When journalism and content marketing collide

April 3rd, 2012

Thursday was the Post Advertising Summit, an event hosted by the professional and buttoned- up content marketing agency, Story Worldwide.

But first, a flashback.

Four articles.

Four was the number of articles that were required to become an official staff writer at my college newspaper.   I had scraped together three.

The fourth one, apparently, involved something called “collusion”.

“A collision?” I may have asked my editor six or seven times.

“No.” he said.  “Collusion. We want you to investigate allegations of collusion in the admissions office. You may want to bone up a little bit on antitrust law. “

And that was that.  Journalism, at least practiced according to the standards of my college newspaper, seemed like an awful lot of hard work. I never made it on the masthead; even then, I couldn’t in good faith lay claim to the title of “journalist.”

I am, in fact, a principal at another content marketing agency, Movable Media. And in the way of content marketers, and the many brands that are becoming publishers, I now occasionally find myself writing featured author posts for publications like this one on the topic of content marketing.

Which is why a PR person thought it would be a good idea to invite me to attend Story Worldwide’s Post Advertising Summit as a journalist.

You begin to see the problem?  As brands and individuals become publishers – and individuals begin creating and distributing content for their own purposes rather than direct compensation things are going to get quite confusing.  The “journalist” your PR team recruits to cover your event might, in fact, work for a competitive firm. * At any rate at least I am not in PR, because figuring out that business is about to get really hard.

I am glad to report that the moment I donned the gray tag that read PRESS, I instantly felt all possible bias drain away, while a palpable sense of journalistic integrity and objective neutrality washed over me.

Perhaps it has always been this way.

The underlying message of the Post Advertising Summit is this: Brands are going to become publishers and content creators, because advertising driven publishing is increasingly vulnerable and possibly completely broken (for evidence of this, see above).

As Simon Kelly, the COO of Story Worldwide explained to me (after I sheepishly explained what I was doing there), the purpose of the summit was a thought experiment.

“We thought it might be cool to see if Story Worldwide could make a piece of useful and a piece of entertaining content in a live environment.”, said Kelly.

A fair amount of the day, therefore, was an interactive dog and pony show that demonstrated Story Worldwide’s capabilities and content development process. ** By the end of the day, SW  had brainstormed and built a pair of useful and entertaining pieces of content (respectively) for two potential partners: The Weekly World News, and the Blue Man Group.

As a neutral (at this point, I hardly need to point this out) observer, I thought both the dog and the pony looked great, if a bit similar.  In both cases, Story Worldwide came up with an iphone/ipad application that encouraged fan participation.

If I had to quibble, I’d say they had picked pretty easy targets with two well-defined and successful content creators. The Weekly World News and the Blue Man Group understood their audience and their core appeal at an incredibly deep level, honed and refined over decades.  So we were, at best, turning Publishers into Publishers.  This, admittedly, is an easier task than turning Brands into Publishers.

But all in all, if you were a brand who needed a talented and professional group of creatives to design and build a content strategy from the ground up (that might very well end up including an community-involving iphone app) you would do well with Story Worldwide.

* MovableMedia isn’t really competitive with Story Worldwide; since we focus exclusively on featured author programs for brands –but that is a pretty nuanced difference.

** Real journalists must get invited to a lot of these.

(original article posted on ADOTAS)

Rand Fishkin’s refreshing take on brands buying blogs- and why we disagree (in part).

February 22nd, 2012

We think brands should become publishers. In fact, that is what we do –  we put brands in touch with influential bloggers to create content.

But instead of creating original content, why not just buy some content properties that already have audiences?

That is Rand Fishkin’s recent modest proposal -  that brands should buy content sites directly. We have always admired Rand’s foresight and expertise — and when Disney recently purchased hundreds of thousands of Moms on Babble.com we considered that acquisition to be precisely what Fishkin is advising. To our eyes, it was not a media play, it was an audience play.  And why rent the audience when you can own the audience?

And we certainly agree with Fishkin’s thesis, elegantly expressed here, that bloggers need income, and brands need audiences — so someone  should figure out how to put these two groups together.

Where Rand’s idea breaks down, to our mind, is a year down the road — when the blogger has been paid for his content site, and he and his team no longer have the passion to keep the flame alive. In the old days, that was fine — Ziff and Davis may have no longer been involved with the company, but the brand and the distribution channels they created certainly lived on.

But in 2012, in the age of author-driven content, that value proposition quickly breaks down.   The blogger eventually introduces a new site, where they can express their passions in their own words. The audience on the original site begins to dwindle and through social channels (twitter/facebook) that audience begins  to follow the author to his or her new content site.

Take TechCrunch–for example, which was bought by AOL not so long ago.  It took Mike Arrington roughly a year to flame out at AOL — but no time at all to launch his new blog. Some of his audience stayed at Techcrunch, but for those who already followed him on facebook or twitter — they quickly became aware that his insights, such as they are, can now be found on Uncrunched.

Ditto Rafat Ali at PaidContent. The editors at Engadget. I could go on and on.

At Movable Media, we are not a big fan of “owning” people; creating a giant agglomeration of bloggers or blogs. Owning an author’s blog, whether small or large, with all of its traffic and thought and passion is kind of like trying to own someone’s persona.

I don’t think the model ultimately works for brands, because personas evolve — the most obvious examples are failed celebrity endorsements like Tiger Woods.  But Tiger Woods doesn’t have to express himself *every day*, in a provocative and interesting way.  Words like “provocative” mean risky to brands. So they are going to try to control for these risks, which will eventually put them at odds with the blogger.

Let people be themselves.  We like the approach they are taking with Guy Kawasaki at Amex Open Forum. Amex doesn’t need to own Guy.  Guy doesn’t want to be owned. Amex just wants to own his content and insights, and see if they can convince his audience to start following their other content creators on their branded site.

Instead of trying to “roll-up” the bloggers, or the bloggers sites, brands will do far better by enabling  bloggers to nurture their audiences and keep their sites independent, while developing methods other than advertising (which is SO broken for bloggers) to bring those audiences and content to their own properties.  This way the brand gets to put their own unique spin and viewpoint on the bloggers content, without necessarily being married to the author’s public persona.

Performance-Based Pay For Content Has Gone Mainstream — Which Is Probably Good For Authors

January 27th, 2012

This week Forbes magazine again touted its success with the business model it calls Entrepreneurial Journalism, without so much as a titter (or a twitter) from the media. Forbes’ journalism model, pioneered (then dropped, then readopted) by Nick Denton at Gawker Media, was very recently considered a controversial and even a heretical approach for journalists.  The value proposition, however, is deceptively simple and makes sense: Pay writers bonuses based on the audiences they can attract.

However, there are three common (and misguided) author objections to this model:

1. Risk – How can authors control the promotion and popularity of the host publisher?

2. Quality - When most of the value earned by the writer is based on performance, the writer is essentially making a bet with his content.

3. Stigma - Many writers simply find it distasteful to have to promote themselves or, shudder, write for search engines.

These authors may need to change their minds and start building up their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and especially G+ circles, because authors are rapidly becoming the primary driver of content distribution.

Read more: MediaPost Article