Tag Archives: online content
Photo Credit: Richard Tseng
Today: two online media moguls. Well, as impressive as that might seem, I suppose, as the group had little knowledge of either party. Chris Hardwick of the Nerdist and Felicia Day of The Guild acclaim both made appearances in my schedule.
Most saw Felicia Day, she was one of the keynote speakers, the one for the day. Besides being the the subject of many a guys dream, she has a perspective of media distribution that may elude to the future of tv and the industry. Felicia is writer, director, and actor in the web show The Guild, she spoke on how she built the show using a meager budget that afforded her a camera and utilized her own house as the set. The Guild is an example of the self-publishing movement the Internet brings – and seeing the show itself caters to online gaming geeks, it would poised for success. The show is now in its fourth season, but has gained a bit more gravity now that it has a couple of sponsors that helps bring a higher level of production to the modest web show.
Some say my career in social media and my training in journalism are at odds with each other. I agree that the nostalgic idea of dead-tree-news traditional journalism with newspaper smells, newspapers leads, newspaper inverted pyramid and newspaper speed is at odds with the 140-character society. However, I tend to disagree with the idea that these two things are polar opposites. I think, instead, that social media simply made news and blog content more democratic. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to fact check a story from Twitter against Google News.
Newspapers, the plural noun sold at Starbucks and 7/11s across the country, may become just a kitschy name that we hold onto like “record label”. But the Newspaper, the media organization that enables the day-to-day education of a society, isn’t going anywhere. I tend to think that content churned out by newspapers has the labels of “trustworthy” and “authoritative”.
Lauren Ysseldyke | Critical Mass Chicago
Being new to CM and the Experience Distribution team, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend Digg’s Social News & Social Marketing Summit and meet the mastermind behind Digg.com, Kevin Rose (@kevinrose). While listening to Kevin talk about Digg’s place in the social space, its upcoming new Digg platform (to be released in a month or so) and marketing concepts in a constantly changing social media world, I realized how extremely important it is today for marketers to know how to find a role in social media. With today’s audience immersed in a “snack culture” (as Kevin put it) of wanting online content in short, interactive form, marketers must learn to cater to these needs when it comes to advertising and building brands. Kevin has learned this concept well through his creation of Digg.com. Falling in a social space between Facebook and Twitter, Digg.com offers its “snack culture” audience a customizable news experience in which content is driven by the audience itself in a concise and interactive format.
“Snack c
ulture” wasn’t the only concept I found interesting and relevant to the CM team and other marketers today. After listening to marketing panelists, Daina Middleton, Sloan Broderick, Rick Wion and Chas Edwards, I took away several necessities to making it as a marketer in an increasingly digital and social media driven world. Here are my top five picks:
1. Role in Social Media: Before diving into the world of social media, it’s crucial for marketers and clients to talk about what each partner’s role should be for social media…Creative? Curator? Publisher? Sloan Broaderick (Managing Director, MediaCom) went into a great story about how Audi follows this concept and focuses on building brand relationships before people even enter the purchase stage. “If you’re just hearing about Audi when you’re ready to make a car purchase then we’re already too late,” Sloan says.
2. 3 Universal Categories of Digital Marketing: Daina Middleton (CEO, Performics) stressed the importance of dividing the digital marketing space into three categories of owned, earned and paid. Owned includes your own controlled assets (websites, commercials, videos); earned includes social and social monitoring and paid includes distribution. Then each of these channels/categories have a different purpose and a different set of goals/KPIs. This is very similar to how CM views the digital space and how the Experience Distribution team is structured. Whereas the rest of the CM company is dedicated to the owned category, the Experience Distribution team is divided into both an earned and a paid media group.
Inspiration often comes from strange places.
†Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, author Scott McCloud examines how we receive different types of information and that process relates directly to design, information architecture, copywriting and content strategy.
Image compliments of Scott McCloud.
“Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.
Writing is perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” (page 49)
Anyone who’s ever sat through a client review will understand this. It’s not that images or art are less important; in fact, it’s the art that usually solicits “ohhs” and “ahhs” from the clients, right?
McCloud is speaking more about our intrinsic speed of understanding. We get a feeling from a picture right away.
But we need to process words – to piece together abstract ideas. With words, it’s incumbent that we create the images ourselves, in our own consciousness; we ponder meaning, ideas and symbols. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies knows that this process ain’t easy.
What’s This Got To Do With Agency Life?
Comics and literary theory? Why should marketers care?
In the same way that images are understood before words in the human brain, so too has the planning and creative process developed in marketing agencies. The halcyon days of 1997 were critical for information architecture. IAs became a staple of the creative agency, a bridge between the client’s objectives and the designer’s creative vision.
The same thing didn’t happen for words. It was easy to understand why you’d want to plot out images. But it took another decade for us to plot out what was written on the page and why. (True, maybe astute IAs and copywriters filled this role until content strategy bloomed in recent years.)
So what’s changed? Well, SEO (based on keyWORDS) has blossomed into the main way we find content online. Search engines are ever more refining the way they surface the most relevant content. Our tastes have matured: the internet is no longer the shiny new object – it helps us complete tasks in everyday life. We now use many, many channels to access information and communicate with brands. Findable, useful, contextual, and consistent across channels…online content is more important to our lives than ever before!
It then makes sense that content strategy – a plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, relevant content – would guide many important choices we make as digital marketers.
