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.

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.

While researching good examples of sales copy for my training session on Digital Publishing Strategy for the APA this week, I’ve re-encountered the debate about long copy in digital media.

Most usability studies suggest that short copy is best for web writing, due to information overload and the scanning behaviour of users online. However, it’s clear that there are still valid reasons for considering long copy for your marketing messages, and some marketers feel that this approach is best for online marketing success.

Long copy goes back decades, where it has traditionally been used in direct marketing and print advertising. In the early days of the web it was responsible for some monstrous sales pages, centred text splattered with yellow highlights, bright red links and aggressive calls to action. Nowadays long copy pages look much better, but the techniques haven’t changed.

The advantage of long copy is that you can showcase a single product in more detail by providing in-depth information on the following:

• Product benefits
• Differentiation
• Bonuses
• Elements of the offer
• Social proof
• Guarantees

This information provides credibility, offers reasons to buy and convinces the customer to make the purhcase.

So how effective is long copy online today? Back in 2004 Marketing Experiments did a study that showed that in an online test long copy outperformed short copy in terms of conversions. I’ve not seen any dedicated studies since then, but its continued use online suggests that long copy will never die.  Marketing consultant Michel Fortin is a huge advocate, pointing out that all your pre-selling material is itself a form of long copy.

Naturally it’s all about using the right tools for the job. I agree with expert copywriter Brian Clark that testing different approaches is essential and the best advice is to go with whatever works.

In summary, I would still advise using short copy online as a general rule, but consider using long copy for the following:

• High priced products
• Luxury items
• Products with lots of features and benefits
• Unusual products
• Information products
• Unsought products (life insurance, investment products, etc)

Please let me know in the comments below about your own experience with long copy online.

Thought leaders like Steve Rubel and Erick Schonfeld perceive a major shift in web publishing. They see digital content moving from an architecture of pages towards information that is distributed in real-time streams.

According to this argument, the traditional web is based on the way we use books, magazines, journals and other static media. The hierarchy of information is structured and editorialised, whether this is done by dedicated content editors (BBC News) or the site’s users (Digg).

In contrast, the ‘stream’ presents content in a dynamic and fluid way, driven by immediacy and organised by ‘now-ness’. Examples of platforms that publish as a content stream include Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and Friendfeed.

Our way of consuming this content is different too. It’s impossible to ‘catch up’ with a stream of content, as anyone who follows more than 1oo people on Facebook or Twitter will know. Instead you dip in and out of the stream, and if you miss something, it’s gone.

Steve Rubel has made a conscious and deliberate decision to stop blogging and focus solely on lifestreaming. But unlike Steve (and like Louis Gray) I’m not about to abandon my blog.

This is because, as Steve himself admits, publishing via blog or lifestream requires a corresponding switch between reflection and immediacy. I believe that good communicators need to be capable of both.

This is one of the reasons why I work hard to balance time spent on Twitter and Facebook with more traditional long-form content, including books, essays and full-length articles. Indeed my channel for this activity is not Twitter or Friendfeed, but a blog: The Culture Club.

To summarise, I’m a big believer in content streams, but I don’t see blogs and other forms of ‘reflective’ content dying out. To be a good communicator you need to embrace both.