Here’s another Slideshare.net find - Andy Sernovitz, author of “Word of Mouth Marketing,” has posted a short & comprehensible slideshow on how to use word of mouth marketing to increase your blog’s popularity.

This is all great advice for any alt-blogger looking to increase the audience of their paper’s blog.

Recently on the AAN Marketing listserv, NOW’s Brian Francis described a promotion the paper had been running, combining a street-presence marketing promotion with an online ballot.

I like this idea because it’s on-brand and multi-faceted; promoting local artists and businesses, raising street-awareness of the publication, and directing traffic to the website to vote for a winning box.

Francis reports:

“We’ve been running an artist-related promo this summer in Toronto called NOW’s Box Design Challenge. We asked local artists to submit a design, using the NOW box as their canvas. Ten finalists were chosen, the boxes were created and are currently on display at various locations throughout the city.

A jury will decide a Grand Prize winner and readers can also pick their favourite by voting online.

It’s been a very successful and cost-effective promo. NOW paid for the boxes and did trade on $100 gift certificates to use at an arts supply store.

We did a different promo last year — the Fashion Design Challenge. Ten finalists made clothing out of NOW newsprint which went on display at various fashion stores. It was great promo, as well.

You can check out (and vote!) for the boxes at NOWToronto.com/challenge.”

PHYSICAL

Each box has a sign affixed onto it, giving the name of the design/artist and the URL so folks could vote on their favorite. There are 10 at local businesses, galleries and museums. [See one in the wild, below.]

PRINT

NOW is running full-page ads, giving contest details, with artist photos.

ONLINE

NOW runs a teaser ad on the homepage, which leads to the ballot form at NOWToronto.com/challenge.

Winners will be announced in August, and the artists will have the option of keeping the boxes. “If someone opts not to,” says NOW’s Francis, ” I’ll find good homes for them.

Have a multi-faceted online promotion you’d like to share?

Tell us about it in the comments. If you’d like it featured, email me at laurafries [at] aan [dot] org.

Peeling the Onion from Web to Print

The Onion debuted a print product in Washington, DC last week, on the heels of it’s web-TV launch [See post, Onion TV Live Now].

The Onion’s media kit claims a healthy print circulation of 610,000 weekly, with print products in nine markets (not including the recent DC launch), and demographics similar to alt readers [See AWN demographics].

And hey, since faux-alts and dailies have been stealing ideas from alts for years, it seems only fair to size up this latest addition to newsracks.

The Onion’s DC print product is a great example of a reverse publishing model - content that is produced and then adapted for its respective mediums.

Graphs created by LauraFries.com using OmniGraffle

In its inaugural edition, the printed version of the DC Onion featured ‘news’ articles that published throughout the week on theONION.com. A.V. Club content (Arts and Entertainment Coverage) including both full-text articles (published on Friday online, vs. the paper’s Thursday), and excerpts of older reviews for capsule movie reviews.

Local events coverage - A.V. Washington, D.C. - featured 150 word capsules highlighting music, film and comedy events, with short articles written locally. None of this material currently appears on an Onion website.

What ideas can I steal?

• Different editorial calendars/publishing schedules for content that appears online and in print
• Formats that suit the medium: short, scannable excerpts in a commuter-based print product, and lengthier, more comprehensive coverage online.
• Brand leverage: Just as the Onion uses its brand name familiarity to launch new products with authority, so too can alts!

Thoughts?

Why is the Onion expanding into print markets at a time when so many others are shrinking their print operations in favor of web publishing? Will the Onion create city-specific web presences? What other web/print entities does the Onion have partnerships with?

MySpace is the behemoth that fragments the attention spans of 18-35 year olds, says conventional wisdom.

But does the megasite really deliver that much value to advertisers?

‘Online community developer’ Communispace’s latest study suggests that smaller, fully transparent, and branded communities attract more engaged users who create content instead of ‘lurking’:

The more intimate the community, the more people participate. […] 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities with 300 to 500 members made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, and more. Only 14% merely logged in to observe, or “lurk.” […]

In a typical online forum, for example, just 1% of site visitors contribute, and the other 99% lurk.

- via MediaPost

So what does this mean for alts? By creating small, vibrant local communities of discussion online, alts can attract engaged audiences that marketers are seeking. MySpace hasn’t won.