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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.