The key to monetisation of information is having a relationship with the Social Media community.

Journalists of traditional media are not used to relating to their readers. In fact, the biggest relationship that a traditional media has with its readers is in the Letters to the Editor section, in which a select few receive a reply and see their letters published. But in general, writers don’t even participate in the comments that many electronic editions include with their most relevant news items. That’s right, they don’t even converse with their users. At most they moderate the most inappropriate comments, and on occasion it isn’t even the author of the article who does this. They simply turn their backs to the community, to their readers.

The reasoning is very often that as there are so many, let’s not bother with any. However, the reasoning should be different: Let’s participate with as many as we can. It’s not about arguing a point, but rather highlighting the parts of an article that form part of the conversation, correcting details that may be inexact. And more.

Because the journalists should build a community. If they write about International news in the Middle East, they should actively participate with the community that is normally interested in this kind of news. If they write about Technology, they’d gain a lot more by participating in blogs and Tweeting with users who write about the same subject they’ve just written about, whether or not it’s their news item.

That way, when they write a news item, they would receive links, comments and mentions in Social Media… They’d have much more of a presence in the community. They would have contributed to it and would therefore receive attention from it.

More profitability with each news item. Better sources for future articles.

The benefits to this kind of an attitude are many. The social utilities, blogs and twitter all regard them highly. The shelf life and profitability of news items, increase. And it’s exponential. Because links are gained, positioning is improved both for the media as a whole as for the news item itself, and page visits are increased and with them the income from CPC and CPM adverts.

But you also gain access to new sources, to sources which acquire news items in a parallel way, sometimes unofficially. Sometimes they are reliable, sometimes they aren’t. But that’s the same as life on the street, circles of trust are created. And the informative quality of the media can be improved.

That means adapting to the Internet.

How can you do this?

We have created Noteca. It is a tool designed to Monitor and enable participation in blogs and on Twitter. I think it would be perfect for any communication medium aiming to become profitable on the Internet. It allows a group to organise its conversations, optimise the time and effort dedicated to such conversations and build relationships easily. My advice is that if you think it might be of interest to you, try it out for yourself.