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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, 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.