On PBS Newshour: Discussing the Yahoo Tumblr Acquisition

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JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to the blockbuster deal announced today in the tech world: giant, but troubled Yahoo buying the popular blogging site Tumblr. The purchasing price: $1.1 billion dollars. The prize: a fast-growing social media site that features more than 100 million blogs in its network and reaches several hundred million people worldwide.

It was started just six years ago by David Karp, who dropped out of high school to work in the tech field. He will remain as head of Tumblr.

This is the biggest move yet by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the company just 10 months ago from Google. Today, she wrote on a Tumblr post, “We promise not to screw it up.”

Rebecca Lieb is research analyst of digital advertising and media for the Altimeter Group and joins us now.

Welcome to you.

So, why does Yahoo want to buy Tumblr? What’s the appeal?

REBECCA LIEB, Altimeter Group: There are several appealing things about Tumblr. There’s certainly the size of the audience, as you just mentioned, but also, perhaps more than that, the demographics of Tumblr’s audience.

Yahoo has been losing users, losing eyeballs for years now. Tumblr represents the millennials, those 20-somethings who didn’t abandon Yahoo because they probably never aligned with the platform in the first place. This is a group that is incredibly important to the advertisers Yahoo is trying to attract.

JEFFREY BROWN: Explain for our non-Tumblr users in the audience what it is. How has it been able to rise so fast and appeal to so many people?

REBECCA LIEB: Tumblr is a blogging platform that is very, very image-centric. It’s very focused on users uploading photographs.

And this younger demographic is a very, very mobile demographic. These are people who have their smartphones with them at all times. And as anybody with a smartphone knows, it’s much easier to update your status with a quick photo of what you’re doing or what you’re eating or what you’re seeing than it is typing with your thumbs.

We saw a very recent move like this when Facebook acquired Instagram last year, also for a billion dollars, which raised some eyebrows at the time. And Facebook has subsequently redesigned its news stream to focus more on these images, as its users migrate to mobile platforms.

I believe that Yahoo is trying to do very much the same thing. And, in fact, since the announcement of the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo has announced that they will be giving users substantially more free space on Flickr, also a Yahoo property.

So we’re seeing a big move towards images and a big move towards mobile on Yahoo’s part.

JEFFREY BROWN: In all of these new deals, and this one in particular, the question is still, how do you make money out of it, right? I mean, what would happen in this case? Is it likely we’d see money made through the advertising on Tumblr or what?

REBECCA LIEB: I think that this is a very interesting two-way street.

Yahoo, of course, is a traditional new media company, if you can — to coin a phrase. In other words, they have very interruptive display advertising, the “click here, buy this now” type. Tumblr has been experimenting with what’s called “content marketing” and forms of what’s known as “native advertising.”

This is — these are marketing messages, but they’re more subtly integrated into the interface. They don’t shout at the user. They don’t interrupt the user. They’re part of the stream and they’re meant to attract, rather than to interrupt.

Yahoo for the time being will leave Tumblr alone. If they slap these interactive ads up on Tumblr, the users will probably abandon the property. At the same time, Yahoo is going to learn from these Tumblr products and try and incorporate them into Yahoo’s more traditional properties.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you — go ahead.

REBECCA LIEB: At the same time, Yahoo can introduce Tumblr to larger brands and more traditional advertisers, the P&Gs of the world, the McDonald’s of the world. So, this does have the potential to benefit both parties monetarily.

JEFFREY BROWN: I was thinking, when you were referring to the possibility of users migrating or leaving, apparently, there’s reports that already some of that is happening. But that just shows how fragile this whole system is, right, this ecosystem of companies and where users go.

REBECCA LIEB: Absolutely.

You know, we have seen companies like Yahoo stumble and lose their luster, AOL, MySpace, in periods of times that are less than a decade. It took companies like Pan American Airlines or Ford Motor companies perhaps a century to rise to ascendance and then to lose their luster.

Internet companies can do it seemingly overnight. Marissa Mayer is trying to bring Yahoo back from the brink, as her former Google colleague Tim Armstrong is similarly trying over at AOL.

JEFFREY BROWN: And just briefly, when she writes that post, “We won’t screw it up,” she is writing that because she knows a lot of people remember Yahoo apparently just — doing just that, right, with other acquisitions.

REBECCA LIEB: Not on Marissa Mayer’s watch.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

REBECCA LIEB: She is relatively new at the company. She’s been there less than a year.

But, indeed, Yahoo has made acquisitions and screwed them up. So did News Corp. when it acquired MySpace. One of Yahoo’s real challenges is going to be how to keep Tumblr cool when it’s owned by what is very easily perceived by its very young, very hip user base to be a corporate overlord.

JEFFREY BROWN: Rebecca Lieb, thanks so much.

Watch Yahoo Makes Bid for Reboot With $1.1 Billion Deal for Tumblr on PBS.

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Going Native

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Native advertising.

Everyone’s talking about it, but what is it, exactly? It has something to do with ads that don’t look like ads, but rather provide a degree of value in terms of being content. In that sense, native advertising is certainly a form of converged media as it combines paid media (advertising) with owned media (content) – often with the goal of generating earned media (social interaction, UGC, etc.).

Yet brands have been paying publishers to run their own content since forever. Does that mean “native advertising” simply a neologism for what we used to call advertorial? Or branded content? Maybe it’s sponsored content?

If native advertising somehow differs from older models of advertorial, sponsored or branded content, where are the lines drawn? Does “native” necessitate some sort of technological framework to carry and/or distribute the content in question (à la products offered by The New York Times, or tech start-ups such as OneSpot or inPowered)? Does it mean a publisher’s in-house agency (think Buzzfeed, Gawker Media) was commissioned to come up with the creative?

Bottom line: The term “native advertising” raises more questions than it does answers.

The value proposition of native advertising is, however, clear in a digital environment of banner blindness and plunging clickthrough rates. Pre-roll ads are skipped or ignored, email subscriber rates are eroding. Given any kind of choice, consumers are saying a clear “no” to interruptive advertising.

Native advertising lies somewhere in bridging the divide between content marketing – a pull strategy – and plain, old fashioned advertising, which is interruptive. Somewhere in its definition is probably the fact of paying for space or time (the “advertising” part) is a fashion that’s “native,” i.e. organic, conducive to the user experience, non-salesy, and offers some sort of value in and of itself as an ad (entertainment, education, utility, for example).

Native advertising’s promise, therefore, is better performing ads – but only if metrics are defined that are “native” to “native.” DM goals likely don’t apply in this case. Highly customized ad solutions mean more revenue for publishers (and boy, can they use it now). Also, deeper creative engagements for agencies, and hopefully, a better user experience for consumers.

The fly in the ointment is that without a real definition of native advertising, it means anything you want it to mean. Or anything whoever’s trying to sell it to you wants it to mean. Confusion in the marketplace is not a good thing (though it can benefit certain constituents).

This is why, as a research analyst, my next project will be to define native advertising, as well as to map the landscape of products and technologies related to the practice. (I’m also part of an IAB taskforce that will work to define the term – it’s therefore important to note the research will be my own work, not that of a committee.)

As this project is just kicking off, I’d love to invite your input. What do you believe native advertising is? Isn’t? What are the important companies in the space? Please let me know, either via email or in the comments section.

I’ll report back soon. Watch this space!

A version of this post originally published on iMedia Connection

Image credit: www.bydewey.com

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Why Brands Must Orchestrate for Content

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Why is content orchestration needed across the organization — all departments included, no exceptions? Here’s a recent example of a near-missed opportunity.

The client recently launched a content marketing initiative, one that’s rich in blog entries and videos around health and wellness. Six months into the program, which is governed by the social media marketing department, the metrics all look good: repeat visits, brand favorability, page views — so much so that the program will be expanded with a site redesign and new features.

One planned new feature is giving readers the ability to subscribe to email updates. The social team did some digging and learned the company is already working with a major email service provider, so the machinery is in place to add that ability.

This is where it bears mentioning that this particular organization is in a highly regulated industry. Marketing activities can only be conducted in certain states. Moreover, different brands of the parent enterprise come into play on a state-by-state basis. To say marketing for this organization is highly segmented is an understatement.

Clearly, because what’s at play here is content marketing, the sell is soft. In fact, it’s non-existent in terms of this particular content initiative. Yet it’s possible that could change, or that the company might elect to add a link, a call-to-action, or a promotional “brought to you by” message in the footer of the subscription emails.

All that’s possible, and more. Subscribers could be asked to indicate in which state they reside when signing up for the emails. Email append could be used on the list to segment subscribers on a state-by-state basis in order to insert the relevant brand name into the messages.

All these ideas are as possible as they are (for now) theoretical. Yet none were entertained by the social media department running the campaign. This would very likely be to the chagrin of the email division, or the direct marketing group, had they known of the plans afoot (which, of course, they do not).

This is only one recent, real-life example of why organizations must organize for content. Without cross-functional communication, coordination, expertise, and goal-sharing, companies are doomed to be mired in inefficiencies, missed opportunities, reduplicated efforts, and just plain not sharing the very high levels of expertise inherent in the broad array of digital practice areas.

How to organize is, of course, the question. Few enterprises have a formal content division or an executive expressly charged with overseeing content initiatives. Recently, research I conducted included asking 78 companies how they’re tackling the content issue. Only nine of them have, to date, made express content-related hires (i.e., people with titles containing “content” or “editor”).

Unsurprisingly, this leads to ad hoc content and content responsibilities that tend to be based more on factors like hand-raising than expertise or strategy. Case in point, here’s how one major brand has allocated content responsibilities:

Yes, models have emerged to address the need to synchronize, manage, coordinate, and optimize content strategy, creation, production, and distribution. Not all of these frameworks necessitate increasing headcount, a solution that at the majority of organizations is quickly filed under “easier said than done.”

Read the rest of this post on iMedia Connection, where it originally published.

New Research: Organize for Content

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More than a handful of brands publish more content now than a major media property such as Time Magazine did 25 years ago.

Despite the overwhelming and ever-increasing trend toward content marketing, and the need to continually feed an ever-increasing portfolio of content channels and formats, most organizations haven’t yet addressed content on either a strategic or tactical level.

It’s high time they did, and hopefully my new research report, Organizing for Content, will help. It provides both frameworks for coping with enterprise content marketing demands and a checklist of recommendations for organizational readiness.

Consider: The average organization is responsible for the continual content demands of an average 178 social media properties, to say nothing of a myriad of other owned media properties, from websites and blogs to live events.

Those few large enterprises not yet active in social media can easily serve five million email subscribers, as well as multiple millions of monthly unique visitors per month to their sites.

Yet the overwhelming majority of organizations don’t have content divisions in their org charts. Only nine of the brands we interviewed for this report (out of 78 stakeholders, also including content service providers and domain experts) have made explicit content hires, i.e. people with titles such as “editor” or those that contain the word “content.”

Who, or what, governs content internally? Responsibilities and oversight tend to be reactive, highly fragmented and distressingly ad hoc, as illustrated below. This highly typical diagram portrays how one major retail brand divides content responsibilities between divisions that are not necessarily interconnected or in regular communication with one another. This fragmented approach leads to inconsistent messaging, huge variations in voice, tone, and brand, and an uneven customer experience. Channel divisions themselves tend to be ad hoc, assigned more on the basis of hand-raising than any overarching strategic mandate.
Where Does Content Live Inside the Enterprise?
 It’s high time that organizations got organized for content. It’s only going to become more demanding – and harder – in the future.

Native advertising, advertorial, paid influencer, and sponsored content are just a few examples of the paid/owned media hybrids brands are exploring. Content must also be created for an ever-expanding spectrum of media, screens, and devices, ranging from smartphones and tablets to emerging platforms, such as augmented reality, Google Glass, and quite possibly devices like smart watches.

These new channels and platforms, coupled with a trend that de-emphasizes the written word in favor of visual and audio-visual content,  create new skill demands. “Hire a journalist,” a tactic many organizations adopted with the rise of blogging, now is in no way sufficient to address more technical requirements involving deeper knowledge of technology, production, design, and user experience. Requiring overtaxed and untrained staff to “do content” in their spare time is obviously hardly a solution.

Our research identifies six organizational models companies are using to address complex, cross-departmental content needs, and also contains a recommendations checklist for content preparedness. Please download the report (at no cost, we just ask that you share it if you like it), and let me know your reactions in the comments.

I’ll also deliver my findings in a webinar on Wed., May 29 at 1:00 EST. Please register and join us! 

Read and/or download the report below:

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Four Disruption Themes for Business

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By Altimeter Group’s Research Team

  • Analysts: Susan Etlinger, Charlene Li, Rebecca Lieb, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Silva, Brian Solis
  • Consulting: Ed Terpening, Alan Webber
  • Researchers: Jon Cifuentes, Jessica Groopman, Andrew Jones, Jaimy Szymanski, Christine Tran

Over 30 Technologies Have Emerged, at a Faster Pace than Companies Can Digest.

If you think social was disruptive, it was really just the beginning. Altimeter’s research team recently convened for our annual research offsite and found over 30 disruptions and 15 trends that have emerged (see below for the full list in our Disruption Database). These disruptions and trends will affect consumers, business, government, the global economy; with accelerating speed, frequency and impact.

Altimeter's Business Disruption Themes

Four Major Business Disruptions Emerge – Business Leaders Must Prepare.

Out of these disruptions and trends, Altimeter identified four major themes that will be disruptive to business. Below is a preview of Altimeter’s four business disruption themes, with a definition and short description of each. In the coming weeks, we’ll publish a short report explaining these themes in more detail.

Everything Digital: An increasingly digital landscape – including data, devices, platforms and experiences – that will envelop consumers and businesses.

Everything Digital is the increasingly digital environment that depends on an evolving ecosystem of interoperable data, devices, platforms – experienced by people and business. It’s larger than the scope of Internet of Things, as it’s pervasive or ambient – not defined only by networked sensors and objects, but including capabilities such as airborne power grids or wireless power everywhere. Everything Digital serves as the backdrop for our next three themes.

Me-cosystem: The ecosystem that revolves around “me,” our data, and technologies that will deliver more relevant, useful, and engaging experiences using our data.

Wearable devices, near-field communications, or gesture-based recognition are just a few of the technologies that will make up an organic user interface for our lives, not just a single digital touchpoint. Digital experiences will be multiplied by new screen types, and virtual or augmented reality. Individuals who participate will benefit from contextualized digital experiences, in exchange for giving up personal data.

Digital Economies: New economic models caused by the digital democratization of production, distribution, and consumption.

Supply chains become consumption chains in this new economy as consumers become direct participants in production and distribution. Open source, social, and mobile platforms allow consumers to connect with each other, usurping traditional roles and relationships between buyers, sellers, and marketplaces. Do-it-yourself technologies such as 3D printing and replicators will accelerate this shift, while even currency becomes distributed and peer-to-peer-based. In this new economy, value shifts towards digital reputation and influence, digital goods and services; even data itself. The downside? An increasing divide between digital “haves” and the digital “have-nots.”

Dynamic Organization: In today’s digital landscape, dynamic organizations must develop new business models and ways of working to remain relevant, and viable.

Business leaders grapple with an onslaught of new technologies that result in shifting customer and employee expectations. It’s not enough to keep pace with change. To succeed, dynamic organizations must cultivate a culture, mindset, and infrastructure that enables flexibility and adaptability; the most pioneering will act as adaptive, mutable “ad-hocracies.”

Altimeter’s Disruption Database

Below are the 30 digital disruptions and 15 digital trends, which were used as the starting ground of our analysis.

Disruptions Trends
3-D Printing and Replicators
App Economy
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Augmented Reality (Google Glass)
Automated Life (Cars, Homes, Driving, etc.)
Automated Robots
Bio-Engineering
Biometric Authentication (Voice/audio, fingerprint, body/eyescan, gesture, olfactory user interface Content Marketing
Digital/Social TV vs. “Second Screen”
Emerging Hand Held Devices / Platforms (Android, Tablet, Phablet)
Gamification
Gesture/Voice-Based Interface/Navigation / “Human as Interface”
Hacking/Social Engineering and Information Security
Haptic Surfaces (Slippery, wet, textured through electrical currents)
Healthcare – Data and Predictive Analytics
Human-Piloted Drones
Hyper-Local Technology / Mobile Location / Indoor Mapping
Internet of Nanoparticles (Embedded in bloodstream)
MicroMedia Video
Mobile Advertising
Mobile Payments
Native Advertising
Natural Language Processing
Near Field Communications
Open Source / Open Data / Open Innovation
Peer-Based Currency / Soical Currency (BitCoin)
Proximity Based Communications
Social Engagement Automation (Robots Respond on Twitter)
Social Network Analysis, Graphing, and Data Science
Social Technologies
Touch Permeates Digital/Surfaces: TVs, Touch Advertising
Virtual Reality / Immersive 3D Experiences
Wearable / Embedded Technology
Wireless Power / Electricity		 Big Data
Collaborative Economy
Connected Workplace
Customer Experience Design/Architecture and Integration
Data Convergence/Customer Intelligence
Data vs Creative in the Org: New Decision Process
Digital Ethnography or Customer Journey Mapping
Digital Influence and Advocacy
Evolution of the Center of Excellence
Generation C
Hypertargeting
Internet of Things or Internet of Everything
Intrapreneurship, Innovation Culture, and Innovation Hubs
Pervasive Computing
Porous Workplace
Privacy: Standardization and Regulation (“Beware of Little Brother”)
Quantified Self or Human API
The Digital Journey and Understanding Digital Signals
The Maker Movement
The Neuroscience of Digital Interactions


Open Research: Please Share Your Comments and Insights with Us.

There’s more to come – we’ll be sharing additional insights such as 1) top questions for businesses to ask, 2) who’s disrupted and who benefits, and 3) enabling technologies.

In the meantime, we’re soliciting your comments as part of our Open Research model. Please share our themes with others, and help us answer these questions:

  • What other business disruptions or trends are you seeing? Please add to this Google form and we’ll provide proper attribution.
  • Which of these four business disruption themes impact your business now?
  • How is your business responding to these themes, or the related disruptions and trends?

Photos from Altimeter’s Research Offsite

Below are a couple illustrations that resulted from the discussions that took place at our research offsite:

Mock Up of Disruption Marketecture

Above Image:  Altimeter synthesized these disruptions and trends, which become broader themes. 

Graphic Illustration from Altimeter Research Offsite

Above Image: A graphic illustration of our synthesis. Thank you to Paula Hansen who was instrumental in visually capturing our discussions in real-time.

Reposted from the Altimeter Group blog 

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Conducting Content: From Dissonance to Harmony

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company-content-marketingWith today’s pressing content demands, every organization with a website, blog and marketing communication documents needs a content marketing strategy. Below are a few questions to consider when developing your own strategy.

  • Do you know everyone in your organization who creates and/or publishes content?
  • Where are your organization’s creative assets stored and managed? (“My Inbox” and/or “My Desktop” are not correct answers.)
  • Do you have an editorial calendar?
  • Do you have content specific metrics?
  • Do you have a channel strategy?

You’ve heard it a million times by now: every brand is a publisher. But no one said it’s easy to be a publisher. Publishing comes with a real need to “feed the beast.” And, that beast is hungry on pretty much a daily basis. Some brands, such as Red Bull, tweet up to 200 times per day.

Content demands have become near-constant and must increasingly be executed in real-time or near-real-time.

Yet, on the organizational level, content tends to be created and managed in silos. The social team does this, marcomm does that, and PR has its own concerns; meanwhile, community, customer support, creative and advertising teams are each on separate missions. The inevitable result is duplication of efforts, wasted resources, and inconsistent messaging.

At the same time, an ever-increasing number of channels and platforms demand both new skills and increase the need for cross-functional coordination and orchestration.

As an analyst, I’m about a week from publishing new research on how brands are organizing internally to meet the demands of content marketing, the result of dozens of interviews with senior marketing and content executives. My report publishes this month. Below is an advance look at the enterprise models we’ve identified for orchestrating content within organizations to ensure that it’s created in harmony with strategic goals, as well as properly resourced across departments and divisions.

More detailed descriptions of the various groups in the model are provided on MarketingLand, where this originally published.

Media Model Threats: The New York Times vs. Grand Central Terminal

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Recycling Bin, Grand Central Terminal

Digital is hardly the only disruption threatening media business models. So too is…reclycling?

Recently I was privileged to take a behind-the-scenes tour of Grand Central Terminal, which this year is celebrating its centenary. In addition to many rare and privileged experiences (Deep in the basement, New York’s oldest computer dating from 1911! Popping open the VI of the famed Tiffany clock and sticking my head out over Park Avenue!), our scarily knowledgeable guide shared an interesting fact about the threat to print publishing posed by the paper recyling bins installed in the terminal in 1990.

On Day One of the recycling program, the new bins collected an astonishing five tons of (mostly) newspapers discarded by commuters, making it America’s largest recycling plant overnight. However the program had done its homework, and knew six tons of paper waste passed through the station daily. So where was the missing ton of newsprint?

Left on the trains? No, they looked. Thrown out with the regular trash? Not there, either. Closer scrutiny was called for, and the case was soon cracked. Commuters (including many affluent ones sporting mink coats and Armani suits, noted our guide) were fishing papers out of the newly installed recycling bins to “recycle” the papers themselves. The terminal, noting a trend, issued a press release. The story was covered on the evening news.

The next morning, the phones at Grand Central Terminal were ringing off the hook. The New York Times was enraged to learn that terminal’s recycling program was undercutting newsstand sales.

The result? Since 2001, the Times has been paying a pretty penny for a contract that reportedly lasts into perpetuity to maintain the on site recycling bins — bins that are taller and deeper than any commuter could ever hope to snag a discarded paper out of.

Problem Solved?

Perhaps the Times has gained newsstand sales as a result of this measure, but it’s one that calls into question the nature of the newspaper and magazine business. Does the Times want to sell news – or papers? The two are no longer intrinsically bound. Digital-only subscriptions are an increasingly important part of the Grey Lady’s revenue model.

But not important enough. So long as publishing – and ad rates – are dictated by outmoded print circulation numbers, publishers will push papers harder than they will content.

Case in point: After acquiring an iPad, I phoned the New Yorker to request my longstanding subscription be switched to digital only. Heck, I travel too much to even collect the snail mail edition from the mailbox.

Condé Nast was more than happy to comply, a rep informed me. All I had to do to secure a digital-only subscription to the magazine was agree to pay double – double – the annual subscription rate for the print/digital bundle.

Recycling indeed.

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Six Emerging Content Marketing Trends

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Three related, clustered events constitute a trend. So, what have we here?

  • February 25: Mindshare appoints a content chief
  • February 27: Edelman names (a new, digital-focused) chief content officer
  • February 27: Facebook announces a content strategy fellowship
  • March 25: Sequoia Capital appoints a head of content
  • March 26: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt names its first chief content officer
  • March 27: Weber Shandwick launches a content marketing unit with 100 staffers
  • April 1: Havas signs a global chief content officer

Chief content officers have been de rigeur in media companies for years. Editorial web sites, magazines, newspapers, and broadcasters have them. Even Netflix boasts a chief content officer.

What’s staggering now is the alacrity with which agencies are now piling into the white-hot content marketing space. Not all of this is new, of course. Content divisions and/or practices have existed for some time at major players such as Leo Burnett, Ogilvy, and OMD. Digital shops, too, have content heads, as do (of course) the small cohort of content-only agencies.

The appointments above reveal these interesting takeaways:

Agencies that don’t have content practices are scrambling to get into the game

From the appointment of an executive with “content” in his/her title to blowing out an entire new division, both ad and PR agencies realize content can no longer be ignored. Clients expect content-related services and advisory. While mileage on the revenue models varies radically, there’s also heated competition on the PR and ad sides for a piece of the content pie. “We’re in a dogfight with the ad agencies,” is how one PR executive put it to me in a private meeting.

Content’s meaning is increasingly (if not almost exclusively) digital

It’s not as if Edelman didn’t have a content officer before appointing Steve Rubel to the role. His predecessor, Richard Sambrook, a former BBC editor, focused on editorial development. Rubel’s purview will be much broader, focusing on relationships both with digital media properties and technology vendors.

PR shops are in the media buying business

Historically, PR firms never, ever bought media. They earned it. In announcing their new content initiatives, both Weber Shandwick and Edelman have stressed that media buying and other forms of brokering will be very much part of what they do going forward. Media convergence and native advertising models make this evolution imperative.

Content is essential for startups

When one of the leading venture capital firms appoints a content head to help its portfolio companies develop and improve their blogs, social media, and video, it underscores just how essential a well-executed content strategy is to success — or failure — in business.

Hire-a-journalist: Will it suffice?

For the past several years, “hire a reporter” has been the mantra of companies eager to get a leg up in blogging or on social media channels. Now that content strategies are more technologically complex and digitally convoluted (converged media, native advertising, video, mobile) than “just writing,” it will be interesting to see what skillsets the next crop of content hires possess.

“Global” appended to content titles

This trend will become increasingly important with holding companies and larger agencies. Brands, too, are beginning to make content hires and shuffle the org chart to accommodate content strategy and execution. One of the biggest content challenges is the one facing large, multinational enterprises that must create content for a wide range of countries, languages, territories, audiences, and products. If any single cohort relies on outside content support, it’s multinationals. Holding companies possess on-the-ground global support and know that coordinated efforts can be a boon to this important new line of business.

This post originally published on iMedia Connection

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Organizing For Content

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gears_shutterstockHow should organizations organize for content? Are brands really publishers? Very few have hired people with “content” or “editor” in their titles. Fewer still (read: almost none) have content departments or divisions within the marketing or other organizations.

Yet, more and more companies are producing content like crazy. Also, multiple websites. Large corporations have tens of millions of visitors to their dot-coms each month, perhaps five to 10 million email subscribers. Then, there are blogs, YouTube channels and multiple social media channels on social networks.

Like journalists, brands are challenged to “feed the beast,” often on a daily basis, sometimes in real time. All this content isn’t just written word. It’s images, videos, charts, infographics… Put all of this together and the process, workload, and workflow demands become truly staggering.

Yet, most companies have adopted content strategies that amount to little more than asking employees already juggling the demands of full-time jobs to please produce content, too, in addition to their day-to-day duties. Not only does this approach not scale, but these employees aren’t trained in either content marketing or content strategy.

Something’s got to give, and I’m currently conducting research to try to learn how companies are making room for the demands content is placing on marketing, communications, IT, customer service and CRM.

We’re analyzing our finding now and will publish our report in April. In the meantime, the questions we asked dozens of interview subjects may perhaps help organizations to assess their own content needs as they relate to workflow, process, technology and partnerships.

If you’re producing content, start asking yourself these questions. And, please let me know if we left anything important out you’d like to see included in future research.

General

• What’s your role? Where do you sit in your company’s org chart? 

• Do you have a dedicated content department or division? (Since when? What spawned it? How were buy-in and budget secured? )

• If you don’t have one, do you need one? If yes, how will this move forward?

• Which team determines the main messages or story line for products and initiatives? Is it a function of product marketing, corporate marketing, and/or do you collaborate across departments?

• Where does/should content sit in your company’s marketing org chart?

• Do you have a dedicated content staff? How many? Titles? Level of seniority?

• What content are you/your group responsible for creating?

• What target audience(s) or product group(s) does your team’s content serve?

 

Please read the rest of this post on MarketingLand, where it originally published.

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Eight Ways Brands Are Screwing Up Content Aggregation

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8 ways brands are screwing up content aggregation

What’s the biggest problem marketers say they face when it comes to content marketing? Producing original content is No. 1, followed closely by the challenge of finding the time to actually produce content, according to the findings of a 2011 survey conducted by Curata.

Content aggregation is a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, organizing, presenting, sharing, and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter to appeal to a target audience. It’s become integral not only to marketing and branding, but also to journalism, reporting, and social media.

Content curation and aggregation can take many forms, including feeds or channels such as on YouTube. It can appear on blogs or even be something as simple as the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list. Whatever form it does take, it’s around a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message, or persona of the person, brand, or company that has created the particular content channel.

That said, there is, unsurprisingly, a dark side of content aggregation. In this article, we’ll look at the eight worst practices that are upsettingly common among brands.

When content aggregation goes wrong

Perhaps unsurprisingly, half of the worst practices in content aggregation touch on potential unethical, immoral, and even downright criminal practices that can — willfully or otherwise — be associated with content aggregation. You must understand what they are before launching a content aggregation program of your own.

Ethics

Plagiarism. Stealing ideas (or passages or quotes) and passing them off as your own is not “aggregation.” It’s theft. And fraud. Understand what plagiarism is and don’t do it. It’s that simple.

Lack of attribution. Give credit where credit is due, right? It’s important to clearly indicate your sources for a variety of reasons, ranging from transparency to credibility (both yours and theirs).

Un-fair use. Aggregating content comes with a set of obligations — ethical and moral, as well as legal. Respect copyright. Most editorial sites have published guidelines regarding reuse of their content. In most (but not all) cases, this can be summarized as allowing third parties to link to the full story or item with a headline and brief descriptive blurb or a quote of reasonable length. Most publishers are happy for the link. It increases both their traffic and their search engine visibility.

Other sites have more liberal or more restrictive policies. When in doubt, ask. Shoot over an email explaining what you’d like to use and why. With most websites getting the bulk of their traffic these days from social media, publishers understand the value of such referrals, and linking to content legally is much easier than it was in the days when many publishers though proprietary was the way to go.

The missing links. Aggregated content is valuable to you, just as traffic and search engine visibility is worth something to the site on which the content originally appeared. Be nice, as well as transparent. Link to the content source. Links are how the web works, after all.

Read the rest of this post on iMedia Connection, where it originally published.