Friday Link Dump: 09/14/12

I’m going to try and get better about sharing more here but in the meantime I need to clear out the baffles a bit.

• There’s some good examples of what is and isn’t “good” curation strategy here, even if that is largely still in the eye of the beholder. Curation can be an important part of any publishing strategy so it’s good for that element to be planned for, executed and measured just as efficiently as the rest of the program.
• With social publishing programs the headline is no less important. What’s good to keep in mind, though, is that headlines in the current climate serve two masters: 1) To hook readers with the promise of something interesting and relevant and 2) To be effective search hooks. So the need is to balance something engaging with something that is effective from a search standpoint, which can often be difficult and is why strong strategic guidance from someone in this area is needed.
• Everyone’s mileage is going to vary on things like this, which is why it’s so important to be looking at your own metrics and making your own judgements, but these are some good guidelines to help you make decisions on publishing times.
• This sums up nicely the basic steps involved in adopting the “business as media outlet” mindset. There are, of course, a lot of fine-point details that aren’t covered here but that doesn’t change the fact that, as the op-ed says, there’s a very journalist-like role that needs to be created within more organizations.
• The article predicts that the “Pin It” button may become as ubiquitous as Facebook’s “Like” button. That might be a bit of an overstatement but it certainly is forcing companies to reevaluate what sort of role visuals play in their online publishing mix and then optimizing for sharing.
• While Facebook – or Twitter or any other form of third-party service – sign-in isn’t essential to an e-commerce site it can help lower the bar for customers to create accounts and then encourage them to share their purchases/wants on an outside network, spreading their recommendations to their friends.
• While the experimental types of reporting being done at large media organizations is good, it is odd that so many journalism-related grants keep going there instead of to truly innovative operations.
• One of the key points to raise in a discussion about a current or proposed social publishing program is what effect it could likely have on recruiting and HR. There will be *some* impact, though the levels may vary by industry and other factors, so it’s important to build considerations into the program even if recruitment isn’t a stated goal.
• LinkednIn is a big question mark when it comes to corporate social publishing programs. The company obviously wants to be a player in news distribution, something this update highlights, but it’s important to decide whether the content that’s being produced will speak to the type of audiences that are following a company on LinkedIn.
• There’s a lot of consolidation happening in the world of social media tools right now. While that would usually lead to a new batch of tools to shake things up, the questions that exist around Twitter’s API strategy throw out that assumption.

The Communications API

A while ago it seemed about 3/4s of the items in my RSS reading one morning dealt with APIs. This service was using that existing site’s API, some other had just changed the terms of service on theirs and thrown developers for a loop and so on. While I try to keep up on this sort of thing as much as possible – these developments do have some impact on publishing and other social media programs – after a while it becomes a bit overwhelming for anyone without actual development skin in the game to take in.

But it reminded me of statement I’ve made in other situations that’s very true for publishers, whether they’re news organizations or corporations running a blog: Your content is your API.

The nature of an API is that it represents, to varying extents, the core of whatever it’s building. It’s what the creator has made available to others that would allow them to build wholly original extensions off that foundation.

So to the story, blog post, Tweet, photo, video or other piece of content that’s published forms an API in and of itself. Readers and followers can share that on their own platforms in whatever form they wish absent technical restrictions prohibiting them from doing so. They can directly Retweet your update, take the link and create their own text, edit what you wrote for length. They can share your photo directly or link to the set it belongs to. They can use it as the foundation for their own blog post that points out something you didn’t think of.

Even more broadly than that, though, a company’s story as a whole is an API both online and off. People are taking what they know of an organization and remixing it into something that fits their own third party application – their lives, that is. So it’s important to communicate that story in a variety of ways so people have the correct foundation on which to build that app.

What makes these story-based APIs different from the technical kind is that they are, more often than not, involuntarily released. People will take what they know of a company and build off that, regardless of how official, complete or complimentary that knowledge is.

It’s incredibly important for communications programs to be designed in such a way to at least acknowledge if not actively accommodate this sort of behavior. Without that mindset in place the foundation that’s being laid may very well be one of sand.

Quora Answers Marketer’s Questions

Quora has been the belle of the social media ball for a while now, attracting the attention of early adopters and quickly turning into an outlet for people to share their expertise. As noted in a recent Wired story on the company much of that early audience has been in the tech start-up and social media circles where the service itself lives, though strides have been taken to expand the audience.

Now it’s looking to expand even further by dropping – or at least significantly lowering – the barriers it had in place to corporate participation in answering questions left by individuals.

The change coincidentally comes at the same time my own thinking about Quora and its potential usage has begun to come around. At first I pretty firmly dismissed it as a tool for little else than polishing one’s own ego and “personal brand” but have begun to think of it as a potentially valuable tool for directly answering questions on the same platform that they’re asked.

And that’s kind of the key detail. As I said on Twitter a while ago, if the presence of Quora or other platforms that are just about the question/answer interplay is the first time you’re considering responding to the audience then you kind of need to take your online communications program back down to the studs and rethink things. That should always be an element, which is why the term “participation” is used so often.

The more welcome attitude Quora now has toward corporate participation means a whole new field of legitimate subject matter experts can now weigh in without their responses potentially being flagged.

Of course it also means the potential for spammy, content farm-esque material to be posted has risen significantly. So it’s on the Quora community to police what’s posted and throw flags when necessary.

There are still problems I have with how Quora is setup that keeps me from being 100% sold on integrating it into programs – the biggest being the ability of someone else to edit a response – but as I said my thinking is coming around and have put it back on my radar as something to keep in mind for the future.

Will entertainment check-ins ever catch on?

With so many brands angling to sign partnerships with entertainment check-in service GetGlue it’s humbling to remember, according to an R/WW story, GetGlue only just recently crossed the one million user mark.

While usage is certainly on the rise I don’t think this or any other entertainment check-in app will truly break into the mainstream until one or both of two innovations occur: Either there’s some way to check into a physical location at the same time or there’s a connection made between the desire to see a movie and eventually seeing it.

The fact that GetGlue, which seems to be putting daylight between itself and its competitors, only now has gone over the 1M mark, is very much a case of the industry hype being outsized compared to actual usage statistics. So, as is usually the case in such instances, it’s important to be thinking about how to use it in the service of marketing efforts but to also not get caught up in the hype surrounding something that’s primarily used by early adopters.

Connecting intent with execution

If there’s one area that the check-in market, both location- and entertainment-based, needs to grow in to it’s the addition of intent-signaling. So I want to use the same network/app to say to the people I’ve connected with there that I’m planning to do something (attend a WordCamp for example) and then check-in when I’m there. Similarly I’d like to build a list of movies that I’d like to see that I can then bo back to and check-in or otherwise mark off that I’ve seen it.

Right now the functionality is too disperse to be truly useful, at least to me. Plancast, GetGlue, Gowalla…these are all good for what they are but they’re too limited, focusing on one are or the other. A good percentage of the Foursquare check-ins I see are from ostensible locations but they’re really events that people have newly created at that physical space.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to check-in somewhere unless you’ve already said you intend to go there. That would defeat the purpose. But the check-in market needs to connect these disparate desires before I’m going to be fully satisfied with the options.

Will QR Codes Fare Better Than RSS?

In speaking recently with Beverly she said one memorable thing about her time at SXSW this year was the pervasiveness of QR codes. Indeed more and more marketers seem to be using them, though the audience for them still seems to be the super-wired users who know what to do with them.

The more I think about QR codes and the potential for widespread adoption and usage the more I keep coming back to RSS and its fate.

A strong case could be made for RSS being the most powerful tool of the Web 2.0 era. It’s what enabled, to a large extent, blogs to be read whether you were using a dedicated reader like Newsgator or Google Reader (a market that’s gone through significant contraction), adding feeds to your MyYahoo homepage or subscribing through Live Bookmarks in Firefox. That leveled the playing field for content distribution since it didn’t require the creation of a formatted email newsletter or other such tool. It also was a time-shifting tool, with feeds simply building up in your reader until you had the time to peruse them, which took a whole lot less time than it would to visit all those sites and check for newly published material.

But RSS never really caught on with the mainstream audience. Even those who were using it were often unaware of the fact that they were doing so, which was usually the case with portal homepage users who didn’t know it was RSS under the hood powering those headlines they were looking at. Tom Biro remarked once that the problem with getting people to use RSS was that it was the one thing on the internet that didn’t do something when you clicked on it. Which is why eventually buttons that automatically added a feed to MyYahoo, Google Reader or some other service eventually became widely seen on blog sidebars.

Unless something changes I see a similar history being written for QR codes in the next couple years. You can look at it on the page of a magazine, where it’s been placed in an ad with the promise that it unlocks exclusive content or some such. But too often there’s the additional instruction to first download a specific branded mobile app before scanning the code.

So while the developers and promoters of QR codes have learned one less from the history of RSS by explaining much more clearly what it is the user is expected to do with that little pixilated image, the fact that they’re being used in such a proprietary manner has the potential to stifle adoption. After doing it a few times to check out what’s available it’s hard to see most casual users downloading app after app for the single purpose of checking out an exclusive video or accessing a special wallpaper image.

To the extent that RSS did succeed – and it did even if it remains largely a mystery to some people – it was because it works everywhere. Some feeds may look better in some browsers or some readers, but you never ever got a “This Feed is Incompatible with Google Reader” error message or anything like it. A feed was a feed was a feed. And they were everywhere.

Similarly the success of QR codes, I think, depends on them being pervasive and universal. No special apps needed. They should work independent of any other bit of software and across all platforms. Only then will the potential of them enjoying widespread mainstream adoption be opened up.

QOTD: 3/4/11

From Marketing Pilgrim:

Having a website is like having an office versus working out of your garage.

Free means…

There are two perspectives to take after reading Ike Pigott’s post The High Price of Free:

1. It means you need to go into services like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others with the expectation that when downtime or other problems come up – and they will – the complaints you register, while justified, only go so far since you’re not paying for support, access or anything else. So you might just have to buck up and deal with it.
2. It means that if you’re looking to get into social media marketing based on everyone’s talk about low – or no – costs you’re going to be visibly different from those who have invested the time and money into quality presentations, materials and consultation.

Like-gating on Facebook isn’t sustainable

There have been a couple of interesting stories recently about how brands have increased the number of “Likes” they’ve accumulated on Facebook and what tactics they engaged in to do so.

First up, Taco Bell added about 250,000 Likes to its page (ClickZ, 2/17/11) by offering those who did so a free taco. But in order to get that offer people had to take the positive action of Liking the page. The company used Facebook ads to drive traffic to the page and was part of its overall effort to turn public perception around in the wake of a controversy caused by a lawsuit regarding the ingredients in its taco meat.

Discovery Communications, though, has managed to accumulate 25 million Likes on its Facebook page (ClickZ, 2/15/11) without offering any sort of exclusive material to those who Like it. Instead they’ve engaged in tactics that focus on community participation and engagement.

Discovery’s story, though, is increasingly part of the minority as more and more marketers – including some movie studios – engage in “like-gating,” meaning they’re putting exclusive content on their page that’s only available to those who Like it. Often the exclusive content is on the splash page that’s displayed, adding to the enticement to take that action. Sometimes it’s video, sometimes it’s entry into a contest but it’s always something that is supposed to be so attractive that people just have to Like the page in order to check it out.

The problem I have with “like-gating” is that while it might be effective in propping up those numbers they’re not part of a long-term strategy to maintain the relationship that’s then established with audience members.

There have been a number of studies over the last few months about why people Unlike brand Facebook pages, most recently one from CoTweet and ExactTarget. The top three reasons people leave a page have to do with the frequency of content being posted and how it crowded their walls with marketing message. But reasons #4 and #5 are, respectively, “I only Liked the company to take advantage of a one-time offer” and “They didn’t offer enough deals.” Those are pretty consistent with the findings of other studies that have been released.

When you, as a marketer, establish a relationship on the foundation of “Like us and you get this deal” then that’s the expectation that’s set for future interactions. If people only come in for the deal then they may not be interested in whatever other messages the company might want to convey. They just want more more more. When they don’t get it they leave.

For movie marketers putting this sort of like-gate in place makes even less sense. Movies have a finite marketing lifecycle, even more so than many other consumer products. Which is why I’ve always wondered why this tactic was employed since building up those numbers is only valuable until the release date, at which point all that effort amounts to very little.

It’s better to put more effort into a solid content publishing strategy, one that adds value to the audience without running afoul of being too frequent and getting annoying. That’s a fine line to tread, sure, and things won’t always be successful for the entire audience 100% of the time. But it’s certainly more sustainable and respectful than one that’s based on feeding people’s need for an “I got a coupon!!!” rush every time an update is published.

Sharing shouldn’t invite theft

Whether or not adding some form of “Share” prompt to your content equals the relinquishing of copyright over that content is currently being hashed out in legal venues and is a situation that all publishers should be watching closely.

The thinking apparently goes like this: The key point made by those claiming copyright infringement around their content on the web is that people are viewing it elsewhere and not on the domain it originally appeared on. But adding some form of “Share” button inherently, it’s being argued, waives any copyright claims since the only purpose of having it there is for the off-domain sharing of content.

While I’m certainly not a legal expert in any way, the leap between someone who’s lifting a full story and putting it on their own site without a link to the original for the purposes of generating ad revenue and sharing a link to the original on Twitter seems to be a pretty massive one. That would, in my mind, mean that even providing a URL to a story would be enough to waive copyright since the purpose of a URL is to point someone to something specific and it can be easily put manually into a social network update or email. That’s a pretty broad argument and one that would have far-reaching implications on publishing across the entire web and not just in the media world.