Content Ideas
SEL: 10 #Content ideas to improve organic visibility; http://j.mp/AnJ49s #ContentStrategy #SERP #Search
Tagged: Content Strategy Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Gerrit Eicker
-
Gerrit Eicker
Content Marketing
AdAge: What is #ContentMarketing? Will content replace advertising? Whose job is content? http://j.mp/wR6dZJ #ContentStrategy
-
Gerrit Eicker
Journalism 2012
What will 2012 bring for journalism? Social media bubble burst? Tech criticism? Appification? http://eicker.at/Journalism2012
-
Gerrit Eicker
-
Gerrit Eicker
NJL, Robert Hernandez: “For journalism’s future, the killer app is credibility – We know that Content is King. There is no doubting this concept. If you don’t have ‘it,’ no one is going to engage with you. We know that Distribution is Queen. In this modern age, what’s the point of having ‘it’ if no one will find it? My prediction is that this ruling monarchy will be augmented by… a prince. Perhaps a duke? Whatever. And it’s called Credibility. … We want to trust journalism. And to do so, we need to trust journalists. – And bypassing the blogger-vs-tweeter-vs-media company-vs-journalist debate, it is going to come down to one thing: Credibility. – Can I reliably trust you to tell me what is going on? If the answer is yes, then I don’t care if you work out of a newsroom or out of your garage.”
NJL, Dan Gillmor: “2012 will be the year of the content-controller oligopoly – Journalists will start paying serious attention to an issue that will ultimately determine whether they can participate in the digital world: control. – We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. … This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous – and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening. … Search engines… wire-line Internet service providers… mobile carriers… Apple… the copyright cartel… government: The forces of control are getting more powerful every day. They are a direct threat to journalism and innovation. Journalists are starting to take note – and we can only hope it’s not too late.”
NJL, Martin Langeveld: “A look back at my 2011 predictions, along with a fresh batch for 2012 – The Eurozone crisis gives way to the dollarzone crisis as Congress continues to deadlock over budget and debt issues. The Dow falters, dropping 10% by mid-year. The prospect of a President Gingrich lifts hopes briefly, but when Obama is re-elected while Republicans retain the House and retake the Senate, it sinks another 5%. Newspaper stocks fail to beat the market, but all the digital giants (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL and Apple) are all in positive territory well ahead of the Dow.“
-
Gerrit Eicker
NJL, Amy Webb: “Big data, mobile payments, and identity authentication will be big in 2012 – When Google launched its new social network Plus, it made headlines for requiring users to create accounts with their real names and identities. At the time, Google argued that people behave better when they use their real names – it even went so far as to call Plus not a social network, but a digital identity service. Some are now questioning how and when Google would be using our digital identities. Outside of social media, police departments in the U.S. have started using MORIS, which snaps on to an iPhone and enables officers to scan the irises of alleged criminals. In Brazil, police offers are starting to fit glasses with biometric cameras which can scan 46,000 data points on a face and query a criminal database in real-time. Siri, an application acquired by Apple for the iPhone, can recognize individual voices and infer contextual information based on the user. In 2012, our fingerprints may not matter nearly as much as our eyes, faces, and usernames.”
NJL, Gina Masullo Chen: “Next year, personalization platforms will bring us more choices, not fewer – News has always been about making choices among lots of information; technology just helps us make those choices more smartly. … If I were creating this future, a large component of it would include offering greater customization of news and information for readers. … People choose what they like, what interests them, what gratifies their own needs, and what fits how they see the world. – In 2012, technology may help them make those choices more quickly and easily.”
NJL, Tim Carmody: “Next year, Kindles, iPhones, and tablets will truly grow up – In consumer technology, five year cycles are really interesting. … Why does this matter for 2012? Well, besides five years of iPhone, we’re also looking at five years of Kindle. That’s two five-year anniversaries that really signal the point when mobile reading became mainstream. You could also call it the five-year anniversary of the tablet as a media device, because really, that’s what the Kindle is, form factor-wise. … With e-readers, in general, I don’t think we’ve really figured out how touchscreen reading devices are supposed to work, how to blend what we’ve learned from tablets with what we’ve learned from e-readers. … If I could make an analogy, 2011 for reading devices was like the first color/video iPod. 2012 will be the iPhone year. It seems like we made big leaps forward only because we don’t actually know what the real leap forward looks like yet.”
NJL, Burt Herman: “In the coming year, social media journalists will #Occupythenews – Social media’s essential role in serious journalism can no longer be ignored. Next year, social media journalism will finally grow up. – Journalism will be more collaborative, embracing the fundamental social nature of the Internet. The story will be shaped by people involved in the news, curated by savvy editors from diverse sources and circulated back again to the audience. This is the new real-time news cycle. … Journalists have always taken masses of information and condensed it into something digestible for readers, adding context and insights. More than ever, journalists will curate sources outside their newsrooms to tell their stories. … It’s up to the new generation of social media journalists to #Occupythenews – and to make sure society doesn’t miss the stories that, diffuse and elusive though they may be, are crucial to understanding our world.”
NJL, Rex Sorgatz: “LA is the future (kill me now) – Let’s get this out of the way: I hate LA. – I hate LA the way that any good New Yorker hates LA, with a passion bordering on paranoid psychosis. I hate the faux culture, I hate the vapid people, I hate the unctuous politics. … But I am here to preach a new sermon: LA is the Future. It pains me to say, but it’s time we all sucked up the fresh sludge spewing from the organic juice pumper. … Let’s start here: Right now, I pay over $200 per month to have 1,600 TV channels pumped into my apartment. How many of those channels do I watch? A dozen, max. – This is clearly broken. Really broken. Stupid broken. – And we all know this has to end, somehow. And we all know it will end, somehow. … But I think we can all agree that this broken system is going to be fixed, somehow. – And when that happens, the fallout for the LA-based television industry will be catastrophic. … When the collapse hits, capital will rush out of the traditional entertainment industry faster than you can say ‘Lehman Brothers.’ … It will be fun, it will be exciting. And I might even hate LA a little less.”
NJL, Vadim Lavrusik: “Curation and amplification will become much more sophisticated in 2012 – A big question for the coming year: How will the right communities get the right kind of news? – Ladies and gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build a sustainable journalism model. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. … For the last year, much of the focus has been on curating content from the social web and effectively contextualizing disparate pieces of information to form singular stories. … Because anyone can publish content today and report information from a breaking news event, the role journalists can play in amplifying – and verifying – that content becomes ever more important. … Curation itself will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated. … The coming year will see a more balanced approach. … Information will, in this environment, inevitably reach the citizenry; at stake is the quality of the information that does the reaching. If content is king, distribution is queen.”
NJL, Steve Buttry: “From a dropped paywall to a social media Pulitzer, expect a year of transformation – We will see more newspaper-company transactions in 2012. … [P]eople with sufficient wealth appear to have bought the companies outright, taking on little or no debt. … The winner of the 2012 presidential election will work harder on reaching voters through social media than through the professional media. …Digital First Media will continue to lead the way in transforming the digital news business. … We will see some major realignment of journalism and news-industry organizations.”
NJL, Paul Bradshaw: “Collaboration! Data! 2012 will see news outlets turning talk into action – 1. 2012 will be the year we finally move away from the traditional homepage – The ‘stream’ as an interface will move from being the preserve of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to being a serious consideration for news website homepages. We’re all 24-hour news channels now. 2. In 2012, ‘Collaboration Is King’… 3. News organizations turn talk into action on data – Any news organization that is serious about its fourth estate role is building the skills to interrogate those datasets.”
NJL, Dan Kennedy: “2012 will bring ‘the great retrenchment’ among newspaper publishers – Paywalls may become more popular in 2012; that doesn’t mean they’ll be enough to save a flailing industry. … The great newspaper retrenchment may prove to be more than a dead-cat bounce. As the economy slowly improves, the newspaper business may well enjoy a semi-revival. But before long, the forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore. … For the most part, though, you can be reasonably sure that newspaper companies will continue to cut costs, maximize profits (or minimize losses), and do their best ostrich imitations until they find themselves under siege once again. – They’re standing up for traditional values – and what could be more traditional than failing to plan for the future?”
NJL, Emily Bell: “2012 will be a year of expanded ‘network sensibility’ – Making predictions about journalism is a hopeless business: Jay Rosen, who is much wiser than I am, said he never does it, and I salute him for that. … The network sensibility will grow in newsrooms that currently don’t tend to have it as part of their process – it is still seen in the vast majority of places as more of a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have.’ … While this use of distributed tools and new platforms continues at speed, I think we will also see some much-needed closer scrutiny on what this new reality means for journalism and its constant redefinition of products and services. … Journalists have always been very skilled at stories and projects and fairly awful at thinking about platforms. We need more engineers who want to be journalists, and we need to teach students more about the implications of publishing in a digital environment – whatever the format their journalism originally takes.”
NJL: “Amazon conquers, Patch dies, a Facebook-only outlet is born…and more predictions for 2012 – [P]redictions about the business of, and platforms for, journalism, from and platforms for, journalism, from Brian Boyer, Rick Edmonds, Kevin Kelly, Joy Mayer, Alan Murray, Alan Mutter, Geneva Overholser, Howard Owens, and Sree Sreenivasan.”
-
Gerrit Eicker
Like!
The Like Log Study: What web content gets most Facebook Likes? Put significant effort in your top stories; http://eicker.at/Like
Gerrit Eicker
Robot News
My Boss is a Robot: scientific experiment outsources the editorial process to Amazon Mechanical Turk; http://eicker.at/RobotNews
Gerrit Eicker
Huffington Goes AOL
Aol. acquires The Huffington Post (HuffPo) for $315M: Arianna Huffington stays editor-in-chief; http://eicker.at/HuffingtonAol
-
Gerrit Eicker
HuffPo: “AOL Inc. announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors. … The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement. … As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.”
Huffington: “By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform. … Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.”
ATD: “For AOL, the deal gives them a site that is very good at generating lots page views and impressions very efficiently–which is the company’s whole thrust these days. – That means lots more ad inventory to sell and an injection of content talent, giving AOL more scale it desperately needs. – The move also obviously gives AOL a much-needed editorial identity and cohesion, which it doesn’t really have. … Five time multiple to the Huffington Post’s $65 million in expected revenue for the coming year, one-eighth of AOL’s market valuation, the offer was accepted quickly.”
Guardian: “The sale to AOL marks a personal triumph for Ariana Huffington, the colourful and controversial co-founder of the site that bore her name, who under the terms of the deal is given a new role as president and editor in chief of a unit to be named Huffington Post Media Group, and includes management of AOL’s sprawling news operations and other media enterprises such as TechCrunch and MapQuest. … Originally a politics blog aimed at Democrats, the Huffington Post branched out into celebrity coverage and turned itself into one of the biggest pieces of real estate in online news media in the US, rapidly overtaking more established media organisations such as the Washington Post by deftly utilising the internet to exploit untapped markets.”
NYT: “The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline. … By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business. … One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. … The sale means a huge payout for Huffington Post investors and holders of its stock and options, who stand to profit earlier than if the company had waited to grow large enough for an initial public offering. … ‘The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,’ Mr. Armstrong said.”
RWW: “Can the Huffington Post strategy bring in as much or more revenue than that? While eyeballs have come online fast, ad revenues have been much slower to move. That’s in large part because in the old media world, advertisers used to say “half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half that is. So they bought both halves. Online, that’s not the case. Every click and every conversion is countable – so ad buys can be made much more rational. Thus much less media gets sponsored. It’s hard to say how this is all going to play out in the long run. – AOL is making a strong move, though, in spending more than an entire financial quarter’s subscription revenue on one big content shop and its leadership.”
TC: “Arianna Huffington’s genius is to churn out enough SEO crap to bring in the traffic and then to use the resulting advertising revenue – and her personal influence – to employ top class reporters and commentators to drag the quality average back up. And somehow it works. In the past six months journostars like Howard Fineman, Timothy L. O’Brien and Peter Goodman have all been added to the HuffPo’s swelling masthead, and rather than watering down the site’s political voice, it has stayed true to its core beliefs. Such is the benefit of being bank-rolled by a rich liberal who doesn’t give a shit.”
Gerrit Eicker
Content Strategy
Johnson: The increasing momentum of content strategy. Focusing on content in webdesign; http://eicker.at/o (via @spreuss)
NJL: “Predictions for Journalism 2012 – To close out 2011, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2012 will bring for the future of journalism.”
NJL, Carrie Brown-Smith: “The social media bubble may burst, and more predictions for 2012 – In 2012 we will see a growing gap between newsrooms that are innovating and those that are…not. – 2011 saw a number of promising examples news organizations going beyond ‘digital first’ platitudes to actually trying things and making it work, and I’m optimistic we will see this trend continue. … 2012 will be a good year for local television. … 2012 *might* see a bursting of the social media bubble, or at least convince us that it is harder game to play than we thought. – This might seem odd coming from an avid social media user who developed two new courses on it for our journalism department and who even has been christened with that dreaded ‘social media guru’ title on more than one occasion [ack]. And assuredly, I do think social media is an incredibly important tool for news organizations to use to promote their content, improve their reporting, and engage their audiences… Journalism schools will increasingly step up to the plate to play a leadership role in journalism innovation in 2012.”
NJL, Dave Winer: “We need to improve tech criticism. Here’s how. – At the end of this year I’m thinking about the need for proper criticism of software, alongside other arts like theater, movies, music, books, travel, food and architecture. It’s finally time to stop being all gee whiz about this stuff. Tech is woven into the fabric of our culture, as much as or more so than the other arts. And it’s headed toward being even more interwoven. – We all need this, on all sides of the art. As users and creators. … The goal would be to move away from the lone inventor myth and see tech projects as more like film production or a even more apt, a TV series. Software is a process.”
NJL, Nicholas Carr: “2012 will bring the appification of media – For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. … As traditional media companies have moved to distribute their wares in digital form – as code, in other words – they’ve come to resemble software companies. … The old general-purpose web, where everyone visited the same sites and saw the same stuff, is rapidly being supplanted by specialized packages of digital content geared to particular devices – iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle, Nook, Xbox – or to particular members-only sites like Facebook and Google+. … Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will. – Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. … Appification opens to newspapers the powerful marketing and pricing strategy that the Berkeley economist (and now Google executive) Hal Varian dubs ‘versioning.’ Long a cornerstone of the software business, versioning is the practice of creating many versions of the same underlying informational product, packaging them in different ways, and selling them at different prices to different sets of customers. … We already see versioning strategies at work in the ‘metered’ programs operated by a growing number of papers… The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won’t work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply won’t pay for a bundle of news online. … That won’t mean the end of the industry’s struggles, but it does portend a brighter future. And that’s good news.“