Another wonderful example of Social Media blending with hard copy is the evolution of Food52, a crowd-sourced social-media recipe/food site started by Amanda Hesser (of NY Times fame) and Merrill Stubbs freelance food-writer and recipe-tester. This site invites viewers to submit recipes — themed each week, for a contest. Amanda and Merrill test each recipe, come up with 2 finalists,  and the readers will decide the winner. At the end of 52 weeks, the winning entries will be entered into a cookbook (hard copy — ink and paper!) that will be published by The HarperStudio.  In the meantime, the cooks, readers, and contributors get to share recipes, chat with each other, add additional content on related issues (ingredients, cooking tools, cookbooks etc) in an ongoing collaboration.

I was lucky enough to get an interview with Amanda and Merrill in between their frantic bouts of cooking. Click below and find out why Merrill’s mother is NOT, NOT, NOT allowed to submit recipes….

PLAY AUDIO:

AmandaAndMerrill_081209.mp3

So at the end, there is a hard-copy cookbook that will have had a full year’s worth of preliminary buzz. The Food52 team is busily tweeting, uploading videos to Vimeo, linking to other food blogs. It’s a win-win for the publisher, the reader/contributor, and the Food52 team of Merrill and Amanda.

Food 52 Intro from Food52 on Vimeo.

All print media are struggling these days, from the New York Times to the local newspaper.  As the readers are moving online, print might seem more and more irrelevant, and publishers are struggling with ways to keep their readers.

I came across a wonderful example of how to do it right. 7×7 Magazine, a San Francisco-based, glossy lifestyle pub invited their readers to submit all of the photos and much of the copy for a neighborhood review (August 2009 issue) of our beautiful city. The photos were incredible, but not just for their beauty. The strength of the issue was really the multiple slices of life that were represented with the great number of contributors. Plus their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages were touted throughout the issue.

The 7×7.com website provides far more content — videos, more pix, more reviews of each neighborhood’s strengths, and on and on. But the print magazine stands alone for its visual beauty and is definitely worth the cover (or subscription) price. The integration of the magazine with its social-media and online versions only magnifies that content and doesn’t detract from it. Job well done!

Major take-aways from this? Not all brands or pubishers are so content-rich or gorgeous (I know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. and all brand managers love their children). Where can you extend your brand or publication into social media, and then involve the reader or customer with the content that is most easy to create and receive from them?

If you are a publisher, initiate the dialogue in print, then move it online. Sell cat food, walking shoes, lead-gen services? On your product labels, in your print ads, on your boxes and packages, invite your customers to participate in a contest related to the topic. Have them send in videos or photos, reward the winner with something related to the brand. And then publish (well-tagged) vids and pix on your Facebook Fanpage, Tweet to direct people back to your website and/or the fan page, upload videos to video sites, along with publishing them on your site.  The more you involve the reader/customer, the more engaged they become with the brand — the true definition of “dialogue”.