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By admin, January 31, 2010 12:16 pm

Perhaps this first post should be titled “The Future of Professional Media” because we are not sure there is a real distinction between the challenges faced by traditional publishers and the broader category of traditional media.  If you are in broadcast or publishing you are probably looking to monetize content across channels and you are likely facing the same challenges.  Likewise, you probably enjoy similar, often hidden, advantages.  We hope we can help you build a winning strategy, demystify the technology and bring focus to your digital channel efforts.

At the end of the day – and there is a lot to talk about and consider in building your own digital channel strategy – it comes down to how well you curate great stories that inform or entertain – or both.  Traditional media companies have been experts at this in print and on-air for many decades.  This capability needs to be exploited in digital channels.   You probably already know that you can’t think about content the same way you think about it in print or on-air.  Unfortunately your strategies to respond are probably foiled by the panic that goes with eroding audiences, shifts in advertiser spending and technology that isn’t really helping.

At storycurator.com, we see the threats to traditional media posed by developments in the digital space – but we are pulling hard for traditional media.  We aren’t journalists or media producers, but we work closely with them.  We don’t have a product (yet), but we understand the technology they use now, and the technology they need to adopt to compete for audience and revenue on the web.

We hope that professional media organizations enjoy a prosperous future and that they can continue to bring credible lifestyle advice, thoughtful entertainment, and, most importantly, responsible, properly funded journalism through digital channels.

We think media companies need to pay attention to a number of challenges posed by emerging technologies and the companies that wield them.  To boil it down, the challenges can be summarized as:

The Driving Forces We Can’t Change

• changes in patterns of media consumption,
• ease of entry for upstarts,
• dominance of web search engine(s)
• ubiquity of social media touchpoints

The first two challenges are going to be hard to fight.  The good news is that the technologies that are driving new consumption patterns and ease of entry for competitors can be leveraged to equal (or better) effect by traditional media.  More on that later.

Search engines (read: Google) and social media, on the other hand, need to be embraced in a different way.  Traditional media needs to find a way to draft in behind what the leading search engines and social media players are doing.   Web search and social media will remain the dominant entry points to the web.  Portals, in our opinion, are playing a declining role as a meaningful entry point but, like any professional publishing organization – they can recover.  Developments like hyper-local applications may emerge as significant new entry points, but they have a long way to go before they become a driving force that ought to affect your strategy.

A user’s entry point to the web is critical and media companies need to care about them.  In our experience, most don’t think much about the user’s end-to-end experience.  More on this in a later post.

The purpose of this blog – and storycurator.com in general – is to pass along all of the things we are learning about how traditional media needs to shift their perspective – and their tool sets – to compete in the digital world.

Discussions on the future of publishing and traditional media are certainly not new topics. They are well covered on many sites. We feel storycurator.com brings a unique perspective by boiling it down to the four driving forces of change, the hidden advantages enjoyed by traditional media organizations and the technologies and tools that will help exploit those advantages.

Media’s (Usually Hidden) Advantages

• your sales force
• your skills in story-telling and curating content for topic exploration

We believe that curating great stories across channels is at the core of any media company’s future success.  Google is an algorithm – they will never be good at story curation that drives engaging forms of topic exploration for their users.  While storycurator.com only has the means to produce content across one channel – the web – we will strive to be the best curators around this topic that we can be.  We hope you can help.  Please provide your thoughts and links to other related resources.

We hope that professional media organizations enjoy a prosperous future and that they can continue to bring credible lifestyle advice, thoughtful entertainment, and, most importantly, responsible, properly funded journalism through digital channels.

A final note: while we celebrate the power of the web to put publishing tools in the hands of all people, we worry about the effects of fragmenting audiences and its impact on the viability of news organizations.  We firmly believe that profitable and independent news organizations need to exist to organize, direct and fund the activities of professional journalists.  Democracy and freedom of informed choice depends on it.  While storycurator.com does not presume to comment on this fundamental concern – we believe it is a concern and we hope you do too.

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By admin, September 16, 2010 3:06 pm

This is a test of InLinks.  When I put [[two square brackets]] around a phrase, it should create an automatic link.

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By admin, May 12, 2010 2:00 pm

I’ve been working recently with a group out of Italy called KipCast.  They have their origins in the dark days of syndication technology – back when FeedBurner seemed to be the only game in town.  In the last few years they have repurposed their crawling and scraping technology – which is highly precise – to support content republishing.  Unlike commodity web crawlers out there, they don’t just spider and crawl to build a general-purpose or [[ vertical search ]] index.  KipCast is used to crawl a targeted list of sites, extract the core content, clean it up, enrich it with consistent meta-data and then publish it somewhere else – usually in aggregation and usually just a summary.

This approach certainly flies in the face of the notion of the linked data cloud – wherein content stays where it started and is never copied but, rather, linked-to.  Acknowledging that, I still think that republishing is a better approach when it comes to curation.  Deep stories and even links to related content need more context in a curated story in order for it to truly engage the reader.  Simple links just won’t do the trick imho.

Story curation is just one example of how KipCast can be used to engage audiences.  In Europe, they have done a lot of work with listings and directories to, for example, build aggregated catalogues of items for sale from various far-flung, long-tail e-retailers.  I suppose this kind of aggregation around a purchase decision can be easily seen as curation too…

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By admin, February 5, 2010 6:39 pm

My oh my.  I am really impressed.  I just started using Zemanta – and I can’t say I know much about it’s history, but I like where it is going.  You don’t need to use it with LiveWriter – it works with most blogging platforms, but if you use Windows, I suggest LiveWriter.  I truly hate posting content in the tiny not-so-WYSIWYG editors found in most CMS systems and blogging tools.  LiveWriter is clean and simple and, when paired with Zemanta, it becomes a pretty decent tool for curating stories.

I certainly use OpenCalais within WordPress and have used it in some custom applications, but OpenCalais only goes so far in helping me find decent related content.  Inform and Sphere are also good alternatives, but their model seems more closed and proprietary – things may have changed, but Inform, for one, didn’t give me a chance to select the related links myself.  It just select all the related links for me, which was rarely good enough.

Zemanta sits there on the right side of LiveWriter (or your blogging tool’s edit screen), analyzes what I’m writing and goes out to find related content suggestions on the fly.  Brilliant – and it will probably just get better.  I noticed a few oddities – at least in the LiveWriter plugin.  It doesn’t always refresh the list when you start writing a new post.  Relics are left behind from the previous post, but they are only suggestions anyways and can be ignored.  The LiveWriter plugin also provides suggested in-line links for your content, usually linking off to Wikipedia for definitions.

It also offers a media gallery that, presumably, goes out to media repositories and grabs readily-licensed or public domain images that are relevant to your topic.  Given my subject-matter, I haven’t seen much in the way of relevant images – yet. 

You can also feed Zemanta with your own Flickr account and provide it with a list of your favorite feeds.  I assume this will allow me to see more related content and images from my preferred sources.  Very nice.   I’m not entirely sure what their business model is yet, but I like where they are going.

I think they need to improve a few things – and maybe this is where their business model comes in:

• tier the suggested links by: my site, my network of sites, my content partners, trusted sources and then the broader web
• allow me to roll over the suggested links to get a summary of content
• provide sentiment analysis on the content showing me indicators of whether the content is positive, negative or balanced
• allow me to help it along by selecting topic phrases out of my content; automated topic extraction is hard to do well – we believe in manual assistance, so let us assist.

Related articles by Zemanta

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By admin, February 5, 2010 10:36 am

Seriously, I haven’t seen a good one yet – so I am forced to ask: have you found a good CMS that really opens up the potential for rich content in a digital medium?  Personally, I think we have all just been beaten into submission by the conventions set by CMS systems from their earliest incarnations.  With only slight variations, these tools give us a text editor, usually TinyMCE and unusable forms for attaching meta-data to articles.

CMS vendors seem to have been drawn into focusing on functionality related to workflow, multi-lingual publishing, scalable page serving and the like.  I think they tend to care more about corporate clients, marketers and e-commerce plays than they do about media companies.  Even if there are exceptions, they have done little to advance the functionality that helps us create great, well-curated stories.

Most people would argue that blogging tools help us build deeper stories with their widgetry and overall “freeness” and ease of use.  I agree that blogging tools have done a lot to bring storytelling to the masses, but they won’t really help publishers create stories that can be effectively monetized.

Both blogging tools and CMS systems are far too focused on the individual article or post – and not the art of how they can be aggregated into something more useful and engaging.  Sure, you can plug in widgets that support rich media and you can easily create links to other stories, but this isn’t nearly enough in our view.  Blogging tools – WordPress in particular – excel at using meta-data to link related content, but, again, that isn’t true curation.  Curation, in our view, is about anticipating how users want to explore topics and then using your expertise to assemble the right content or, at least, pointers to the right content.  In our experience, better monetization depends on creating experiences that will be explored.

I’ve yet to see a publishing system or CMS that does this.  If you know of one, let us know.

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By admin, February 4, 2010 7:10 pm

These guys get it.  They really, really get it.  Sure, its boring stuff that they cover on eHow.com and the rest of their properties, but the content seems highly monetizable to us.   I recall talking to publishers about this kind of low-end content two and a half years ago.  The appeal at the time (and to this day) is that the content is highly findable, routinely searched and it provides a very nice context for advertisers or sponsors.  An article on "how to de-ice your sidewalk" is read by folks who are likely to be motivated buyers of de-icing products who have implicitly targeted themselves pretty directly.  At the time, these publishers were horrified at the prospect of producing this kind of content.  Last year, when I introduced the same idea, they were certainly more receptive.  We are now working with a few publishers who want to move this forward in specific content verticals.

Traditional publishers are going to lose a significant share of ad revenue to Demand Media and the like

At storycurator.com, our intention is to bring the Demand Media story to as many media companies as we can – if only to get their reaction and feedback.  My sense is that there will be resistance to the idea of mimicking this approach, which is unfortunate.  With their established sales forces and their relationships with advertisers and agencies, media companies have a current advantage and a window of time to make this model or something similar work.

If a media company tells us that they aren’t in the business of writing this kind of content, then we will be obliged to suggest that Demand and those like them will be taking ad dollars right out of their pockets.  This will happen for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the likely performance of campaigns embedded in this highly relevant content.

We wouldn’t necessarily suggest that recognized media brands sully themselves by focusing exclusively in simple, service media – but we recommend some move towards the tools and approach used by Demand for editorial planning.

Demand Media-style content provides a better context for advertisers than traditional publishers’ editorial choices allow

It is also worth noting that the traditional media companies operating today were the only game in town ten or even five years ago.  Broadcast and publishing, as mediums, were too expensive to produce stories on "how to de-ice your sidewalk".  The web makes content so easy and cheap to produce – and so findable – that the kind of content that media companies have historically produced, because consumers demanded it, is now, potentially, not the best content for advertisers.  Demand is showing us how a whole new category of content is going to sneak up and take advertising dollars from traditional media because, frankly, it is content that sells snow-blowers and de-icing agents while traditional editorial content, entertainment and news does not.   Oh, and by the way, we don’t think social media sells this stuff either.  More on that in another post.

When contextually targeted ads can outperform media buys for reach by 400%, advertisers will notice

Sure, I hear you saying that media companies still have reach, and reach matters.  Granted, but we see reach in the traditional sense declining in importance.  Perhaps reach across an aggregation of properties via an ad network will still matter, but even that is a point for future debate.

Have a read of this Wired Magazine article to get a full sense of what Demand is really all about.  I’m not sure about Demand’s focus on video.  That seems strange to me, but their algorithms for targeting findable, highly sought after easily monetizable content is groundbreaking and gamechanging:

Demand Media | Magazine.

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By admin, February 2, 2010 2:15 pm

At storycurator.com we position social media as an entry point to the web – not much different than search.  One admittedly debatable difference is that when the user is interacting with their network in social media space, they are not willing recipients of advertiser messaging.  I’d be curious to see how many social media interactions revolve around product or brand-related discussions.  While I’m sure the number isn’t insignificant, the “reach” of any one conversation is miniscule.  We think advertisers need to temper their expectations with respect to social media.

Monitor brand reputation and audience interests – but do not advertise

We see a backlash coming for marketers who use social media channels for outbound messaging.  Marketers need to respect the social media channel and, if they do, they may get enough critical mass of chatter around their brand that they can extract some meaningful brand sentiment data.  While this is valuable information to have, it needs to be taken in context.  While sentiment analysis is beyond the scope of this post, we love to talk about it and how brands need to respond to this valuable intelligence.

Let’s get back to how social media and user generated content can figure into creating great content hubs or stories.   First off, social media and user generated content can provide ideas for new stories or content hubs.  Figure out where the buzz is in social media space and then begin to build a content hub around it.  Invite the “influencers” in the social media space to come in and comment or contribute in other ways.

Once your content hub is up and running, consider engaging readers through things as simple as user comments all the way up to more sophisticated games and contests and, if the topic hub has evergreen potential – even forums.  Pay attention to new and related story ideas that come up through reader comments and forum posts.  If they use particular domain-specific phrasing or keywords, make note of this and use their language as you add articles to the hub.

Social Media is a key entry point to the web, but not a productive marketing channel in its own right.

Sound crazy?  We know.  Jaws drop when we say this out loud. 

We are concerned about the level of attention paid to social media right now by marketers and media people.  We aren’t convinced that social media provides the right context for advertising because participants are not in the right mindset to receive the message or engage in any meaningful way.  We know that brands are certainly discussed in social media space, and that this must be monitored, but efforts to participate in these conversations simply don’t seem economical to us.  I find it ironic that marketers are so caught up in reach when they place media, but don’t see the abysmal reach (and durability) of social media conversation.  Odd.  Forums, on the other hand, make a lot of sense to us, but I guess that makes us old-school.

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By admin, January 31, 2010 7:59 pm

We have all worked with web analytics tools at one time or another to understand how well the site is performing.  Google Analytics,  Omniture, WebTrends – all of them are great tools – but we are not convinced we use them as well as we could.

The media properties that we have been associated with tend to look at total site traffic in aggregate over long periods or, if they ever get into the details, they tend to look at the site section by section.  Often, they will even look at the performance of an individual article.  In fact, it is at the most granular level that analytics become the most helpful and drive the most insight.  Sadly, we have rarely seen much insight drawn from these numbers.

We propose that media companies need to turn web analytics on its ear.  They need to take a bit of a different cut on the data to make it really meaningful.  Also, no one tool can currently deliver the type of data that good curators will need to manage their portfolio of topics.  We haven’t seen a perfect combination of tools but, looking across sources, here is what we should measure:

• leading indicators of interest in a topic: even before the first article gets written, use data to help identify what we should be writing about.  Demand Media, arguably THE biggest media success story of the last few years, bases their business on this practice.
• story type and investment profile: patterns in data related to a story or topic can suggest a certain trajectory or story type; e.g. evergreen with growth potential vs explosive but short-lived types.  Different story types deserve different levels of investment in time and resources and, likely, create different monetization opportunities.
• performance of story elements and multi-variate tests: determine what story elements work the best; this will likely differ by the type of story.  Use A/B or multi-variate testing if you have access to the required tools.  This will tell you if you are assembling your stories in a compelling and usable way.
• depth of visit/engagement in the topic: at a glance, measure how many pages deep your users go in a specific story.  Sure, topics can be linked and the lines between stories can be blurred, but do your best as this is a critical measure.  While depth of visit on the overall site is an important traditional measure, engagement in a single story more directly correlates to the performance of contextual ad units – which will become  a critical measure in its own right.
• contextual ad unit performance: while not all ads can be measured this way, those with a clear call to action and a conversion objective ought to be measured within each individual story to see if the rich context of a well-curated story makes a difference.  This is a critical selling point of story curation.  For this to be meaningful, the story topic must have some contextual link to the ad itself, i.e. the ad should relate to the story.  We expect that some types of stories will perform better than others, but, overall, good curation should yield the kind of ad unit performance numbers that you will want to take to media buyers and advertisers.

These new categories of measurement, plus all of the other traditional analytics data, are crucial to effective curation.  In fact, it goes beyond just helping tune the story, it also helps prove the model.  Supportive data across these areas of measurement is ultimately critical to proving the benefits of story curation – including the monetization of properly curated content.

As far as publishing goes, gone are the days of post it, forget it, move on.

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By admin, January 31, 2010 2:11 pm

Curating for Topic Exploitation

Google and other search engines, including emerging semantic search, do topic exploitation very well.  You give the search engine a topic keyword or phrase, and it will do its best to show you relevant articles for that match the topic.  For curators, exploiting a topic according to a keyword is important, but Google will always do it better.  We think good curation considers exploitation, but techniques for enabling exploration are more important.

Curating for Topic Exploration

A great curator has a sense of how a topic ought to be explored.  That is the art in the science of publishing to the digital channel.  Google will never do this very well.  Exploration can branch in many directions, depending on the user, and providing useful paths for exploration is not easy but, if done well, your users won’t go back to Google right away and your all important engagement metrics will improve dramatically.  Advertisers and sponsors will learn to appreciate topic engagement because (and depending on the topic) it provides a great context for promoting brands, products and everything else that advertisers care about.  Ironically, the best example of curating for exploration is Wikipedia – a web property that can’t even be monetized.