Social media skills are becoming a core competency for staff at digital publisher Vox Media, which is looking to produce more stories native to these platforms.
“An increasingly important thing for us is that we’re in a multiplatform world and how do we make the most of these platforms natively?” said Vox Media president Marty Moe speaking at the Digital Media Strategies conference in London today.
Moe explained that producing content geared for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube was an important part of the “media equation”, and that it’s not just about using social media as a distribution channel for stories.
Marty Moe, President of @Voxmediainc "We think of @Facebook as one of our homepages" #DMS15 pic.twitter.com/5IylN9sk72
— Alex Hidalgo (@alejohidalgo) March 10, 2015
Vox Media’s goal, as outlined by Moe to delegates, is to create stories produced by and for so-called "digital natives".
The key to achieving that, he said, was “to combine the best of publishing and distribution technology” with the right talent.
He said Vox Media was happy to trade the advertising revenues that could come from publishing certain stories on their own sites to build an audience on social instead. Most important, he said, “is reaching users where they are”.
BuzzFeed revealed a similar approach last year with the announcement of BuzzFeed Distributed, a division with reporters and creatives which aims to produce videos and other stories exclusively for BuzzFeed's social channels.
So what makes a media business successful in this day and age? Moe said the “Time Inc of the 21st century” is going to be a “great video company”, adding that the media landscape today is changing as more outlets look to increase their video offering.
John Ridding, chief executive officer of the Financial Times, was also on the panel and agreed video was an exciting proposition, but explained that it does not have to take up a lot of funds.
Video doesn’t need to break the bank. Hollywood-style production standards don’t make sense for us - @John_Ridding, CEO of FT #DMS15
— Garrett Goodman (@GarrettGoodman) March 10, 2015
Vox Media has taken up the challenge to expand into video as well, and Moe said its competitors in this area could be news media like the New York Times as much as television networks like HBO.
He said a significant part of the publisher’s expansion of its video offering was “to reach the digital native, video-producing community”.
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