Mike is dressed in a Carling Black Labour t-shirt. Nice one. His first slide is about 2007 being a tipping point for the SA Web. His point: Web 2.0 and social media are here. Even Mike points out how obvious this statement is - but it’s an important one to reiterate nonetheless.

Mike believes that Facebook democratises the web by making applications really easy to run, install and distribute for users who aren’t necessarily early adopters and innovators, but who find the utility simple and fun to use. But even so, there are obviously broadband considerations in South Africa that affect any social media experience from our shores. Times and costs are changing though, with Telkom pricing dropping fast. We now have more options like Neotel, Vodacom, MTN, Sentech and more. So the good news is that landline and mobile connectivity costs are becoming a lot more affordable, which makes the internet and social media a lot more accessible to even more people.

Social networking is NOT a trend, shouts Mike. The technologies are. We’ve been connecting with each other since the dark ages but how we do it is what’s moving on a daily basis. The web allows a long tail of content for us to tap into - from main news portals right through to the hundreds of smaller blogs. But that said, average users are starting to suffer from ‘message immunity’. Thanks to email overload, permission marketing and Google searchability, users are becoming more selective in what they listen to, watch and read. Interruption marketing like TV ads, radio ads that break up music and magazine ads that you just page past is dead. We need to think about and achieve a new level of interactive, engaging messages that have context and relevance.

Neal Farrell from Ramsay, Son and Parker was one of the key minds behind CarToday.com. He quickly states that we’re in a state of flux. The rate of innovation has created a state of excitement which has resulted in clutter and daunting amounts of confusion. We need to zoom out, focus and get things back to a realistic state of normalcy.

He’s a firm believer that the brand is king. When you go beyond the magazine and go digital, you’re adding value. You’re adding content for your readers and creating a tool to drive users to subscribe to your print title. And then back online again. Your online strategy can never work without the backing of your print brand. Why call your online entity carsarethrilling.com, when you can leverage 50 years of brand equity in a domain like cartoday.com?

Stop the Them vs Us mentality. Converge, converge, converge. Digital and print teams should be one team, that focuses on the same quality content, whether it appears on a print page or web page.

Extend your brand online. Finish a three page article with 7 more pages online. Feature more photos, more videos. If you’re at a conference, start publishing feedback online immediately and then run a full feature in the next print edition. Involve readers in a community around your niche content, ask them to vote and share their opinions.

Neal believes that one person should have a realtionship with the client. Not someone from Car magazine and another from CarToday.com. This is the answer to the question of print vs digital sales, and will remove the needless competition between the two … when they really should be one.

When it comes to online design, don’t forget your brand. How it looks on the shelf at CNA should look identical on your site. The biggest challenge: forget the tech, forget the money, forget everything else. If you can’t get the magazine industry to embrace digital, you’re going nowhere. Change management is the biggest obstacle. But once you get past this, the opportunities are endless: user-generated content, syndicate content, profile your reader/user base (get to know them intimiately), publish once and give access forever.

Video content allows three monetization techniques: pre/post-roll advertising (before or after video play), ’sponsored by’ advertising and branded content. Neil believes the last has the most value and the most opportunity for profit. Generally, Neil is disappointed at the current state of online advertising - taking just 1% of ad revenue in South Africa.

Now for some out the box stuff. Neal suggests that as content producers (rather than just magazine publishers) you could even be including IPTV, satellite TV and mobile TV in their strategies. The future is web, mobile, TV and whatever comes next - with the print publication as the anchor.