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11 ingredients for digital success in 2018

December 31, 2017 by Susan Getgood

The past 6 months have seen tremendous upheaval in digital media. Companies that were once high flyers — Mashable, Rolling Stone, Time — sold for a fraction of their former (perceived) value. Whether you think this is massive disruption or simply inevitable course correction, the ingredients for digital success have evolved.

It’s not enough to have a mobile-first site with strong traffic, SEO friendly content, a way to deliver video pre-roll and a good native offering. You DO have to have that, but digital success in 2018 requires a few more ingredients. Scale alone is not enough.

Here’s my recipe for digital success in 2018. Whether you are a digital publisher or a brand extending its content strategy, below is my take on how to turn readers and viewers into true audience that you can then further monetize — events, products, e-commerce etc.

 

11 ingredients for digital success

The Basics
1. Great content. With a point of view
Content with a point of view will be more successful than content that tries to be all things to all people. Vanilla is a lovely flavor, but if everyone offers that same vanilla, content becomes a commodity. Point of view isn’t necessarily an opinion or a “stand;” you don’t have to be news or hard-hitting to have one. It can be everything from a niche target, an overt POV, to a more subtle theme or vision underlying and holding together the content you create. It is NOT a mission statement or manifesto, although those can part of a point of view.

2. A deep understanding of and commitment to your customers — both the one you have and the one you want.
Point of view is likely something you share with your target audience or customers. The more you know about them the easier (but never easy) it will be to build a product they will love. This is equally true if your project is 100% digital, or digital is simply the gateway to purchasing a tangible good. You also have to be committed to looking at your business with a customer-centric lens. Everything truly does depend on making the customer happy. Shortcuts may get you through in the short-term but long-term success for any brand is about delivering to customer needs. Consider expanding the C- suite to include a Chief Customer Officer to be the steward of this effort in partnership with client service, marketing, sales, finance and operations.

3. Data, data, data
Data drives decisions. What gets measured, gets managed. You’ve probably heard these phrases more than once in your career. Simply put, the things we measure are the things we can effectively act upon. If you don’t have data, you can’t adjust, optimize, improve. Of course, for measurement to be effective, you have to define a baseline for success up front so you measure the right things, not every thing. All data is not equally important.

Analytics (website, social platforms, campaign performance) are just the first part of a comprehensive research plan. Third party research data is the second. And proprietary research – into your audience, your content performance, market opinion — is the connective tissue that brings analytics and third party data together into meaningful, actionable information that you can use to make your content better and differentiate from the competition.

Traffic Drivers
Our first set of ingredients are the traffic drivers. How do you find the audience and bring them to your content?

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is your first, and best, friend for building traffic. Nothing — not even paid search — replaces strong organic search results. You can build an internal SEO team or contract an SEO firm to develop your SEO plan and process. However you choose to operationalize SEO, it should be a continuous loop between the content creation team and the SEO management team. But search alone is not enough to ensure success, and you shouldn’t expect it to deliver all your traffic. Against one measure, it scales amazingly well. One well written, search-optimized article can deliver many readers against multiple queries. On another, not so much. You acquire every reader one search at a time. To achieve any scale, you have to keep feeding the beast fresh new content all the time. Even though you can update older content, you still need staff to write and edit. Search is the foundation of your traffic strategy, but it isn’t the whole structure.

5. Social traffic
Social traffic isn’t the panacea either, but you need a robust social strategy to distribute your content on the popular social platforms. Specifically Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter (in descending order of importance). Earned, or “organic,” mentions of your brand are important and you should by all means start with a social communications strategy that leverages your owned social accounts to spread the word about your content and initiatives. But don’t expect earned social to get the volume you need. For most brands, organic social reach is a delightful myth. While your audience may follow your accounts for the news, they aren’t going to re-share it at the volume you need to reach new audiences. And then there’s the fact that the algorithms of social (Facebook in particular) are DESIGNED to push you toward paid social. Ads, boosted posts etc. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Make it work.

My advice is to post your news and stories and get the organic reach that your audience will naturally deliver. Then boost the best performing posts to reach new readers. This will increase the potential pool that might share the content, thus increasing your earned media. Branded content in the form of influencer-generated posts is an important ingredient; consider MarketingLand’s report this week on research done by social analytics firm Shareablee showing that viral reach from branded content ads on Facebook eclipses standard ads.

6. Native advertising
The power of native content is why you should use your web and social analytics, and even your SEO analyses, to identify the best content to put in native advertising units. Publishers may prefer to promote the branded content they create in their native units, but increasingly they are opening their inventory up to native programmatic as well as premium native advertising using content sourced elsewhere. Plus of course services like Taboola and Outbrain, although I recommend that you regularly evaluate whether the traffic you get from less-premium sources is the same quality that you get from more premium sources of traffic.

But like SEO, social posts and native ads deliver one reader, one viewer, one click at a time. Scale requires volume. Every increase has a real cost to produce and distribute the content. It’s effective, but not terribly efficient.

In addition to growing your unique users, you need to convert those one-time readers and viewers into a loyal audience. You want them to keep coming back for more, and consuming more than one piece of content at each visit. In analytics terms, you want your uniques to keep growing, but your page and video views to eclipse uniques. In my opinion, 4x is a baseline for good, and you really want it to be much more than that. Our next set of critical ingredients are the engagement and loyalty drivers.

Engagement and Loyalty Drivers
These ingredients deepen your readers’/viewers’ relationship with your content.

7. Newsletters
What’s old is new again! Newsletters are the best mechanism to get casual readers/visitors into into your content ecosystem and regularly coming back for new content. Because they are permission-based, with the user having control over what data is shared with the publisher, they are more compatible with privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will become increasingly important for any firm doing business with EU nationals when GDPR takes effect in May 2018.

That said, getting permission from the user is only part of the privacy mandate; you also have to protect it, so your newsletter tech needs to be super smart. Bottom line though, the more you can get the reader/viewer to share with you (first party data), the less you will be restricted by potential regulations/restrictions on the use of third party data from the big databases. That means delivering real value in exchange for personal information, and the more you ask, the more value you must add.

Don’t use your newsletter simply as an index to articles on your site. Folks may subscribe but they won’t necessarily become loyal readers (and repeat visitors) if the newsletter is nothing more than a promotional tool for your articles. Take the time to create some original content around the articles you recommend. Follow the example of Digiday; its daily newsletter highlights articles from the Digiday site, but it places them in context, giving the reader value even before she clicks over.

8. Recommendations
Website design matters. It is all well and good to say that no one comes to your home page, so giving it undue importance is wasted effort. For many, site visits are driven by search and social directly to the content. But the structure of content on the site once someone gets there and their ability to discover new, relevant content matters. A lot.

Publishers and brands need to invest in recommendation engines and native units that bring readers/viewers deeper into content based on their interests. Baseline is a smart keyword/topic match to the article/video they are reading or viewing, but we need to push the envelope on this. As we build stable databases of loyal readers’ preferences and past viewing habits, we should make inferences about the type of additional content they would like to consume, both editorial but also branded content. The better we match our recommendations to their interests, the more likely they are to consume multiple pages of content by choice, and not just because you split the content up into 7 pages.

9. Video (but smarter)
Digital publishers by and large have struggled with video. There is huge advertiser demand, nowhere near enough quality inventory, and strategy after strategy to manufacture it has met with lukewarm success at best. Facebook seems to be the hands-down winner for delivering targeted video eyeballs, followed by the video aggregators like Jun Group who have fed the digital demand of both publishers and brand-direct.

What seems clear to me, whether you are looking at digital, linear or OTT, is that successful video strategy is grounded in more than just delivering consumer eyeballs through targeting and audience acquisition strategies. If you BUY every view for slightly less than you re-sell it to your advertiser client, your business cannot scale efficiently. It works for a while, but eventually the advertiser figures out that she can buy that same eyeball direct.

To be successful with video, it comes back to figuring out what resonates with your audience, what fits with your editorial or brand mission, and most importantly, what you can do better, smarter than the other guy. I wrote about this in September. Success is rooted in smart content strategy, incorporating video where it makes sense for the story, not simply to deliver advertising. We shouldn’t pivot to video; we should integrate video into a multi-format digital strategy that includes all sorts of content. For a successful publisher’s take on this issue, check out Digiday’s report on Bustle’s strategy.

Even if your content is primarily text, and doesn’t seem to “need” video to tell the story, for example B2B content, you need to start at least thinking about video. Pew Research reported this spring that millenials are now the largest living generation : “In 2016, there were an estimated 79.8 million Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in that year) compared with 74.1 million Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).”

This generation looks at and engages with content — both digital and IRL — differently than the older generations. For many in the cohort, video is the preferred communication medium. Business sites that want to reach this new worker need to think about how to incorporate video into their content strategy.

For what its worth, I think it helps to think about video as 5 basic types.

  1.  News / Documentary — current events, educational, fact-based. Your purpose is to convey specific information to viewers, and you may or may not have a specific point of view and desire to convince / persuade.
  2. Comedy — Make ‘em laugh.
  3. Caught on Tape — There is a reason “America’s Funniest Home Videos” has been on television for more than 20 years. People LOVE to watch real people and animals in funny, silly situations. The quality of the videos may be dodgy, but the quality of the engagement is not. See also babies, puppies and kittens.
  4. How-To – do just about anything. Cook, apply make-up, style a wardrobe, decorate, garden, change a tire, take pictures, make videos, even business topics can come to life in video. You name it, there is a how-to video to show you the way. This is the easiest type of content for publishers and brands to add to their sites, and our appetite for it is insatiable.
  5. Scripted entertainment with HIGH production values — the market has been cornered by linear and OTT properties created by the big entertainment studios, especially at long-form, but I think there is room for scripted short-form where talented amateurs can be competitive with the big guys.

In my opinion, there are two successful video strategies. You can specialize in one type of video, and go deep and long to meet the needs of your audience for that type of content on your channel. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, you must have an unserved or underserved niche to be successful. The other strategy, which is the one most publishers and brands would be well-served by, is that you integrate the appropriate type into your story telling as needed, but your focus is the stories. You don’t need to specialize in one form as much as you need to make sure that the video you are creating is additive to the stories your audience comes to you for.

Note that some of these formats lend themselves naturally to the development of community, ie the fans that are loyal viewers. For example, comedy shows, reality TV, and character driven drama or comedy. Others are more likely to be driven by search engine results such as tutorials. Current events are a bit of a blend. We may be fans of a particular franchise such as The Rachel Maddow Show, but much of the time, we are driven by search about a specific news item.

Make small, smart investments in your original video programming, and then look at the numbers – what drives traffic and engagement? Do more of that. Drop anything that doesn’t work, no matter how much you love it.

10. Community
Influencers must become part of your content ecosystem. For branded content but also more broadly to extend the footprint of a publication or brand authentically into the community. This takes a different shape if you are a brand using your content strategy to directly promote your company and its products or a publisher, aggregating content and monetizing through advertising, but the fundamental principle is the same.

Go beyond seeing your customers as content or product consumers, and engage your audience in the content creation process. Last fall, I outlined how this might look for a digital publisher. The most important thing to remember is that you want to create multiple touch points for your customers into your brand or publication, and leverage their contributions as much as you can. Everything from deep relationships and extended partnerships with brand ambassadors or top-tier contributors to simple content creation programs with mid-tier influencers and earned media with micro influencers.

11. E-commerce
Many publishers are leaving money on the table by not integrating shopping into their sites. For branded content for sure, but also to earn against the products used in the normal course of business. Where can I get the clear mixer bowl in that video? I love what the host was wearing. Show me similar outfits. One needs no further proof that this is a smart strategy than that Amazon has launched an influencer program to develop branded content as an extension of its affiliate marketing program.

Online retailers like ShopStyle have a robust affiliate program as well as content programs using influencers. Publishers like Diply, Mashable and Bustle have incorporated e-commerce on their sites, to varying degrees:

  •  CRO and President of Diply Dan Lagani sat down with Cheddar to talk about the potential of e-commerce for digital publishers.
  • Bustle in the Wall Street Journal:  “The company has also signed additional video deals with Facebook Inc. and YouTube, and boosted its affiliate commerce, where it takes a cut of product sales generated by links included in its posts.”

But for long-term success, publishers need to develop e-commerce strategies that do not depend on Amazon affiliate income; Amazon will likely start cutting its affiliate commission rates as it further develops its own content strategy. Whether they choose to go direct to brand, partner with the affiliate networks like CJ Affiliate and Rakuten or partner with retailers, the key will be to integrate the shopping cart in such a way that it is non-intrusive to, but integrated with the content experience. The smarter, the better. Bonus for integrating influencers into the mix, as ShopStyle does.

The other e-commerce play is to have your own product line. Not every publisher has the wherewithal, the brand or the stomach for this, but if you have your own products, you are the original channel 😃 Subscription boxes were all the rage this year; no matter what your interests, you can probably sign up for a box of merchandise to be delivered to your door every month.

The garnish — a podcast

A podcast, my last ingredient for you, is more of a garnish than a requirement, so I am not counting it among the 11required ingredients for 2018, but I suspect it will be one by 2019.

Podcasting is the most social of social media. The format is so simple — a conversation between/among two or more people that makes us feel, with the intimacy of sound, like we are seated at the table too.

According to Edison Research, podcast reach has grown by 50% over the last four years, and nearly a quarter of Americans age 12 or older listen to a podcast monthly. Podcasts are most popular among 18-34s, but teens and the 35-54s are also listeners. 41% of Americans listen to some form of “speech” audio on any given day.

Right now, the playing field, and opportunity, is wide open to all. The duopoly of Facebook and Google are no better situated than any other player to establish a podcast audience and generate revenue from (and with) that audience. Even though many big advertisers are still waiting for listener metrics to get better, Edison projected podcasts to earn $220 million in ad revenues in 2017. Publishers searching for new sources of revenue would be well served by considering a podcast. It ticks a lot of boxes — content, community, native advertising, low barrier to entry and easy to experiment with formats.

The fast and simple way in is to sponsor an existing podcast that aligns with your brand values/proposition and reaches your target audience. The longer way around, and the more lucrative for a publisher, is to create a new podcast that delivers unique value for your brand and to your advertisers. I highly recommend looking to your community of readers/viewers/influencers for both hosts and guests.

And there you have it — 11 ingredients for digital success plus a bonus garnish. Thanks for sticking with me to the end.

Filed Under: Blogging, Branded content, Community, Content marketing, Digital, Digital media, Influencer Marketing, Newsletter, Podcasting, Social media, The Marketing Economy, Web Marketing Tagged With: Advertising, Facebook, Google, Google Search, Marketing, Measurement, Social media

Predictions for 2018 – Podcasts, Newsletters and Targeted Content

November 10, 2017 by Susan Getgood

In my post earlier this week, I predicted three types of digital content would be central to advertiser efforts in 2018.

Newsletters

What’s old is new again. Newsletters are super valuable because they are permission-based; your customer has opted into the sales process by subscribing. Our top of funnel marketing activity logically should focus on getting the customer into our marketing ecosystem. Short of an immediate purchase, subscribing to a newsletter is the next best thing. But focus efforts on subscribers who open and engage with the content; scrub deadweight regularly. A large subscriber count is not the goal. What matters is converting the active subscribers into customers.

Targeted content

We have so much data about customer preferences and purchases in the DMP (data management platform). We should be using data to better target content as well as ads. This is the foundational premise of start-up LiftIgniter, an AI driven personalization engine. It promises to deliver more personalized content to site visitors, learning and improving over time to deliver an optimized visitor experience and increasing stickiness. And ad revenues.

I think publishers should take this idea one step farther, and use such technologies to deliver a better branded content experience to visitors. Users outside the target might see an aligned piece of editorial content that is simply sponsored by the advertiser, while readers/viewers who are known to be interested — “in market” — see a more branded, conversion-oriented piece. This would be a win-win. Advertisers would pay premium fees to reach the targeted, qualified audience with no waste, while the casual visitors see top of funnel awareness-oriented content and aren’t turned off by a harder, irrelevant sell.

Podcasts

Podcasting has been waiting a long time to find its critical mass, and the time, it seems, is now. According to the Pandora Definitive Guide To Audio, podcasts will earn $220million in ad revenues in 2017. Slowly but surely, innovators are solving the content discovery and usability issues that slowed growth of the format, and better listener metrics can’t be far behind. Video will always be important, both branded content and editorial video, but I see podcasts as the big growth opportunity for publishers in 2018. They have lower production costs than video, and offer a more even playing field, in which (so far) Facebook has no special advantages.

Filed Under: Branded content, Digital, Newsletter, Podcasting

More on podcasting and Business Forward SMB podcast

March 12, 2008 by Susan Getgood

 "I think she’s got it." — Professor Henry Higgins

It was an experience, my friends, but I’ve finally nailed the various technical and software issues I was having in the podcast production process. There is so much more involved than simply recording and uploading to a server to produce a professional sounding podcast. I don’t think you can fully appreciate the process until you do it. I certainly didn’t.

I mentioned the Holtz-Hobson podcasting book in my previous post. Another book that proved invaluable was Sound Forge 8 Power! by Scott Garrigus.

Take a listen to the most recent program, Business Forward #6: Making Channel Sales Successful, our interview with SAP Channel Sales VP Dan Kraus. While the content of all the episodes is great (if I do say so myself), and the previous episodes sounded okay, this last one just sounds cleaner.

On another, but related, note, if you are a small business owner and will be attending BlogHer Business next month in New York, I’d love to interview you for the podcast. Drop me a note at sgetgood@getgood.com if you are interested.

Tags: Business Forward, SAP, podcast, small business marketing

Filed Under: Business Management, Customers, Podcasting

Everything you always wanted to know about podcasting

February 22, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Well, not really. But I launched a podcast for a client this month and in the process, have learned more about what can go wrong with a podcast than I ever thought possible.

The good news is, we’ve got no trouble coming up with guests or topics for the podcast. What has been killing me is all sorts of little technical crap. My husband and the designer who coded the blog are both quite technical and I’m no slouch either, but we were all pulling our hair out last week and this over a series of little things that just kept going wrong.

So, in the hopes of sparing you our fate, here’s what we learned.

1. Don’t use Podpress with self-hosted WordPress to burn your feed. The code for the player in the post works fine, but I could NEVER get a feed out of it. I eventually purchased FeedForAll and am burning and uploading the feed manually. The Podpress support docs were not helpful. Quite frankly, you are probably better off using Libsyn or some other podcast publishing host, but we’ve got a hosting account for the blog and can serve the files from there as well, so we chose to not do so.

2. Wait until you’ve worked out all your feed issues before submitting to Apple iTunes. Unless of course you want to understand every frakking line in the feed so you can troubleshoot it. Like I do now. Of course, if you follow the advice in number one above, you won’t end up with weird directories that break your feed like we did.  I’m sure some of this was operator error but man, it should be easier than this. The key thing to remember is: you can’t edit the directory submission to iTunes. Any changes have to be done in the feed itself.

3. Podpress and the Database Backup plugin for WordPress are incompatible. At least with my hosting set-up. They each require too much memory. So we have to do the backup manually right now. Luckily I only publish once per week. When I have time, we are going to research another player plug-in as that is all I am using Podpress for, and I’d prefer the automatic back-up.

4. When you record your podcast, if words drop out in the playback, it is due to the buffering of the sound data. If you don’t have enough memory, your podcast will sound like it was recorded by a drunk. Options: more memory, increase the page file size or record at a lower bit depth You do not want to know how long it took me to figure this out. Let’s just say the take of Marketing Tips now up on Business Forward was well-rehearsed.

5. How to do everything with podcasting by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson is a terrific resource. On Amazon.

Finally,  I still can’t figure out how to use the Noise Gate in Sound Forge. Anybody want to talk me through it? And please don’t tell me to RTFM. I’ve tried that and am still confused.

In other news, Battlestar Galactica returns with new episodes on April 4th and <spoiler alert> Carson Beckett is back on Stargate Atlantis tonight. These, my friends, are my silver linings.

Tags: podcasting

Filed Under: Podcasting

Syndicate Wed. Afternoon: Building a Business Case for Podcasting

May 20, 2006 by Susan Getgood

Building a Business Case for Podcasting. Eric Schwartzman, moderator. Panel: Heather Green, BusinessWeek, Mikel Ellcessor, WNYC, and Jeff Burkett, Washingtonpost.com.

Podcasting: "Makes sense. Do we do it now or in 6 months?"

Schwartzman’s opening remarks are on his blog.

This panel did a great job covering how clued-in big media companies can integrate podcasting (and blogs) into their mix.

Mike Ellcessor from WNYC covered how his station saw podcasting as a response to the increasing fragmentation of radio. They initially viewed as podcasting as an experiment. They had a number of programs that they thought might reach beyond the usual geographic WNYC audience; in particular, On the Media, nationally syndicated by NPR, is produced by WNYC.  They also podcast segments from some of their daily talk shows. Primary goal was to increase their 1:1 relationships with their audience, which makes sense for viewer-supported television 🙂

Jeff Burkett manages the online properties for the Washington Post, Newsweek and Slate. His group builds online vehicles that must meet the needs of both the edit and advertising sides of the business, so figuring out how to do advertising within the podcast was one of the objectives.  He commented that he is in the mass media (versus long tail) so a different set of economics applies.

[Comment:  In fact, all three of the panelists here are mass media. They have both different resources and requirements than an entrepreneur or hobbyist considering a podcast as a revenue or brand opportunity or just something fun to do.]

Back to the panel. Burkett says that they just appended traditional radio and tv spots to the pod- and vid- casts, a solution that he hopes to replace with something more tailored to the new media as time goes on.

Heather Green from BusinessWeek,one of the co-authors of the well-known May 05 BW cover story on blogging,  then talked about her involvement with blogs and podcasting. Since she is on the editorial side of the book, her perspective was slightly different from the previous two speakers. . The economics, at least vis her own podcast,  aren’t  her main interest [Comment: although it might be the publisher’s 🙂 ] For her, podcasting is an experiment; "you have to try it." She considers podcasting a disruptive technology that changes the landscape whether or not it has a business model.

Schwartzman asked the panelists how they built the business case for podcasting.

Ellcessor said they knew there was interest outside the NY area for their radio programming. Podcasting was cheap and easy for them. They also kept it in an experimental context, which let it succeed without high expectations.

Burkett related much the same thing — podcasting was considered an experiment.

Green didn’t have to build a business case. She talked about how she viewed the three publishing vehicles she has available for her content: her blog, her podcast and the print publication. She mostly uses the blog for random stuff that doesn’t fit into the print story and to report on interesting  "meet and greets" that don’t fit into any current projects. On the podcast, she interviews interesting people, including past interview subjects. One dilemma: how much does she hold back for a story, how much does she put out there.

The entire panel talked a bit about the valuation of podcast advertising.  Prevalent models,  CPM and sponsorship. Green said she thought podcasts will be sold as part of a package of multiple media. This makes sense to me. She also commented that very few people are going to make any money at podcasting. My opinion: I think it will depend on how you define "make money." If we define it as purely ad-supported, she’s probably right. If we look at podcasting as part of a larger package (or brand), I think it can substantially contribute to revenue. Just hard to measure.

Questions from the audience.

Sam Whitmore asked if they knew what percentage of audience listened on an iPod or MP3 player versus a computer? No one did, but there was a lively exchange about the value of knowing how the audience is listening. The iPod listener is potentially more valuable than the multi-tasking PC listener.

Someone asked WNYC, how do they prevent podcasting from damaging their fundraising efforts. The answer was pretty much, we can’t completely, but we went into it with our eyes wide-open, and try to live by the creed, "first do no harm."

What’s the ideal length? No answer to this one, not even from these experts. The WNYC podcasts are created from radio inventory; On the Media is its normal 59 minutes and the talk show segments range from 20-40 minutes.

For Burkett (WaPost)  it depends on what the podcast is about. For example, he hates that Onion Radio News is only 30 seconds, feels it should be 5 minutes.

What instincts do you have about the listener, common traits? Mike: time pressed; Jeff: agreed time pressed, therefore harder to reach on radio and TV; Heather: classic early adopter, highly educated, high income/net worth, more women than we thought.

Finally, can the little podcaster compete with mainstream media? Panel thinks yes. Mike: talent will prevail, as long as you master the basics, offer a certain level of sound quality. Jeff: it is all about people and their passions.

The last question was an off-topic question for Heather Green related to a recent article "Is it 1998 again?"

Tags: Syndicate, Corante, podcasting, business case

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Filed Under: Blogging, Media, Podcasting, RSS

More Syndicate coverage: Syndicate and me. Syndicate and marketers.

May 18, 2006 by Susan Getgood

Home stretch. Before I get to the Wed. afternoon sessions, a word about why I attended Syndicate.

To start with, I was  personally interested in the topics, especially podcasting. So when Corante issued the call to its blogger partners to attend Syndicate and blog the event, I jumped on it. As a small business, I can afford the trip to NY or the conference registration, but not both. Covering the event was a win-win. I covered my trip, but didn’t have to pay for registration. I’m very grateful to Corante and IDG for the opportunity.

In return, I am taking the commitment to blog the event very seriously. I didn’t miss many sessions and hope that my marketing and PR colleagues are enjoying the reports. Given comments about how few marketing and PR folk (versus tech) attended the show,  I’m glad someone with the marketing perspective is writing up the event in detail. Why? 

Because change is a slow process. Marketers and PR folk who haven’t yet made the leap into the blogosphere may be thinking hard about it, but still reluctant. For whatever reason. They aren’t going to attend a conference about syndication, ’cause it just doesn’t seem relevant  in their day to day jobs. Probably isn’t. Even if they are blogging or podcasting, the conference definitely has the feel of a tech (versus marketing or business) oriented event. Cause it kind of is…

But… many of the topics that were discussed are relevant to the  issues on the marketing and communications plate. I hope that my blog entries about it may spark someone — to try something new, attend the next conference, start their own conference, push hard at their industry associations, maybe even just to finally start their own blog.

So, if client work willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll get the rest of my summaries up by the weekend.

Tags: Corante, Syndicate, blogging, marketing, PR, public relations

Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing, Podcasting, PR, RSS

Syndicate Wednesday Morning

May 18, 2006 by Susan Getgood

First things first, my number one fan says maybe I was too hard on Amanda Congdon in my post about Tuesday’s keynote session. Which was not my intent. I enoy Rocketboom, think she is tremendously talented and wish her and her colleagues all the success in the world. I just didn’t get a lot out of her session, and thought it was a bit basic for the Syndicate audience. But she clearly has a lot of passion for what she is doing, and others did enjoy it, so there you have it.

On to Wednesday’s sessions.

Steve Gillmor’s "It’s the Gestures, Stupid" — The title of this session is homage to James Carville’s "It’s the economy, stupid" phrase from the first Clinton election oh so many years ago. As Gillmor pointed out, Carville’s "stupid" (and his as well presumably) was self-reflective — a reminder to himself of what was important, not a commentary on others. Nonetheless, there were quite a lot of us in the room with looks of total incomprehension during Gillmor’s talk. Who all felt a lot better when Doc Searls commented in his closing session that even he doesn’t fully understand what Gillmor is talking about.

So, I am not even going to try and summarize what Gillmor covered in his session, other than to tell you that I *think* the gestures concept and Gillmor’s Gesture Bank (www.gesturebank.com) is an open source model for the aggregation of meta data. I’ve signed up for the public beta because I am now curious. I’m sure more than a few folks did the same. And perhaps that was the primary goal all along. We don’t get it yet, but we will…..

Gillmor was followed by Steven Schwartz of Reuters, "Syndicating the Publishing World." This was a typical polished corporate presentation, with slides and all, that might as well have been titled "Why Reuters loves the Web."  Schwartz was extremely good at staying on message — I lost track of the number of times he told us that Reuters is the "world’s largest news agency" 🙂 

Thinking about it afterward, the two sessions – Gillmor and Schwartz – couldn’t have been more different. The contrast between Gillmor’s informal style and Schwartz’s corporate demeanor was marked. I didn’t understand everything (much!) of what Gillmor said, but I got the gist that there were some important ideas lurking in "gestures." Whereas, I understood pretty much Schwartz’s whole pitch, but I could have gotten the same information from a Reuters fact sheet.

Tags: Steve Gillmor, Reuters, Syndicate, Corante, gestures, Gesture Bank

Filed Under: Blogging, Podcasting, RSS

More Syndicate Tuesday

May 17, 2006 by Susan Getgood

Stormhoek Sauvignon Blanc is nice, but the Pinot Grigio is FINE. The wines were served at KnowNow’s reception tonight (and a later party which I intended to go to but just crashed). I wish I could figure out a reasonable party for a Stormhoek gig, Wonder if they’d go for a non-geek dinner…..I could definitely do a a dog show thing….

The Edelman session this morning was by far the best today, at least for a marketing/comms person. Here’s the summary of the other sessions I attended today.

Building Brands Through Compelling Podcast Content, Paul Gillin (moderator), Scott Sigler, Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger (Mommycast.com) and Audrey Reed-Granger (Whirlpool). Overall this was an interesting session, but the thing that sticks with me the most is Reed-Granger’s narrative of how she got the podcast approved. The critical elements: the trust (and good track record) she had established with corporate leadership combined with a clear editorial calendar and vision for the podcast. The discussion on how to include/integrate corporate interests/sponsors was also interesting; the podcasters clearly came down on the side of a clear separation between church and state. I was also impressed by the passion they all had for podcasting.

Grokking the Big Picture, Paul Gillin (moderator), David Geller, Mike Davidson, Dave Sifry, Eric Elia. Most of this session just seemed a rehash from other conferences, other arguments. Interesting if you’ve never heard or read it before but otherwise ? Blah blah blah. Most interesting comment: Mike Davidson’s that RSS was missing the "oh wow" factor, perhaps part of the reason for slow uptake. Not to mention RSS is still too hard for the average bear. See what I mean. Nothing that new.

Sifry did announce a deal with Paramount for Technorati to aggregate the conversation around selected Paramount films, which will be hosted on the Paramount sites. This sounds very interesting, plan to keep my eye on it. Then there was a long discussion of full versus partial feed.Yawn. Nothing new. There are arguments to be made for both. It’s an easier decision for full feed if you are not trying to monetize the blog.  When they got to questions the sessions turned into "speaking from the floor"  and I got kinda bored. Sorry 🙁 

This session did spark my interest in clarifying the differences among all the different news aggregators (Techmeme, Digg, Newsvine et al), so watch for that this month.

David Weinberger, Tagging. I enjoyed this session, which was held more as a conversation than a presentation. Gist: The power of tagging isn’t in the self tagging that an author does of his/her own material. That is just simple metadata. The richness comes from users tagging material that they find interesting in ways that are meaningful to them using social networking tools like flickr and del.icio.us. Because the tagging is public, we get the social effects — others use the same tag for similar but not necessarily the same type of content and tag the same content with additional tags meaningful to them. Clusters develop around tags, and so forth. Suddenly, your tag for an article introduces you to all sorts of other material. Subscribe to the tag and you get a steady stream of stuff that you might never find in normal reading of Web sites and blogs.

Short story: this session cleared up a lot of my confusion about the value of tagging. Things to ponder: the ownership of content changes now that folks can classify things the way they want (bottom up versus top down). How other people tag our content can start to define, even change, our online personas.

Halley Suitt, Top Ten Sources. This session was mostly an introduction to Halley’s new venture Top Ten Sources. She talked a little bit about the issues raised when they launched the site re: syndicating other bloggers’ content and answered questions about their business model. She also read two past blog posts, one written when her father died and another on alpha males.

Amanda Congdon, Rocketboom. I didn’t get too much out of this session. I sense that Amanda is more comfortable in front of the camera than behind the podium. The content was also wrong for the Syndicate audience — there was nothing that most didn’t already know.

Seen today: Fellow Corante bloggers Vin Crosbie and Tish Grier, Brian Oberkirch, Tom Biro, Paul Gillin, Dana McCurley, Eric Schwartzman, Joel Richman and Josh Hallet

Shopping accomplished: a pair of cute sandals on sale at Coach (hotel is on Madison Ave.)

Wednesday: the bad boys of PR and more.

Tags: Syndicate, Corante, RSS, podcast, podcasting, blogging,  tagging

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Filed Under: Blogging, Podcasting, RSS

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