content

Why your business must own its content

January 22, 2013 By Dan Thornton

Businesses can hire office space from as little as an hour of time, can lease hardware or make use of cloud computing solutions, and can compete on a relatively level playing field online with just a cheap hosting account. But conversely, it’s never been more important to own the central location where you’re creating and publishing your content.

There’s a timely reminder of the terms and conditions for LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook by Luke Brynley-Jones, which highlights the extensive agreements you make when signing up to a social network for yourself or for your business. For example you grant LinkedIn the rights to distribute and commercialise:

any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you…”

At the same time, those companies are also looking to attract more users from search and other social networks in exactly the same ways as you are. Check out this insightful post by John Battelle – Portrait of Twitter as a young media company. And consider the widely reported launch of Facebook’s Graph Search. Or how Google is unifying everything around the Google+ backbone – business pages, local map listings etc.

Leverage external sites, but own yours:

We actively advocate the use of social networks, and assist companies in making the most of those opportunities. But quite often we’re asked why a client should bother running a blog, website or their own community?

Not only are there risks in relying on a third party to always be available (See the current uncertainty over the future for Posterous for a good example), but in a time where content and content marketing are becoming ever more important to business, do you want to be allowing a variety of services the opportunity to distribute, commercialise and benefit from your content?

There are benefits in allowing people to access, use, and re-use your content – this blog, for example, is licensed under Creative Commons, but that was our choice to make, and not pushed onto us by any terms and conditions. It also comes with the restriction that any distribution has to be accompanied by attribution, and is non-commercial. That attribution means that sharing will help this site benefit in terms of inbound links and search engine optimisation.

In terms of business assets, you need to own your content, and the benefits that will come from it . It’s more important than a nice office for attracting customers, and changing your perspective will encourage you to devote the time and effort required for high quality articles which will help you rise above the coming content marketing deluge.

And if you’re struggling with how to start tackling that challenge, we can help break down the website set-up, content and social media strategy, and the tactical implementation, for you – or even supply high quality articles which are prepared in conjunction with you, to ensure they’re exactly how you want to portray your business, and exactly what your customers want or need to read.

Learn about content and business from a master

January 16, 2013 By Dan Thornton

Content is on the rise in prominence at the moment, due to the interest in content marketing and inbound marketing. As always, there’s a mixture of good and bad advice available.

In addition to what you may read from marketing and content agencies, it’s well worth investing a little time in listening to creators. In this case, it’s Leo LaPorte, founder of the multi-million dollar TWiT network of podcasts, speaking at New Media Expo 2013.

And finally, a tip of the hat to Euan Semple, who happened to mention the video as worth watching in a Facebook conversation.

Why artists want to kill ‘content’, and why they’re wrong…

January 12, 2012 By Dan Thornton

A massive and heinous crime has been committed by the internet against writers and artists. And it isn’t piracy, electronic distribution or increased competition for attention. If you really want to offend a creative person, just watch their response to the prose, film and art they create and love being referred to as ‘content’.

First it was businesspeople talking about content as something to fill the empty space between adverts. Then those SEO types came along and messed around to game the search engines and fool users. And now there’s a growing army of marketing people talking about using artistic methods to power ‘content marketing’ and prostitute noble work even more.

Don’t they understand?

Writers, artists – it’s OK when people say ‘content’

I consider writing a massive part of both who I am, and also of my occupation. I’ve held editorial roles, and received payment both for writing, and using all forms of media as an integral part of marketing. And I have absolutely no problem with anyone using the term ‘content’, as long as they’re not assuming it magically appears and doesn’t deserve time, resource, effort and reward.

After all, words only have the meanings we infer on them, which is why I might apologise to a section of you still reading who may have been offended by the Lego imagery above. At the same time a section of you might have found it amusing, or just not cared. It all depends on the signification you get from the use of that particular word.

And yes, in a business and web development context, ‘content’ is often almost a dirty word, as if in retaliation against all the people who declared ‘content is king’ for so long in the past.

But it doesn’t have to meant that. All it means to me is a shorthand way to avoid repeating ‘text,images and video’, everytime I want to describe what I do, or what is meant to go on a page. And that’s all I hope it will mean to you in the future…

How your work can avoid being just ‘content’

Here’s the thing to remember – ‘Content’ refers to what’s contained in a box as defined by a dictionary. It isn’t how the people reading or viewing your work are going to refer to it, especially if you achieve something remarkable. Noone in the history of the world, even in business, marketing or SEO, has come home from a day at work and told their partner or family about the ‘amazing piece of content’ they saw. Instead they’ll share an amazing story, a stunning picture or a moving film.

Content as an adjective is about being mentally or emotionally satisfied with the current state of things (the Swedish have one of my favourite related words, ‘lagom’, which is translated as being ‘just right’ ‘not too much, not too little’ etc, and to some extent it continues to permeate Swedish culture). If you’re doing just enough to satisfy the search engines, or the need for some promo text, then why do you deserve to be refered to as more than ‘content’ anyway?

Writing, photography and film-making are not inherently more noble than serving fast food or working in a factory. There will be people who are far more passionate about serving the perfect burger up with good service than some writers are about churning through the latest press release to just get something up which might get a bit of traffic.

So instead of spending time and effort bemoaning how people could dare refer to artistic output as if it was just the result of someone working, just do three things:

Create stuff that tears through any box it could be put in.
Share and reward the brilliance of others. Comment, tweet,like,donate,flattr,recommend to publishers/studios
Don’t settle for crap. Don’t be lazy and settle for something which is filling space for a brand or media company.

The content war is only just beginning

November 8, 2011 By Dan Thornton

The war is just beginning for writers, and it may seem strange given that Demand Media is starting to bounce back from an October share slump, but it isn’t going to be fought between quality writers and content farms.

Despite the frantic changes Google has been making to the search algorithm following a perceived drop in quality as churned-up content fills search results, it isn’t about the damaging effect of outsourcing assignments for the lowest possible cost or the economic effects of global competition.

This time it’s man vs machine, and the machine is getting a lot better.

Content War: Man vs Machine:

You may be dismissing the idea of a machine creating content based on the previous experience of spambots, as they fill comment sections the world over with ‘Blog very good. Me Like’, to build links to a website. Mostly this are easily filtered by a combination of spam filtering software and especially a final layer of human approval. What might possible sneak past a computer tends to fairly obvious to a human, particularly if it involves a variation of the ‘cheapexactnameofaproductiamselling.com’ linked in various ways.

But to adapt a quote by Cory Doctorow on copying, machine-created content will never be worse, or more expensive to produce, than it is today. It will only get better, cheaper and more accessible to both legitimate publishers attempting to make their workflow more efficient, and to spammers and content farms who can finally do away completely with the human element.

Want proof? Check out the work of Automated Insights, as detailed in this recent post by founder Robbie Allen. With a team of 12, they’ve produced over 100,000 sports stories in 9 months, having launched 345 websites which are all automated, and cover every division 1 NCAA basketball team.

Still dismissing the potential? Try reading the following excerpt from the latest game report on one of the sites, CarolinaUpdate.com:

The Tar Heels got to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team after falling to Duke, 75-58, in the ACC tournament. In making the Elite Eight, North Carolina defeated 15th-seeded Long Island, 102-87 in the second round, seventh-seeded Washington, 86-83 in the third round, and then 11th-seeded Marquette, 81-63 in the Sweet Sixteen.

North Carolina was led by Tyler Zeller, who had 21 points on 75% shooting. The Tar Heels also got 18 points from Harrison Barnes, 11 from Dexter Strickland, and seven from Kendall Marshall.

Kentucky was on fire from beyond the arc, scoring 36 points in three-pointers to get an edge.

Now you see what I mean?

Will the future be written by machines?

When Allen ends his post by explaining how machines are a benefit to human journalists, there’s certainly some truth in it, although I suspect he’s also doing his job in placating the more nervous amongst the publishing professions. Whilst he’s keen to state that the current technology is suited to purely quantitative and data-driven work, and that journalists should be liberated to be able to focus on qualitative commentary, I suspect although he’s a very accomplished programmer, he might be limited in experiencing what happens for many publications around the globe.

As he himself says, ‘In the near term, the writers at O’Reilly and elsewhere have nothing to worry about. But I wouldn’t count out automation in the long term.’ The technology is at an early stage, and will only get better. After all, if 1000 monkeys could knock out a Shakespeare, we now have that processing power. And every year those processing primates will become cheaper and better, until instead of 1000 monkeys for one Shakespearian work, we could be seeing a sonnet per monkey.

What’s the future for human content?

So what happens next for humans who want to create written work beyond the status updates to which many of us might be relegated?

Well, in the short-term, we can choose to focus on quality. That’s certainly why I’m interested in projects like The Verge, and the new site and project from Milo Yiannopoulos whose views I may well have disagreed with on a regular basis, but whose aspiration to build a European quality technology site I can certainly identify closely with. Although we do have it a lot better with Techcrunch EU than the main ex-Arrington site who have recently managed to publish some unintelligible guest posts and at least a couple of stories which I knew to be factually inaccurate, but have never been corrected.

Longer term? Whilst we can believe the noble ideal that machines will always be best with a human working alongside them, my educated guess is that spammers will be first to unleash better content algorithms into the wild on their own, particularly given the revenues they can currently get. The sheer amount of spam content means the tiniest percentage of respondents to Nigerian lotteries generates huge profits, and increasing that with better content in a no-brainer.

And anything suitable for automation – which is a lot – will be picked up by newsrooms the world over as managers and publishers will optimise over the heads of any reluctant Editors. That’s assuming enough Editors actually care about their digital product to raise a fuss when their favoured print is still in a slow death spiral.

And then that boundary will shift. And shift again, and slowly the room of writers becomes a room of servers with a couple of database admins, and one or two sub-editors just checking through a cursory selection of articles.

The solution has to be based around increasing the levels of humanity in everything we write, and everything we do online. Not only to build a bridge with anyone who reads our work, but also to ensure Google, Bing and future search engines are distinguishing what we do. Because as the level of automated content rises and becomes increasingly abused, the search engines will have to respond, and we could see search and creation algorithms cancelling each other out, leaving those authors and writers who have gone through the required steps to verify their organic-based life form will be advantaged.

What that urgently means is three things:

1. If you want to be a writer, you need to be using social media and tools like Google’s Author Markup today. Now. Because the sooner you can ensure you’re human, and the longer that exists, the better off you’ll be.

2. If you’re ever planning to launch your own website or brand, do it now. Don’t expect to learn the ropes in a staff job for a few years and then head out on your own – although that may have been a good plan, if this all comes to pass, you’ll need to be in an established position to be able to get your voice heard if you have a problem with Google’s Author markup, for example. And the way to get that help is to be reaching a million uniques per month by then, which means starting now.
If you wait a couple of years before deciding you’d like to create the ultimate blog/site on a subject, you’ll find that a few thousand readers per month could leave you at the end of one of the longest queues around if you ever need help.

3. Your personal writing style is going to be more important than ever. So a blog can be an invaluable daily tool for honing that, rather than spending your time re-writing press releases in a bland house style to churn out content as if it was 2008 all over again.

A blogging #FollowFriday

June 24, 2011 By Dan Thornton

It seems that the rise of social networking has led to two effects on blogging and the interlinking between bloggers. Facebook and Twitter aren’t killing blogs, but they do seem to have led to a lot of people dropping blog rolls of their favourites, regular recommendations of others, and the classic blog memes whereby you’d tag other bloggers to respond to a challenge or question.

And while recommendations via Twitter, Facebook or any other social network are always great, I figure it’s time I started recommending people once more. So here’s 10 blogs I read religiously for consistently good quality content, inspiration and advice, which is generally delivered in an entertaining way. And for an atheist/agnostic to read something ‘religiously’ that’s gotta be pretty good praise.

Tara Hunt: Online Marketing person turned entrepreneur, and really insightful for the whole ‘running a business’ thing.
Neil Perkin: Another person with a history in magazine publishing, and someone who keeps me thinking I need to raise my game.
Jonathan MacDonald: If you’re not familiar with ‘choice architecture’, you really should be.
Eaon Pritchard: Moving down under doesn’t appear to have mellowed Eaon – in fact his blogging appears to be better than ever.
Mark McGuiness: As a creative coach and poet Mark shares really useful creativity and productivity techniques alongside his fomal coaching.
Sizemore: Sometimes rude, and infrequently updated, but consistently packed full of interesting and unusual inspiration, as you might expect from someone who writes interesting and unusual scripts.
Adam Westbrook: Given the rise in online video, you need to be using it well. And I can’t think of much better places to get tips.
JP Rangaswami: Longer, thoughtful, insightful posts on internet culture, with the occasional diversion into cricket and the Grateful Dead.
Louis Gray: Not only did he start blogging about news fillters, aggregators and curators the same year I started this blog, and have children around the same time, but just as he had two offspring to me one, his blog justifiably rocketed for news on a valuable growing area of the net.
Danah Boyd: Anytime anyone talks about teens, privacy and the internet, I reckon Danah Boyd is the sanity check to measure their plans against.

And now for some bonuses:

That list isn’t particularly focused on the big names, the rising stars, or anything other than these are 10 people who if I’m short of time, I’ll skim through Google Reader to see if they’ve posted anything and make sure I’ve read it before skipping other stuff (generally the things I skip tend to be the generic news from bigger tech websites). That’s not to say they’re the only people I read a lot, though.

Others in the list include: Dave Cushman, Chris Brogan, Fred Wilson, and loads, loads more.At Paid Content, Rob Andrews is excellent, and at ReadWriteWeb I always make time for Marshall Kirkpatrick. I’ll look at other ways to recommend more people in a more accurate and dynamic way some in the future.

In the meantime, you can see what I like enough to share via Google Reader, or via an automated Twitter feed.