media – Page 5 – Anna Wahrman

Trusted brands rule social

June 11, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

UCLA and HP researchers have determined that successful tweets have common — and predictable — characteristics. Per this fascinating piece in the Atlantic, the researchers’ algorithm can predict a tweeted article’s popularity “with a remarkable 84 percent accuracy” based on the principle that news’ social success can be defined by source, category, language used and the celebrity factor. But the striking thing is just how much the “source” part accounts for:

“What led most overwhelmingly, and most predictably, to sharing was the person or organization who shared the information in the first place. …Brand, even and especially on the Internet, matters. Online, the researchers are saying, the power of the brand is exactly what it has been since brands first emerged in the Middle Ages: It’s a vector of trust. ..When it comes to news, trust is actually much more important than emotion. Shareability is largely a function of reliability.”

It’s all a part of the trend of consumers having conversations with brands and vice versa — instead of being overtly bought and sold as in days past — and the resulting trust rewarded to brands who do it well. Extrapolating, content marketing and social marketing, which help brands build that trust and have those conversations, have with this study been proven out with measurable statistics.

As recently as last year, many brands’ strategy could be summarized by the following (ridiculous) two-pronged approach: 1. Chase SEO (damn the quality of the result); 2. Pray for something to (somehow) go viral. But the Internet changes with alarming rapidity, and the past year and a half has seen a major shift away from these tactics. SEO baiting abated, thanks to Google tweaking its algorithms to rank better content higher, and brands acknowledged that since viral content is by its nature unreliable, they shouldn’t rely on it.

This isn’t to say that search and innate shareability shouldn’t be considerations for brands — they absolutely should; they are foundational. But the new forward strategy is reaching users where they are (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), giving them something reliable and useful, and earning trust in return.

In the case of so-called old media, they must become trusted sources again in this new landscape. Successful new brands (Fab.com to name one) are taking it even one step further with an almost post-branded attitude: Their online presence not only establishes trust with consumers, but their conversational and understanding tone also unpacks branding itself and exposes undisguised sellers as outmoded entities that peddle wares to you but don’t really get you.

Reaching consumers and establishing trust by getting them isn’t a new concept in advertising and marketing, but it’s one that must be repeatedly learned anew as consumer attitudes evolve. It’s a snarky world, but it’s the one we live in, and brand strategies must evolve or perish.

Content strategy in context

June 3, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

From content strategist Rahel Bailie’s Intentional Design blog, regarding what she terms Big Content, which is to say: “Consideration of content beyond the copy, and even beyond the content.”

“When users feel good about an experience now, they will give feedback now. Conversely, when users have a bad experience, they are more likely to hold onto that feeling of indignation until they feel heard. …For organizations that increasingly depend on user-generated content as part of their marketing strategy, it’s important for them to (a) get users to generate content and (b) get users to generate content that reflects well on their customer experience. In other words, building an environment that encourages users to give immediate feedback should increase the number of instances of positive feedback.”

More — way more — about content strategy and how it relates to user experience at her Big Design Slideshare. Below is my favorite bit: What content means in context:

Can we monetize mobile already, please?

June 1, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I didn’t really understand a lot of the slides in Mary Meeker’s presentation at D10, which All Things D and Scribd were nice enough to share, but a few sure stood out.

In this pair of slides we can see that tablet (which counts as mobile, compared with desktop) has seen explosive growth.

Now look at the monetization.

What?! Why are we still trying to justify $3.50 CPM on desktops (versus 75 cents on mobile!) when as we’ve just seen, mobile use is on track to surpass desktop (as it already has in India). This is not any one business’s problem (which seems to be a popular opinion with regard to Facebook). It’s every business’s problem, and it’s mystifying how we have been ignoring it. Web publishers are already playing catch-up to web users’/readers’ value versus those from print (compare $10 or so) — let’s not roll over any more than we must. Let’s work on real solutions for monetizing mobile already. Really awesome sales and marketing products that draw in the users who are there already, ready to be shown great stuff.

Is Facebook destined to fail? Don’t bet on it

May 30, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I know Michael Wolff is a provocateur, and I take just about everything he does, says or writes with a large grain of salt. But this Technology Review piece about Facebook being “a bust” is just ridiculous in its arguments and assumptions. He basically makes a few on-the-nose observations, draws all the wrong conclusions, then dismantles his original thesis.

Basically, he writes, Facebook is destined to fail because it’s ad-supported.

He makes a correct, if rather obvious, observation: “At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media.” And he is right when he says that “the daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency.” And of course he’s on target when he reports, “I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.”

But there’s nothing new there — any of it. We already know CPMs don’t work. As an industry, we’re testing out (or should be, anyway) new revenue streams to see what will work. Pay walls? Maybe — but the jury’s still out whether non-print-subscribing users will put up money for the website only. Cutting jobs (and quality)? Likely, except while it helps the bottom line in the short-term, it erodes trust between reader and media in the long-term. Better targeted ads? Probably, yes, until everyone opts out and/or the government bans it. Running the exact same stories on different local channels to save on news-gathering and ad sales teams? I hope to the heavens that stops really soon. Meantime, our collective time is probably better spent thinking up new ways to do business online and encouraging and learning from those companies who are testing new ways of doing business — like Facebook. Otherwise, you’re just a hater.

So his conclusion that “Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it” is an utterly hyperbolic eye-roller. And his acknowledgment that the company “has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits” is actually an argument in favor of the very thing he claims to want fixed a mere paragraph before. Not only should Facebook “reinvent advertising,” it must. Because the way things work now for consumer websites, as Wolff acknowledges, isn’t working. And I think it will. Or at least I wouldn’t bet against ’em.

Wolff draw parallels between Google and Facebook, yet somehow fails to draw a similar parallel for Facebook’s growth potential. He praises Google for its ad system, acknowledging that it also “didn’t have the big idea at the company’s founding, either,” but dismisses Facebook altogether: “Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway.”

“Big” is right — it has redefined all those things, so therefore it can and will create its own, new reality. So when Wolff says that Facebook’s strategy is “Just wait,” I say, “Hell, yes.” The company, in its brief life, has completely flipped the script on all the items he mentions. They just did it. They’re doing it. It is, in fact, as Wolff says, “the bridge to new modes of human connection.” And that is the opposite of being “left in the same position as all other media companies.” Most other media companies are failing at the ad-web business. We know this. Most other media companies (and, frankly, non-media companies) are drafting off of what Facebook is doing — and following its rules and ecosystem, just as they did with Google in years past.

I’m not Facebook’s biggest fan; it often pisses me off as much as it pleases me. But I’ve seen it change the web business from the front lines these past few years. Jobs are being created — “Social Media Editor,” “Social Marketing Manager” — that didn’t exist only two or three years ago, and these are being directly guided by Facebook (and, to a lesser degree, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.): its game, its rules. As Google did with “SEO,” so Facebook is creating an industry around its product.

I guess the most (and the least, after all these words I just typed) I can say is this: I’m looking forward to the day when I can say, “I bought Facebook at $29.”

Where are the digital editorial workflow tools?

May 21, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Mediabistro captured some great thoughts on workflow from Fast Company social media editor Anjali Mullany:

“I’m a strong believer that workflow and technology changes the kind of journalism you put out. What I’ve seen is just how crucially important it is to have in place workflows that make sense and to use technology that understands that workflow.

For example, a CMS [content management system] that has a lot of constraints behind it will literally change the kind of journalism you can produce and the workflow. …If you don’t have a great project management system, whether you’re using Basecamp or Google Docs or whatever, if that project management system doesn’t understand how your reporters operate — if they feel they have to jump between email, IM, and text and whatever — that can actually disrupt the kind of work they’re able to produce.

Trying to figure out strategies for digital newsrooms, technologically and in terms of workflow, is the biggest challenge. I think it really comes down to these hardcore, very fundamental infrastructure type problems that haven’t been adequately solved yet.”

Unrelated (yet completely related) recent story about how The Bangor Daily News overhauled its workflow to incorporate Google Docs and WordPress.

A great workflow can elevate your work and a bad one can really hold you back, and I sincerely hope we will see more efforts to improve processes surrounding digital workflow in the near future. Just as curation is getting rightly hailed as an essential element of filtering out the noise and making sense of the Internet, so too should great processes be invented to corral the historically awful editorial workflow found in typical CMSes. It’s overdue. Way overdue. Not just Asana and Basecamp and the like, but tools and hacks that work specifically for journalists and that journalists can finally put to work.

A content marketing Segway

May 13, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Turns out, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett run a content-marketing firm called DumbDumb. Per the NYT, they’ve just signed on to create branded content for TBS.

“The videos will be in the vein of what is known as branded content or branded entertainment…Such sponsored stories are becoming increasingly popular as marketers wrestle with the growing ability of consumers to avoid ads.”

The Times interviews Laura Caraccioli-Davis, EVP at Electus:

“DumbDumb specializes in ‘content marketing’…part of the trend of ‘brand as publisher, brands trying to produce strong, relevant content’ for consumers…’content that’s bespoke to a brand, and highly shareable.'”

Electus is a content-marketing agency itself…and DumbDumb is one of its partners. It’s all very insular, but the point is that content marketing is wave of the future for brands — the way that they will reach consumers where they are — and Michael and Gob Bluth are content marketers!

Interesting…

The content is the product

May 11, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Thought-provoking piece from Andy Rutledge:

Online publishing is largely broken because media outlets are built to seek profit not from their product, but rather from the distractions and obstacles they conspire to place between the customer and the product. It’s a strategy that destroys quality, destroys confidence, and destroys the product consumption experience. It’s irrationality on parade: publications set up to destroy the very things they are supposed to deliver. It should come as no surprise that such a product tends to sell poorly.

Digital publishers don’t need a cleverer and more elaborate ad strategy. Digital publishers need a value and UX strategy for their product.

A simple solution

May 9, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Forbes’ Lewis DVorkin attempts to drop some wisdom with his nine “requirements for a sustainable model for journalism.” His opening words are powerful:

“FORBES and the entire media industry face daunting challenges. Digital publishing is perhaps the most disruptive force the media has ever encountered. Anyone can publish anywhere, anytime and attract an audience. Questions loom about the future of print in a tablet world. As downward pressure on CPMs indicate, new kinds of digital ad products are required. Journalists must learn entirely new skills or risk being run over by a competitive force of native digital content creators. News organizations need to develop new labor models (our contributor network is one) that can produce quality content efficiently. Most scary of all, news stalwarts must recognize that brands are publishers, too, and they want the media to provide new solutions for them to reach their customers.”

Yessir!

But then his nine simple tips come into play. We need to create quality content. I agree! Journalists need to engage with their readers. Yes, I think that’s smart. The things we write and products we create need to be usable and efficient and at scale and…wait, what? All of that, all at the same time? Hardly.

Who would disagree that a journalistic business (or any other, for that matter) should strive for a quality product from an authentic source who efficiently creates content via usable platforms and is also, simultaneously, profitable? What advertiser would not like to create “premium products that enhance, rather than disrupt, emerging consumer experiences” to win audiences and sell their stuff? No one, that’s who!

But the reality is that it’s really, really, really hard to actually do all those things. Really.

I don’t know if it is, as one commenter says, “the ‘do more with less’ pixie dust mantra that executives who don’t have a specific answer like to use,” because I want to be more positive than that. But DVorkin’s statement that “Scalable content-creation networks and open-source publishing tools that have been highly customized can drive the timely output of quality content” makes me go

As I mentioned in a previous post, the ground is always shifting, and none of us has the answers. We theorize, test and iterate. With any luck, people earn a living wage to experiment with how to create content that others find compelling, and to somehow monetize it. But expecting this business to be all these things — efficient, engaged, supremely usable, scalable, transparent, authentic and profitable — all at the same time, when the reality reshuffles itself every three to six months and all of us are merely guessing at the industry’s next steps, is a very high bar indeed.

DVorkin has at least cobbled together some theories. It’s a start. He is, like we all are, trying, throwing stuff at walls and seeing if it sticks, building the plane in midair. Maybe he thinks quality and quantity can live harmoniously together — my experience has not borne that out. Perhaps he really does believe that efficient can also be engaged — I’ve not seen that happen without either burnout or, at minimum, tears.

But at least he’s out there doing it: Theorizing, testing, iterating.

Keeping up with users

May 8, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Two very interesting pieces, and made more interesting when juxtaposed. One is a fascinating look back at Technology Review’s app-creation process and attendant drama. The other is about how those annoying Social Reader apps, after a moment in the sun, are being shunned by users.

The thesis of both seems to be that brands are stumbling in the dark to understand user/reader behavior. And just when they think they’ve found the light, after spending hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars, users look, shrug and move on.

From Jason Pontin, the EIC and publisher of Technology Review:

Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites. Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated, because they had hired Web developers who knew technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Publishers were astonished to learn that iPad apps were real, if small, applications, mostly written in a language called Objective C, which no one in their WebDev departments knew. Publishers reacted by outsourcing app development, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unbudgeted.

The ground of the Internet is constantly shifting, and brand and businesses have to keep up. It’s very expensive, frustrating and often fruitless to try, but keep up one must.

No one really knows the answers. No one really knows why some apps are successful and others aren’t. Or why communities spring up or fall away. Why sites run hot then cold. Engagement, sure. Great user experience, yes. Brand loyalty. Easy tools. Peer motivation. Curiosity. The urge to be heard. Bragging rights. Belonging. Good deals. FOMO, especially with social.

Like magazines before them, sites and apps, and programming languages, and CMSes, and devices (and on and on) heat up, run hot…but then — poof! Gone. Or at least diminished.

Truly, no one knows. Many people have theories, but that’s all they are, because this technology stuff is brand-new. But it’s important to note that it’s not a waste of time to theorize, build upon that theory (aka experiment), test it and learn from it. As a matter of fact, that’s all we can do: Learn, adapt and with any luck succeed.