Stop Press: Publishers Start to Take Social Media Seriously

Finally, ten years after I first began building “online communities”, five years after MySpace took the world by storm, four since Facebook stole their social networking crown and 18 months after Twitter went mainstream – publishers are starting to take social media seriously. I’ve been amazed that newspapers and magazines have, during the social media revolution, almost uniformly failed to capitalise on their incredibly powerful positions, such that many are now going out of business. How can groups of intelligent individuals, publishing regular, compelling content to large audiences of engaged readers have failed to realise the value of engaging in conversations?