SXSW Day 1, I took the content path. The three-panel series – which they called workshops (not sure I entirely agree with that nomenclature though) – boil down to this:
- You need a content strategy. Let me tell you why. Because words are cheaper than comps. Because a cohesive UX requires a conduit between the designers, the copywriters and the brand strategists. Because effective message delivery starts with a good message architecture. And because messages across channels become disjointed without an editorial calendar to ensure consistency and adherence to message goals. Also, you want a social media strategy? There is no social media strategy without a content strategy. Content strategy is core to conversation strategy. Passionately presented by Margot Bloomstein. See her slides here.
- Don’t be afraid of the scary spreadsheet, it’s here to help. Three streams of a product strategy are design strategy, technology strategy and content strategy. Content strategy is often the missing link. So how do you approach a content strategy? Four-stage process: discover, design, develop, deploy. The majority of the discussion dug into the details of what the discover process looks like (“a really scary spreadsheet!”) – both quantitative/get the facts and subjective/assess the quality. Overall, the panel contained a lot of good content, but at such deep detail as to be more suited for a handbook than a presentation. Hope Rachel and Karen make the slides available. In the meantime, my stream-of-consciousness notes are captured here.
- 90 percent of everything is crud. Particularly on the Web. Bah. According to Richard Ziade and Tim Meaney of Arc90, the state of publishing can be summed up by Sturgeon’s law. We are sacrificing quality for quantity. The art of composition – mise-en-scene in theater terms – has largely disappeared. The idea of assembling content around an editorial vision is also gone on the Web today. All content is created equal, so it just sort of streams by. And far from the concept of an ambient content stream that we dine upon, we are in fact haplessly gorging ourselves. Why? As noted in the NYT article about why people share articles, people crave shared experience. So where do we go from here? Richard presented a series of “hopeful signs” to counter Tim’s “issues,” but they were tentative at best. Whither the editor. I think I missed the revenge part … perhaps that came in the form of our midsession emergency evacuation? More details in my stream-of-consciousness notes here.
My two cents: Content strategy is mission critical on three levels: process/workflow, social media conversation-building, and user experience. The latter gets at Tim and Richard’s gripe with the direction content has been taking as print media collapses and content online becomes sliced into ever smaller pieces. It’s true that editorial curation is getting lost on the social Web, but I would argue that it is being replaced by tools that allow us to self-curate, or to select curators in the form of those influence multipliers that we choose to follow.
And we DO have the ability to control the flow through the pipes (though we sometimes forget). But we don’t have as much control over the aesthetic presentation of the content we consume. This is where I see the crux of the need – and the opportunity – for good content strategy. Not simply designing and filling the pipes, but structuring and packaging the experience of the content flow. Mise-en-scène.
Hello. My name is Barrett. And I’m Studio D’s resident lurker.
I hide in the shadowy corners of online communities, observing, listening and trying to separate the signal from the noise. You’ll rarely see me contribute to a conversation, but I’m paying attention, considering your arguments, and likely making value judgments on content.
I’m not going to tell you what I think, because I don’t know you. I doubt you really care if I think you’re wrong. Rare is the time that a denizen of the typical message board or comments section actually swayed by response. It’s about waiting your turn to speak, then trying like hell to make yourself heard. I have no desire to contribute to the echo chamber. But I will take everything from it that I can.
This attitude strongly reflects my real-world temperament. Life of the party I am not. I’m that guy hanging out in the corner chatting with the people he already knows, looking around and listening. It may appear I’m not having a good time — that appearance is misleading. I just like to take it all in.
Conversations with friends take familiar turns, self-moderated friendly debate leads to sometimes-valuable insights. If a friend somehow tries to make the boneheaded claim that The Cure was a better band than The Clash, we have the common ground, respect and rhetorical tools to disabuse him of such a sadly mistaken position — tools other than sheer numbers and volume. But if some crazy Joe Strummer wannabe and a guylinered goth kid start a screaming match about it across the room, well who the hell is going to tell them any different? A considered response will just as likely be met with a punch in the mouth (or maybe a crying jag) as any sort of acknowledgment that you have a valid point. I’ll gladly watch others try (and sometimes succeed), but I’ve rarely found it worth my effort to jump in.
I am, of course, aware that not all the net is a breeding ground for open conflict. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of online communities that provide valuable advice, feedback and discourse for their members. If you’re big into your profession, your hobby, your hometown, your whatever, there’s likely a spot for you with a group of welcoming, knowledgeable folks you can seek out. These, however, are not the circles in which I travel. My knowledge and interests run wide, but not deep (a rarity in Studio D — this is a bunch of kids who dove right into the deep end).
Accordingly, my surfing habits lead me not to the small structured meetings of the chess club but rather the general chaos of an assembly in the gym. Class clowns, instigators, student leadership, jocks and honor students in a big shuffle of anxiety, hormones and flop sweat (If there’s a better metaphor for a Fark politics thread, I don’t know what it is).
I’m not trying to say that no one should participate in high-population, high-volume communities. It’s rare that I go through a thread on a topic of interest and find no comments of value. The folks that write those posts obviously find enough gratification in the act to keep doing so. That gratification is not in the writing for me though, and I have little personal need of broadcasting my unsolicited opinion to the world. I unload that venting on my nearby co-workers, Facebook friends and suffering family members, whom I know will actually be justified in calling me a jackass.
This all raises the question of why I’m writing this entry at all. It’s a lot of not-entirely coherent examples and metaphors for someone who’s not into broadcasting his voice into the great unknown. The easy answer is my boss told me I had to do it. The better answer is that sometimes things need to change, even if you have to drag them kicking and screaming. Studio D is all about engagement, and it’s always easy to find reasons not to do things. It’s probably time to find reasons to do them. Let’s see what happens.
Image by Frederic della Faille
WGN CEO Randy Michaels provoked radio and blog commentary earlier this week when he issued a list of 119 words that WGN-AM radio announcers were no longer allowed to use on the air. The directive “puts WGN news staffers at a loss for words” gripes blogger Robert Feder, who includes the full list in his post. “If CEO Randy Michaels was looking for a way to make his employees loathe him even more, then he’s done a marvelous job,”says Pandora Young of FishbowLA. And Ian Chillag of NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” lampoons the effort in a blog post that crams in every item on the list.
Michaels’ approach seems heavy-handed, reportedly asking staffers to monitor announcers’ compliance via “bingo cards.” And nobody likes to be told what they can’t say or do. Michaels is being accused of micromanaging, which may be true if you think a radio executive has no business concerning himself with what’s actually said on the air. But if Michaels is really just trying to improve the quality of WGN’s radio broadcasts, the list itself is a good start. I can’t find a good justification for using any of the terms on the list.
Most of them are flabby or pretentious ways to say something that could be expressed more sharply: “laud,” “area residents,” “at this point in time” or “the fact of the matter.” Others are redundancies: “5 a.m. in the morning” or “medical hospital.” There are also attempts at insincere folksiness — “All of you,” “hunnert” as a pronunciation for “hundred” — and banal weather terms including “white stuff” and “shower activity.” A commenter on Twitter suggested that failing to use “alleged” could land the speaker in legal trouble; that’s possible, though a good writer should be able to say “accused,” “charged with” or other terms to clearly explain that the person isn’t yet proved to be guilty. “The alleged attacker” is too often a lazy way to call the suspect an attacker without verging into libel.
Check out the list here. What terms would you defend? What would you add to the list?
What is zombie media? Tactic-only social media.
What does zombie media look like? Empty, vacuous Facebook pages and Twitter accounts devoid of conversation. [Warning] Zombie accounts often have lots of content flowing through them, but no one is there. It’s brainless.
Is zombie media the same as social media spam? No. Unlike most social media marketing, social media spam has a deliberate strategy and better ROI.
Where does zombie media come from?Sadly most zombie media comes from well-intentioned marketing efforts. Marketers launch a Twitter account or Facebook page or blog but don’t have the resources, systems and process aligned to sustain the effort.
What is the cure for zombie media?Influence is the cure. You achieve influence through building trusted relationships and engagement with other influencers.
Marketing has always worked because of influence. Take away influence and your marketing sucks. It used to be that you achieved this by working with a handful of influencers or influential media sources. Today the influencers can number in the thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions.Your existing processes won’t scale to meet that need.
But influence is not a switch that can be turned on or off. Influence is something that you build over time and work to maintain. To scale the effects of influence you need processes and systems we’ve never had in place before.
You need to rethink everything.
Marketers are all being asked to do more with less, but no one has given them the tools to do that.
If you put systems in place to integrate social media with your marketing/PR efforts, you will do more with less and achieve better results that you can measure. I know this because I’ve seen it done.
Guest post by Katharina Wilhelm, account executive, WE Munich, and Manuel Huttl, general manager and vice president, WE Munich
The German Waggener Edstrom team used the digital playground for a new approach to producing marketing material: In the era of 3-D cinema and 3-D to come on every home screen, the team developed a digital animated-image movie for client Canadian Solar. The renewable energies company is very open-minded about digital approaches to communication. Canadian Solar wanted a movie that combined its Canadian heritage and its ice hockey sponsorship, and that could be used for international trade shows.
WE launched the video at a time when everybody was talking about the Olympic Games starting in Vancouver. Now, it is one thing to shoot the necessary material in a single day and develop Canadian mountains on a German screen; it is quite another thing to make a behind-the-scenes video about it. The movie brought more than 2,000 views on YouTube in the first four days, plus sales requests for the solar modules. The movie is now going to be the starting point of a worldwide campaign.
You should watch the “making of” video first:
And then have a look at the original video.
Can you tell which mountains are real and which are of digital origin?
To follow up on yesterday’s post I wanted to try my best to help those people who will refuse to heed my advice. Here is a recommended list of Zombie Media books. Conversely, if you don’t want to end up with zombie media, I highly recommend the non-zombie versions of these books.
- Naked Conversations About Zombies – How zombies are changing the way businesses talk with customers.
- The Zombie Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by zombie technologies.
- Zombies Engage – The complete guide for zombies to build, cultivate and measure success on the Web. Foreword by Zombie Kutcher.
- The Purple Zombie – Transform your business by being a zombie.
- Zombieville – How businesses can thrive in the new zombie neighborhoods.
- Zombie Agents – Using zombies to build influence, improve reputation and earn trust.
- Z 2.0 – New collaborative tools for your organization’s toughest zombies.
- Creating Zombie Evangelists – How zombie evangelists become a voluntary sales force.
- Here Come the Zombies
- Twitter Marketing for Zombies
- Use Twitter to communicate with your zombies
- Use zombies to maximize your presence on Twitter
- Build and use your network to spread the zombie virus
- Measure the success of your zombies
Do you have a favorite zombie media book?
Bonus points if you can name all the real books and their authors.
Tac Anderson passed along a very good postby Hutch Carpenter on the ethics of crowdsourced design a la 99designs, crowdSPRING and others. Many designers have eloquently stated how these services devalue design and encourage theft and plagiarism, and I won’t be using this space to throw another explanation on the pile. What I can lend to the conversation are my personal experiences, having been burned by these so-called “opportunities” many years ago.
I wrote and published my first Web page when I was 10 years old. I began freelancing as a designer and cartoonist three years later. When I was 15, I apprenticed in a design program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and later that year began my first regular job designing CD-ROMs that shipped with certain Intel server products.
As a young, impressionable designer hungry for growth and attention, I was a textbook victim of crowdsourcing (or, more appropriately, “spec” work). I clearly remember being enticed by the prospect of “beefing up my portfolio” or gaining “exposure.” I saw firsthand how these companies take advantage of a designer’s time, energy and talent for little-to-no compensation, and often fewer rights. I saw my work taken from me, altered and ultimately discarded. I watched my competitors reap greater rewards by submitting plagiarized design.
These experiences occurred without the aid of focused, online services that make soliciting “spec” a quicker (and potentially more thoughtless) process. I can only begin to imagine the increased discouragement young artists will have as a result.
If you or your organization are interested in exploring crowdsourcing in a community-focused way, I offer two suggestions:
- Engage with a professional design team, but outline a plan for structured community involvement in the design process. I employed this strategy for the CyborgCamp logo, and Happy Cog solicited user feedback while redesigning elements of Mozilla’s Web presence. Costly review and research processes are democratized while maintaining the expertise and advisory only seasoned designers can provide.
- Hold a contest for an event identity (or something similarly finite), targeting an audience that has more than a monetary investment in its success. For example, if your company is sponsoring an outreach event for local schools, open a design contest for students in the area.
If your impetus for crowdsourcing is merely to save a buck (remember, “you get what you pay for”), why not sidestep the pitfalls of contest Web sites entirely and seek out an ambitious nephew or family friend with an eye for design? The family association will keep both of you relatively honest and ethical, and it may have a real impact on his or her college applications and fledgling freelance prospects.
I encourage all professionals (design or not) to join me in saying “no” to spec work.
I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the coming wave of zombie media.
Now that companies are starting to show results with social media, the rest of the early majority and late majority adopters are going to continue to pile on. They’re going to try and strap on social media to their existing efforts and realize that they can’t sustain these efforts. Worse yet, they’ll launch these efforts with no thought to what to do with their new fans, friends and followers (assuming they get any to begin with).
We will continue to see a plague of abandoned Twitter accounts, outdated blogs and neglected Facebook pages. These are the social media equivalent of zombies.
Unsupported, non-strategic, tactically driven efforts have no ROI and accrue to no larger business objective.
What are the signs of the coming wave of zombie media? They’re everywhere if you look.
Screenshot: timeinc.net
If you trust someone — or a publication or an institution — are you also influenced by that person, outlet or article?
There’s been a great deal of dialogue lately in traditional and social media about trust and influence. Many marketers believe that if you trust a third-party spokesperson, or even a celebrity in an ad, you’ll be influenced to make a particular choice regarding a product, or service. The marketing theory behind it is that you listen to people you trust, be they journalists, academics, celebrities or friends/family, and you generally follow their advice and recommendations (influence).
So Much to Say, But Who Exactly Are They?
With the explosion of social media where people have hundreds of “friends” in Facebook and thousands of LinkedIn “colleagues” and Twitter followers, the question has been raised: How trustworthy are all these people and how influential are they? And, given the often anonymous nature of social media, who are these people?
At the outset of social media fever, Universal McCann published research entitled “Since When Did We Start Trusting Strangers? ” At the time, the study reported that social media was having an outsized influence on product purchasing behavior.
Trust Is Local and Global — and Perplexing
Recent research on trust, specifically Edelman’s Trust Barometer, reports that global trust in business is up while trust in friend input on a company, product or service is down by nearly half from 45% in 2009 to 25% in 2010. While I was surprised that trust in business was up (hmmmmm … like Wall Street business?), I read with interest as I thought the “Great Social Media Backlash” was beginning. OMG!!!
But then I realized there’s always an online backlash and social media is here to stay. I mean, come on, if Martha Stewart is constantly chattering about Twitter, it’s not going anywhere but up. Trust me.
… But It’s Not the Same as Influence
This brings me back to the original question of the relationship between trust and influence. While I don’t exactly trust Martha Stewart, she definitely has an influence on me and millions of other people (she influences my wife and my wife’s sister and I trust their lifestyle radar). And, BTW, my lack of trust in Martha has nothing to do with her financial behavior. I don’t trust Drudge, Fox, HuffPost and Truth-Out either, but I am indeed influenced by them.
Waggener Edstrom’s recent research (yeah, here’s the sell) called Moments of Influence confirms the relationship between our Influence Channel Index and trust. In fact, friends were considered the most influential and trustworthy people/channel when purchasing a video game — even more influential than family and advertising (it is, after all, gaming not climate change). In addition, the research identified a sub-segment of people who are hyper-connected and hyper-influential. We call this segment Influence Multipliers.
First Impressions Last
Influence Multipliers (my wife and sister-in-law) are the “go to” people we all turn to in society for advice on everything from fashion, lifestyle, new products and services. We all “have a guy or a girl” and they’re the early adopters and social trendsetters. But, today, the big difference is that Influence Multipliers now have a powerful broadcast medium at their disposal: social media.
Do we necessarily trust Influence Multipliers? Maybe not. Does it matter? Do we follow what Influence Multipliers do and say? I’d say yes. Why? Because it’s an aspirational thing: We want to be in the know and on top of things and have “exclusive” access to data.
Similar, But Different
From our research, we learned that reach doesn’t necessarily mean influential, and influential doesn’t necessarily mean trustworthy. Apparently, people discriminate between influence and trust. You may trust an academic on climate change, but you may not be influenced by what he/she says when it comes to buying a car, or the latest gadget.
So, while there’s a relationship between trust and influence, what matters more? Trust or influence? I’d argue that influence trumps trust.
Today, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is officially predicting which film will win the best picture Oscar. Based on data culled from two twendz pro™ “Try it Now” dashboards, created to monitor the Twitter conversation surrounding the two frontrunners (“Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker”), Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is predicting the Oscar will go to … “The Hurt Locker”!
In the spirit of transparency, let me explain the methodology used to come up with this prediction. Waggener Edstrom Insight and Analytics team members spent some time reviewing both dashboards. Using only original tweets with a stated, definitive pick for the Academy Award for best picture, each “vote” was tabulated. In order to provide the most accurate results, ambiguous tweets (those that could not be discerned one way or the other but seemed to be voting) were excluded from the tally and factored into an error margin. Following this methodology, our review found “The Hurt Locker” to be the clear winner by a margin of 260 votes. This is in spite of the fact that “Avatar” had almost 1,200 more original tweets than “The Hurt Locker.”
From the WE release, here are some cool supporting tidbits found from twendz pro:
• Many of the supporting tweets for “Avatar” as best picture referenced its budget and sales.
• The average number of followers for an “Avatar” Twitter voter was over 110.
• Those supporting “The Hurt Locker” focused on its plot, characters and director Kathy Bigelow’s directing capabilities.
• The average number of followers for a “Hurt Locker” Twitter voter was over 220.
Twitter conversation aside, there are some compelling statistics, not to mention influential industry pundits, in agreement with our prediction. Roger Ebert calls “The Hurt Locker” the “current favorite” despite a “rule-breaking” producer (more on that later) and says if one of the other films wins, he will be “very surprised.” “The Hurt Locker” has also won multiple industry awards that are often considered predictors of the best picture Oscar. This includes the Director’s Guild Award for outstanding direction of a feature film; only six times in 60 years has the DGA winner NOT won the Oscar for best picture. Further, according to TIME, in addition to the Director’s Guild, “the producers’, writers’ and editors’ groups all chose ‘The Hurt Locker’ over ‘Avatar.’ No film in Oscar history has won all those guild awards and then lost Best Picture.”
Statistics aside, make no mistake: There is substantial politicking that occurs behind the scenes to encourage Academy members to vote for various films. In fact, the Associated Press reported yesterday that a producer of “The Hurt Locker” had been banned from attending the Oscars due to e-mails he sent to the Academy urging members to vote for “The Hurt Locker” and “not a $500 million film.” The Academy concluded that producer Nicolas Chartier violated Oscar rules, which “prohibit mailings promoting a film and disparaging another.” Nevertheless, the promotion continues – on all sides. James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, and others from “Avatar” have been making the rounds for weeks, from “Saturday Night Live” (Sigourney Weaver) to “The Late Show With David Letterman” (James Cameron) to publicity in various weeklies (Zoe Saldana).
And what about the other nominees? “Precious” … “The Blind Side” … “Inglorious Basterds?” Will there be an upset? Probably not. As someone who makes a living reviewing and analyzing data, my money is on “The Hurt Locker.” Having seen it, I get it. Do I agree with it? Well, that’s another post.