, or public webcasting, whatever you want to call it. That’s something that I take really seriously, that there is a decision in most countries in the world that some public money should go towards media that might otherwise not be created.

I don’t think it’s the only way to fund a program like ours, but what is unique about Search Engine is that we are a tech show that doesn’t talk about gadgets. There’s no obvious tie-in for a sponsor. There’s no specific discussion of this phone over that phone, and as a result it retains some autonomy.

There’s been some talk about finding new revenue streams. TVO does fundraising from their viewers and I would love to give that a shot. I know that podcasts like This American Life and Radio Lab have a lot of success doing text message donations.

When you’re talking about Web audiences, they’re used to donate buttons, and they understand that if you want to keep a show alive, five bucks is a pretty good deal.

You’re also a cartoonist and documentary filmmaker and have been working in media since you were a teenager. Do you see more or fewer opportunities to be creative – and get paid for it – than when you started out?

Way more. It always felt like these things were separate and distinct career paths and that unless you can make a full and complete living at one of them, you should just give it up completely.

Today, you can not only do a bunch of things, but your audience will probably move with you from one thing to the other, and you might be able to make a little bit of money at five different things.

I remember as a kid being terrified of being bored, of finding myself in a profession where I had to do the same thing every day, monotonously, and losing interest in it. I’m really inspired by the fact that that doesn’t have to happen anymore.

Photo by Joi via flickr

How is blip.tv different from other online video sites?

We like to say that blip.tv is what NBC would look like if it were created in 2005 rather than 1939. Think about a pyramid of content with Hulu owning the top and YouTube owning the bottom. Blip.tv owns the middle.

We work with independent producers. Blip.tv provides the player and the bandwidth and distributes the videos to places like YouTube, iTunes and to TV sets through Roku, Sony TV and other places. Then we monetize the series by aggregating, say, 50-100 shows that reach moms, and then selling space to an advertiser that wants to target that demographic. And then we share 50 percent of the revenue with show producers.

Just the other day we were excited to send a check to a producer for $123,000, which means we will make about half a million dollars this year for that series. I think that really shows that you can create a Web series that’s scalable and profitable and we’re really excited to be part of the ecosystem making that possible.

What impact are new platforms like blip.tv having on television content? Is the nature of storytelling changing or is it just the same old stories distributed in new ways?

It’s been interesting for us to watch that what succeeds on the Web is different from what succeeds on traditional television. So far, what works on the Web is authenticity, going after a niche market, and really engaging with the community that you serve.

One show that’s doing really well on blip.tv is called Nostalgia Critic. It’s really just a guy with a camera who talks about pop culture from the ‘80s. The production value is not super high.

If you love pop culture from the ‘80s, you’ll love this show. If you don’t, you’ll hate this show. He’s not trying to be all things for all people but he really engages people interested in that topic.

You’ll find that the best show producers are active on Twitter, on Tumblr, on Facebook and they really listen to the community that the show serves and incorporate their feedback into the show.

Contrast that with traditional TV, where you won’t succeed if you don’t reach a mass audience. And production values may trump authenticity.

We saw you speak at the Supernova Conference in Philadelphia  last month where you suggested that media companies should act more like startups. How so?

I’m talking specifically about the digital side of a media company. If you’re running the digital side for, say, a magazine, I think you could do your job with a few really good technologists and a few curators of content; we’ll call them the editorial team. They oversee the production of some content but also curate content along whichever vertical it is that the magazine caters to.

That means becoming the aggregator for all of the best bloggers on that topic, the best folks who are creating photos – maybe on Flickr or Shutterstock – and the folks who are creating the best Web series on that subject, whether it’s through blip.tv or Howcast or another platform.

I think this offers a lot of benefits for the media company. It keeps their overhead a lot lower. And it means that they’re not banking everything on their production crew having to create all the content on their site.

And then you’ll obviously need sales people and to make sure that all the content on the site – curated and produced – is as high quality as possible so that you maintain very high CPMs.

You recently joined forces with 7-Eleven to produce a branded reality show, The 7-Eleven Roadtrip Rally. Do you see branded entertainment playing a bigger role in the future of television?

We don’t do a lot of brand entertainment on blip.tv. We had a really special opportunity to coordinate a deal between one of our producers and 7-Eleven, which did very well in terms of viewership, but that’s a rarity for us. We’re not really in the production business.

I think branded entertainment has the opportunity to do well but it’s absolutely key that any series that’s going to succeed on the Web understands the audience that it’s targeting and serves that audience.

It’s also important that a new series comes with marketing dollars just as a traditional TV show would. There’s a bias in this nascent field of Web series that a great series will just take off and gain audience immediately.

Independent show producers are often happy to build up an audience over time and iterate on the show. A brand that’s spending a lot of money on a series might have a little less patience.

The blip.tv website seems to be aimed at content producers, not consumers. Do you have any plans to make blip.tv more of a hub for great independent Web series?

Right. Our website is not as beautiful and easy to navigate as it could be and we are well aware of that. Right now, blip.tv is not a destination site. The site is catered to making it easy for producers to upload content, choose advertising options and then distribute the show.

In the future we do see an opportunity to turn blip.tv into a destination site, but we haven’t yet.

When producers upload their shows to blip they’re given the choice of participating in your advertising program or keeping the content commercial-free. Are we at the stage where both producers and viewers are comfortable with the idea of ads in their online videos?

I think we’re way past the days of 2005 and 2006 when show producers and audiences weren’t expecting to see ads on shows.

Viewers are savvy enough to come to expect it, not just through us but the myriad of other platforms that have ads showing on video. People can handle them just as they can handle ads on television.

You still have some people who create shows as a form of artwork but whereas that was most of the community of show producers in 2005, it’s now very much a minority.

It’s now possible to create an original online series that’s both scalable and profitable. So I think a lot of folks who may have been focused on traditional media in the past are looking toward the Web as a place where they could make money without really having a boss or anyone having a say over their content.

Many see what’s happening in newspapers and magazines (layoffs, closures and print reductions) and blame a broken business model turned upside down by the Internet – with its free content and classifieds. Others, though, would argue that the traditional print product and model – including the production and distribution models – is fatally flawed. So, is it a content issue or a monetization issue?

I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. If you look at the newspaper model, it’s not completely broken. The industry last year made almost $50 billion and the advertising situation is not as bad as a lot of people think. In fact, newspapers have gotten back most of the money lost on classifieds through their online operations. Almost $4 billion a year is coming into the industry from newspaper websites. That’s one of the things that get lost in this discussion. Yes, classifieds are moving out, but there is a new revenue stream moving in. In fact, if it weren’t for the recession, it probably would have equalized this year. Now, it will take another year or two. That being said, the big-city, mass-audience format of the newspaper is no longer working.

In an op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor last month, you argued that journalists deserve to be underpaid. You wrote: “If journalists want to promote good journalism and value creation that makes them earn more pay, they will have to take more responsibility for coverage decisions and content choices so that journalism becomes more valuable.” What sort of coverage decisions do you suggest they make?

What I’d do first is get a good understanding of who’s reading the newspaper and what their interests are. Generally, readership studies have been done very badly in the newspaper industry and the magazine industry as well, because they tend to put a great focus on those people who aren’t reading. One of the biggest problems is that people who actually buy the newspaper, the core customers, don’t read 75 percent of the content. That’s costing companies an awful lot of paper, a lot of production, a lot of salary. And they need to figure out how to get rid of that stuff and replace it with content that readers are not able to get elsewhere.

Conventional wisdom says that if you let readers guide content decisions, all we’d be left with is Britney Spears-type coverage, at the expense of investigative or public service reporting. Is that true?

That’s not true. In fact, if you look at core newspaper readers, that’s what they hate most about the paper. That stuff has been put in there to get the people who don’t want to read about public affairs or the economy. And so what they’re trying to do is retain this mass audience, even though the mass audience has been leaving at about 2 percent a year for the last 30 years. Those people don’t want to read about Britney, they’d rather see her on video, on the Internet or on TV. Yet, publishers are still saying, “We need to get everybody, including people who aren’t invested in news.” That model’s not working. It has never worked. It’s been an absolutely steady decline for almost four decades.

Will online advertising rates ever catch up to those in print, making an Internet ad as profitable for news organizations as print ads used to be? In a sense, shouldn’t online ads be more valuable since they’re so targeted, measurable and could actually send you straight to checkout?

I don’t think it will ever happen. Online works pretty well for branding and for loyalty campaigns, but it’s not particularly effective for retail ads. If you look across nations, you find that in terms of cross-elasticity, magazines and the Internet are closer than newspapers and the Internet, while magazines and TV are closer than newspapers and TV, in terms of what advertisers they attract and the willingness of those advertisers to substitute media. Each medium has its virtues. People use the Internet to find products they know they want to buy. So it’s not a simple thing to say you’re going to take all this local advertising and throw it online.

We at Sparksheet have been looking at the ways in which companies are using social networking sites to connect with customers and build their brands. You noted recently on your blog that companies should think twice before jumping on the Twitter or Facebook bandwagon, that they should be realistic about costs and effort. When is it worth it for a brand to join the social media fray, and when is it better off sitting it out?

I think it becomes worthwhile when you have regular content and regular transactions with your customers. So, for instance, if you’re a distributor and you have an overstock that you want to move rapidly, at that point it becomes reasonable. But the problem is, when you have every company sending messages to everybody all the time, it becomes just a blur of spam. It’s the same way with news. People want some breaking news about some things but after a while, if they get too much stuff, folks will start tuning out.

Do you see branded content as a solution to the news industry’s woes? Is there a way to have a “Mercedes Wall Street Journal” or “60 Minutes by Whole Foods” without dismantling the traditional “Chinese wall” between journalism and advertising?

The Chinese wall is actually a rather recent thing in journalism. If you look historically, it’s something that was built after the professionalism of journalism in the 1920s and ‘30s, and it was always breached at various times. I think the wall will be more porous than it has been, but if it breaks down too much, you lose your credibility, in which case you lose your audience anyhow.

Robert Scoble is one of the world’s leading evangelists of all things digital. Previously with Microsoft, Scoble has also worked with Fast Company among others. He is perhaps best known as a blogger: millions around the world read it every day. And one of Scoble’s most famous creations is his starfish, a great, colorful visualization of the amorphous social-media landscape. Inspired by Brafman and Beckstrom’s “The Starfish and the Spider,” Scoble emphasizes the online media ecosystem’s decentralized and interconnected nature. Below, we dissect the starfish, laying out each medium’s strengths and weaknesses and examining which players are converting each into eyeballs and dollars.

Video

Strengths:
youth audience, viral, multiple senses, easy to embed, creativity, control over message
Weaknesses:
production costs, online video not as popular with adults, oversaturation
Services:
YouTube, Google Video, Kyte, Seesmic, Hulu
Conversions:
Politicians and interest groups use video to spread the word. Aspiring musicians and filmmakers can market themselves on the cheap. Grey-market entrepreneurs who provide links to TV shows and movies are making a killing off ad sales.
Who’s making money?
Let’s face it: YouTube will never be the cash cow Google expected it to be. And how annoying are those commercials networks lace their videos with? There is hope, however, in sites such as Hulu, where the big boys get a share of the pie.

Photo

Strengths:
“worth a thousands words,” cheap, easy to share across platforms
Weaknesses:
static, copyright confusion
Services:
Flickr, Zooomer, SmugMug
Conversions:
Citizen journalism sites such as Gothamist and CNN’s iReport are thriving off our Flickr photos.
Who’s making money?
Flickr has stayed afloat with its premium subscriber model but Yahoo suitors such as Microsoft may think they can squeeze more money out of the photo-sharing leader.

Blog

Strengths:
personal, interactive, multimedia, free and easy to use
Weaknesses:
Casual tone can lead to political and corporate gaffes. Many companies are leery about opening themselves to criticism through comments or linking. “Post or die”: maintaining a popular blog is a full-time job.
Services:
WordPress, Blogger, TypePad
Conversions:
Google, Wal-Mart, Amazon, McDonald’s and Whole Foods are among the most powerful corporations with successful. – and surprisingly readable – corporate blogs.
Who’s making money?
Blogs are the lifeblood of what Internet evangelist Jeff Jarvis calls the new “link economy.” According to a Wall Street Journal story, more Americans earn a living today from blogging than firefighting or computer programming (although some bloggers have questioned the Journal’s accounting).

Events

Strengths:
Welcome to the real world.
Weaknesses:
“If you build it, they will come”—except when they don’t.
Services:
Zvents, Evite, Eventful, Upcoming, Facebook
Conversions:
Scoble likes to talk about an unofficial Obama rally that was organized online and drew more than 4,000 supporters – plus the future President.
Who’s making money?
Depends on the cover charge.

Collaborative Tools

Strengths:
internal efficiency, transparency
Weaknesses:
Expensive and buggy. Will our privacy evaporate in a cloud?
Services:
Zoho, Zimbra, Google Docs
Conversions:
Google’s ever-evolving collaboration tools build brand loyalty (not to mention dependency).
Who’s making money?
By keeping its programs in perennial beta mode, Google can scrap unprofitable – or just plain crappy – creations while saving face. What happened to Vista Beta, Mr. Gates?

Wikis

Strengths:
Crowdsourcing, transparency, unabashed geekiness: Wikis are the coolest social media on the block.
Weaknesses:
The hazards of democracy: Wikis are fair game for critics, pranksters and sh*t disturbers.
Services:
Pbwiki, Twiki, Wetpaint
Conversions:
Wikipedia, anyone?
Who’s making money?
Wikis are the NGOs of the Internet economy. They won’t make money, but the geeks won’t let them fail.

Audio

Strengths:
intimate, easy and cheap
Weaknesses:
Radio is so 1930s.
Services:
BlogTalkRadio, Odeo, podcasts
Conversions:
The Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network just keeps growing.
Who’s making money?
Even public-radio producers have embraced mid-podcast advertising, which is somehow less annoying than video ads (how can you not buy a mattress endorsed by Garrison Keillor’s soothing baritone?)

Email

Strengths:
personal and timely
Weaknesses:
spam!
Services:
MediaPost, AWordADay, TPM Daily Digest and other so-called Bacn.
Conversions:
Six months after the election, President Obama is still tapping into his campaign e-mail trove to sell himself to the American people.
Who’s making money?
We’re so used to ads in our inbox, who would mind a few more?

SMS

Strengths:
even more personal, even more timely
Weaknesses:
except for when cell-phone carriers fail to deliver on time
Services:
Communications Channel
Conversions:
Obama announcing his running mate via SMS was a neat idea, but the cat was out of the bag hours before that early-morning text.
Who’s making money?
As if the Verizons and Videotrons of the world needed another revenue stream.

Microblogs

Strengths:
niche, timely, personal
Weaknesses:
limited audience, time-consuming
Services:
Twitter, Jaiku
Conversions:
Freelance writer Daniel Baum blabbed in 140-character form about his rise and fall at The New Yorker – just in time for his new book launch.
Who’s making money?
So far, Twitter is another VC trust-fund baby. But its powerful real-time search capabilities make it extremely attractive to a conventional search engine such as Google, whose results will always be a few steps behind.

Personal Social Networks

Strengths:
It doesn’t get much more personal than this. An advertiser’s dream.
Weaknesses:
Some might think twice before playing in another company’s walled garden.
Services:
Facebook, Myspace Linked In
Conversions:
Facebook has converted nearly every high school and college-aged kid into a computer geek and online consumer.
Who’s making money?
Program developers, online marketers and Mark Zuckerberg have all made a pretty penny from Facebook. But questions about proprietary rights and privacy continue to loom over the site.