For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

A lot of the discussion in the content strategy Twittersphere has the feeling of a group of blind people trying to describe an elephant.

There’s a lot of talk, all of it descriptive, some of it incisive, but it falls far short of describing the elephant.

And that’s the problem: talking about content strategy isn’t going to answer any of the problems at hand: if you really want to know the elephant that is content strategy, you need to talk to a zookeeper.

The content zookeeper has a base of knowledge that may have come from textbooks. But the reality is, those textbooks were written by professors who spent little, if any, time in the field. The theory of content-keeping differs widely from the dirty reality of it all.

No, the content zookeeper has gained much knowledge the old fashioned way—he has earned it. The lessons were frequently visceral and, as such, unforgettable. They often contradict the textbook, and sometimes, go places the textbook author has never even imagined.

So who are today’s content zookeepers?

• The content zookeeper has learned the hard lessons of information architecture and user experience from the daily maintenance of a web site. He has dealt with the limitations and woes of various content management systems and knows how to make them dance.

• The content zookeeper has learned the intricacies of SEO and SEM by digging deep in the stinkiest piles of metadata.

• The content zookeeper has learned the care and feeding of freelance writers and bloggers, because he not only writes his own blog, but has written hundreds, maybe thousands of articles and edited at least that many more.

• The content zookeeper has sketched wireframes on a cocktail napkin and turned them into a website.

• The content zookeeper has learned unanticiapted lessons about how content interacts with other content and either creates synergy or anarchy.

• The content zookeepers is nimble, adaptive and can see to the root of a problem quickly and efficiently.

• The content zookeeper’s mantra is: “Test, Assess, Repeat.” What’s working? Keep executing the content strategy, keep monitoring the metrics and keep cleaning up the messes. The content strategy may be static, but the tactics keep changing to meet the conditions.

Ultimately, the content zookeeper is there to cultivate the tension between what people do when they visit a website and what we want them to do there.

Being a content zookeeper isn’t rocket science, but it IS science. Hire a trained content keeper for your next project.

Here are a few other places to look: Brain Traffic, scatter/gather, Predicate.

— Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by thinboyfatter

OK, so let’s say you are managing a website. It could be as simple as a blog written by one person on one general topic or something complicated that weaves massive amounts of content into an eCommerce matrix. Either way, it’s a large interconnected web of content—your content ecosystem.

Bottom line: your content already rocks, but it’s not bringing in the readership and without the readership, you are failing to deliver what you promised the CTO (sales leads, widget sold, butts in seats, whatever metric you are beholden to) when you were given control of the site.

So now what? How do you spread the word? How do you evangelize for your content without being obnoxious?

New school versus joins old school
This is going to require a blitz that’s at once comprehensive and low key. It’s going to require the latest social media savvy as well as traditional marketing tactics.

Navigating social media
Do you have a Facebook page? Are you still using MySpace? Who’s tweeting about you? Have you snagged the obvious domain names and Gmail accounts for your brand? (For a mighty herd of social media marketing tools, go here, or for a counterpoint on the value of social media for business, go here.)

Social networking
Facebook is growing explosively and has recently accelerated past MySpace in several key user metrics. Continue to ignore Facebook at your peril. This is not to say that Facebook in three years won’t be in the same tailspin that MySpace is currently experiencing, but you can’t afford to give those years away to your competitors.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Facebook page. Do not let anyone who doesn’t have a personal Facebook page operate it. Give the operator free reign to update the page with the appropriate multimedia content and use the status update as an additional outlet to promote new content on your main site.

Micro-blogging
Twitter is something that makes no intuitive sense to many people before they start to use it. Once they do, however, its utility as an instantly updated and instantly responsive news and information kiosk becomes abundantly clear. How is your brand being talked about on Twitter? Are you tweeting, or has some impostor hijacked your brand for nefarious purposes? If your brand has yet to be sucked into a Twitterstorm, consider yourself lucky and be prepared.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Twitter identity for your brand. The person in charge of your Twitter account should already be a Twitter user as they will know the etiquette as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the medium. Encourage them to start tweeting, but more than anything, encourage them to listen, monitoring what is being said about your brand and using Twitter to respond to customer relations issues. A little good will is going to go a long way. Then start using Twitter to promote your content.

Social aggregation
Search engines are just one gateway to online information. While SEO is important for now (but is likely to be made irrelevant by semantic search very soon) there are ways to avoid the deep dark pit of the Google algorithm and promote content through other types of search.  Social aggregation sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Delicious all offer some variation on the theme of sharing stories.

Content promotion tactic: Post a story to Digg and get some colleagues to Digg it. If it’s good content, it will gain its own traction and move up the list. Don’t overdo this. Same deal with StumbleUpon and some of the others. Be selective and use your best content.

Old School
Yes, you still need to be writing SEO friendly copy, entering appropriate and comprehensive metadata for each piece of content, sending out email newsletters, blogging, posting videos to YouTube, posting photos to Flickr and more. No one said all this free promotion wasn’t going to be time consuming.

Happy curating. Your content ecosystem will be all the healthier with a little care and feeding.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by baxterclaws

Simon Dumenco has a great interview with David Carr of the New York Times on Advertising Age‘s Mediaworks blog. Carr talks about his new book (now out in paperback) and the rapid decline of media fortunes of late:

“I think one thing that people do not understand is, as recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did. And I think we’re finding out now that the real, actual value of journalism in the current economy is not that high, and that what the dot-com bubble did and Tina Brown and others did to boost the value of journalism and writing to the point where some people were being paid $5 a word—well, I think there are a lot of people right now, really talented people, who are working for 50 cents or a dollar a word, and you know what? It’s pretty hard to make a living doing that.

So that’s one tier, and the other tier is I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.”

Read the rest here.

—Jonathan

Intern.

If ever there was a word associated with suffering, intern is it.

Interns get no respect. Not that they’ve earned all that much, but all too often, they are treated like chattel. Interns have even had been auctioned off on eBay.

But this is not to say that an internship can’t be a benefit for both the intern and the mentor.

It has been a few years since my intern days as a young field biologist, but let’s just say that my months collecting data for other people’s research projects taught me a great deal about life and two important corollaries to Murphy’s Law:

• Nothing is so bad that it cannot get worse, and

• There is no limit to how bad things can get.

I won’t go into the details, but I learned to problem-solve my way out of situations that included the following obstacles: pelican vomit, bicycle handlebars that occasionally detached at speed, rotting sea turtle eggs, the four worst employees in the entire Costa Rican national park system, clueless and sunburned tourists and bird-eating spiders. Yes. Bird. Eating. Spiders.

Fellow Eat Media Content Editor Wendy Biddlecombe also had some memorable experiences as an intern:

• Trade Magazine, New York City: Ridiculed by conservative, old New York executives for wearing fedoras and a Hillary Clinton campaign button. Said New York executives tried to turn me into a cigar smoker. This is the only internship that gave me a stipend. That stipend was well spent when the company fired their senior editor during her maternity leave, promoted the junior editor and assumed that I could pick up the slack. Plus side: I know more about tea, coffee and cigars than anyone else I know.

• Book publisher, New York City: After a semester spent as an editorial assistant with a killer midtown view from my personal office, I interned with the company again after a semester in India, only to find that the office has been filled and the only desk available to me was in the window-less mailroom. I spent the semester looking for little pleasures, like snooping through high profile writer contracts and returning new releases to Barnes and Noble for store credit. In my defense, it was only to afford books for school.

All that said, internships are highly sought positions, even by those who are already earning the big bucks.

Why? Because they not only offer a glimpse at what it’s really like to ply a trade but you might even pick up some of the tricks of the trade along the way, depending on the quality of your mentor. Also, depending on how much independence you are given, you may get to learn a lot about self-reliance and problem-solving in a non-academic setting. No more theory. Time for some practical skills.

Sure, you probably won’t be paid much, if at all, and you will likely be asked complete some hideous, mind-numbing task of the sort that goes along with the phrase, “We’ll get the intern to do it.” But even these tasks can have hidden Easter Eggs within them; you just have to be willing to strive for the Zen state of Samadhi—total oneness with the moment—and don’t mess up the Starbucks order.

— Jonathan

Photo by dsb_nola

Freelance writers, ya gotta love ‘em. Sure, they can be a prickly and fickle bunch, but spend enough time prospecting and you will uncover the geniuses among them. Treat these gems right and they will take you far.

If you’ve ever worked as an editor, you’ve had to learn a lot about the care and feeding of this unique subset of humanity. Here are the top 10 tips for managing a stable of off-site freelance writers:

1. Write the most comprehensive creative brief you possibly can. Initially, some freelance writers are like Harry Potter’s house elf, Kreacher—they require extremely precise instructions if you want the desired result. Leave even the tiniest gap in the creative brief and the story you had in mind may not be the story you are returned.
2. In addition to the creative brief, provide as much background as possible about the publication the piece will appear in and who makes up the target audience. A story on fusion technology that’s written for engineers will look a lot different than one written for a general audience. The background is also a good place to tell the writer what NOT to do. Again, this will save a lot of time for both of you.
3. Specify the length, the tone, the takeaway and the format for the story. If you want 1,500-word case study written for MBAs that concludes with a list of five process implementation tips, ask for it.
4. Be clear, up front, about the expectations on revisions. If you have a kill-fee policy, be up front with it: writers need to know going in that if they fail to revise a piece to a reasonable point after two revisions, they will get the kill fee only (and probably won’t ever see another assignment from you). Though if you reach the kill fee phase, some of the blame lies with you, editor, for failure to vet the writer properly or for failing to adequately communicate what you desired in the story.
5. Tell the writer what they will be paid, how they will be paid and when they will be paid. Honor your financial commitment to the writer in a timely fashion.
6. If a piece needs major alterations, let the writer do them. Give as much direction as is necessary and let the writer do the work. The piece belongs to them. (At least until it’s published, depending on your contractual agreement.)
7. Remember that your writers will be working on other projects at the same time as yours, so you may not be able to get instant turn-around on revisions.
8. Be specific about the supporting materials you expect to be turned in with the piece. If you want source contact information, brief source biographies and source headshots, along with five links to related material and a 50-word call to action, ask for them. And if you want something in a specific format, ask. But be reasonable and respectful: If you think you need to ask for a full interview transcript, why did you hire the writer?
9. Be available for questions. No matter how good your assignment is, questions may come up—some may improve the story in a way you’d never considered. Writers must be able to reach you by phone, email or IM during normal business hours. The work you save may be your own.
10. Be clear about the deadline, but also be flexible with your writers, especially the ones you have an established relationship with. There should be enough room in your editorial calendar to wait a few more days for information from a key source. If there isn’t, build it in for the next round.

A final, bonus tip: Writers are people too. Treat them like adults (as long as they continue to act like them). Keep the lines of communication open, honest and timely.

— Jonathan

Content wants to be free.

We all want free content.

But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is you. And me.

What are we willing to pay to get our content for free? What costs are we willing to pay beyond the monetary?

How much of our privacy are we willing to have invaded to get the information and convenience we desire free of charge?

How good does the content need to be in order for us to part with our hard-earned bucks? I was certainly willing to pay for New York Times opinion articles when the Times Select program was in place, but apparently, there were not enough people like me as the program was discontinued.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is one of the few major content providers to charge for content, but it’s not content I’m willing to pay for. However, when an iPhone app recently appeared that allowed free access to WSJ content, I was all over it. Rupert Murdoch is, apparently, quite upset at the existence of the app, but the technology does not exist to charge iPhone users, yet.

Many sites exact a non-monetary toll, requiring you to create an account that collects personal data that, theoretically, can be used to market products to you. These sites do assume that you are faithful in reproducing your biographical information. I am not. I have signed up for many a site as Phil McCracken, Hugh Jass or Jacques Strappe. Age 104. Etc. (While this makes me feel better, I doubt this small-time deviancy really affects the value of the database.)

But there’s other information about yourself online that you can’t hide from the marketers.

If you have a Gmail account, as I do, you already agree to let Google read your email. Why do you think the ads you see are uncannily related to the content of the message you are reading?

Troubling? Yes. Worth giving up the convenience of my FREE Gmail account? Not yet.

(As an aside, it’s really wonderful when contextual advertising fails spectacularly. See this great juxtoposition between a swine flu story, an advertisement for White Castle’s new pulled pork sandwiches, and the cover of The Jerusalem Post. Kosher? No. Funny. Yes.)
Contextual advertising is just one of the tools the advertisers have to get their meat hooks into us when we’re partaking of the free content.

On a logical level, and this is coming from a former newspaperman, I know that there is a cost to producing content. I know that top-notch, unique content costs even more. For years, I readily paid a nominal fee every day to have that content delivered to my doorstep, but the internet changed the content landscape in a fundamental way.

(Interestingly, I pay more each day for internet service than I ever paid for a newspaper subscription; ironically, none of the money I pay my ISP goes to the content creators. It’s like if my newspaper subscription money just stayed with the paper carrier and never went to the New York Times.)

So I am conflicted. I know that advertising pays for content, but I am used to getting my content for free on the internet and there is a part of me that will do what it takes to make sure I don’t have to pay, monetarily or otherwise. However, there is exceptional content out there that I have paid for in the past and would pay for again rather than go without (Sunday just isn’t Sunday without The Times, printed or not.).

And I have resigned myself to the fact that Google reading my Gmail is probably just the beginning of the future of advertising that’s directed solely at me based on where I have been browsing and what I have been writing. Behavioral targeting is the next step, but that’s another post.

— Jonathan

Photo by Fagerjord

If you are just graduating J-school or have recently left another industry and for some odd reason, have a hankering to parlay your writing skills into the field of journalism, you may have heard that this is not the greatest time to be entering the business.

In one sense, you would be right. The field has lost thousands of jobs in the past couple of years as several factors have come together to put a serious financial crimp on the industry.

So, the likelihood of you landing a job at a major daily newspaper or national magazine is low. Very low.

But if you swing over to JournalismJobs.com, you will see that there are hundred of jobs available in the field. They are just probably not the sort of job you’d have previously considered. And they are not in the sorts of places you think of as journalism hot spots.

Idaho Falls, Idaho. Sierra Vista, Arizona. Waynesville, North Carolina. Sharon, Pennsylvania. And many other spots that line the blue highways of America.

But these jobs, most of them at small community newspapers, offer an immense number of benefits.

1.    You get to hone your craft every day in close proximity to your subjects. This is both a blessing and a curse. I won’t elaborate further.
2.    You get to practice every facet of journalism. You will write news and features, editorials and columns, sports and business, you name it. You will take photos. You will shoot video. You will learn a whole host of computer programs. You will blog.
3.    You will learn humility. You will screw up and it will be in everyone’s hands the next day. Your office will likely be on Main St. People won’t be shy about pointing out your shortcomings.
4.    You will get to know a community better than you have ever known any place in your life.
5.    You will get to experience the upside and the downside of the sort of Mayberry-like living that’s still present in broad swaths of rural America.
6.    The public will get to know you better than you’d ever dreamed of. People you’ve never met will approach you in public places with “something that has to go in the paper.” Depending on your personality, you may or may not get used to being a local celebrity.
7.    You will get creative. The paper must go out every week and some weeks, especially around the holidays (and during the off-season if you are living in a tourist town), there will be NOTHING going on.
8.    You will become a better writer because you will be writing a lot. You will learn to edit your own work, quickly and ruthlessly.
9.    You will also learn to edit the work of the barely literate and the hardly coherent, AKA, letters to the editor.
10.    Finally, you will hone you web skills. Even the tiniest newspapers have a website these days and you will be maintaining it.

Full disclosure: I spent 10 years working at community newspapers in Colorado, Nevada and Georgia. And if you decide to take the plunge, read Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism, Relentlessly Local.

— Jonathan
Photo by Marcin Wichary

The swine flu outbreak has been hogging the headlines for a couple of days now. A quick survey this morning revealed 15 flu stories on the front page of WashingtonPost.com, nine on the front page of NYTimes.com, 14 on the front page of HuffingtonPost.com and 18 on the front page of DrudgeReport.com.

That is an awful lot of virus-laden porcine content.

And why? Thus far, only a small number of people have died, none of them in the U.S. The swine flu strain that’s behind all the headlines does not appear to be any more virulent than other strains of flu. Yes, swine flu (H1N1) does transmit easily from person to person, unlike the much more virulent bird flu (H5N1) that has been causing unease among epidemiologists for the last several years.

So where does the balance lie between informing and alarming? What are the ethical constraints of the content provider in a public health related situation?

Howard Kurtz, in his Media Notes column in today’s Washington Post, said that simply by virtue of the sheer volume of swine flu coverage, it would be reasonable to infer that there’s a real emergency.

Turn on your TV, hit one of the news networks and it’s “all flu, all the time.”

One commentator noted that the 24-hour news cycle necessitated bludgeoning viewers with the same information over and over. He also noted that scared people tuned in more often and for longer periods of time, so providing “context” for the news—i.e., running a story that goes beyond the headlines and that puts the risk of the swine flu in perspective—stood directly in the way of ratings.

So despite the sell-out that seems to be going on at every major news outlet, ethics still matter for content providers. Ethics matter because trust matters. Sensationalize at your peril. You may get a bump in traffic today, but it won’t be without cost.

—Jonathan

Photo by sarihuella

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist known for his intricate and elaborate single panels that depicted simple tasks being performed in a complicated, tortuous fashion.

Goldberg may have died in 1970, but our fascination with the types of devices generated by his fertile brain has accelerated in the Internet age. Go to Youtube, type Rube Goldberg in the search box and welcome yourself to time-kill central.

Check out this video that was the result of a content hosted by chocolatier Cadbury as a part of its “Crème That Egg” promotion:

As diverting as these videos are, watching what should be a one-step task divided a hundred times or more, Rube Goldberg should not be your inspiration when you are mapping out the navigation for your website.

You can make it easy or hard for people to get where they want to, depending on what you want them to take away, but the one thing you don’t want them to leave with is a suitcase full of frustration.

Five iron-clad rules for site navigation:

1.    Make it easy for people to contact you. The “Contact Us” link should be on every page. Put it where you want, footer, top nav, wherever, but make sure it’s a logical spot.
2.    Make it easy for people to learn more about you. One of the first things I usually do when I stumble across a new site is see who’s behind it. If there’s no “About Us” page or it’s sparsely populated, my interest plummets. I know the Internet allows anonymity, but it’s not a trust builder.
3.    Site search should be on every page. It’s a gateway into more of your content and allows the visitor a degree of control. It’s a win-win.

4.    Don’t leave people hanging. If you’ve just had them read an inspiring story, many visitors are going to wonder how they can do more. Have a strong call to action that fulfils this need. It made me nuts yesterday when I read a moving story on the New York Times about a family who had a child battling cancer and was struggling to find health insurance and there was no way listed to contact the family or contribute to help them out. I was able to send a message to the article’s author, but got an auto-reply stating that I may not receive a response. Bad New York Times, bad! If you’re going to be too busy to respond to feedback, don’t accept it at all or warn me beforehand. But don’t let me spend my time writing something and then tell me my message went straight to email purgatory. UPDATE 4/21/09—New York Times national correspondent Kevin Sack wrote back and supplied the information I was looking for. Shaming of NYT is hereby retracted. Rule number 4 still stands.
5.    Don’t waste people’s time. See item #4.

You can make it as easy or as hard as possible for people to get what they want on your site. Consider carefully the ramifications of making it too hard. We may sit through a 10-photo slideshow that has each photo on a separate page so you can increase your click count, but waste too much of our time and it’s time for “Adieu.”

— Jonathan

I went into a Dunkin’ Donuts Monday morning for the first time in I don’t know how long, and while I was initially annoyed that there was a long line, it gave me a few minutes to take a look around and see what had changed since I’d last been in…

First, and most importantly to me, I was able to see many trays of doughnuts glowing in a big rack behind the counter. And they had some Boston Creams left. Dunkin’ Donuts’ core content was not being neglected.

I looked at the dozen or so tables in the place and noticed something shocking: No one was eating doughnuts. Some people were tucking into breakfast sandwiches. Everyone was drinking coffee. And not just the 50-cents-a-cup black tar you associate with a doughnut shop, but fancy coffee drinks, the kind people pay $4.59 for at Starbucks without batting an eye.

I watched all five people in line in front of me order big, fancy coffees and not one single doughnut. Did I mention there was a six-car wait at the drive through and that all I saw being passed out the window was coffee?

The Dunkin’ Donuts content menu had been expanded, and at least in the very small sample I had (one data point), it appeared to be a resounding success.

The clerk seemed a little stunned when I order two doughnuts and no coffee, but someone else must have been eating them, because the two I had were fresh and delicious, just as I’d remembered.

Not a few blocks away at the nearest Starbucks, the same story was being told, albeit in reverse. The coffee was still headed out the drive-though window and people were still hanging out inside, mooching the bandwidth on the free Wi-Fi, but a quick look at the menu revealed new breakfast sandwiches and, wait for it, doughnuts. I had one of the doughnuts the other day, a cakey lemon-zest flavored ring that while good, was just a little too highbrow to work as a doughnut.

Starbucks had expanded its content offerings too, but success may prove elusive.

What’s interesting is that both Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks decided they could no longer survive as content specialists. Coffee wasn’t enough for Starbucks and doughnuts were not enough for Dunkin’. And it’s not that both brands’ signature products weren’t appealing. They just weren’t enough to sustain growth.

Which brings us to that content inventory you’ve been meaning to do. If  your focus is relatively narrow, are your customers being forced to look for elsewhere to fulfill some of their needs? You may be the recognized expert in your field, but do you need to offer a greater breadth of content to keep your customers happy? If so, choose the direction you expand with care. As both Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds (with the McCafe) have found out, its often easier to offer less expensive luxury goods than it is to go upscale with a humble product like Starbucks tried with its doughnut.

— Jonathan