by ttucker23 on July 29, 2010
Flipboard offers a content-focused view of social media
Everyone’s talking about Flipboard, the magazine/social media hybrid for the iPad. It looks like this really could point the way forward for consumption of social media, and also be the iPad’s first real killer application.
For me the real story is that it flips (sorry) the social media thing on its head, from a view that’s focused on the people in your network into a view that prioritises the content that those people produce or link to.
That’s a big deal.
Why? Because that’s what social media is all about. Most of the time we’re interested in what the people we connect to have to say, and the content around the web that they recommend.
In other words, the use case for social media is not ‘I wonder what my friends are doing today’ but ‘I wonder what my social graph has got for me to look at’. In this scenario content comes first, not the content creator.
This might seem counter-intuitive in the social media environment, which is driven by connections. But think about it – your Facebook and Twitter accounts are actually forms of information and entertainment (I need to credit my friend Matt Woods for that insight).
If your close friends really need to communicate with you there are better ways – phone calls and face-to-face being the most obvious. With social media we get a chance to hear what people are thinking, feeling, liking and hating. And that’s content.
The reason that social media is so effective is that some of that content is personally relevant in ways that mass media can’t be, such as your work colleague’s new baby pictures, or news of a friend’s holiday. Plus the media content that’s shared comes with personal endorsement and recommendations from people you trust, ie your network and social graph.
Flipboard takes your uniform stream of Twitter tweets and Facebook updates and applies traditional media hierarchies, prioritising stories that have high engagement and making it easier to see the important stories.
This is particularly useful in Twitter, where shortlink URLs to content make it unclear where you’re likely to end up. Twitter has for so long been useful and innovative that we’ve got used to overlooking some of its most obvious user experience problems. Flipboard fixes many of them in one fell swoop.
There are still problems with Flipboard – the algorithms need to improve and display problems create niggles – but it’s clear that this is a game-changer.
And this is just the start. Soon we’ll look back on the way we consumed social media and wonder how we coped pre-Flipboard.
by ttucker23 on July 17, 2010
Okay, so we’ve known for some time that in online media the consumer is king. But is it just me or are consumers starting to demand a little bit too much? Is it starting to get a bit out of hand?
I love the clip below of Louis CK on how ‘Everything’s amazing and nobody is happy.’ I might just buy the T-Shirt.
It’s funny ‘cos it’s true – people are demanding a lot of technology companies. As Louis says in the clip, ‘how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago.’
Now think of some of the demands being made on leading tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. We want amazing stuff, at low cost, often free, and we don’t want ads on it, and we want our privacy protected, and if there’s any other business models you can think of outside of that, we don’t want you doing any of those either. Phew, tough times.
The onus is definitely on digital businesses to forge new and creative ways to monetise their products and services. I’m all for that. But I’m also sensing the start of a slight shift in emphasis. If we as consumers want all this cool stuff, maybe we’re going to have to compromise a little bit more too, whether it’s paying for valuable content or allowing our private information to be used by businesses for commercial ends.
Hopefully businesses and consumers can meet somewhere in the middle, where tremendous value is created for both.
by ttucker23 on June 3, 2010
I nearly called this post Content 2.0, but decided we’re all a little bit jaded with the 2.0 label these days.
Nevertheless the concept stands: content is making a comeback.
‘But I thought it never went away’ you might say, and in many ways you’d be right. But in the past few years the spotlight has been on radical new technologies, such as social media and microblogging, and shiny new platforms, like smartphones and tablet computers. Content skulked off into the wings and bided its time.
But over the past 12 months the word is slipping out that content is back on the agenda. Smart marketers have switched on to the fact that quality, targeted content attracts visitors from search engines, gets shared on social networks and establishes authority. This approach to marketing even has its very own new buzzword: content marketing.
With this second coming of content there is a whole lot more that needs to be learned. In the past ten years the rules have changed, and an effective content strategy needs to factor in all the shiny new things mentioned above, namely optimising for search engines, social media and mobile delivery.
Not only that but the competitive landscape is harder than ever. As more and more businesses are becoming media companies, there’s more competition for the top spots in Google and more content jostling for the customer’s attention.
The growth in the quantity of content isn’t slowing down either, quite the reverse. PR companies are circumventing traditional media and publishing direct. A new wave of media companies like Demand Media and AOL’s Seed.com are applying ruthlessly efficient algorithms to create ideas for content and then streamlining the content production process using a giant pool of low-cost freelancers. Demand Media found that their algorithm-generated content produced 4.9 times more revenue than the ideas that professional editorial people came up with (guess what happened to those editorial people).
It’s clear that in the age of the second coming of content, a mixture of new and old skills is required if you want your business to thrive. Knowing your audience, and providing them with high quality content that meets their needs, is more important than ever. But creators also need to maximise the opportunities provided by search and social media, and take on board more innovations that are doubtless coming our way in the near future.
It’s a challenging but exciting time to be in the content business.
