Publishers are seeing social as a big traffic driver across the
board, but the question remains how to organize for
this.

For
some very socially savvy publishers like a Mashable, this can mean a team of
five-strong and a detailed strategy for matching pieces of content to the
appropriate social platform. Yet for others, social is a much looser affair,
involving perhaps a junior employee but with the burden ultimately falling on
the content creators themselves to provide social
juice.

Mashable, which bills itself as a social publisher, is on the extreme
end. It has a five-person social team, responsible for organizing social
strategies across the whole company to help bring readers to the site. The team
reports to the CMO, Stacey Martinet. This is no side task: Mashable has about 10
million followers across the social platforms.

For
example, when a writer writes a story about a topic, the social team decides the
social networks to target and when to push the messages out. Mashable writers
are expected to do their own social promotion.

“Their purpose is to organize social,” Peterson said. “While everyone
is responsible for social execution, there has to be a brain center for social
strategy. They’re truly responsible for the same things marketing is responsible
for: creating best brand experiences for our readers and following and driving
traffic to the site.”

The
Wall Street Journal has seven on its social media team who are considered
journalists. Liz Heron, the WSJ’s director of social media, said that she hires
people who understand the core principles of journalism; they can all shoot and
edit video and “can recognize a story.” While everyone is dedicated to social,
there is one person whose charge is to focus on community building. The WSJ has
a combined 6 million social followers on Facebook, Twitter and Google
Plus.

“We
think of our roles as distributors of WSJ content on social networks,” Heron
said. “As journalists and reporters, a big part is news gathering. The better
news you have, the more people will come to your site. It’s big priority for us
to stay ahead of the curve and hit on things that engage people in a new
way.”

Quartz, a far newer publication under Atlantic Media, sees social
differently. It’s a big driver of traffic, accounting for almost 50 percent of
traffic, yet it relies on the writers itself to do the heavy lifting, not a
dedicated staffer, much less team.

“I
get why you’d put elbow grease to accelerate those marketing tools to drive
readership, as it might pay and also monetize by selling advertising against
it,” said Jay Lauf, group publisher of Quartz. “I do wonder if it’s worth it to
have an entire team dedicated to that proposition when your editorial team
should be the best and most practiced driver of those
things.”

Other
publishers have a mix of approaches. New York Magazine has a team of three, each
responsible for the magazine’s different brands — Vulture, The Cut, Grub Street
and The Daily Intelligencer. They have dual editorial and marketing roles. One
develops and drives social strategies for the outlet. Two people are dedicated
to creating content for the social channels; one person is responsible for
Vulture and Daily Intelligencer; one person does The Cut and Grub Street. The
third handles NY Mag’s main Twitter handle.

“You
need to be doing it multiple times a day because that’s the expectation,” said
Michael Silberman, NY Mag’s general manager of digital. “You need people who are
creating content and engaging the audience on those
platforms.”

But
the outlet also recently hired a dedicated social media person to sit on the
sales development and marketing team to figure out social angles for ad
campaigns.

The
WSJ is experimenting with revenue-generating products that stem from its social
efforts. It recently started a matchmaking program and documentary series
between entrepreneurs and mentors called Start
Up of the Year. It was conceived with video and social in
mind. Same with its new conference business, WSJ Tech Cafe, which
fosters discussion between the tech and entrepreneur communities — both online
and off.

“I’m
glad the people who hired me aren’t tying me to revenue,” Heron said. “It’s much
more of a long game, to develop new audiences.