Do You Believe Zuckerberg's Law of Social Sharing?

It’s being equated to Moore’s Law of early Internet days; the now-validated prediction that computing power will double every two years as costs fall by half. I don’t know whether it meets that standard, but here’s what Zuckerberg originally said in 2008:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

My attention was drawn to this by a recent infographic on a Bloomberg Business Week site—more about that in a minute. The infographic is too large to reproduce easily, but it has some interesting factoids. Of course, the growth numbers are based on the Z. prediction; it’s not clear whether they used actual Facebook numbers to validate them. Whether the sharing figures are accurate (and who could tell with precision anyway??) the phenomenon is real. I found some other interesting things while looking around.

Aol & Nielsen content sharing study

View more presentations from Mitya Voskresensky

The consumer behavior behind sharing is important. There is a recent study by Nielsen for AOL that is worth paging through. Among other things, it finds that email is still the most-used sharing tool although social networks, especially Facebook, are gaining fast. Most Internet users share but they share different content on different networks. That’s interesting and important to the marketer who wants to have her content shared.

The difficulty of doing that was brought home to me by this chart. It is the multichannel options for the ShareThis multichannel bar. I use the simple icon on this site and it’s reliable and it produces interesting analytics. They’ve also added a real-time widget that other bloggers or website owners might enjoy. There are a lot of options here: how does the marketer select the best ones? Start with any analytics you can get. You might want to test different options of a multichannel sharing bar, although you don’t want to confuse your visitors. Finally, you might resort to marketing research among key users or the most avid sharers on your site. You have to understand the behavior of your own target audience.

Marketers also struggle every day with issues of keeping up with their discipline, given the torrent of content. I ran into two interesting services. The infographic I referred to was created by Summify, a personal service that creates a daily summary of news from the user’s social networks and sends it by email, to the desktop, or by mobile. The infographic was posted on a BBW beta site called Business Exchange. It describes itself as a social sharing site, with items “filtered by like-minded professionals.” Those professionals can view, comment, and suggest new topics. I don’t see a distribution tool, but if there’s not one, it will probably come.

These services represent two different and interesting approaches to taming the torrent of social sharing. They fall short, however, of actual content curation, adding expert judgement to the equation, as practiced by Huffington Post and others.

It’s a big world, full of content. The job of marketers is to make their content entertaining, relevant, and worthy of social sharing. A big job indeed!

Marketers Must Do "Content Marketing"

It’s hard to work around the Internet without recognizing its endless appetite for content of all kinds. I’ve long told marketers that they have to “repurpose” content. Grammatical correctness aside, marketers cannot create entirely new content for each occasion, each channel. They need to repurpose the good content they have in one channel for use in other channels. Some of that is very simple—posting a TV ad on YouTube, for example. Others require more effort—creating a B2B webinar, for example. Both have one thing in common. There is already a great deal of content in almost all companies—on or off the web. The requirement is to identify it and repurpose it for other significant channels.

Joe Chernov’s Content Grid gives an indication of the complex possibilities of content channels today. It suggests several strategic issues. There are some types of content that are best used in the early (awareness) stages of the buying decision process and some better used later when the subject is moving closer to making a decision (consideration). There is also some content which is going to have single author/small group authorship (centralization). Some content is inherently multi-authored (decentralized). Some content should be under the careful control of corporate staff; some is open for comment or co-creation by external readers.

That still begs the question of what content marketing is. Here’s a definition from Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action. . . content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.

In another blog post, he describes content marketing as editorial-based, marketing-backed, behavior-driven, multi-platform and targeted.

It’s not about fluffy advertising messages; it is about content that adds value to the use of your product and therefore to your customer’s life.

There’s a final important issue related to content marketing—it’s not “one size fits all.” As Chernov’s grid indicates, potential customers at different stages in the buying process need different information. Early in the process a potential customer who is unfamiliar with your company and your products needs content that builds trust. When the prospect is getting close to making a decision she needs more specific information, perhaps a video demo of how the product can be used. Making a strategic assessment of how much content, to whom and when is the purpose of a content map. This map is stated in B2B terms, but it can easily be adapted to B2C.

A interesting example is Best Buy’s On network that went live in selected retail stores last week. The Best Buy On website has been up for awhile. It has a lot of product content that looks as if it might come from manufacturers, but it also produces its own exclusive content and takes advertising. The content, complete with ads, is now appearing in Best Buy stores. According to a Best Buy spokesperson speaking to BrandWeek :

The objective isn’t promotional, it’s around engagement with the product category or entertainment,” Bryan said. “Our quid pro quo with advertisers isn’t about [point-of-sale] lift. It’s a media placement.” Taking that approach, Best Buy On has managed to draw advertisers who don’t sell any products in stores, such as Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer mop and Tide’s energy-efficient detergents. Other advertisers, however, are the type you’d expect, including Panasonic, LG and Bose.

That’s interesting, but I think Stephen Shepard, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York summed it up best in a recent Ad Age article (subscription required). He said, "If they do a good job of it, it's welcome. I don't mind reading something from Best Buy, if it's fair and informative and honest."

That sums up the promise of content marketing; it will attract people who are looking for products you offer—or who will be someday! The degree to which it is persuasive will be determined by how informative and balanced it is and by the marketer’s ability to produce an ongoing stream of relevant content.

Do You Have a Personal Content Strategy?

Dan Schawbel, the personal branding guru of Gen Y, spoke in my social media marketing class last week to an audience of mostly Gen Yers. He made a strong case for building a personal brand. It makes sense to me to do it in the early stages of your career. In fact, it strikes me as the digital counterpart of having a good paper resume in the ‘olden days.’ It’s essential. The issue is how far you want to go with it and on what platforms. In other words, what are your objectives and your target audience?

Something that hadn’t occurred to me was the importance of building a network in actually getting some kinds of jobs. An applicant for a job in social media needs to be an accomplished user of social media, with friends and followers. It’s probably especially attractive if the profile of the friends and followers is similar to the target audience of the employer. When I stopped to think about it, the point was obvious. Would you hire someone to drive a car who didn’t know how to drive???

To me, the utility of a personal digital brand as you are career building is obvious. What about us older ducks? It still may be useful; think about your own situation. For some of us, it’s not. For me, that seems especially true because I have a pretty big digital footprint already. If someone wants to find me, they can. But in spite of that, I got an interesting tip from Dan and I’ve pursued it. Dan creates an enormous amount of content, but he is also a dispenser of relevant content created by others that he Gathers and Monitors. Most of us do that with email and RSS feeds; it creates a huge amount of incoming content to manage. His content management strategy is online. Mine consists of a bunch of file folders and Google Desktop search. I don’t tag, so search often comes up empty, even though I know I’ve read something and I think I’ve saved it.

So I found Dan’s Organize guidance especially useful. I had investigated Del.i.cious but I hadn’t become a regular user. I signed up and started using it over the weekend, and I think it’s going to be useful in both cutting down the clutter in my Documents file and on my messy desktop and, at the same time, enabling me to find things I need.

Now I have 3 buttons that let me easily tag the URL I’m on at that time, to look at my recent bookmarks, or to go to the Del.i.cious site to see what others are doing. There is also a bookmarks sitebar, which is easy to open and close from the pull-down menu on the Del.i.cious tab. Since I use Yahoo! as my opening page, all this was essentially automatic and I didn’t have to do much configuring. My only objections are minor; an extra line on my header but that’s text, so it’s small. It occasionally interfered with my Yoono sidebar, which is the one I prefer to always have open, but I seem to have settled that.

As you can see, I’m bookmarking content for a current project in higher ed as well as content for classes and writing. This has just got to be easier than all those files and folders. It’s also going to be useful to see what others are doing in terms of similar content and tags.

I think I like this. Will I Distribute much of this content? I’m not sure I will, but I’ll probably do more than I’ve done in the past because this makes it so easy. I’m going to be happy if it just streamlines my work!

What applications of this good concept can you make to your work or to your creation of a vibrant personal brand--or both!?!

The New CNN - Marriage of Site and Social?

Very early this morning I heard John Roberts and Kiran Chetry introducing the new CNN website on American Morning. Even at the early hour it sounded interesting, so I checked it out.

CNN's web designers seem to have brought as many different types of content to the home page as possible. It has latest news and features -- both headlines and videos, most popular (newspulse), a whole banner of editor’s picks videos in a banner across the middle of the page and topic boxes with links to stories. I think that sounds confusing, but it’s well organized and easy to follow. Take a look for yourself.


It was the personalization and social features that I was most interested in, though. There are more, but here are two that I investigated. I set up a profile, personalized my weather for Boston (easy), tried to upload a picture (didn’t work), and followed some topics, which John and Kiran said was easy. I didn’t find it so, at least initially, but as you can see, I did make it work. I wanted to follow Tech and thought I’d get latest headlines. All the RSS feeds to that macro level of topics are still there, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. What I found was that I had to read an article; at the end there was a Follow This Topic button. Hitting that button usually gave me several keyword-type choices which then showed up on my profile page. The topics are rather micro for my taste, but it will be interesting to follow them for awhile and see what shows up. You can follow up to 12 topics, which on the one hand is enough to keep up with, but on the other hand may not give the reader much of a perspective, given the small scope of most of the topics.

I’m not an iReporter, but I was interested in what’s happening on the citizen journalism front. What was new to me was the concept of “vetted” iReports. These reports have been checked (for correctness, acceptability, they don’t say exactly what) by CNN editors. One assumes that’s an attempt to give credibility to citizen journalism. On the iReport main page they have an Assignment Desk where readers can get story ideas while in search of their 15 minutes of fame. That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s the real purpose, for CNN or for local news sites. News happens and often reporters aren’t on the scene, but people with their phone cameras are. With that in mind, CNN just launched an iPhone app so people can upload iReports directly from 3GS iPhones. Events and breaking news seem to be the whole point!

As I looked as this I was reminded of a section of last year’s Razorfish FEED report (now hard to find but is on SlideShare). The chapter on usability/Dr. Nielsen is what I was recalling and here is the provocative quote:

The New Building Blocks

Jakob says:
People don’t read your websites; use a different editorial style and make your pages “scannable.”

We say:
Throw away your concept of primarily designing “pages” as building blocks and start designing experiences. (slide 20)

I think that’s what CNN is trying to do. Call it engagement, call it offering experiences, it may be a guidepost on the road to the future of the web. It’s an experiment worth following.

Widgets for Content Distribution

My fascination with widgets has been documented from the early days. About a year ago I wrote about Google gadgets and suggested that marketers check them out and see how they work; they can be DIY. If you search widgets on the blog search bar at the top of the page, you’ll find more widget posts, most about marketing campaigns that have a widget component.

Whatever you call it—and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing term is one of my favorites—marketers have to get the word out and bring people back to their website (or blog) for information or action. For most websites, search is primary in generating traffic. Another important way to bring traffic to your site is to get content out with links back to your site. Widgets are perfect for that; see the McKinsey widget on the sidebar of this site.

Last week’s post on applications and widgets emphasized some of the large players in the space. Can a small blog/a small website use this technology cost-effectively? The answer is “yes.” “Free” is more difficult.

This aspect of the subject came to mind when I received an email from Wowzio.com about a new hosted widget service that’s the brainchild of former Yahoo! social media and software powerhouses. I was interested and checked it out. They have a good explanation of white-labeled widgets. It’s a hosted service, so there are charges. It’s still in Beta, so they are offering free services for personal blogs. I took advantage of their offer, requested and invitation, and took the widgets for a trial run.

The way it works is simple. You provide your blog or website address. They make some connections on the back end and send you a link to your widget page. At present, they have six widget templates from which to choose, as the graphic shows. The “Customize This” link leads you to a page that lets you size the widget and choose background colors. Then it gives you embed code. Even better if you have a blog on a standard platform like Blogger or Typepad, you simply click the button for the platform and it inserts the chosen widget on your blog. Then you configure the sidebar content as you want it. I tried tag cloud and live activity widgets and they showed up on my blog, just as Wowzio said it would. Look at the right sidebar; they are interesting, fun to look at. The content distribution issue is that, if you want to Grab This widget, you can put it on your own blog or website, just like I put the McKinsey widget on mine. Your content has just been made available to readers/visitors of other sites!

I was intrigued, so I asked for an invitation for the natural history blog I edit. It has many beautiful images, so the photo gallery widget was an obvious choice. It’s lovely, but it’s far enough down on the sidebar that it’s below the bottom of some posts, meaning many readers may not see it. I need to work on the sidebar design more and see if I can move it up further without decreasing some of the important subscription and search items—all of which are widgets of one kind or another!

Wowzio enters a space similar to other app platforms like Kick Apps, which has been around for awhile. They have a lot of explanation about how it works and there’s a link for pricing at the bottom of the home page that gives you an idea of what these services run. I don’t see doing this one myself. It really would take a developer, but from what I’ve seen that would be a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars, depending on your location (and how busy free-lance developers are!). Wowzio doesn’t seem to have set a price for small business customers yet, but that will certainly be forthcoming.

The critical question for a small business is whether it’s worth a hosting fee—say $100—each month plus a developer if you need one to create the widget.

I think there’s a pretty simple answer. Do you have content that a clearly-defined target audience would like to include on their own blogs or websites? That would be content that is relevant, engaging and continuously updated.

If you have great content, you may be ready for a widget to distribute it. If you don’t, you need to be working on the content. Great content always comes first!

Sign of the Times--Nascar and the Web

A lot of social media developments passed by while I took August off. A few of them were worth saving and revisiting. One was the announcement in July that Nascar had picked 20 websites and blogs to credential for press coverage.

According to Ad Age (subscription required), “The attrition of both space and writers at newspapers around the country has meant a growing number of empty seats at Nascar media centers and press boxes, and less mainstream media coverage for the sport.” Add to that a weak economy and high ticket prices, and Nascar racing, along with other sports, has suffered. As far as I can tell, Nascar still has the highest “attendance” figures for any sport in the US, so it’s an important bellweather. Their website makes it clear that this Turner Interactive site understands the power of the web, engagement, and interactivity.
In this media environment Nascar executives were smart to rethink their historical distrust of non-traditional media. The Sports PR blog has a nice commentary on their process and motivations. The 20 sites selected are listed in Nascar’s press release.

Most are websites; a few are blogs. I look at a few of each, randomly selected. My eyes glazed over pretty quickly because I’m not a professional sports fan, especially Nascar. But it’s clear to even a non-fan like me that these are serious sites or blogs, with multiple contributors and in-depth coverage. They are definitely not just a guy with a blog and an attitude.

The Ad Age Article points out that both the NBA and MLB have credentialed writers for both major websites and sports blogs. NBC just purchased ProFootballTalk.com. Local teams appear to credential web writers based on their own criteria. Ad Age says, “The Baseball Writers Association of America, which has lamented its dwindling ranks because of newspaper layoffs and cutbacks on space, voted in December 2007 to open its membership to web-based baseball writers.” That’s definitely a sign of the times!

The decline of print media, especially newspapers, continues unchecked, although multiple sources, including Pew, find use of online news sites continuing to grow. As far as I’m concerned, there’s still reason to view unedited news with care. Some news sites have editorial scrutiny; most do not. Does that mean their information is invalid? Does it imply that they cannot—and will not—increase in professionalism as they continue to gain prominence?

My personal answer is “No” to both. Online, including video, clearly seems to be the future of news. That’s a revenue issue for content marketers and an advertising and promotional one for the rest of us.

Ignore at your peril!

More Digital Oldies--This Time Kindle!

I had the conversation again yesterday. “I’m not really up on this stuff; isn’t it for younger people?” It reminded me of a recent article in Time magazine about the age of Kindle users. Guess what? They are on the older side! There are probably two reasons. The Kindle is expensive; $359 for the Kindle 2 and $489 for the larger screen Kindle DX. Second, they are used to read print content like books, newspapers, and magazines. Ad Age recently pointed out that “print is not aging well.” Ouch!

According to eMarketer (May 20, 2009), The device, first introduced in late 2007, accounted for approximately 10% of total North American book units sold in Q1 2009—or about 4 million out of the 38 million books sold. You can also subscribe to electronic content like blogs on the Kindle, all of which should make for happy reading.

But that’s not all. Amazon recently announced a Kindle app for the iPhone. It’s gotten mixed reviews, mostly because the screen of the iPhone is so much smaller than that of the Kindle. However, for those of those who don’t want to carry something larger, reading on the iPhone may present an attractive alternative.

In addition, there is also buzz about Amazon making a college version available with preloaded textbooks. As a textbook author (talk about a broken business model!), that’s long overdue. My Internet Marketing text is available with an e-book option bundled with the print text or as e-book alone. I don’t know what the sales breakdown is, but every time I ask a class I find that few, if any, of the students have activated the e-version. Why they prefer to carry around a print copy is beyond me. “Comfort level” is the best explanation I can think of because most of the things you can do with a print copy (highlighting, for example) is available on e-books. The other issue for college students has been the price of readers. Still, I’ve long felt that colleges had to make book readers the default distribution method for text books.

The iPhone app and the college version both suggest that the age of the readers of e-books could trend down over time. For all of us who believe in reading, that’s good news.

What does it mean about the future of “print” media? Will we consume traditional print content on our electronic readers? Probably. Will there be a way to monetize it? We haven’t found an effective way to do that on the web; why should it happen for electronic readers?

All this bodes well for content on the go, whatever your age. It doesn’t seem to offer strong hope for traditional print media, though. That’s still an industry in search of a savior—and I don’t think it’s a Kindle!

Survival of the Fittest--Marketers, Media, Agencies

I saw the Digital Darwinism article in Booz & Co’s online Strategy+Business magazine a few weeks ago. I read it, thought it summarized important ideas, then pushed it to the side of my desktop where it languished until a couple of days ago. When I received an email that it had been republished as a Resilience report I reread it and was again impressed with its insights.

Part of the reason is some good case studies; author Christopher Vollmer talks about HP and there are sidebars written by Carolyn Everson of MTV Networks and Ajaz Ahmed of digital agency AKQA. That represents their three key players in this struggle for survival; businesses, media and agencies.

The report identifies 5 behaviors that the fittest will use to survive:

1. Getting close to consumers. Hardly a surprise! The point is to “activate” consumers, making them “prosumers.” I think we used to call that brand advocates, but whatever we call it, it’s hard to do.
2. Stimulating conversation. Again, not a surprise. Advertising is out; listening and dialog are in.
3. Recognizing that content and context are inextricably intertwined. This puts a premium on careful media choice and integration.
4. Making better use of customer data and insight. In this fragmented media environment we lack integrated metrics to measure the progress of our efforts.
5. Building new, more collaborative relationships. This is where marketers have to work in close collaboration with their agencies and media to create the kind of meaningful, two-way dialog that will “activate” customers.

This report is essentially analysis of the fall Marketing and Media Ecosystem 2010 report, which I've written about a couple of times previously. While there is nothing startlingly new in the analysis, it is cogent, focused and a good reminder.

A friend commented to me recently that a brand of our acquaintance didn’t seem to have the basics in place. Good point. These are the basics. If your company/your brand doesn’t have them in place your chances of survival in a challenging environment are seriously diminished!

Response Monitoring That's Military-Friendly

One of my students saw this AP article on military use of social media about the time I saw the one in Marketing Vox. She picked up on the amusing idea of a general using "friend" as a verb--thanks, Beth! My reaction was that I'm delighted when someone does my work for me.

This chart is from the Air Force, and it seems to me to all be right on target. In fact, soon after I first saw it I had a comment on another blog that exactly fit one of their scenarios. Good for the Air Force! And I highly recommend that you copy and save it for your own use.

I'd add one scenario that I've discovered through trial and error. If a commenter makes a comment about something other that the subject of the blog post, it's a good candidate for being ignored. At best, one brief factual response and ignore anything further.

What I realized is that a commenter like this has an agenda and is not likely to be convinced by either fact or sweet reason. The news blogs are full of commenters like this and they can be really annoying. But unless you need to get a fact out, ignore them. They have a short attention span and will soon be looking for someone else to annoy.

Happy monitoring!

Content--Online and Offline

My interest in local news sites is well established. They seem to be the vibrant part of the news scene at present. In this context Walter Brooks of eCape pointed me toward a current article in Vanity Fair. It profiles Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and chronicles his tenure as publisher at the New York Times. That alone is interesting and particularly relevant on the day the NYT released its quarterly earnings. The latter part of the article gets back to their lead-in—that a “doomsday clock” is ticking for the traditional newspaper industry and has a number of interesting strategic insights. They say:

American journalism is in a period of terror. The invention of the Internet has caused a fundamental shift not just in the platform for information—screen as opposed to paper—but in the way people seek information . . . Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It’s not that they have short attention spans. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly by professional journalists, they search out only the information they want, and are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news.

The article points out that it isn’t just a matter of putting traditional news online. They quote Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (page 6, Internet version) as saying that newspapers can’t consider all platforms as being equal. They must make strategic choices of platform and exploit the technology of each platform. That applies to all Internet publishers, not just newspapers, and it appears that many do not yet understand how profound that statement is.

The New Digital Content Marketing from Bob Collins on Vimeo.

Reading the article—and I’d encourage you to read all 8 pages, not just my brief quotes—I was struck by the similarity of theme in a video by Bob Collins of SHIFT Communications. The video is also long for an Internet video; it runs about 6 minutes. I think once you start it you will be captivated by the message of the expert commentary he has aggregated here.

Is it true that electronic content is the only content valued by many people, especially the Internet generations? That’s a scary thought to many businesses, especially traditional media.

But I think there’s another step for all of us. It’s not enough to simply make our content electronic. We have to make it visible. We have to distribute it (or announcements that it exists) widely around the net. Is that what inbound marketing is all about?