Flack's Revenge

Turning the Web Din into a Vibrant Content Marketplace with Content Curation

My monthly Content Marketing column, which ran today, offers content curation tips that are based on how the pros do it (meanling professional online publishers and news sites).

The appeal of curation for content and social media marketers is obvious; after all, why take the time to come up with original ideas or create all content from scratch when you can simply riff off (or rip off) what is already out there? As the theory goes, you can up your posting frequency and perhaps even quality if you incorporate third party content into the mix.

That is the theory; however doing it well can be fiendishly difficult. The professional sites wrestle with all kinds of issues related to appropriate editorial practices, and the ethics of exploiting the work of others.

How much can you excerpt before curation becomes stealing?  Do you change headlines, or leave them intact?  And what about the tug of war between keeping people on your site vs. the obligation some feel to  send traffic back to the original source's site (since, let's face it, the curator is generally not paying for the content)?

I discussed these issues in my post about overcoming content curation challenges.  That post also covered a group that some journalists formed to spell out codes of ethical blogging and aggregation, headed by AdAge writer Simon Dumenco. (I met Simon at a NY content marketing event; he explained the difference between aggregation and curation; my post You Say Aggregtion,I say Curation discusses others' views on this).

Sadly, many curate do in a way that just creates more noise; I for one, am growing weary of of all those automatically-generated newsletters that clog Twitter and try to pass as clever curation.

The best curators filter Web noise and guide people to the best content. They have a keen eye for what really is interesting, informative and aligned with an audience.  They often provide an expert's view, adding value and not just mindlessly echoing content for their own gain.

 

Content Curation Update and Roundup

I am working on my monthly Windmill Networking content marketing column, and thought it would be a good time to revisit my article Blow Out Your Content Markerting and Lead Social Conversations witih Content Curation, which ran in March.

So I took some time to get caught up with experts in the field whom I know and respect.

Tom Riddle of curation platform CIThread, a solution that I have covered, mentioned that the company is taking a step back and reevaluating its approach to the marketplace.

When I asked him about alternatives, he mentioned Curata (I know and have covered them, as well) and Curation Station, but seemed to wonder whether any curation tech companies were having great success and impact on the market.

I also spoke with Alex Romanovich of Social2B, and he had a lot to say, offering his "two cents" on the state of content curation:

Let's define this first.

Content Curation is a content marketing approach that allows an individual user or an organization to collect, refine, and repurpose or retarget this content to a specific audience.

This is a great opportunity for Small Business or Professionals who are interested in providing unique, curated content to their target audience, as a differentiator. Content Curators are Content Connoisseurs - the good ones are providing value to their audience, and sometime monetize it as well.

Another important aspect of content curation is the fact that well curated content is all about personal story-telling and personalized input on the content obtained elsewhere. The original content is left untouched, yet the curation process allows for a more opinionated and more refined look at nuances and elements of that original content.

So what's the big deal? Well, precision and viewpoints make a difference. The audience likes curators for their ability to refine and to filter content, and thus categorize it for the target audience.

Here are some good examples of Content Curation platforms and what they may entail:

1. Pinterest - image and video curation at its best. More on Pinterest in this Social2B blog post. After you review the blog post, consider this - there are tools now, like Curalate.com, that allow brands and professionals to measure the effectiveness of their Pinterest curation presences. As always, and with any content, you have to be consistent, sustainable and relevant.
2. There are a variety of tools that allow you to create your own Curated Magazine - Storify, Paper.li, Scoop.it, and many others, allow you to select the existing publications and create an interest based publication catering to a particular audience. Passion Marketing and Interest Based Marketing will be entering our vocabulary fairly shortly.
3. For bloggers, there are a number of Blog Curation solutions, including the WordPress itself as a curation platform with various plug-ins. The solutions can be as simple as leveraging Google Alerts and using free tools, such as SocialMention. If you want to integrate other features related to curation, such as voting and feedback, FanNewscast could be a great solution as well - extending curation to Facebook and other platforms.
4. For email marketers, it is possible to integrate your email content with social media, thus extending your message beyond the direct response capabilities offered by email only. XYDO, ConstantContact, ChimpMail, Vertical Response and others now provide well integrated, social content marketing and curation solutions to drive your audience towards the social media and digital media platform of choice

Finally, to get results from Content Curation you need consistency and some level of automation offered my platforms such as Curata and others. Curata includes a more sophisticated level of automation and analytics not immediately offered by other platforms. In the end, Curation is all about telling your story - your own way, refined for your audience and catering to your community.

Social Media: To ROI or not to ROI, that is the Question

This week on Windmill Networking, I wrote about how to measure and earn ROI for social media-fueled
content marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, before you even get started, your campaign can get lost in the corporate approval quagmire: one, because securing any or more investment for social media can sometimes be tricky, and two, the whole thing may be viewed as risky, since it may take the company out of its comfort zone of tried-and-true marketing tactics.

The more general topic of ROI for social media is a hot one, and there are a range of opinions.

On Windmill Networking, Neal Schaffer said, in his article, There's No Such Thing as Social Media ROI; It's Called Business ROI:

Social media, like your website and internal IT technology, becomes part of your company’s infrastructure over time. It’s not a question of having a robust social presence just like you need a robust website: You simply must have them.

On Occam's Razor, Avinash Kaushik said, in his post Best Social Media Metrics:

You don't participate in social media to only drive business outcomes. I cannot stress that enough. If that is your primary objective you are going to suck at it

Problogger Media CFO Sean Jackson made some excellent points in the article: There is No ROI in Social Media Marketing:

The truth is, marketing will never produce an ROI... marketing activity is not an investment.. An investment is an asset that you purchase and place on your Balance Sheet....Marketing is an expense, and goes on the Profit & Loss statement.

People who use the term ROI see marketing as something to buy...But smart companies see marketing as an integral part of doing business — a necessity no less important than the company email system, their computers, or their office lease.

The questions about using social media to support marketing – how to justify, fund it and ideally earn and prove returns – reminds me of the more general topic of marketing tech. I wrote about this back in 2009: Don't Underestimate the Soft benefits of Social Media.

I have spent many years, introducing marketing technologies; I might be showing my age, but we faced similar questions when trying to get sales teams to adopt CRM in the early 90s, or organizations to buy Lotus Notes in the 90s; these were infrastructure plays too, but we found that it was just good business to propose pilots that had strong business cases, usually tied to some quantifiable business result.

Similarly, while I agree that social media investments are fundamental, not all costs are fixed, and some can be tied to campaigns like marketing; these should promise a return.

Also, taking an ROI-driven apporach can help justify the spend and sell in projects for smaller organizations that are cutting their teeth on social media and may have tighter budgets, or others that are the later adopters.

Suffice it to say, it is just good business sense and corporate politics (if you unfortunately need to engage in politics) to make sure that your efforts deliver on some kind of projected return; this gives you credibility to get more funding, and may make it easier to get support for campaigns that dleiver soft vs. hard ROI results.

New Research Sheds Light on How News Spreads Online

Breakthrough Identifies Roles of Influencers and Paves the way for Further Study

A story in the New York Times recently caught my attention. The simple title Why Some Twitter Posts Catch on and Others Don't, seemed to promise an article that would finally answer the question that plagues most PR people at one time or another; namely, "why does one client or news item seem to get more attention and sharing than others?" (Of course, this question is usually followed by "how can I ensure that my news gets the most sharing and exposure?").

Interest in these types of questions led me to the field of memetics years ago. Memetics is the science that seeks to explain how ideas spread.  It says that the heartiest units of information, or "memes," catch on, and are passed along from person to person (helping to define and shape cutlure); while the weaker ones are quickly discarded and forgotten. Call it information Darwinism, if you will.

However, after reading several books on memetics, and struggling with how to apply the theory, I concluded that it is more of a soft than a hard science (or a pseudo science, some say). I have written a number of blog posts on related topics (see my Interview with Doug Rushkoff and Memes Gone Wild).

The TImes article cited above offered some very useful information, and led me down a path that helped me better understand advances in the study of how information spreads across social networks. I interviewed Jure Leskovec of Stanford, one of the researchers behind a paper quoted in the article.

Below, I share some excerpts from the Times article that I found to be interesting, and, in a series of posts over the next few days will blog more about what I learned from the interview with Jure.

...researchers at Cornell and a few other universities like Stanford are finding patterns in the way information catches on in cyberspace...

The structure of a social network ... can have more influence than the size of a group, researchers say...

An earlier Stanford study found that bloggers, over time, had more influence than mainstream publications in areas like technology or entertainment.

...the way information spreads online is often more complicated than viral transmission, in which one person passes a link to, say, a YouTube video directly to another person. As with political topics, people often wait until a number of friends or trusted sources have promoted an idea before promulgating it themselves.

...Content from news agencies tended to spike and gain the most attention immediately, while news that started on blogs or was picked up by bloggers often experienced several peaks or rebounds in popularity as time wore on.

Professor Leskovec says the studies provide a quantitative way to predict which stories will hold attention and which will fade rapidly, based on who covers the material first. In a few years, he says, “we will be at the stage where marketers will be more mathematical and less intuition-driven..."

Clearly, this was a topic that begged further exploration. I wanted to understand (and help my readers better understand) how online influence works, who is most influential for different types of news (with tech being the area that is nearest and dearest), and what we can learn to help us get the best possible visibility for our news.

Stay tuned and read the next in my series for more on this.

Google Refresh is a Good Thing for PR, Social Media and the Web

Google was in the news this week for making significant adjustments to its search algorithm. Their move was an apparent response to all the outcry about high rankings for low quality content, which in turn has been driven by the growth of content farms and other attempts by many to game the search system.

I think this is a great move and should result in changes that benefit those who work in PR and social media, among others. I work hard to generate original content that I hope will be interesting to others, and is not  driven by what people are searching for at any given moment. So do the people I work with and our clients.

The growth of content syndication sites and content farms has led to a lot of noise and garbage that just gets in the way of things on the Web. Sure, there is some good content on these sites. But as anyone who tries to monitor topics and brands and wade through never-ending streams of Google alerts quickly realizes, there is a ton of redundancy and garbage. Even when you do find good articles, the syndication sites make it hard to understand the original source and date of the information.

The Wall Street Journal had a couple of stories this week on the topic.  Google Reorders Web Winners discussed likely winners and losers, and included the following quote from a Google spokesperson:

... "people generating original content and maintaining high-quality websites" benefit Google.

Another article in the Journal introduced the term "article vomit,"  which, amazingly, was coined by someone from one of the offending sites, who also pointed to changes that are forthcoming:

He added that authors will now be required to write a minimum of 400 words an article, up from 250 words, along with many other changes to improve quality.

Clearly, given Google's influence, the changes will hopefully encourage longer and higher quality articles (and perhaps even stem an apparent decline in blogging, a topic that I wrote about in Builldog Reporter this week).

SMAFUs: What they are and how to avoid them

A colleague burst into my office, concerned over an update she had seen on LinkedIn that led her to believe one of our top people had left the agency for another job. Later that same day, our LA manager sent me a note - he was alarmed over heightened activity on our Twitter account. Someone was tweeting under the agency name at a much more rapid clip then we were accustomed to, with 20 updates in the last half hour - had someone hijacked our account, he wondered?

These are both examples of the unintended consequences of social media. In the first instance, an innocent change to the user's profile triggered a LinkedIn network update and email that alarmed my colleague. In the second case, auto-posting caused our Twitter account to go haywire when we refreshed some old posts on the agency blog.

I am sure others can cite similar examples, which illustrate some of the pitfalls of social media. For all of the great intelligence that can be gleaned, and tools for communications, there can also be unforeseen network effects. It just goes to show you that you need to be wary about information gained from social media monitoring, and also very careful with technologies such as auto-posting, so as not to create these messes or draw the wrong conclusions..

These situations and others have compelled me to invent an acronym that is the corrollary of SNAFU, or situation normal all fouled up - call it "SMAFU: Social Media all Fouled Up"