Tag Archives: social media

Content Strategy Links of the Week, November 28

Here’s a roundup of top pages I’ve been reading this week:

Teenagers and tweens watching TV half as much as adults, Ofcom finds 
“Tweens and teens watch just half the amount of live TV as adults each day, and choose to “top-up” viewing by watching clips on services such as YouTube, Vimeo and Vine, according to new research by the UK media regulator.”

It’s not just about print vs. digital media — it’s about culture
Interesting table included here looking at the differences between legacy media and ‘digital-first’. Worth looking at…

This building is an organism for making newspapers
In the Agile world we often talk about how locating people in an office is just as important to product output as knowledge. With that in mind, take a look at this diagram from a 1920s newspaper company.

Digital Publishing: There’s No Place Like Home
Some choice quotes here:
“According to the analysis, a user who visits a news site directly spends, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit, while a Facebook user spends just an average of 1 minute 41 seconds on your site. In addition, direct visitors view about five times as many pages per month as Facebook users, and visit the site three times as often.”

“Even though they’re a smaller percentage of overall traffic, app users listen to much more audio,” said Perry. “Mobile users might visit a couple of pages and stay on the site for five minutes, but our app audience seems more willing to listen to a stream for an hour.”

“Despite the reduction in traffic, newspaper homepages harken back to the historic place the front page of a newspaper had in the community. Forgive me for sidestepping into marketing speak, but editors should think of their news organization’s homepage as their ultimate brand statement.”

How are brands driving TV ad viewers online?
“It’s either a case of brands not understanding the importance of driving TV viewers online or they already assume it’s a pointless exercise because viewers disengage as soon as adverts appear.”

How Technology Is Changing Media
An in-depth look at how BuzzFeed is leading the industry’s trends in social, mobile, and video.

 

 

 


Content Strategy Links of the Week, November 20

Why social is key to creating habit-forming news products

“According to Nir Eyal, it’s often fear that encourages a person to return to a product again and again. Boredom drives return visits to YouTube, loneliness encourages people to go to Facebook, uncertainty encourages people to search Google, he says.

So for newspapers, news sites and digital products, perhaps the driver is FOMO, a fear of missing out. People return to find out about the key news events that they don’t want to miss.”

Latest from the NPR social media desk

“1. Everyone’s talking about Serial. Seriously. Vox has gone one step further and built an interactive guide to keep track of who’s who in this character-driven crime story. Brilliant? Yes. A step too far? Maybe. But the resulting audio cards are really user friendly and offer sideways entry points into the story, in addition to making it all easier to follow. Now, just think of other ways we could break down a story that might make it easier to for the
audience to enter and understand.”

Why We Crave Human-Curated Playlists

“Context is key for music, and that is where services like Songza and Beats Music are picking up tips from FM radio. These services are essentially using algorithms to help people discover new playlists, instead of discovering new songs. This allows for a marriage of both technology and human curation.”

This woman is Hearst Magazines’ secret digital weapon

“Sharing content is another key part of the strategy. Other publishers aggregate news from elsewhere or open their sites to outside contributors to increase their publishing volume quickly and at low cost. With all of Hearst’s magazines as well as newspapers to draw from, the publisher has a long way to go before it has to look to outside sources for content. Part of Lewis’ mandate, then, has been getting Hearst to surface stories that can work across brands. Ultimately, the goal is to have 20 percent of a given Hearst site’s content coming from another Hearst property.”

More than 7 in 10 believe radio will not decline, survey finds

“An ageing population and an increasing numbers of retirees could mean increasing popularity. However, the test is to ensure that young people continue to reach out to radio as they grow older.

“To address this challenge, radio must continue to be a place of ‘music discovery’ and must adapt to new ways of enjoying content on the go – and on modern media devices.”

Quartz rethinks the newsroom for the digital age

“We don’t adhere to the preset roles you have in news organizations,” Seward said. “It prevents a myopic view of how stories need to be told. When you have the ability to think about how to tell a story differently, then it leads to more creative ways.”

Why Instagram isn’t (yet) a great platform for news publishers

“So while Instagram currently isn’t the best host for what most publishers are doing right now, as the platform becomes more video focused publishers with expertise in creating narratives in video form will find Instagram’s a more effective way to reach audiences. Until then, though, as Guyatt says, there’s very little purpose to publishing content to a platform on which it does not belong.”

Why podcasts are suddenly “back”

“The money and raw numbers have finally gotten investors to pay attention, and investors have a lot of press influence. But podcasts have never exploded and have never died. The truth is that they’ve grown boringly and steadily for almost a decade, and will likely continue to do so. And that’s great!”

The web is alive and well

“To see the mistake here, just look at the most popular mobile app supposedly leading this turn away from the web: Facebook. A substantial portion of Facebook content offers links to other websites. Tapping them opens a browser within the app, and there you are, on the web. The latest version of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, in fact, brings in-app browsers on par with the company’s own Safari browser in terms of capabilities and performance.”

It’s small touches that can make a difference in New York’s layouts

“Each week, Williams and his designers choose one of the feature articles set to appear in the print magazine, usually the cover story, and brainstorm ways they can add visual design elements that improve the storytelling process. This has become increasingly common at many publications ever since the launch of Snow Fall, the multimedia story project produced by a team of New York Times journalists, designers, videographers, and coders — though when I mentioned Snow Fall, Williams was quick to note that New York’s forays into the medium are much less epic in scale. “It’s possible to build them with each issue and without overwhelming the team,” he said in a phone interview.”

Three Amazing Things I learnt from News:Rewired (July, 2014)

I went to Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired conference held at MSN in London on Wednesday (23 July) and here are my random notes from the event.

1. “Newspapers will outlive sites”
This was by far the most provocative statement of the day, delivered by WSJ’s mobile Editor David Ho and beautifully crafted for a roomful of journalists. However, his statement was heavily qualified as he pointed out seven signs that has led to this change:

  • News consumers are shifting to mobile.
  • Most data traffic on mobile happens via apps, not websites.
  • Mobile Web visitors tend to skip home pages and go straight to articles via search and social.
  • Tech companies are focusing on deep-linking technology to take users from one one app to another, bypassing Web browsers.
  • Technology is becoming more personal and anticipatory – contextually aware of user actions and environment.
  • User interfaces are evolving beyond screens to focus on voice and gesture control.
  • The Internet of Things and wearables loom right behind smart phones poised to deliver a profound change.

He spoke further:

Newspapers have been around for about 400 years and they have a lot of staying power. The people who like them really like them.People are beginning to understand something that we at the Journal figured out four years ago when we launched our iPad app. A finite self-containing non-updating content set still has value – the concept of the edition still matters, especially in a world of non-stop news.”

These are not new facts but they were eloquently put and Ho even got us to play Flappy Bird after his opening keynote which is no small feat. In short, think platform, not destination.

2. “Explain it in one sentence and why people should share it”
Bella Hurrell from the BBC raised some very valid points around infographics – and I agree. Sometimes you have to question if your infographic project is communicating knowledge in the quickest and most informative way possible or is it just an exercise in pretty looking graphics? Does it really need to absorb so much resource? What are your trying to achieve? Have you lost the plot? (This is a question I often ask myself). 

Further reading here.

3. Buzzsumo
There were a lot of social media tools presented at the event but Buzzsumo really stood out for me. If you haven’t explored it yet you can find out more here.

Until next time.