Magazines Getting To Grips With Digital & Social Media Trends

Magazines are in trouble, many have folded or about to...the former powerhouse Newsweek was sold for a dollar in exchange for millions in debt. Digital and social media trends have shaken the industry, but now they are getting to understand the digital age and adapt to it. My weekly fashion staple, Grazia magazine has launched Grazia TV on the web. It is an innovation for the weekly glossy that has been prompted by the need to reach audiences on a new level, create ever-rich content and find new commercial opportunities for brands and advertisers. Grazia will be filtering editorial content into moving footage and the weekly webisodes will bring the brand to life on a whole new social media trend platform for readers like me. Bauer, Grazia's publisher launched Grazia TV during last month's London Fashion Week and it will run on Grazia's website, a YouTube channel, and other syndicated channels and on iTunes as a free vodcast. It will offer an interesting entertainment experience that will find a new audience in the UK and across the world.

Across the Atlantic, COSMOPOLITAN magazine a popular publication for young women is also engaging with the power of social media trends for its first global, digital advertising campaign. The campaign was unveiled in New York last Thursday on a billboard in Times Square avec launch party for advertisers, media buyers and press, and its focus, is a video that simulates a photo shoot for a new Cosmopolitan ad campaign. It uses Facebook Connect, where viewers of the video can download their own photographs and those of their friends, which pop up in the video as it progresses; the viewers are depicted as the stars of the campaign. Cosmopolitan hopes that viewers will share the video with their friends and spread the message that it too has a global reach and is at the forefront of the social media trends game.

I think it is clear that the power of magazines to define and then create the idea of community will become more crucial to their existence in this digital age and my line of thinking was further endorsed by Hattie Brett, Senior Editor, Grazia who said in context to Grazia TV, "We're trying to create editorial that's as compulsive as possible in a broadcast format. Every clip is embeddable as we want bloggers to pick it up and embed it on their sites. We really want this to go viral."

Gawker Media Founder Nick Denton says, "People don't really want to read text. They want videos; they want images, bigger, more lavish." In other words, consumers are looking for online media products that more closely resemble TV and magazines, which is probably why the Flipboard is the closest thing I've seen to the future of magazines; it is a social magazine, taking the things your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter and displaying them in a magazine layout. Importantly, it is interactive; creating the idea of a digital community.

Photo Credit: FontShop