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Really successful online marketers are companies with a powerful, consistent brand personality. Why? Well...In the last year or so, I’ve noticed a brilliant shift in the world of online marketing. As you know, many of the companies that are growing at a fast clip are using content marketing. They’re communicating with their customers. They’re giving away information for free. But even more than that, the really successful online marketers are companies with powerful, consistent brand personalities. They know who they are and what they stand for. And it comes across in every blog post, newsletter, webpage, and communication....Here's how...
...The company is finding that the most popular content for tablets depends on the title. Golf Digest sees great success with video. Generally speaking, long-form editorial content like actual stories, video and slideshows do well across the board because the tablet is a lean-back device, where consumers aren’t looking for short snippets of content like they are on a mobile phone, for example.
“If you look at the time of day with highest tablet usage it’s usually during prime time or on the weekends,” Reynolds said. “That’s why we are developing tablet-specific content to fit that different mindset. We’re not worried about tablet usage cannibalizing Web usage because Web, tablet and mobile, are all part of a complementary ecosystem.”
Reynold’s said that the biggest opportunity for Conde Nast in the tablet space is the amount of data is has on subscribers. It gives the publisher a look at the preferences that people have for content and advertising on specific devices and Conde Nast can optimize based on that.
...Effectiveness of longform So the question we all have about these beautiful layouts. Does it work? Is it more engaging? How do we know? Though Brundrett didn’t have exact numbers to provide, he said their numbers have grown and the audience has developed higher expectations for what they produce.
“We get really great traffic to these pieces, off the charts engaged time, people are reading all the way down the page, great comments and discussion,” Brundrett said. “From a social perspective they get shared like crazy . They do really well for us.”...
...Brands are answering the call to create more value for customers by publishing news and content marketing. In fact, 86% of BtoC and 91% of BtoB organizations are now using content marketing tactics. As companies adopt a publisher model of content and media creation, many are beginning to rival the reach and influence of the publications in their industry.
Amex OPEN Forum and General Mills’ Tablespoon are great examples of this. What do these changes mean for Public Relations and Communications professionals? How is PR competitively positioned compared to marketing and advertising in a content centric web? Read on for answers to these questions and more.
By providing news content that traditional sources are not, brands are creating new connections with their communities and customers. While much of content marketing falls under the realm of corporate marketing, the expertise in messaging, content creation and media relations that many Public Relations professionals bring to the table can offer a competitive advantage in 3 key areas...
Does working in PR make me a kissing cousin to Darth Vader? After all, I used to be a reporter – I was one of the hundreds of casualties...
... This is the reason why so many reporters are choosing to go into PR. We’re in the unique position of having been on the receiving end of countless press releases and pitches. Many of my former Herald colleagues are now doing PR work for both businesses and nonprofits. Some have started PR firms of their own. So, reading a recent Buffalo News article about TV reporters joining the PR ranks made me think about how annoying it is when I’m told I’ve “gone over to the dark side.” This is not Star Wars and it’s not that simple.
First and foremost, many of us simply reached the point where we needed a little more job stability than newspaper reporting could provide. Because right now most people working in print newsrooms are enduring increased workloads – picking up the slack after all the layoffs and resignations – while having their pay slashed....
The noise around brand journalism these days is deafening. Unfortunately, a lot of it is based on poor practices or wrong information. We need to toss the marketing and get back to creating great content.
As in irresistible content. Content that shares real news, tells stories, solves problems, informs, educates and connects with consumers.
You know. Kind of rhymes with journalism?...
... Superficially, native advertising is just new content in purchased space online (see more examples). But I think there’s so much more to it than just buying advertising. Audience sharing is a critical part of the mix. The engagement and alignment between both the advertiser’s and newspaper media’s audiences is the “secret sauce” that can really deliver stunning returns for both parties. Think about it like this. Puma seeds the content onto The Guardian’s website, but it’s also reproduced on YouTube by video embed on the football club fan page, sent out to readers via a newsletter and blog and syndicated to football aggregation websites. The newspaper gains readers who wouldn’t normally visit, and all its other advertisers benefit from eyeballs and potential clicks. Similarly, the newspaper’s readers consume the content online, in print, via apps and other social sites where it has been shared. It all serves to benefit Puma with access to audiences far beyond its already engaged fans and clothing lovers....
Steve Rubel, our chief content strategist, and I have been visiting with media companies for the past three months to understand more fully the opportunity in paid content for PR firms....
It is clear that media companies are now willing, even eager, to explore the third way to revenue, beyond circulation and classic advertising, to a new hybrid model, which falls somewhere between the old advertorial and the novel sponsored content. The new mantra at Edelman is that the paid ought to support the earned and owned content, to make it work harder and more intelligently than a classic media buy that stands on its own. We need to flip the traditional model on its head, whereby media buying agencies act as the intermediary between client and media, extracting the best financial deal on the basis of mass purchasing power.
Our advantage will never be scale in buying; rather we will have a more intelligent approach, a smart bomb instead of multiple bomber runs. But to do this, we will have to be given access to some advertising funds to be used at our discretion when a story seems to be taking off in popularity. We also need some money to initiate a surround-sound approach from conference sponsorship to proprietary content creation to online discussion moderation and aggregation of related content. So clients will have to entrust us with some of the paid media funds, then hold us to even higher standards for delivery of results....
A brand is essentially the sum of what people say about it. We’re connected and social now. And that’s not all. We’re hypercritical, hyperactive and so hyper-online, we’re barely offline when we sleep. ...Along the way, it’s nearly impossible to avoid subjects such as blogging, search, social, and some of the other tricks of the trade. Why? Because the best website in the world won’t make you a dime unless people come to it and find themselves engaged with the content there. There I go again. I can’t stop spouting the gospel. I want my clients to understand the key to effective online marketing, or any marketing, is to get customers to know, like and trust you. That’s a high bar seldom achieved with a heavy dependence on ad or brochure-like communications. Ugh. Stop me now before I talk you into doing content marketing against your will....
Not that long ago we started distinguishing between owned, earned and paid media but how real was that? Media evolutions that scare me.... If you’re looking for tips and tricks regarding the evolutions in brand journalism and the usage of content marketing (oops, I used the term) in branding and PR, don’t read this. If you want an opinion (mine, that is) on the dangers of some content and media evolutions, read on. I have a good friend who’s quite cynical, even more than I am. He sees marketing as lying and making people pay too much for products. I can’t even blame him. As a former journalist and publisher but at the same time a marketer, I’m in a constant state of duality regarding the role of both journalism/media on one hand and marketing on the other. And in this “digital and social age” it’s getting worse. If you know part of the role of a publisher (read on) you’ll understand that duality. Also look at the number of journalists becoming “content marketers”. Are there still journalists in fact? I never read a story about a “content marketer” becoming a journalist. Especially phenomena such as brand journalism (for later blog posts) and converged media confuse me in an ‘ethical’ way. Marketing is business. Brands are business. Media is business. Brand journalism is business. If media converge, do we still have credible media? Each time I preach people-centric and human marketing, I hope you keep that in mind. We are not doing business for a greater moral cause (although we can, more than ever)....
Jay Rosen asks, reasonably, that people start drawing useful distinctions between buzzy terms like content marketing, sponsored content, native advertising, and even brand journalism. Here’s my stab at it:
The Native Matrix - Who is it written by? Editorial staff, Sales staff, ad agency, Brand execs - Who is it published by? Publisher: Public relations, Sponsored content/ Native advertising, Brand journalism/Thought leadership or Brand: Content marketing, Marketing, Blogging *Sponsored content is designed to be read; native advertising is designed to be shared. None of these distinctions is hard and fast, of course, but at least it’s a start; basically, it all comes down to who writes the content in question....
Drinking From the Content Marketing Fire Hose As we launched the site, the iQ team started to work with a team of journalists and editorial partners, conducted editorial meetings and worked closely with the Intel social media team to amplify and extend iQ content. Before we knew it, we were beginning to operate a newsroom, managing a robust content machine and starting to see our goals for iQ come to fruition. By end of 2012, iQ was emerging as an essential asset to Intel’s marketing and social media strategy. Although satisfied with the early success of iQ, we knew there were many improvements to be made. In January 2013, iQ version 1 (the current site) was released. Several new changes and strategies were implemented from our learnings since the BETA launch. So what have I learned about content marketing in the last 11 months? I’ve distilled the 12 core lessons for brand publishers organized by the tenets of the iQ content marketing approach; production, process and promotion....
Marketing forecast? Sunny with a chance of burritos... Who said content marketing isn’t fun? A recent Adweek story looked at three companies, including Taco Bell, who are buying real-time, mobile ads based on the weather. Twitter and The Weather Channel were quick to recognize the growing revenue possibilities in mobile marketing. They announced a deal to create custom content based on the weather and sell it to eager marketers....
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Traditional journalists probably won't like a lot of how Upworthy's become one of the fastest growing aggregators on the web. But it's hard to question the effectiveness of its methods.
Back in November, the Lab’s own Adrienne LaFrance wrote a number of words about Upworthy, a social packaging and not-quite-news site that has become remarkably successful at making “meaningful content” go viral. She delved into their obsession with testing headlines, their commitment to things that matter, their aggressive pushes across social media, and their commitment to finding stories with emotional resonance.
Things have continued to go well for Upworthy — they’re up to 10 million monthly uniques from 7.5. At the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, editorial director Sara Critchfield shared what she sees as Upworthy’s secret sauce for shareability, namely, seeking out content that generates a significant emotional response from both the reader and the writer....
Even if you're the ultimate hybrid project manager/content creator and community-engager, reality is, you'll probably develop Community Manager Multi-Personality Disorder (CMMPD)* at least once in your career. *We totally made this up.
In my years managing communities for companies ranging from teeny startups to global soda and makeup brands, I learned one thing very quickly: Establishing systems and using the right tools early on can save your sanity (and your laptop’s RAM).
Here are six tips and tricks in my medicine cabinet for achieving social media vitality....
A brand story is made up of all that you are and all that you do. From the company’s history, mission, inspiration, goals, audience, and raison d’être, it’s why you exist. Your story is the people, places, and ideas that your company thrives on. It’s the foundation that keeps a brand going and growing. It’s a blend of those vital little core pieces of information about your business — how you came to be, why your products or services are special, what you’re passionate about, your company culture, how you make people’s lives better, and why you would do business with your company.
Brand stories can be told in many different forms, with an evolving story line and cast of characters, but content creators must be vigilant about continuity and consistency, avoiding any holes. Your brand’s story has to resonate with people at a level that goes way beyond what’s tangible — the functionality, features, and benefits of your products or services — to create a deep, emotional connection with your audience. You have to create something that they want to be a part of and show that you really “get” who they are and what they need.
Here are a few basic questions to answer to help you pull your story out of its box
... Scribble’s traction is international; its ScribbleLive real-time content creation and distribution platform is available in 14 languages and used by the biggest media brands, including the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN and ESPN to name a few. I spoke with Scribble CEO and co-founder Michael De Monte about the raise, and his vision for the company.
He pointed out that Scribble recently launched ScribbleMarket, a way for brands to easily syndicate their live content, and to find said content from other sources for use on their own site. Licensing can be free or paid, and this lets news agencies quickly leverage their reporting resources for additional income streams, by providing not just static articles for syndication as has been the case, but full-featured, interactive real-time content that’s being dynamically updated from a single backend.
quiet“The marketplace for us is the exciting component of what we’re building,” De Monte said. “This opportunity to share content in real time, becoming like the iTunes of real-time content has a lot of potential to change the face of media.”...
Many of today’s burgeoning brands are successful on the Web in part because of their ability to produce stellar content, content that emanates from the passion they have for producing quality products and the desire to please their fans and consumers by exceeding expectations.
As people immerse themselves in valuable content on the Web via social media, as well as reputable sites like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Gizmodo, brands and marketers are finding ways to bridge the gap between journalism and advertising by becoming publishers.Brand journalists combine brand storytelling with traditional forms of journalism, helping brands connect with their audience in a more personal, transparent way....
How can we better define the quality of branded content and entertainment? Recent contest judging suggests some criteria. Branded content and entertainment should be simple: produce a content property inspired by a brand, and delight an audience with its entertainment value or usefulness. It works for brands like Red Bull and Unilever, just as it works for Netflix or ESPN. In 2013, I’ve been the jury president at the Dubai Lynx International Festival of Creativity for its inaugural Branded Content and Entertainment category, and a jury member for the annual One Show Entertainment. Regardless of where the event occurred, both juries were challenged to answer the question: what is good branded content and entertainment? Like Hollywood, with its guilds and unions establishing the criteria for how talent is paid and credited for work, we need to better define how branded content and entertainment is awarded and ultimately perceived within the industry. The following are questions we should ask to determine the work we should celebrate....
All the wrongheaded bullshit about brand newsrooms seems to believe the gospel that human history began at CERN in 1994. In fact, the history of all this – of news, brand journalism and brand newsrooms – is long and instructive. My agency set up the first newsroom for a global brand roughly a decade ago. Microsoft, then and now, needed to create massive amounts of content all over the world in real time. A newsroom structure saved them much duplicated effort and huge amounts of money, while insuring accuracy, timeliness and consistency. Not bad. The sum total of all this is that brand news, despite what marketing bloggers would have us believe today, can’t be all about hi-jacking events or tracking events or any such quixotic, overly broad enterprise. What brand news needs to learn from real news can be broken down into three important parts....
In the age of brand storytelling, here are the 5 basic rules for picking the right content agency to tell your brand’s story.... Content creation now is the biggest challenge of 21st century marketing. It’s time-consuming and complicated. Most startling to ad people, it requires a creative and strategic mindset that is alien to life-long inhabitants of adland. I still find myself explaining to agency people, for example, that good brand content must be ownable and original. Re-running content from well known magazines doesn’t build your brand, it spreads the magazines’ brands. Imitating others’ great content will sell about as well as Karaoke versions of classic hit songs. “Native advertising” that’s really just offensively self-serving advertorial will both fail and embarrass. (For more on “native,” look at Native advertising will fail if it means ‘Let’s lie to the natives.’) Get brand content wrong and you can generate incredible brand damage. (Ask Fleet Laboratories’ Summer’s Eve “feminine wash,” Nestlé’s Kit Kat brand and many, many others.) But get it right and you generate legions of fans who promote your brand with more credibility, less cost and far greater effectiveness than you could ever muster with traditional ads. This is the enormous pot of gold at the end of the content rainbow. (Ask Ford Fiesta or a host of Story clients, including WGN America, and others.)...
So you have created a content marketing strategy and are using social media but how can you use this activity to increase your brand awareness and generate more visitors to your website? ]] Different Kinds of Content Content has many forms, from blogs and news items to videos and infographics. Making sure you create and manage content of the right kind for your audience is a core part of building your online following and increasing brand awareness....
While there are major differences between content marketers and journalists, the two groups do have one important thing in common: They want to make their writing the best that it can possibly be. This requires a whole lot more than just writing nice turns of phrase. It requires doing research, reading widely, and interacting with others. So with that in mind, we’ve outlined 5 things that content marketers can learn from journalists...
Today is my first day as a marketing fellow at HubSpot. In my last job, I was the editor in chief of a technology news site called ReadWrite. Before that I was the technology editor at Newsweek, and before that I was a technology columnist at Forbes. I’ve spent my entire career in the media business, and now I’ve bailed out. In the end it was a pretty simple decision. I came to the realization that advertising is dying, and therefore any business that depends on advertising to pay the bills is a dead end. I also had grown less and less enchanted with the kind of work I was doing as a “mainstream” journalist. Media companies need a new way to make money -- one that doesn’t depend on advertising. But so far nobody has come up with anything. That wouldn’t be so bad, if at least they were aware of this problem. The truly scary thing to me is that publishers either aren’t aware of this, or won’t admit it....
I'm always fascinated by organizations that embrace brand journalism, hiring reporters to create content that serves as marketing and public relations. For almost a decade, I've recommended that companies of all kinds model their sites not on their peers' boring old brochure-like approach but rather aspire to becoming like a media site such as Forbes, the BBC, or The New York Times and that they actually hire reporters and editors, not marketers and copywriters, to produce the content. One look at the Raytheon homepage shows they do exactly that. There are real-time news, images, and a top stories section. And Raytheon is a B2B (and B2G) company! "You can see our homepage is very much a news operation," says Corinne J Kovalsky, Director, Digital & Social Media at Raytheon. "We've got feature stories and trend stories about cool products."...
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Like humans, brands have a personality. Make it popular.
Very thought provoking reading in terms of identifying what your brand personality is opposed to trying to be big and bold and funny like other brands have done successfully.
First of all the personality must be appropriate for your brand and secondly it must reflect what your brand stands for.
Two points that stand out the most for me in the consideration of brand personality is consistency and authenticity - any one consumer who looks at your advertising, sees your social media and marketing content etc should be able to identify who you are and what you stand for. On a deeper level even relate to the personality and feel like they have a relationship with that brand.