Huffington Post: More Social Than Content

Huffington Post is now a “social media company.” What started as a former left-leaning political blog and morphed into the leading pure-play online newspaper, is redefining itself once again.

Founded by Arianna Huffington five years ago, this web mega-star is now drawing more traffic than the New York Times. It boasts 50 editors and 20 channels, ranging from music and technology to student life, religion and food. A travel vertical is launching later this month.

But don't be fooled by all that content — it's all about what users are doing with that content, as it positions itself to advertisers as more of a "social media" than a "media" brand.

In a recent Ad Age interview, president and chief revenue officer, Greg Coleman, commented “that positioning meant using all those powerful social media tools that had helped get the site to 24 million monthly uniques to help advertisers push their messages out across the web.”

Coleman’s past includes Yahoo and AOL, as president and chief revenue officer; his present and future includes pitching "social ads" on HuffPo as a new opportunity to marketers, and overseeing its massive community, which generates more than three million comments a month.

“We've been labeling ourselves America's Internet Newspaper," Coleman told Ad Age. "We're already preparing for 5 million comments within the next year and a half, and that's required a whole layer of social badging with our users, who are actually moderating our site."

Although known primarily for its breadth of editorial content and commentary, Coleman sees the future as a hybrid of content and technology.

“It's the whole content management system that our team has that enables editors to do their own search engine optimization and [content] sharing right at their desks and to get updates on how well their stories are doing every fifteen minutes,” said Coleman.

As for the company’s position on social advertising, Coleman cited a project promoting GE's Healthymagination, where the campaign’s reach far exceeded its literal grasp due to social tools. GE ran ads tagged with any wellness reference on the site.

“We then created a special share bar for GE, and any time you tweeted that article or retweeted that article or shared it, the ad module would go with it. So when you shared it with your friends on Facebook, the GE ad module would go there. When you retweeted it, [it automatically added] the hashtag "GE healthymagination."

Coleman is hiring a small cadre of "social marketing managers" to project manage their site tools for marketers. Positioned as "fast-growing, high-income, high-education, highly opinionated audience with scale," HuffPo is aiming to hit marketers' sweet spot.

It's also on the iPad, where it's trying to figure out what works on that platform.

As for their travel vertical launching this month (July 20), Coleman calls the category “a natural for our audience. They travel a lot, but to get people to blog about their travel experiences is going to be awesome. And to be able to use the social tools, everything else that we get, for the travel part, and we'll have plenty of partnerships, it should be pretty exciting. It's a very rich advertising vertical as well."