AOL CEO Tim Armstrong interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington interviews his future boss at AOL, CEO Tim Armstrong, at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2010.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

So I’m starting to piece together that AOL has a hell of a content strategy AND a heck of a senior management team. Watching AOL execs at the Monaco Media Forum 2010 – see the panels with AOL global execs here and here. I particularly loved the following comment from Jeff Levick, AOL’s President of Global Advertising & Strategy:

It’s about having world-class individuals who know the most amount of information in that specific area, and can program and curate information in the most beautiful way for that audience.

Thus the recent acquisitions of TechCrunch and Huffington Post.

glenn

Content Strategy panel at the Monaco Media Forum 2010

Michael Wolf of Activate hosts a Content Strategy Panel at the Monaco Media Forum in November 2010:

Participating on the panel:

• Chris Ahearn – President, Media, Thomson Reuters
• Scott Dinsdale – EVP Global Digital Operations & New Technology, Sony Music Entertainment
• Eric Hippeau – CEO, Huffington Post
• Sara Öhrvall / Director, R&D, Bonnier

For more sessions, please see the Monaco Media Forum Channel on YouTube.

glenn

New Rules of Viral Marketing and PR – David Meerman Scott

New Rules of Marketing and PR

Having recently been exposed to Social Media and Word-of-Mouth Marketing through GasPedal and the Brains on Fire team, I’m currently reading David Meerman Scott‘s The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Here’s a video of Meerman Scott speaking about Internet and Social Media Marketing at the Business Marketing Association 2009 national “Unlearn” conference.

Meerman Scott begins with the following key tenants:

• The rules of Marketing and PR are being rewritten – moving from traditional media platforms and strategies to viral marketing strategies using social media and social networks. These new digital mechanisms for reaching audiences are both cheaper and more effective.
• However, to learn the “new rules”, you have to first “unlearn” a lot of traditional assumptions about marketing and PR, and engaging audiences.

I love Meerman Scott’s emphasis on buyer personas (see also The Buyer Experience blog). Quoting Meerman Scott from the presentation:

I recommend you create detailed buyer personas … Think about not what does your company do, not what does your product (or services) do, but instead what do you want your buyer personas to believe about your organization. For example, Gatorade improves athletic performance. How about Volvo? One word: safety.

You get the idea. For more on developing customer personas please see Developing deep insight into your Customers – XPLANE’s Empathy Maps.

Another nice quote from the presentation:

On the Web, you can EARN attention by publishing your way in. By creating fantastic Web Marketing [content]. By doing YouTube videos, and doing eBooks. And working with bloggers or writing your own blog. Or being on Twitter, being on Facebook. All these ways of earning attention. …

On the Web, you ARE what you publish.

Give it up for Content Strategy on the Web.

Viral Movements – World Wide Raves

Meerman Scott followed up his New Rules of Marketing and PR book with a book specifically focused on viral marketing on the Web titled World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories. I currently have the book on order, but below is a clip of Meerman Scott discussing the six things you need to think about if you want to create content on the web that people will share:

I love the 6 key themes that Meerman Scott communicates:

1. Nobody cares about your products (except you)
2. No coercion is required
3. Lose control
4. Put down roots – e.g. be in the places that your buyers are
5. Create triggers that encourage people to share
6. Point the world to your (virtual) doorstep

Again, a lot in common with the approach that Brains on Fire uses to build impassioned movements.

glenn

Future of Content and Journalism – Web 2.0 Summit 2009

Just came across a couple of great videos on the future of content and journalism from the Web 2.0 Summit 2009. The first is titled The Future of Content, and can be viewed below:

The second is titled Whither Journalism, and is shown below:

Over a year old now. I think the debate has evolved a bit since these panels, but still quite relevant.

glenn

Content Strategy and Publishing – My introduction to

So I think this is the first post I’ve every written specifically about Content Strategy. Even though I work in the news media industry and face strategic and operational concerns around content strategy daily, I hadn’t really encountered a community of folks who called themselves content strategists – who professed to practice a formal discipline of content strategy.

Meeting Razorfish’s Rachel Lovinger

A couple weeks back I had the good fortune to attend the Smart Content conference in New York city on October 19th. The conference addressed the role of metadata and semantics in content strategy, and one of the speakers at the conference was Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish. Rachel presented an overview of her report Nimble: A Razorfish report on publishing in the digital age – which was published in June 2010. Considering that I work in news media, and I have a passionate interest in semantic technology, I thought the report was absolutely fantastic. It’s definitely the best report I’ve seen summarizing the future impact of semantic technologies in the publishing industry. If you’d like the slideshow version, here’s the presentation Rachel gave at Semtech 2010: Semantics in Publishing and Media.

On Content Strategy

Not only did I greatly enjoy Rachel’s presentation, but I had a chance to hang out with her after the conference for a bit. Like the name of Charles Hugh Smith’s blog, I found Rachel to be “of two minds”. On the one hand, she clearly has an interest and passion for “findability” of content, and semantic technology’s role in making content findable and contextual.

However, she has also played a big part in launching the discipline and community that has formed around Content Strategy. Clearly, Rachel is very passionate about content strategy, and I believe she commented more than once during our conversation, “You know, you too might actually be a content strategist” – in the sense that many people often play the role of content strategist in their company, but don’t always apply that label to what they do. It was pretty cool actually. For the record, I don’t think I am a content strategist … yet. But there’s something there that I find very interesting, and it’s a bit part of the challenge news media faces in transforming itself (more on that later).

Apparently, the Smart Content conference was my time to be introduced to the world of Content Strategy. For not only was the conference heavily attended by content strategists, but I also sat next to Ahava Leibtag, a content strategist in the health care industry. Ahava and Rachel served as my guides that day into the world of content strategy.

Content Strategy – the Community

Content Strategy, as far as I understand it, covers the various activities of planning, process, and method that go into creating and publishing compelling content to serve the goals of a digital presence – be it a company, organization, or individual (this is my folk definition BTW). And a community has formed to promote this practice as a formal discipline. Here are a list of some of the important voices in this community that I’ve been able to discern:

• Rachel Lovinger
• Kristina Halvorson
• Jeffrey MacIntyre, and here
• Karen McGrane
• Colleen Jones
• Erin Scime
• Elena Melendy
• Scatter/Gather – Razorfish’s Content Strategy blog

This is just a few names I’ve found that are important voices in the Content Strategy community. But reading their work should give you a feel for what the community is all about.

Seminal articles in the Content Strategy community

Apparently content strategy, as a discipline and a community, really didn’t formally take off until 2009. Rachel credited this significantly to both the community-building efforts of Kristina Halvorson, and to the Content Strategy Consortium that took place as part of the IA Summit 2009. From 2007 through early 2009, several important articles appeared that helped shape and engage the content strategy community. These articles were:

• Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data, by Rachel Lovinger
• The Discipline of Content Strategy, by Kristina Halvorson
• Content-tious Strategy, by Jeffrey MacIntyre

My bad, but I haven’t even had a chance to read these articles yet. But I just wanted to surface that they seem to have had an important impact in the development of the content strategy community.

Content Strategy and Publishing

So finally, I’m able to get to the core message/topic of my post, which is the role of Content Strategy in News Media companies today. Obviously, it’s critical. It always has been.

But several factors make content strategy in news media companies particular fascinating today. Firstly, the Web has massively democratized the creation and publishing of content. Mainstream media organizations no longer “monopolize the channel” the way they did during the 20th century.

Secondly, digital media publishing has a very low cost structure. And the cost structures of the traditional news organization (along with the costs of publishing a print edition) are very difficult to maintain in the face of pure-digital publishing entities.

Thirdly, the audience now has a voice. The day’s where a news organization could editorialize from on high to a passive audience are pretty much gone. News and content consumers increasingly demand a voice in the content they consume, and they have a much wider variety of sources to from which to consume content that speaks to their particular interests and viewpoints.

The net result of this is that traditional news organizations really do have to significantly rethink how (or even whether, in some cases) they (i) create content, (ii) curate content, (iii) parter with prominent voices in their community, (iv) engage audiences, and (v) make their content compelling, discoverable, contextual, and relevant. Let me tell you, this is a tall order for journalistic cultures that grew up in the days of print journalism. And it really does define nothing less that a fundamental transformation of how we create, curate, and deliver news and content to our audiences.

So I guess you could say that the whole topic of content strategy really “speaks to me”. 🙂

Jeffrey Macintyre and Panel on Elements of Editorial Strategy

I always try to have some interactive content in my blog posts, so here’s a nice talk given by Jeffrey MacIntyre of Predicate on The Elements of Editorial Strategy.

The presentation slides can be found here.

In Summary

Well, I guess I now have a “handle” – i.e. Content Strategy – to provide as an umbrella for considering how to rethink creating, curating, and delivering compelling, relevant, contextual, and timely content to audiences who are demanding a voice in the news they consume. And so the journey continues …

glenn 🙂