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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…

Comments (1)

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.