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Reading the News in a Digital Age

By lurieben October 25, 2016 October 26, 2016 Public Relations, Uncategorized

An interesting new study from Pew Research finds that younger Americans significantly prefer to read the news, generally online, than watch it on television. According to the study, 42% of 18-29 year-olds and 40% of 30-39 year-olds prefer reading the news when possible – dropping to under 30% for people over 50.

While there’s a huge rush towards video or multimedia content over text – and posts and ads with images or video do tend to see stronger results in terms of social engagements and clicks than other performing better – there appear to be some contexts where people prefer to read information rather than watching someone tell them about it. In fact, watching silent videos is becoming more common on social networks, and these videos are incorporating more text.

I’d go beyond the research to wonder if this is associated with the high rate of news shared on mobile devices and on social platforms. For many older Americans, watching the news was a communal activity and shows like 60 Minutes or Good Morning America tended to be on at times when people would already be sitting at home over a meal or would be able to watch it while doing other activities like getting ready for work or preparing dinner. It could be consumed without disrupting their routine. Now, the internet has liberated people to consume news in the background all day long, catching snippets here and there on their smartphones as the latest developments are shared by friends to social channels. Even long-form news has become relatively easy to read as a link from Twitter or Facebook. This growth of at-a-glance news consumption anywhere, anytime has made scannable text a preferred news method.

Similarly, the rise of cord-cutting, with more than 1.1 million Americans getting rid of their cable TV in 2015, has likely meant that fewer and fewer people under 50 have regular access to a TV or have the TV running in the background as a passive source of news.

While print journalism has been struggling for years, with a 7% weekday circulation drop in 2016, it will be interesting to see if TV news will be impacted by this apparent trend towards reading the news online.

Images from the author’s collection and from Pew Research.

Tagging Content for Users and Algorithms

By lurieben September 17, 2016 October 26, 2016 Public Relations

Algorithms and tools are groping around in the dark, with only the limited tool of tagging to help them figure it out. Let’s say I want to share a blog post on Facebook. I drop in my link, and the page handily populates with information on the post:

All this draws from the page’s metadata and feeds into Facebook’s Open Graph algorithm that determines what the best headline, intro description and image are. If you’re expecting others to share your content, setting up the metadata to feed them the right information will be key – so your copy is the right length and the right image gets pulled in and linked.

Creating Your Tags

When you’re thinking about creating tags, consider which types are most appropriate:

Descriptive – Terms like #ocean or #beach that say something about what’s in the image, or meta tags that describe the content on the page.
Image type (for images only)– Qualities of the picture itself – a close-up, a landscape, a soft-focus image.
Contextual – Relates to the conversation that you’d like to be in – becoming a part of that discussion.
Conversational – When the tag becomes the conversation. This most commonly happens on Twitter, where hashtags such as the joking apology of #sorrynotsorry are more message than meta.

The Future of Tagging

Search engines like Google have moved away from keyword tagging and towards automatically analyzing the text and structure of a webpage in order to draw conclusions. Similarly, as image processing gets more advanced, algorithms are able to parse out some of the details of what’s in an image.

As an example, Shutterstock recently launched an auto-tagging tool for its mobile image uploading. The tool looks through the existing metadata/tags in the current library of images, maps it against the content of the image, and provides a range of suggestions. For a nature photo, these might include “flower,” “nature,” “beautiful,” “red,”closeup” and more. As these tools become more prominent, we should expect:

Clustering – We’re likely to see more of what already exists. If people already know to search for #destinationwedding in order to find content related to weddings, we’ll see more and more uses of that tag by people who want to show up in that context, and the tools will continue to recommend it.
Tags substituting for descriptions – Descriptions are challenging to write, since they need to encompass all that a piece of content contains. Tags are easy, since they can be single facets of that content, because they’re automatically recommended, and because they automatically feed search engines. Expect to see the continued growth of numerous tags over lengthy descriptions of content.

Where do you see the future of content tagging?

A Picture Worth a Thousand Tags

By lurieben August 5, 2016 October 26, 2016 Public Relations

Quick, describe Raphael’s St. Michael and the Dragon in 12 adjectives or less. Would they include #knight #religion, #greatart and #chiaroscuro? Would we be missing some of the essence of the image in boiling it down to these tags – these simple, searchable snippets?

The digital world is a tagged world, a world coded and snipped into little boxes. Content must be deconstructed into its essential elements and coded in this way so that the algorithms that curate content for us (Google, Facebook, etc.) can put them into the appropriate boxes. It’s most obvious on channels like Instagram, where an image might have 10 or more hashtags coding it:

It’s also apparent in many other contexts, such as meta tags on webpages to improve their search engine optimization (though Google and other search engines have moved to de-emphasize them in their ongoing algorithm updates in favor of content- and link-based analysis).

But it’s not intelligently curated, and it doesn’t speak to quality. I can tag any image or page anything, without that necessarily implying that it’s actually related or that it’s going to be relevant. Even if my tags are accurate, what something is isn’t always what it’s about; content, whether visual or text-based, doesn’t make sense without its context the unspoken relationships it has with other concepts matters deeply in understanding it. English, as with most languages, is very context-oriented. If I say “spring” to you, I could mean:

Spring (the season)
to spring (the verb)
“Spring!” (the verb as a command)
a spring (a water source or an elastic object)

Without additional terms, it’s near impossible to know which one is referred to.

Content without curated context

We have unprecedented flexibility in the ways we sort, filter and understand the world online. Yet this poses a new challenge once we come out the other side and work to understand the content. In the physical world, content tends to be placed within a certain context by its curators. To get to the Raphael paintings, you walk through galleries of his predecessors’ art, and to find a book on robotics in the library, the Dewey Decimal system places it with other robotics books.

Online search engines, social channels and other electronic middlemen let us tag things in dozens of different ways and then search based on them, such as subject, color, author, data format, production date, organizations or people mentioned, or more. The results then show up based on that search – putting each item in a context it wasn’t necessarily intended for. Just as with “spring,” if I search for #ocean, I could find the romantic image above, or an image of storm-tossed ships on the verge of destruction, or an article on marine biology – with nothing in common other than this single aspect. Each result must stand alone and be interpreted alone.

We’ve asked algorithms to be our curators, helping us find what we need in whatever way we’re thinking about it. This is an immense opportunity to draw new connections and find new content. Yet the challenge is that to make this possible, we must squash down content into a few tags for search, then try to re-expand it on the other side into its full richness. The more we can emphasize that richness while still making it possible to find, the more likely our content is to resonate and earn results.

Read more on implementing content tagging and the implications of auto-tagging in Tagging Content for Users and Algorithms.

The Sound of Silent Videos

By lurieben July 14, 2016 October 26, 2016 Public Relations

In the early days of movies, the shift from silent movies to “talkies” was transformational. Sound brought a new dimension of verisimilitude and compelling emotional reality to the silver screen. Today, we see a reverse trend towards silent videos on social media. Even as the volume of video content shared online rises to new highs each year, with more than 8 billion video views per day on Facebook, the same again on Snapchat, and social channels such as Pinterest racing to encourage native video sharing, the 85% of all Facebook videos and similarly large percentages of videos posted to other social networks are watched without sound.

Pinterest is implementing a new native video player.

Silent video is the logical result of two competing pressures on social networks.

On the one hand, video content is compelling and sparks engagement, with the average US adult spending 115 minutes per day watching digital video in 2015. So the more videos that a social network can host and encourage its users to watch, the better. Not only that, but autoplaying video ads is great for advertising revenue. If a Twitter user watches an autoplaying video for three seconds, the advertiser gets charged and Twitter makes money. If a Facebook user watches a video for 10 seconds, the same happens.

On the other hand, people hate pages that automatically play sounds. Hate them. No one wants to be checking a social network at work or on the bus only to suddenly hear an unwanted video start playing; it’s embarrassing and annoying.

So there’s pressure to get more videos seen, and pressure for them not to have sound – thus silent videos are common.

The modern social media-optimized silent videos

Creating silent videos for social media calls for a different approach than a TV commercial or other traditional video. Expect that a significant percentage of your viewers will be watching with their sound off, so text overlays are critical to engaging your audience. Generally, this means that content created for other media can’t just be dropped in, even with subtitles added – the subtitles won’t convey the full meaning of the video. The early silent commercials had to use simple and clear visuals and narratives so viewers could clearly understand the message, and social videos must do the same.

When text is included, it should be visually dynamic and should accompany and reinforce the voiceover or dialogue (for those who turn sound on). It should also fit smoothly into the overall visual look; too much text combined with too much other visual complexity will confuse viewers.

Political campaigns on all sides of the ideological spectrum have been doing a great job at this. Here’s one example of a Twitter-friendly video that is strong with the sound off and stronger with it on (setting aside the particular policies and positions advocated; image links to the video itself on Twitter):

DigiDay has some useful additional recommendations particularly for Facebook, including starting with a compelling image before leading into a text-heavy video. They do mention that too much similar-looking video makes news feeds stale – so as always, consider your unique angle in your videos.

Product Previews: Managing URLs

By lurieben June 27, 2016 June 27, 2016 Public Relations

Watch out for when convenience and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices collide with information control. When releasing a series of product previews, your audience will often be wise to the patterns you use in releasing preview content – and they’ll take advantage of that to get additional glimpses of your news ahead of when you want to release it.

For SEO purposes, we know that it’s highly recommended to use URLs that reflect your content. So if you’re previewing new rules for the Elves faction in your wargame, you might have a URL along the lines “of rootdomain.com/wargame/elves-preview.” Then you might have “/dwarves-preview,” followed by “/humans-preview” (let’s leave the other SEO considerations aside for the moment).

We also know that it can often be efficient and convenient to create and stage a lot of content at once. For example, if you’re writing three preview articles to be released daily, you might write something at “rootdomain.com/insider/5-20-2016,” then “rootdomain.com/insider/5-21-2016,” etc. Or you might upload a lot of images, with image names like “articlename/preview1.jpg” then “/preview2.jpg” and so on – just to have them ready and convenient.

In both situations, once people see one or two items in a pattern, they’re pretty creative about figuring out the rest. For example, Privateer Press, maker of the miniatures game Warmachine, has been rolling out short fiction about its’ armies leaders throughout spring 2016, and asked people to sign up to get emailed right when the stories come out so that they could be the first to read these product previews. Yet even before most emails were out, people had figured out the URL for the next story and accessed it. They knew the pattern and followed it:

Similarly, if you’ve got tomorrow’s newsletter already uploaded and just haven’t shared the link yet, people can probably extrapolate from yesterday’s URL.

So, lots of explanation to say simply that if you’re hosting it on your site in a predictably named way, fans can track it down.

Simple solutions:

Don’t stop optimizing your product URLs for SEO – but wait to take pages or posts live until the actual time when you’re ready for that information to get out there.
Be thoughtful when bulk uploading images or other visual assets that you’re not ready to reveal – adjust their URLs to be less predictable.
If something is intended to be an email exclusive (at least initially), consider requiring users to enter a simple code included in the email so that people testing URLs can’t find it in advance.

Image from USFWS, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wildlife_Viewing_(9160100369).jpg under the CC-BY-2.0 license.

Puzzles: A better path to engagement?

By lurieben June 20, 2016 June 20, 2016 Public Relations

Making it easy to engage on social or other media is often appealing. Make it simple to retweet or to Like, and the engagement metrics will pile up. But what about making engagement harder – so that it requires thought, requires solving a puzzle or a riddle? Could difficult forms of engagement like puzzles be a better creator of truly memorable brand moments?

Puzzles require investment from fans– but they are much more memorable and rewarding in turn. They call on fans as people who want to understand, who want to be challenged and surprised, rather than as passive consumers of prepared content. And they are natural tools for storytelling, where a problem is initially faced with frustration and dead-end attempts, but through community problem-solving and creativity, fans can succeed and receive a reward for their skills.

Two great recent examples include:

Online Puzzles

The Sentinels of the Multiverse superhero card game recently promoted a new expansion with an elaborate series of interlocking online puzzles.

The game designers hid clues in the game’s existing cards, in their rulebooks, and in an accompanying video game. Since the clues required attention to detail to notice, logical deduction skills to interpret, and often many false starts to solve, the game’s community needed to work closely together to uncover the mystery. As one clue led to the next, the game designers rewarded them with small previews – little glimpses of what was to come – that kept the community solving puzzles until they had uncovered the full mystery

Puzzle Rooms

The most recent release of Magic: the Gathering was themed after mystery and madness. To build excitement about the release, players at one of three major Magic events had the opportunity to enter escape rooms – rooms where you are locked in with a group and given a limited period of time to solve enough puzzles to escape.

Each room was set in the expansion’s world, one rich with the tropes of fantasy horror, such as experiments gone wrong, powers beyond space and time meddled with, and the good turned to evil ways. As people passed through the rooms and solved the puzzles, they got to glimpse a few new cards as they were released. Check out a few examples from:
Melbourne
Bologna
Detroit

These puzzles passed all the tests for engaging content – getting fans involved and making them excited to tell their friends about their experiences. They were:

Aligned with their audiences. The game’ audiences are passionate and tend to pride themselves on their problem-solving skills, so problems and puzzles were on brand and on message.
Richly interactive. They sparked their own reward through being the first to solve a difficult challenge.
Visual and shareable. For example, an escape rooms with props is wonderfully atmospheric and gets fans engaged and excited to talk about their experiences to all those other fans who couldn’t make it there.
Community-building. Working online to puzzle out a new cipher quickly brings people together in a real community – as actively engaged people, not just as consumers.

Image by Olga Berrios, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/ofernandezberrios/2719757761/ under a CC-BY-2.0 license.

Spoiler Alert: When Your Product Launch Is Spoiled

By lurieben June 14, 2016 June 14, 2016 Games, Public Relations

In many competitive industries, your product launch is your golden opportunity to build hype and get people excited. When better? There’s a shiny new product coming out, with new rules, ideas, art and more. But in the games industry, your product launch faces a challenge that moviemakers and Harry Potter readers know well: the risk of having your launch spoiled ahead of schedule.

Let’s talk about spoilers in the games industry

Most games are self-contained: you buy a box, it contains little wooden sheep, plastic spaceships or an artistically designer board, and you play it as-is. In these games, little is gained by tightly controlling the flow of information, since all players come into the game with equal knowledge and equal access to all the parts. For example, in Settlers of Catan or Carcassone, there’s unlikely to be new parts.

Other games exist in a world of unequal knowledge and investment. Consider:

Magic: the Gathering– the world’s most popular collectible card game. In Magic, the game continually releases new sets of cards, and players build decks from a subset of the most recent cards to compete with. When a new set comes in, older ones rotate out of the most popular competitive formats.
Miniatures-based wargames – There are a wide range of these, such as Warhammer or Warmachine, where players collect an army of plastic or metal figures belonging to a particular faction, then play against players with their own separately collected armies from the same or other factions. For example, an army themed around Arthurian knights vs. an army themed around Tolkein-esque forest-dwelling elves. In these games, new models are released regularly, so the business model depends on – every so often – refreshing the core ruleset and rebalancing all the individual models’ rules.

What these games share is that players make a financial and emotional investment in a Magic deck or a Warmachine faction. It’s less playing “the game as a whole” than being “an Eldrazi deck player” or “an Elves faction player.” It creates passionate fans – which is fantastic! – but also poses challenges when planning the launch of a new Magic set or a new miniatures games edition.

On the one hand, players have made investments, and the cards or the models people they like to play may no longer be competitive. So they want to know – what will the new rules be? What new cards are coming out? Should I get excited or be disappointed? Players are eager for information, eager to be the first ones “in the know” so they can show off their information, eager to find out what’s going on. Controlling the flow of that information in the run up to the launch date is therefore critical so that new concepts, miniatures or rules can be revealed in context and in their best light.

When the news gets out

Just within the last year, Magic producer Wizards of the Coast suspended several of its most active players – volunteer judges – for sharing information on upcoming cards, and Warmachine manufacturer Privateer Press found that all of the rules for its new edition had gotten out early, likely as part of a localization/translation process where someone failed to follow a non-disclosure agreement.

In both cases, there was a backlash from the community. Wizards of the Coast’s crackdown was widely seen as unjustified – the judges had shared information, not stolen it themselves – and Privateer Press started to face harsher questions as people began to see the new edition all at once rather than rolled out with the planned discussion, inside insight, and framing. They called for people to not share unofficial spoilers but – at least publicly – did not appear to take action against those sharing them.

Not only that, but the releases were less well received, because they didn’t have the chance to be framed correctly. People argued about the reality of these spoilers, making their unveiling a contentious time rather than one where people could get excited together.

Four tactics for managing your product launch post-spoilers:

Keep your big news in your back pocket.If a transformational change gets revealed earlier than you expected, there’s two ways things can go. In one, you have your preview piece all ready to go. You share it, people get excited about your news rather than the unofficial spoilers, and you move on. In another, you’re frantically starting to write that piece the day after your news is on social media – and you’re already behind the social news cycle.
Investment sparks entitlement.You care a lot about keeping your intellectual product under your control, but your fans do not. They want to know, and they do not welcome after-the-fact efforts to punish leaks. Expect that information that needs to be kept private should be kept close to hand – attempting to pull it back off the internet or social media once it’s out there is generally not received well.
Contextualize your choices.Spoilers are typically released insight-free, with no glimpse into your process or the broader vision of the product. Even after spoilers come out, you can still share a great story about “why,” “how” and “who” that can be really interesting to your audiences. You’re the designer and the producer – you have insights no one else does!
Step up your rich content.So rules may have come out, or an image of a card or a model’s rules. You can add value to that by – say – showing the model in action on the battlefield in a battle report, or sharing some behind the scenes full-art images that show more than you’d get from a grainy spoiler. If you are the source for the best information, people will continue to look to you.

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/15725991454/; not under copyright as a United States government work.

Chocolate Reviews: Meadowlands 70% Cacao

By lurieben May 21, 2016 June 13, 2016 Chocolate

It’s always surprising how little the actual cocoa percentage can mean on a chocolate bar. I’ve had 85% chocolate that was fruity and mellow, and 85% that was (to me) so bitter as to be barely eatable. While they’re both technically the same percentage, that percentage includes both cocoa butter and cocoa solids. Since cocoa butter is basically the same as any other fat – it doesn’t have a chocolate flavor, as anyone using it in their personal grooming products likely knows – a bar can be a high percentage of chocolate without actually being very full of the cocoa solids that give it its deep, rich flavor.

So whenever I get a new 70% bar, I never quite know what to expect. Meadowlands’ 70% cacao from the Dominican Republic promised (in an unfortunately well-concealed description on the side) to be “dark and earthy, hints of rum, fruits and spice.”

Packaging

Opening it up, it looked great. Simple and appealing robin’s egg blue packaging, a similarly simple and useful foil wrapping, and easily breakable & snackable squares (though I do wish the flavor profile description had been easier to find).

Tasting

Where I expected a dark and earthy flavor, rum and a little bitterness, I found vibrant fruitiness. Not cloyingly fruity, but clearly so. Each bite had a smooth mouthfeel, though the texture could have been a little snappier and cleaner-breaking. And each had a clean finish, one that encouraged the next bite without demanding it (many chocolates linger, with a tactile stickiness or a regretful aftertaste that requests the next bite to cleanse the palate from the last).

In short, Meadowlands’ Dominican Republic 70% is different than described, but still delicious. Worth having again!

Content Marketing Through a Lead Generation Lens

By lurieben April 28, 2016 May 4, 2016 Public Relations

Last week’s Content Marketing 2.0 event, hosted by MIMA (the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) and featuring LeadPages’ Clay Collins, was a fantastic look at the world of lead generation – that is to say, turning your content into business results. In today’s world where ad value equivalency is (mostly) a thing of the past and clients insist on seeing more tangible ROI, lead generation is becoming a bigger part of the picture. PR is no exception from the challenge – and the opportunity – of converting potential customers, and despite a rainbow of social media channels and media strategies to drive audience members to a landing page or website, what matters as much if not more is what happens what they get there.

I came away from Clay Collins’ talk with three key insights on how content marketing should incorporate lead generation principles:

“Maybe” means “no” and “sometime” means “never.” 100% of people who don’t make a decision about whether to become a lead while they’re on your site – don’t become a lead. If you are to keep them in your lead generation process or sales funnel, you need to build their connection to you. And that leads to…
Offer many ways to easily “upgrade” content. If someone liked your YouTube video, perhaps they can download your notes on it to read late. Or they can get a .pdf version of your blog post. Simple actions, that give people a clear next step to take if they’re not ready to commit to contacting you but they did like your content.For example, if you’re selling products that need to be purchased at the corporate level – say, a major new SaaS offering or a subscription to an academic journal – your customers might not be able to buy right away, but they would like to read more info (conveniently available from your videos, blog posts, etc. and tailored to be more than a simple product description) and build their trust of you.
“Thank you” shouldn’t end the conversation. It’s weird, isn’t it? We spend a lot of effort building awareness, getting people to the website, convincing them to sign up for a newsletter or buy a product – and then those who are aware, who clicked on your content, who liked your content, who decided to sign up for more – get a thank you page that says something like “Thanks for subscribing to our bi-monthly newsletter! Check your email for news from us!” And then they have to wait two weeks to get an email from you.When folks are signing up for your emails or taking other actions that move them down the sales funnel, they’re thinking about you and they like you. Don’t be pushy (everyone hates pushy salespeople and sales websites), but start a new conversation on that. If they want to get your emails, maybe they’d like to also join your webinar next week or watch a video on your upcoming products.

Micro social networks

By lurieben March 22, 2016 March 22, 2016 Public Relations

If you’ve ever spent much time on a cruise ship, you’ll realize that everything there happens at about a 15 degree angle to the rest of the world. There’s unique traditions that quickly become normalized, like the great and honorable tradition of squirting Purell onto your hands at least 10 times a day, because norovirus is a thing on boats, or looking at the floor of the elevators to find out what day of the week it is.

There’s the odd feeling that you’re staying in a comfortable hotel which – well, first of all, which you cannot leave – but also which, every so often, shifts beneath your feet. Not a lot, but enough to make you question whether your last drink of the evening was stronger than expected than, and then to remember that it is 8am and you have not, in fact had a drink in days because it turns out that they are extremely expensive.

And there’s the presence of Twit-arr to share your memes, hashtags and towel animal photos. There’s minimal access to the “real” internet on a ship, so some enterprising souls developed a Twitter-inspired, pirate-themed, micro social network so that people on the boat (and specifically with the cruise group I traveled with) could talk to each other online.

Twit-arr had no access to the broader internet, and in fact was operated solely through the wireless network on the boat, making it possible for people to share within the limited environment of the cruise – with about 1,000 people – knowing that whatever they shared would stay within that group and would not appear online afterward.

In practice, what this meant was that Twit-arr enabled a much broader version of that same connectedness that small groups in close quarters might, but effectively spanning 1,000+ people and an enormous cruise ship.

Because it was tailored to the experience, it could integrate the day’s events schedule and key information about the cruise, and serve as a one-stop platform for learning about the latest happenings and then chatting about them.

Because it was temporary and ephemeral, it allowed for the creation of a spontaneous online community inspired by but not identical to other social tools’ conversations, such as a lack of external “trolls.”

Last year’s SXSW Innovation Award winner, FireChat, tapped into a similar idea – bringing people together in the place and time where they are in a way that doesn’t share content too broadly. (FireChat also has a different technical approach that uses Bluetooth and peering to enable communication when there isn’t wireless or cell service or when they are overloaded – taking the core idea of time-and-place-specific connectedness in a different direction.)

In the internet as a whole, there’s only so much room for additional social networks – the giants of online social such as Facebook have a substantial first-mover advantage from their established user bases, as any number of social networks have shown as they tried to gain traction. Where it does seem like there’s a valuable niche is in micro social, where time, place and customized content bring something totally different – from being connected to the world to being connected to people here, now, sharing this experience together.

Year: 2016