Now you can add Pluto.TV to your mix of news and curation sources

Often I find myself stopping and considering just how far we’ve come as a society. The information age has brought about so much that you can find out about just about anything with a couple of taps or mouse clicks. However, this overflow of information is a mixed blessing: When you have so much information flowing in from so many sources, how do you separate what’s important from the noise?

That question is the reason why, despite so many advances in media, people still rely on old-fashioned outlets, such as newspapers, radio and television, as a source for hardcore news. When it comes to subjects of profound international concern and impact, like the rise of ISIS for instance, traditional outlets have an advantage: professional framing and analysis. While there are definitely a lot of bloggers out there who are just as knowledgeable as journalists who work for traditional media, the blogosphere in general has fewer filters – and that can be a problem when you’re dealing with subject matter as delicate as militant jihadists.

A new generation of news consumers turns to social media

Professional journalists dedicate their lives to understanding a certain subject (as do many bloggers, don’t get me wrong). And, in my experience, the fact that they’re paid to keep abreast of developments in their field gives them an edge in reporting on what’s going on in their field. So, while some people might argue that bloggers have an advantage by not having to abide by any rules of the road, in some cases these constraints serve a purpose – such as making sure reporters adhere to journalistic standards of integrity and objectivity.

However, the mutually beneficial relationship between journalists and traditional outlets leaves a major part of their target audience out of the loop. I like to call these overlooked people ‘‘cord-cutters’’ – the people who get the majority of their information online. Just because these people don’t own a TV set doesn’t mean they don’t want to be informed – and you’d be surprised by just how much of their news intake comes from social media.

ISIS knows this. The Islamic State goes to great lengths to recruit young Muslims from around the world, using the same social media that young people use. And the biggest problem this presents is that it gives ISIS total and unfiltered control over the content or propaganda they are spreading. It’s safe to assume there’s an overlap between the cord-cutters and the aforementioned users of social networks, so having a platform on which cord-cutters can get the entire story is paramount.

Pluto.TV enters the picture

What can work is a combination of old and new: a new-media platform presenting content created by traditional media. A great example for such a mix is Pluto.TV (disclosure: Pluto.TV is a Blonde 2.0 client). It is a curated video platform that offers a continuous stream that can be viewed from any device. Pluto.TV has curation experts who sift through the incomprehensible amount of video out there and present them in a TV channel for the Internet.

Recently, Pluto.TV launched ISIS: A Special Report, a channel that offers non-stop coverage of the organization. The channel offers documentaries, news reports, and even live events from various sources. ISIS: A Special Report is a great way for cord-cutters to stay informed without having to turn to traditional media.

I’m not going to get into politics or my personal opinion of ISIS, but I will say this: It is an organization that you should stay informed about. The impact it has on the Middle East and the ripple effects its actions create worldwide could very well be a phenomenon that will define our era. And, with such an overflow of information on so many platforms and networks, it’s great to have something like Pluto.TV to sort through the mess for you.

The post Have you cut the cord from traditional media? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

More companies are hiring scribes to ramp up ‘content plays’

Target audience: Journalists, brand managers, SEO specialists, PR and marketing pros, business executives, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers.

Afunny thing is happening to a lot of journalists I know: They’re bailing on Big-J journalism.

But while many are leaving the profession of journalism, they’re taking their craft with them. Faced with the Incredible Shrinking Business Models of the old media economy, journalists have begun taking their storytelling skills to the business world, particularly tech.

Companies are snapping up journalists left and right. Today every company is a media company — and who better to tell these companies’ stories than journalists trained in the art of storytelling?

Look at the roll call of A-list journalists who’ve traded newsrooms for businesses, venture capital firms and marketing startups:

• Michael Copeland, senior editor at Wired magazine and a former senior writer at Fortune and Business 2.0, joined Andreessen Horowitz in June to lead a new content strategy.

• Ben Worthen, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was hired in March as Head of Content at Sequoia Capital in a content marketing play.

• Dan Lyons, who won a cult following as Fake Steve Jobs, was a senior editor at Forbes and a columnist at Newsweek before becoming editor-in-chief of ReadWrite — which he left in March for a content marketing job atHubSpot.

• Harrison Weber left The Next Web, where we was East Coast, Design & Features Editor, for WeWork, where he has launched FullStart, a new publication for entrepreneurs that combines storytelling and startup resources.

• Brian Caulfield, a journalist for Forbes, Red Herring and Business 2.0, joined Nvidia about a year ago as chief blogger.

• Tomas Kellner, a staff writer at Forbes for eight years, is now Managing Editor of GE’s daily blog, GE Reports, which takes a journalistic approach to covering innovation and technology breakthroughs.

• Rafe Needleman, the well-known tech journalist who was editor at large at CNET for eight years, joined Evernote in August 2012 to lead the team that runs its hackathons, workshops and outreach while writing an intermittent column.

• Erick Schonfeld, former editor in chief of TechCrunch, editor at Business 2.0 and writer at Fortune, joined DEMO as its executive producer in September 2012. He now gets to decide which startups make it on stage instead of just writing about them.

Notice a pattern?

More journalists opting for ‘brand journalism’

It’s not completely new, of course. In earlier eras, many a journalist jumped over the Chinese wall to join a PR firm or ad agency. During the dotcom heyday, many took a leap into online entrepreneurialism before the Big Flameout of 2000-2001.

Of course, you don’t have to leave traditional just-the-facts-ma’am journalism behind if you join a tech company. Katie Couric and David Pogue recently made a splash by leaving CBS News and the New York Times to continue what they’ve been doing — only they’ll now be doing it for Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! (Prediction: Pogue is a keeper. Couric’s fish-out-of-water story will last a year or two.)

And a handful of journalists — Om Malik at GigaOm, Matt Marshall atVenturebeat, Sarah Lacy at Pando Daily, Jessica Lessin at The Information, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg with AllThingsD and their new unnamed venture — managed to make the leap to business CEO/publisher without leaving journalism.

But the new new thing is for journalists to bring their mad skills, if not their rigorous craft, to what’s known as content marketing, sometimes called “brand journalism.”

Why is it happening? In a word: Google.

Ever since Google rolled out its “freshness update,” companies have caught on to the idea that if they’re going to rank high in Google’s search results, they have to play the content game — by creating new content, delivered weekly, daily, even hourly, that generates lots of social sharing. That’s what Google demands today, so businesses need to feed the beast with interviews, Q&As, buzz-worthy infotainment and blog posts ranging from the erudite to the irreverent.

It all begins with generating interesting content — in other words, the kind of thing Robert Scoble has been doing forever. Scoble has been churning out blog posts and video interviews from his days at Microsoft to his current position as startup liaison officer for Rackspace and chief content creator at its Building 43.

And if anyone argues with you about whether someone is “really” a journalist — what? no news organization credentials? — all you need to do is heave a little sigh and say, “Who’s a journalist? Someone who does journalism.Look at Robert Scoble on any given day.” Though not necessarily at every single hour.

Scoble, who has a journalism degree, self-identifies as a journalist rather than a marketer. “It’s like being 97% a journalist,” he said by email. “The real difference between working for a journalistic organization and working for a company is I tend to only work on things that would help the company I work for. I doubt I’d go to Afghanistan and study their culture and how it’s rebounding since the war there, for instance.

“I’ve always seen myself as a hybrid: mostly journalist mixed with in with being a strategist, brand expert, general marketer and public face of a company.”

Lyons: Drawing on journalism skills, but without the independence

The line between journalist and marketer has gotten blurry in recent years. Journalists touting their posts on Twitter are committing random acts of marketing. Marketers conveying the story behind a new launch, product or service often create posts in a news-you-can-use format largely indistinguishable from Big-J Journalism.

Just don’t ask them to do an investigative report on their corporate bosses.

Dan Lyons said he draws on his journalism skills for his content marketing role at Hubspot. “I do virtually the same thing that I did as a journalist,” he said. “It involves storytelling, content creation, and trying to find and write great stories that get traffic. My ‘beat’ is media and marketing and tech, but it’s all through a lens of marketing. From my perspective the biggest change is how the company I work for goes about monetizing that traffic. In traditional media the money came from selling ads and putting them next to content. At HubSpot the traffic is about generating leads and converting leads to customers.”

Lyons, who spent 25 years covering tech, adds: “I still think of myself as a journalist, but I don’t know if I would call myself that officially. I think being a journalist — a real journalist — is a special thing, and requires real independence, which I don’t have.

“My job is to get people to be aware of HubSpot in hopes that some small percentage of them will actually buy HubSpot software. That’s not journalism. Yes, it involves storytelling, content creation, skills that you develop as a journalist. I interview interesting people, I write Q&As and book reviews. Some of the stuff I write I think I could be publishing in Newsweek or any other mainstream media outlet. But no, my job really is not journalism.”

Kellner: Storytelling is the key

Tomas Kellner points out that some companies have been in the storytelling business for a long time. In 1947, GE hired Kurt Vonnegut to look around the company and find good stories. (Back then, they called it PR, not content marketing.)

Like Lyons, Kellner said he’s using his journalistic chops in running the GE Reports blog. “Every story needs to have some type of challenge, a protagonist, and something has to be at stake. You have to find it otherwise people will not read it. Many companies still tell their news through a press release, and you will certainly not find a flesh and blood protagonist there. But the press release is dead, or at least dying. The Internet made smart companies realize that they can tell their own stories online by hiring the best storytellers there are.

“The barrier between traditional media and the companies they used to cover has collapsed. Anyone can tell their own story in a compelling way and reach tens of thousands of readers now,” he said.

Having a “content play” these days starts on one end of the spectrum with initiatives like Sequoia’s Grove (“Founders helping founders”), its new portal for how-to content, videos and events; Adobe’s CMO.com, a news and information site to attract C-suite customers, and Bob Evans, chief communications officer at Oracle (and, bingo!, former Editorial director of CMP and content director of TechWeb), writing a column for Forbes BrandVoice.

The further to the right you go across that spectrum, the less blurry the line becomes between marketing and journalism.

David Berlind, former executive editor of CNET and chief content officer for UBM Tech, entertained a few offers from businesses looking to create a content play before landing in July as editor in chief of ProgrammableWeb, owned by software company MuleSoft. “My paycheck comes from a vendor,” he said, “but what I like is that I get to run it as a fully independent, objective news engine that’s creating content. What we do every day is journalism.”

Still, he’s quick to add, “There are just not that many journalism jobs anymore. So who am I to judge when a journalist takes a job with a vendor? Their craft of writing and storytelling is in high demand in the business world, and a steady paycheck is a nice thing.”

Kellner agrees. “You’re definitely going to see a lot more companies hiring journalists.”

The post When journalists trade newsrooms for business storytelling appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Amazon chieftain may infuse journalism institution with much-needed tech innovation

Hello, Jeff Bezos, and welcome to the Great Decoupling.

Over the past decade I’ve given a number of talks about the future of journalism and media, from a symposium at Princeton University to three panel discussions about the Future of Media in Silicon Valley. The common thread is what I’ve called the Great Decoupling —  the idea that the daily high-quality journalism cannot be sustained if it’s stripped from its moorings: the flotsam and fluff of newspapers (crossword puzzles, comics, horoscopes, advice columns) and magazines (Vanity Fair’s scented ads, which we put up with only because it supports great writing).

As a result of technology’s Great Decoupling, news has been decoupled from its containers, from its vessels. We want our news and media friction-free. We want it on our devices on our terms, in our preferred format, whether that’s via a website, tablet computer or, yes, a Kindle Fire. And that comes at a cost, as decades-old business models are upended.

As readers peel away from newspapers and traditional publications in favor of blogs, niche publications, Internet TV and other alternative media, the cost of this disruption is evident for all to see: less in-depth reporting, less investigative journalism (the few remaining investigative journalists spend half their time in courtrooms or prison), less serious public discourse and fewer foreign news bureaus. In its place: a media distraction machine offering fact-free cubbyholes of comfort to a seriously underinformed nation careening from one national calamity after another.

It surprises me how many brilliant people, including Silicon Valley and Beltway heavyweights, don’t appreciate the role that family dynasties — the Sulzbergers, Grahams, Chandlers — and rich titans have played over the years in supporting journalism that serves the public good. More often than not, good journalism never has and never will be a profit center. (I worked for the Sacramento Bee when it was run as a civic-minded institution and when it was run as a public company, and the difference was striking.)

Which bring us back to Jeff Bezos. A new era in journalism kicked off yesterday with the announcement that Bezos — one of the smartest minds in the technology field — had agreed to buy the Washington Post for $250 million. This reminds me of another great tech thunderclap — when Google rescued YouTube, which was bleeding money profusely, from certain oblivion by buying it for $1.6 billion in 2006.

Here are some reactions to the unexpected news from around the Twittersphere:

Early reaction: Cautious optimism

And here are some early reactions from around the blogosphere and mediasphere:

Jeff Jarvis:

I hope and pray the real value he brings is his entrepreneurship, his innovation, his experience, and his fresh perspective, enabling him to reimagine news as an enterprise. …

Bezos’ key competence is in building relationships. This is wishful thinking on my part, as I have been arguing that we in journalism need to stop thinking of ourselves as manufacturers of a mass commodity called content and start understanding that we are in a service business whose real outcome is informed individuals and communities. Thus we must be in the relationship business.

I have been arguing with newspapers lately that they must gather small data about their individual users — where they live, where they work, what their key interests are — so they can serve people with greater relevance and value. I hope that skill — building profiles and using them to improve relevance — is the first that Bezos brings to the Post.

James Fallows in The Atlantic:

This is a moment that genuinely surprised me. I think I’ll remember where I was when I first heard the news — via Twitter! — and I am sure it will be one of those episode-that-encapsulates-an-era occurrences. Newsweek’s demise, a long time coming, was a minor temblor by comparison; this is a genuine earthquake. …

For years anyone thinking about the future of news has realized that, completely on its own, what we consider “serious” journalism has never been a viable business. Foreign reportage, serious investigative or government-accountability coverage — functions like these have always been, in economic terms, parasites that need to ride along on some profitable host body. In the old days, that was the fat, bundled newspaper, which provided a range of information to an audience with no technological alternative. We’re in the un-bundled era now, and serious journalism has been looking for new host bodies — much as higher education, museums, the fine arts, etc have also needed support beyond what the flat-out market would provide. …

So let us hope that this is what the sale signifies: the beginning of a phase in which this Gilded Age’s major beneficiaries re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence. We hope it marks a beginning, because we know it marks an end.

Sarah Lacy in Pando Daily: “The smartest CEO in tech right now might actually have a plan” and “There are few people who think longer-term than Bezos.”

In the Guardian, Emily Bell called it “a marriage of old media and new money” and “a fascinating transition as east coast influence passes to Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism.” (Just what the doctor ordered for old-school but still-relevant journalism, in my view. See my 2010 presentation on Paths to the new journalism.)

Bell summed it up nicely:

“Silicon Valley is full of middle-aged men who, a dozen years ago, proved they could make the impossible come true. With his penchant for 10,000-year clocks and a reputation built on long-term strategy, Bezos might be embarking on the project that most tests his patience. But if he can really mold something transformational out of old media with his new money, he will have beaten bigger odds in a more spectacular style than any he has so far faced.”

I agree. Journalism needs not only a shot in the arm but a major kick in the butt. Silicon Valley (and we can include Bezos in that club, even though he’s based in Seattle) can teach journalism not just about efficiencies but about innovation, experimentation, daring to succeed by daring to fail. It will be a fascinating, fascinating process to watch in the years to come.

I’m not sanguine any time big money swoops in and takes over a major news outlet. But in this case, I am hopeful. Good luck, Mr. Bezos!

Postscript: I’ve tried several times now to create a Storify, including this one, without success. Every time it tells me “twitter identity already attached to jdlasica,” and so it can’t. Um. That’s me.

Related

• Paths to the new journalism (Socialmedia.biz)
• If newspapers disappear, will it matter? (Socialmedia.biz)
• Newspapers and blue sky thinking (Socialmedia.biz)
• Time for innovative news models (Socialmedia.biz)
• Surveying the new media landscape (Socialmedia.biz)
• Wrapping Up WeMedia (Socialmedia.biz)
• A series on participatory journalism (Socialmedia.biz)

The post Jeff Bezos rescues the Post from the Great Decoupling appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Advice to streamline your media workflow

Target audience: Content marketers, Web publishers, PR execs, journalists, producers, businesses, media organizations.

In just the first 20 episodes of my podcast “Hacking Media Production,” I’ve collected hundreds of tips from journalists and producers on how to produce content better and faster. What follows is my selection of the 55 creative content production hacks.

If you like what you see and want to learn more, feel free to click through on any episode to listen to the interview and see lots more tips on that subject. And if you want to learn lots more, please subscribe to “Hacking Media Production” via iTunes.

From “Using Crowdsourcing Tools for Cheaper and Better Production”

1If you can think of it, someone may do it for $5: The site Fiverr is filled with mini creative services available for $5 such as drawing a cartoon of your dad, recording a voice-over message in Sean Connery’s voice, or even a bogus video testimonial for your product.

2Crowdsourcing design work still requires an art director: Be aware that using services such as 99designs or Crowdspring will cost more than you expect because you’ll likely need an art director to spend hours of time managing the contest and interacting with the designers to get the final product you want.

From “Crafting Popular Research Reports”

3Write the headline first, before you conduct research: Don’t try to figure out how to make your research sexy after you’ve done the work. Your first task should be to write catchy story headlines that will speak to the research you’ve yet to conduct.

4Get more content bang from your research buck: Craft your study so it’s able to feed the creation of at least three or four different stories.

5Hire a statistician: Basic cross tabulations won’t tell the whole story of your research. You’ll need a real statistician to uncover stories and behaviors the average Excel user won’t be able to see.

From “How to Write a Pitch that Journalists Won’t Laugh At”

6Don’t try to be clever: Being clever to dress up boring news doesn’t help. Neither does an opening icebreaker line such as, “Are you excited for the Super Bowl?”

7Be creative in what you’re offering: “Don’t be creative about how you package the pitch. Be creative about the news you’re trying to pitch,” said Harry McCracken, Editor-at-Large for Time.

8 Avoid disingenuous compliments: Many compliments to journalists today look as if they came through a database. Don’t think you’re fooling a journalist if you’re just referencing a recent story and saying how much you liked it.

From “Tips for Sharing Professional Photos at Live Events”

9Configure your Eye-Fi card for social sharing: This SD card can wirelessly upload your photos with appropriate labels and hashtags to a multitude of locations such as DropBox, Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. After you configure make sure you send a test photo to the feed and then delete it.

10Entice others to tag, specifically on Facebook: Photograph a few key connectors at an event and then tag them when you post the photos on Facebook. These connectors will know others at the party and will inevitably tag them as well, saving you a lot of work and exposing your photos to people who didn’t know you.

11Tweet out some of your photos in intervals: If you’re uploading 400 photos from an event, you don’t want to flood your Twitter feed with all those photos. Instead, use a service such as Twitterfeed and have it tweet out the latest photo in 10 or 15 minute intervals.

From “Using Historical Data to Create New News”

12News is something people don’t know: That doesn’t mean it’s new information. It means it’s information that hasn’t been covered. Services such as Google Patents are a treasure trove of weird and interesting information.

13Focus on patent drawings: The text in patents are filled with painfully long legalese. You’ll find a more interesting story a lot faster if you just focus on finding interesting drawings.

14Look for the current news hook to attach to old information: If it’s Christmas, look for Christmas patents. If a certain company is hot in your industry, look at their patents or patent applications.

From “How to Pitch a Speaker for a Conference”

15Would people pay for it: This should be the barometer of whether your talk is something people will want to hear. People are traveling to the event and paying for a ticket. This presentation better be worth their time and money.

16Your presentation should not be Googleable: If the same information from your talk can be found in a Google search, then it’s not worth presenting, and therefore it’s also not worth paying for.

17Put the conference name in the subject of the email. This shows that it’s not a mass mailed email, plus it really shows you’re thinking specifically about a certain conference that this speaker would be appropriate for.

From “How to Run a Contest to Generate Free Content”

18Emotion-based contests work best: If you give contestants a chance to express themselves, that’s often all they need to participate. The prize may not be a motivating factor.

19Do A/B testing on your contest question: To make sure you’re pushing out the very best version of the contest, do A/B testing and then push your marketing efforts toward the version that’s doing the best.

20Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Facebook works: Contests have a very high click through rate on social networks with PPC advertising. Getting people to “Like” something because they’ll be entered into a contest is that little extra nudge most people need to actually click that “Like” button.

From “Tricks to Producing Corporate Comedy”

21Easiest laugh is the recognition laugh: A big secret in corporate comedy is you don’t actually need to write a joke to get a laugh. You can often get laughs simply by acknowledging people within the company, especially people of power. Just mention that person in a non-business situation.

22Non-actors can only be themselves: If you’re trying to make people in your office funny, don’t have them play other characters. Let them be themselves, but in funny situations.

23Map corporate lingo to dialogue of scenario: Bring accounting terms in a “Star Trek” script, or maybe database architecture terminology to a pirate scenario.

From “Build an audience around content”

24Web content is iterative media: You change your content based on the behavior of the audience. You’re creating your media property with your audience.

25Authentic and real wins in Web video: On traditional television, people work really hard at not being themselves. That’s not true with Web video. Be direct, open, and yourself.

26Strive for velocity of comments on video launch: A lot of comments in the first hour or two of a video will help make it more visible to people visiting YouTube. To help juice that initial push, let viewers know the host will be in the comments for the first two hours of responses.

From: “Tricks to Find and Report on Industry Trends in Real Time”

27Real-time search tools level the reporting playing field: Even if you don’t live in the area where most of the news is happening, you can compete with those locals by using real-time search tools to effectively uncover breaking stories.

28Subscribe to vendor RSS feeds via SMS or instant messaging: This lets you know about breaking stories the moment they become available. Email is too slow because it often doesn’t come when the story breaks.

29Follow aggressive users of Delicious: For the sites and companies you care about, follow the Delicious users who are the first to bookmark their hot stories.

From “How to Sequence Your Video Quickly”

30Create a shot list: Sounds basic, but even the most experienced producers forget to do this. Write down on paper the different shots you want to be able to tell your story. You’ll need this when you go to edit your piece.

31Listen for the details: Listen to specific things mentioned in the interview and then go get shots of those items.

32Zoom rule of 1-2-3: In post-production, the rule is don’t enlarge a shot more than 123 percent or you’ll start to see pixelation.

From “How to Launch a Competitive Content Site”

33Don’t syndicate your content: While it may sound like a good idea, Google may perceive your site to be a spam site even if it’s the originator of the content. Your search engine ranking will plummet and it will take years to fix with Google.

34Make social media participation part of the job: Hire journalists to write and participate in social media. Pay them for getting involved with the audience.

35Put as much above the fold as possible: Whatever the audience wants, make it super easy to find and consume. If you can, create a condensed version of quick to find content in the upper left-hand corner.

From “Tricks to Building Your YouTube Audience”

36Write a title for your subscribers first, and then one for everyone else: For the first version of your video have a simplistic title such as “Do this” that your subscribers will see first. The enticing title will drive a lot of traffic from your subscribers. After that plays for a week, go back and change the title and make it more search engine friendly.

37Content supersedes professionalism: Don’t spend as much time on professionalism but rather focus on the content itself. The content is far more important in driving views over the slickness of production quality.

38Collaborate with other YouTubers: Like rappers doing cameos on other rappers’ songs, find YouTubers in your same niche through a channel swap or just interviewing each other. You’ll be able to take advantage of your respective audiences.

From “Produce Just One Great Article Every Month”

39Write evergreen stories that become industry staples: Don’t let time pressures dictate the release of stories. If you’re putting so much effort on a single article, let that piece be the definitive piece on that given subject for at least five years.

40Publicity across multiple issues, not just the current issue: If your stories don’t have a short shelf life, you can publicize back issues.

From “How to Create Really Fun Trivia Games”

41Let your audience have fun not knowing the answers: Even if the audience doesn’t know the answers, the process of the game and the information learned from the game should be entertaining in itself.

42A good question invites fun speculation: Even if you don’t know the answer right away, a question can be presented in a way that the players can make educated guesses based on the information presented.

43Triple check your facts: Don’t always rely on one source. Make sure you have multiple sources verifying your information. One comment on a website, even if it’s Wikipedia, doesn’t cut it.

From “Produce a Daily Web Show in Two Hours”

44Have access to talent on all coasts: While some people are sleeping, those awake are doing research on the stories.

45Create timely content that’s evergreen: If you want your programming to be both popular and have legs, be timely on your content but let it have interest beyond the day it’s released. Weird news fits that description.

From “Using Storify to Produce Content”

46Uncovering the best of trending stories: When big stories hit, who’s providing the best information in terms of the best article, photo, and video? Storify is now analyzing trends and usage of its product to see which content gets used the most.

47Prompt your audience for content: Instead of just searching for reactions, many journalists are using Storify as an engagement tool by first asking questions of their audience. Those social responses are then reflected in their story.

From “Produce 100 Blog Posts in One Day”

48Split your time between gatherers and publishers: If reporting at a conference, those at the conference will be the content gatherers and those in the back office can write and publish the content.

49Pre-write content: This is how you can “fake” 100 blog posts in one day. You start preparing the content beforehand. If you can, get embargoed content and write it off the blog. You don’t want to accidentally hit the “publish” button on information you agreed to embargo. It will ruin your chances of getting any embargoed content in the future.

50Take a picture of the specs: For accurate transmission of technical information to your back-office editors, photograph the specs in a trade show booth.

From “Producing Video for a Mobile and Social Audience”

51Lead the video with the most critical elements: Deliver on the promise of the headline immediately. If you don’t deliver this in the first four or five seconds of the video, you will lose the viewer.

52Break complex down into the simple: Take incredibly complex issues, look at the very core elements that make up the story, and just deliver that information. This is unlike 24-hour news media which must deliver an endless stream of information, often trying to fill hours of time.

53Sometimes you can let the raw video stand by itself: Given the success of “in the moment” YouTube videos, you can distribute raw video content without contextualization. Let the video speak for itself first and if appropriate cut another version with your editorial spin.

From “Secrets of Getting a Journalist to Quote You”

54You can get quoted while never speaking to a reporter: Email-based matchmaking services such as PR LEADS and Help a Reporter allow reporters to issue queries and get email responses which they can copy and paste into their stories. That means so many articles never include even a single phone interview.

55Respond fast: One reason you won’t get quoted is if you don’t respond fast enough. Journalists have deadlines. Sometimes they’re within hours, and sometimes weeks. Often they won’t clarify a deadline. Assume immediately. You’ll improve your chances of getting quoted with a prompt reply.

If you like what you read and want to learn lots more, please subscribe to “Hacking Media Production” via iTunes.

Creative Commons photo attribution to TenSafeFrogs, Happy Monkey, and Exit Festival. Permission to post photo by Pinar Ozger of Alfred Spector granted by GigaOM Events.  Stock photo of “Enter to Win” key courtesy of  Bigstock Photo.

The post 55 expert tips to produce better & faster content appeared first on Inside Social Media.

10 stock photo sites with low-cost or free images

Guest post by Megan Totka
Chief Editor, ChamberofCommerce.com

There’s something about a great image that draws attention and makes people want to find out more. Using stock photos for your small business blog will help you stand out and grab more eyeballs — not to mention keep your visitors coming back for more.

As a small business, you probably are already stretching every dollar you have. This means you don’t have hundreds of dollars a month to spend on blog photos. The good news is, you can still get great quality images, licensed for commercial use, for less than $5 each — or, in some cases, for free.

Here are the best sites for low-cost, high-quality images for your small business blog.

iStockphoto: Millions of royalty-free photos

1A stock image staple for more than 10 years, iStockphoto offers millions of royalty-free photos, illustrations, videos, and audio files. The site features easy browsing by category and a powerful search engine, and images are tagged with lots of keywords to help you find just what you’re looking for. There’s a wide range of pricing on iStockphoto, from 1 to 150 credits per image, with credits costing between 95 cents and $1.50.

Shutterstock: Discounts for bulk purchases

2 More than 20 million stock photos and illustrations can be found on Shutterstock, searchable by keyword or found by topic category like Beauty/Fashion, Food and Drink, or Healthcare/Medical. While the costs are a little on the high side, with individual images for $19 (less if you buy bulk), you can get a deal with a subscription if you use a lot of images.

Fotolia: Images as low as 19 cents

3Fotolia also features more than 20 million royalty-free images, and a better deal on price, although many aren’t quite as high quality in our view. With subscription plans and bulk discounts, images are priced as low as 19 cents each. You can get a daily or monthly subscription, or pay as you go with a credits system.

Bigstock: Highly effective search

4Photos, illustrations, backgrounds, patterns, and more are available on Bigstock. The libraries are sorted by collection and category, and there’s also a highly effective search engine. Like the other big stock image sites, you can buy either credits or subscriptions. Credits (it takes more credits to buy larger images) average out to 99 cents per image, while subscriptions drop the per-image price to 46 cents or less.

Depositphotos: Wide assortment, flexible plans

5With more than 11 million images and more added every day, Depositphotos is very likely to have just the image you’re looking for. The prices are great, too. Some of the bigger stock photo sites, like Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and iStockPhoto, advertise “pennies per image” but require expensive subscriptions to get those cheap bulk prices. With Depositphotos, you can buy as few or as many as you need, and still average from $1 to $5 per photo. Their lowest subscription plan, at $69 per month, gives you five images a day and comes out to about 49 cents per photo — more than enough for your blog.

Photos.com: Fantastic selections, versatile system

6This site contains more than 5 million high-quality images with a simplified, reasonable pricing structure. At Photos.com, you can buy single images, image packs, or a subscription. Subscriptions run for 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year, with the year subscription giving you 19-cent images. Single images and image packs start at $1.99 per image, and go down to 90 cents each when you buy 50 images for $45. It’s a much easier system than the credit-based purchasing used by most large stock image sites, and the selection is fantastic.

123RF: 20 million images at reasonable prices

7At 123RF, you’ll find almost 20 million images, including photos and vectors, with prices as low as 21 cents with subscription plans, and from around 68 cents to $2 for small or medium-size images that are suitable for blog posts. While this site does use a credit system, it’s more straightforward than most.

Stock.XCHNG: Combo image bank & social media site

8A combination image bank and social media site, Stock.XCHNG provides images completely free of charge for use on websites and blogs, in exchange for a linkback and credit to the photographer. The site features more than 350,000 high-quality photos to choose from. Just be sure to read their image license agreement before posting an image.

MorgueFile: Free use of high-res photos

9Another totally free site, MorgueFile is a photo sharing community that charges nothing to download and display high-resolution photos and images. Attribution is not required for nearly all images, but check out the uploader’s notes, because some request attribution or a link as a courtesy — and it always pays to be polite.

Wikimedia Commons: 17 million free images

10This wiki site has nearly 17 million media files, most of them images, which are free for use under the Creative Commons license. Wikimedia Commons lets you search by keyword and also has a category tree by topic on the main page for easy browsing. There are plenty of quality photos, images, and clip art to be found here.

Bonus sites

• Flickr: Many of the images on this user-driven site are available free under a Creative Commons license. Search for free images for commercial use.
• NASA Imagery: Yes, it’s that NASA. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has an archived library of almost 100,000 non-copyrighted images, free for personal, educational, and website use. Browse the image gallery.
• CC Search: While this isn’t an actual stock image site, the CC Search portal makes finding just the right (free) image fast and convenient. You can use Creative Commons Search to find images that are available free for commercial purposes from 13 different sites. Be sure to check the “use for commercial purposes” under the search box at the top before running a search.

Remember, this isn’t an exhaustive list, just a roundup of some of our favorites. If you’d like to explore more sites for your small business, head to rubberball, veer, Jupiterimages, or Fotosearch. And if you have a big budget, Getty Images and Corbis will almost always have something up your alley.

What about you? What are some of your favorite photo resources or catalogs?

Related

• Free Photos Directory (Socialbrite)

The post Images to make your small business blog pop appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Start-up wants to democratize the creation of interactive video storytelling

Target audience: Journalists, educators, tourism professionals, broadcast news professionals, businesses, nonprofits, cause organizations, Web publishers, general public.

One appealing storytelling startup that launched four months ago, Meograph, gives online storytelling an added dimension that too often has been missing: context.

With Meograph, you can create what co-founder/CEO Misha Leybovich calls “4D storytelling” through a simple interface that lets users add images, video and text to a story they want to tell. It’s free.

“The big vision is that we want to democratize the creation of interactive video storytelling,” Misha said over coffee at ING Cafe in San Francisco earlier this month.

Today if you have a story to tell, you can publish a video to YouTube and write a blog post about it, but it starts to get funky if you want to add a lot of photos or tell how the story evolves over time. Meograph lets you create and share interactive stories that contain combine video with maps, a timeline and links, filling in that often missing context of where and when.

Here’s an example of a 7-minute meograph created by WalesOnline, focusing on the abduction of a young girl that riveted Great Britain last month:

When you create an account, you log in to create a story in as little as 10 minutes by following simple prompts in an intuitive interface. Then you add media — any YouTube video, along with photos, maps, time stamps, narration and annotations — to give it that 4D storytelling flavor: content, context, interactivity and connection (links to explore at a deeper level).

Producers can embed the resulting meograph on a website or in a blog, just as you embed a YouTube video.

“This is the next dimension of digital storytelling,” Misha said. “It’s not just passively watching a video. You can be involved and watch it in two minutes or spend an hour exploring links.”

Targeting journalists, educators, tour professionals & marketers

This is still early days for Misha and his partner, who make up the team. It’s a Web-based application so there’s nothing to download and no mobile app, though you can watch a meograph on a mobile device.

“It’s hard to incentivize people to tell stories,” he said. “People like to take photos and do check-ins and simple one-off things. But no matter how easy you make the tool, storytelling is always going to require a process or plot.”

Misha isn’t sure if a storytelling tool will attract million of regular content creators, but he thinks it has the potential to attract millions of viewers. “A storytelling platform needs to take a different approach than a social network,” he said.

Meograph is off to a good start, with more than 8,000 users who’ve created more than 35,000 moments (interactive stories). Instead, the business plan calls for targeting journalists, educators, tour professionals, marketers, as well as specific use cases such as weddings, babies, graduations and genealogy.

“We’re focusing on anyone who’s not a professional content creator but who wants to easily and quickly produce professional quality content,” he said.

Meograph has been focusing on producers rather than the end users who watch the resulting works, so there’s no search capability on the site, though that’s coming soon.

To date a few news organizations have been using Meograph as well as tourism professionals who want their itinerary to come to life and universities that are using it for campus tours and to highlight study abroad programs.

Chicagotalks used Meograph last month to cover the Chicago Marathon. The site reported:

The reporters found they could take what they had reported during the marathon, at different times of day, and all around the race course and Chicago, and include their stories as “moments” on a timeline that displays the date and time of each moment and a view of the location. The race reporting is exciting because it gives you a sense of the race over time and space. The reporters included interviews, videos, photos, and lots of links to material like a map of the race course. One reporter got the story of the missing medals first hand. Another reported from her home, which is on the race course, presenting the race from a resident’s point of view. The reporting moments are vignettes, but reported using this unique tool, the user gets a customizable view of a big day for Chicago.

The time dimension is especially compelling: You can not only aggregate different contributors’ reports about an event but update your meograph in the days or weeks ahead — and anyone who has embedded your meograph on their site will then see the updated version.

Misha said there’s little competition between video-focused Meograph with Storify, which is primarily a tool for mashing up text, tweets and images (though it has now added video capabilities). We wrote about Storify two years ago.

Said Misha: “We want to be the democratized Adobe. Ninety-nine percent of the population is never going to learn to use those tools [Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and the like]. But everyone has a story to tell. Our goal is to make the storytelling process easy while making the output varied and interesting to watch.”

We’ll be watching Meograph as it evolves and gets wider uptake by prosumers and professionals in the months ahead.

Related

• New media articles on Socialmedia.biz

• How Flipboard is changing everything

•  Interview with the founder of Storify

The post Meograph: Multimedia storytelling made easy appeared first on Inside Social Media.

It used to be called custom publishing, but now it’s just annoying

It’s aggravating to knowingly use a term to describe your business, even though it poorly defines what you and the industry does. That’s how I feel about the term “content marketing.” It’s the industry’s current buzz term used to describe the need to create content over advertising in order to engage with customers in social spaces.

Content marketing is nothing new. Prior to the explosion of social media, it was and still is called custom publishing. Most of us experienced it for years every time we picked up a Triptik, map, or tour book from AAA. Or maybe your brokerage firm sent you a magazine offering up advice on how to invest your 401K.

Another new term used to describe custom publishing is brand journalism, and it’s the way I like to describe what my firm, Spark Media Solutions, does. Simply put, companies hire us to be journalists for them. The way we create media is no different than when we’re producing media for traditional media outlets.

We are custom publishers and brand journalists.

What’s wrong with the term ‘content marketing’

I hate the term content marketing for the following reasons:

• It’s insidious. The relationship says, “Here’s some content for you that you’ll find valuable. But when you’re not looking, we’re going to sell you something.”
• There is no “marketing.” When you create content to inform and educate, you’re providing answers that may fulfill a step in the sales process, and you may be strengthening trust of your brand, but that’s true of all content. You read a book by a certain author and if you like it you’ll be compelled to purchase and read their next book. Each article in a newspaper must be of a certain quality. If it’s not, you will stop reading and purchasing the newspaper.
• The name “content marketing” assumes a sales pitch within the content. If there was a sales pitch in the content it would be called “advertising.”

Even though I dislike the term “content marketing,” I begrudgingly use it on my business site and blog. I have no choice. If I want people to understand what it is we do, and to be visible in searches on the topic, I have to use the term everyone else uses to understand our industry.

Am I being too sensitive? Do you agree or disagree with me that “content marketing” poorly describes the industry of businesses becoming their own media networks?

Creative Commons photo credit to ShashiBellamkonda.

The post Why I hate the term ‘content marketing’ appeared first on Inside Social Media.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ’em Tiger!

Via Biznology

The post The anachronistic social media isolationist appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king.”

So, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships.  Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing.  People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page.  Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer.  The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Biznology.

The post Social media success demands talent above technology appeared first on Inside Social Media.

To the right, you’ll see, scrolling down most of this article, a full-length screen capture of the SMNR we produced for a launch campaign that we did for the first iPad tablet-only daily newspaper, The Daily. I am using this SMNR because we’re particularly proud of it, and you can explore it In Real Life (IRL) over at thedaily-newsrelease.com.

As I am sure you will notice right away, this SMNR — and all of our SMNRs — is a flat-file, traditional Web page. You’ll also notice that it scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.

No, we didn’t do this because we’re not good coders and don’t understand database-backed web applications like WordPress or Drupal. I have been developing Web applications since they were Perl CGI scripts, into PHP, then into Python-based Zope, and even Ruby on Rails.

We’re building our SMNRs on flat-file, scrollable, single-page Web pages because of human nature: people tend to click away from where we want them to be. We want them to be on-topic, on-target, and really considering the act of blogging on behalf of our clients. In this case, The Daily.

We use old-fashioned HTML standbys such as HTML anchors, allowing us to link within the same page. We don’t want people to miss anything and we don’t want people to get lost in a maze of pages.

We also use flat-file HTML on an Linux-variant Apache install because we tend to reach out to thousands of bloggers at a time — upwards of 8,000 — and we don’t want a database-backed website to get bogged down by a potentially heavy, all-at-once stampede of traffic. Flat-file pages tend to serve faster and more reliably because they’re generally much less resource-intensive.

What we did for The Daily, section by section

Let me go through the SMNR we created for The Daily, section by section, so that I can explain. Long story short:

If we can’t get someone we send an email-based blogger pitch to to post something within five-minutes of opening our email, then we’ve lost him. If it isn’t as easy as pie and as clear as crystal, then we might get nothing. If it looks like it’ll take six minutes instead of five, we’re lucky if we get a tweet or a post to a Facebook Wall. More about that later.

The banner

The banner is simply a quick, attractive “splash.” It’s always above the fold and needs to convey, in a single glance, what’s up and why we didn’t, in fact, waste the blogger’s time. The banner is useless but essential. It allows the client to clearly, as though in summary or abstract, convey the entire message of the campaign both visually and textually. Carefully selected choice slogans, logos, screen shots, and photos go in the banner. However, since it isn’t really possible to “steal” anything from the banner, all the content found in the banner should be replicated somewhere else deeper in the SMNR.

The banner may just seem like bling or flair but it’s is really the single opportunity the PR professional or publicist has to sink the hook, to build the resonance and excitement and to activate the passion required to encourage bloggers to spend their valuable time and finite energy on doing something for me and my clients for free.

One caveat, however, is to make sure the banner isn’t too tall that it blocks out the QuickLinks, below, or seems just like an advert or splash page instead of what it is, a multimedia press release rife with important, objective blog fodder.

The QuickLinks

OK, that’s rather hard to see, so I will make it a bit larger below so that you can see what I am talking about.

That’s better. Well, the QuickLink row is essential because it might be the only interactive part of the SMNR that’s above the fold for some viewers, especially those who are still running 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 screens. (Don’t roll your eyes about the small screen size — there are still millions of folks worldwide who are running small monitors, large font sizes, and also dial-up modems, not your big 2560 x 1440 resolution, double-screened 27″ LCD computer displays. You should work with and understand everyone and design to your lowest common-technology denominator.

So, the QuickLinks are a short-cut to what the blogger wants. These links don’t go anywhere off-page, but, rather, just link down to somewhere much further down on the single page.

And like I said, if we don’t do everything to make it as easy as possible to allow the blogger to search, discover, collect, and report on what we’re pitching, then we’re risking losing them.

The video introduction and the social network sharing

This is a two-parter. Obviously, the commercial that goes with the introduction of the then newly launched iPad-only daily news site, The Daily, is the main thing we wanted to promote. A no-brainer.

More importantly is what I circled in red, the “Share This” embed with the easy-to-share-to-Twitter-Facebook-Yahoo!-Etc. buttons. We never used to add this to our Social Media News Releases. Why? Well, we were afraid that if we did, bloggers would share on social media and social network and with either their Facebook or Twitter friends and followers instead of posting it on their blogs.

The truth is, the SMNR is all about making everything as easy for the blogger as they need it to be. Folks who feel the need to feed the maw of their always-hungry 24/7/365 blog, will always blog (and often then tweet and Facebook their post), and the folks who are interested enough but don’t have the time or interest in the topic or promotion or don’t feel like their blog is the right place for the news we’re pitching won’t blog no matter how much we may well disagree.

So, popping that little “Share This” array of buttons has quadrupled the number of earned media mentions that we get from folks who wouldn’t have blogged our stuff, our news, our clients, anyway — they are just interested enough to throw us a bone and share the Daily with their followers and friends.

The news

The news section is the most important part of the SMNR. Because there’s lots of great stuff to steal. Consider our Social Media News Releases to be one-page versions of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — which is to say that once we have appealed to a blogger enough that she has opened our email, read our pitch, maybe emailed us, clicked through to the SMNR, scrolled past the banner, the QuickLinks, and ignored the Share This buttons, we want the blogger to have to do as little additional work as humanly possible.

We also post as many photos, illustrations, screen shots, and logos as we can into each SMNR, inline, so that a blogger can easily copy-and-paste each image into the blog post and not need to download and then upload. We act as the host, happy to sponsor the image hosting to the SMNR. As many of these as we can because we never know which one resonates with each blogger.

So, we pre-link all the items in the bullet-list with text links to the daily. We link the phrase The Daily any and every time it comes up in the list. This will appall SEO gurus who think I am an ignoramus who doesn’t know Search. I am an expert in search and my SMNRs are not Google-bait, they’re blogger-bait. We actually do not want our SMNRs to start competing with our clients’ sites — and they used to — but if we mess up all the delicate Google balance, then hopefully our SMNRs will not show up in the top-ten on Google, which is often quite challenging since most sites are absolutely terrible.

Actually, recently, we have had clients who have wanted to optimize their SMNR for search, but then you put the onus of linking, textually, on the shoulders of the bloggers, many of whom are not experts in search or HTML. So, we make sure that almost every single link has one linked textual on The Daily, just to make sure that every potential news item that a blogger might want to copy-and-paste onto his blog includes a link.

We never know what the blogger will or won’t steal, we don’t know how much or how little the blogger will copy, paste, then blockquote into their blog. Some bloggers go full-text, blockquoted, and then wrap the copy that we wrote in a bit of introduction and a parting shot into a blog-post sandwich where the copy, exactly as we wrote it, is the meat.

OK, you may have noticed that the page is pretty long. It requires quite a lot of scrolling, right? Well, remember how brief, concise, and minimal the blogger email pitch was? Well, the pitch might be laser-focused but the SMNR is everything but the kitchen sink. As many diverse and random and seemingly extraneous content and assets as we can find and collect we put into the SMNRs.

Those of you who have ever spoken to me about this before might want to jump ahead. I have an analogy for you. If you think of the Sunday paper and all those coupons, think of our email blogger pitch as a coupon for a big-screen TV at hhgregg.

If we can get that person who’s browsing the Sunday Post to cut out the coupon — already a huge task, to say nothing of even buying a paper, reading the paper, and braving the coupon section — and then pocket the coupon, get in the car, and drive to the store, once that guy gets to the store, he’s generally committed to doing something. While we’re pitching the TV, we’re just happy if that consumer ends up spending an equal sum on something — anything — else, just so long as it’s with hhgregg.

Same thing with an SMNR. The email pitch is the coupon selling a particular thing — the launch of the iPad app — and the SMNR is the big box store offering loads of other things, including bios, and other content. In the case of the Daily SMNR, a blogger may well come in to look at the offer to download and use the iPad app or to share the video with the readers of her blog but may report, instead, on Daily Editor in Chief, Jesse Angelo, who left the New York Post for a position with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

To me, it really doesn’t matter what news from the SMNR the blogger reports, it just matter that the blogger takes time out of her busy, busy, day to spend some time writing about our clients, for free. We really always remember that we’re not entitled to anybody’s time, especially if we’re not paying for it. No matter what, every mention is a gracious courtesy.

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

I always tell everybody that only 1% of all bloggers have media, communications, or public relations experience. Full stop. Even fewer of them are HTML gurus. Nothing can be assumed. I am not recommending pablum. I am not saying that we have to dumb down for the bloggers, it’s just that they speak a different language from ours in PR. We don’t share lingua francas. So, we always go out of our way to make sure everything is as simple and self-explanatory as possible without ever insulting the blogger.

In the above case, we always make sure that embed codes are included whenever any video is included — if we ever want to see it embedded inline in a blog post. We had an embed code in the first video at the top of the SMNR but it was deleted by the client. Even if our blogger knows how to find the embed code himself, we really don’t want him to leave the site to go hunt it down over at YouTube, as I explained earlier. We don’t want people to ever click away.

So, we include all embed code at a height and width that is optimal for most blogs, in this case 480 pixels wide. If the blogger is sophisticated enough to want a 853 x 480 video, he can go get that, we’re just making it as easy as possible to make the entire process take less than five minutes from the opening of the email to the clicking on Publish.

Social media and tags

The “Share This” buttons at the top of the SMNR are promotional. They don’t reference the client-owned Social Media properties. It is essential to make sure that we offer up everything and anything to the blogger’s consideration.

Finally, to make it as easy as humanly possible for everyone, we include a string of comma-separated topical keywords that each blogger can easily copy-and-paste into the “post tags” portion of your blogging platform.

Yes, I know. this SMNR has everything including the kitchen sink. Not true. It gets worse. If you explore the SMNR for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day the SMNR we did for the US Olympic Committee we made for the Winter Olympics in Canada, or one of the SMNRs for the Fresh Air Fund, you’ll see that there are all sort of other things such as banners with embed codes and additional videos and all sorts of other assets — really the kitchen sink, in many cases.

Favicon, header title, and meta description

One last thing that I want to discuss before we end this helluva long post is about fit and finish. Too often “single use” sites like this just don’t get the love they deserve. Make sure you take some time to create a nice “Favicon” aka favorites icon, shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon and bookmark icon. Also, please take the time required to create a strong and descriptive Metatag Title and Description tag as well.

<title>Introducing The Daily - Facts and Resources</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Daily facts and resources page. Introducing The Daily The first digital daily news publication built from scratch for the iPad by some of the best in the business to bring you information that's smart, attractive, and entertaining.">
<meta name="keywords" content="the daily facts, the daily resources, the daily facts and resources, the daily, thedaily.com, rupert murdoch, news corp, apple, mac, ipad, ipod, iphone, iphone 3g, iphone 3gs, iphone 4, steve jobs, macbook, macintosh, mackbook air, ipod nano, new iphone, ipod touch, apps, ipad apps, iphone apps, mac rumors, ipad reviews, apple technology, apple news, ipad news, iphone news, tech, technology, geek, geek news, gadgets, new gadgets, new technology">

Why? Why is it even worth the extra time to go back into the engine room and tool with the Meta Data? Well, the HTML Title tag directly contributes to what people see when they either bookmark your page, what they see in a browser tab, or what they see in the Title Bar. Easy-peasy. A real no-brainer. Also, despite what anyone at SEOMoz thinks, meta tags are still important and here’s why:

You’ll notice that all the text in the search result that comes up when your search serves up thedaily-newsrelease.com as a result is content that Google didn’t so much have to find or scrap; rather, it simply serves up the text directly from the Title we wrote and also the Meta Description we also wrote in the form of the search result headline and description.

I hope the previous 2,500 words have done a pretty good job of explaining why we insist on producing a proper, well-produced, well-branded Social Media News Release (SMNR) — both philosophically, practically, and psychologically.

And because I really don’t know everything, please feel free to comment, contribute, share, and ask any questions you may well still have about the process, the evolution, and any technical details you might be unclear about or I have failed to cover. Thank you for your amazing attention span!

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