While going through my usual slurry of social media profiles I was linkbaited into an image of a car in Mexico barreling into a line of people on bicycles. The picture speaks for itself but what really caught my eye was a little red button on the bottom that said ” Mixx it.”
Social media is such a hot topic in today’s interntet marketing world. We’ve recently hired two (2) social media interns just to help us keep a handle on all thing user generated on the web. I was amazed to see a pinnacle of journalism like CNN also take a step in that direction, a step which was calculated and strategic.
From doing a little additional research I saw that CNN had entered into an agreement with Mixx.com to be the default social media news site partner. What this means is that:
- CNN was not as interested in digg.com
- CNN was smart enough not to build it’s own social networking/UGC system (see Walmart social network)
- Mixx had benefited from a traffic jump that topped out at nearly 1m in May as reported by Techcrunch
I’m impressed with the partnership, as I have always turned to CNN to be my trusted news source and I’m getting to appreciate Mixx more and more. Whats important is that CNN was able to realize the importance of this new medium but had the foresight to go about it the right way, instead of spending the time trying to build a community around news they looked at other options to meet their objectives – and push more of their reporters news across the web. As they have done with widgets, I am sure they will also succeed in their objectives with social media.
