The last time I was at SXSW, it was year 2000. I convinced my ad agency bosses that as a copywriter on the Dell account, it was imperative that they send me AND my art director partner (the extraordinary Enrique Mosqueda) out to Austin to investigate all this interactive hoopla.

To put things in perspective, these were the days when we were making ads for PC’s that played music (replace your stereo!) and “Workstations” with “RDRAM technology, dual processor capability and a 133MHz front side bus.” (I can assure you no one in our company had the faintest idea what a front side bus was.)

At SXSW that year, there was a panel on something revolutionary called a Weblog. Epinions.com had just come out of preview mode. And panelists spoke of a future where Broadband would make it possible “to watch videos on our Palm Pilots and beam them to friends.”

And there was a group of cool kids who called themselves Content Strategists. These were the copywriters of the future, it seemed—the ones who would still have jobs in the foreseeable future. They lived in San Francisco, slept in late, worked from home or cafes, were incredibly well spoken and making tons of money. Some of them had blue hair. All of them wore jeans. (I have torn apart our office to no avail in search of my business card from 2001 with the title of “Content Strategist” printed in a glamorous shade of black. Enrique even jazzed it up with ironic lo-fi black square dots. No doubt it is in an old coin purse with expired credit cards, chinese fortunes and cute boys’ phone numbers pre-husband.)

Back in NY, agency folks from junior AE’s to group directors started jumping ship, trading the agency’s pristine environment of glass, leather and steel, where fresh flowers sat on reception desks of the agency’s 15 floors, for poorly ventilated one-room startups stuffed with desks, computers, bean bag chairs and boxes full of dotcom t-shirts. They traded print ads and press checks for banners and HTML, which they learned from Webmonkey cheat sheets.

Back then, we weren’t sure who would be left standing once the glitter inside the Silicon Alley snow globe settled. But we copywriters were adding “content strategist” to our business cards just in case. Even if we had no idea what it meant to be a “content strategist.”

Here we are 10 years later. I’m a partner of a content agency, which means I’ll be footing my own bill to SXSW 2010 (goodbye Driskill, hello Sheraton). Ian will be speaking about web content. And everyone will be talking about the iPad and its promise to bring our favorite magazines back from the dead. Looking forward to 2020, when all of next week’s excited chatter will seem just as archaic as that “front side bus.”

—Britta

Still not using social media to its full effect to promote your content? Well, maybe you can take a lesson from the President.

A couple Sundays ago, President Barack Obama pulled a what’s known as a “Full Ginsburg” by appearing on all five major Sunday morning political talk shows on the same day. Obama was plugging his healthcare reform package, and hitting all the talkies at once, and although politically risky, was really the only way to spread his message far and wide.

Why? The multiplying effect.

• Obama makes his plea on each of the news shows. Most politicians, policy wonks, assigning editors, and the entire staff of Politico are watching.
• The first round of stories and blog posts come out that afternoon. Other bloggers and commentators weigh in.
• The first round of response stories gears up and the second round of stories moves on smaller news outlets. The number of readers and commentators grows.
• And so on and so on and so on.

By Monday morning, anyone who follows the news knows what Obama’s healthcare plan is.

So for your next blog post, I want you to try what I’m going to christen a “Full Brogan,” named after social media marketing maven Chris Brogan.

Your blog post starts with you. It will be read by the usual visitors to your blog, but unless you are Seth Godin, that’s probably not a really large chunk of the populace.

So seed the post all over the place: via your Twitter feed, on your Facebook page, on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Fark. If you are feeling really jaunty try Mixx, Newsvine and Sphinn, among many other choices. All this Johnny Appleseed activity comes with a two-part caveat. If you are not already a member of one or all of these communities, you are going to have to join; and likely, until you’ve spent some time there listening, adding to existing conversations and starting some of your own, it’s not likely that the pebbles you are tossing in these very large ponds are going to make waves of consequence.

But if you keep giving and keep sharing quality content, eventually, the multiplying effect will take over. In August, I seeded a blog post on MIT’s Personas project around on several sites. The next morning, I checked the hit count on our blog and the numbers had gone through the roof. We’d had three months worth of hits in one day. A look slightly deeper into the blog stats saw the bulk of the traffic coming from one source: Reddit.

Determining why the post got so much attention gets a bit trickier, but it ties into how you take care with making your contributions to social media sites and not just start seeding willy-nilly.

Make sure you write a descriptive headline. This may be the only part of your material that gets read by most people and is likely your only chance to hook them.

If the site has communities within the community (like Reddit), take the time to find the right one to post to.  If you have a story about programming, but you place it in the general story pool, you may miss the core of your audience.

Pay attention to the metadata requested by the sites, especially tags, keywords and summaries. It’s should be obvious, but it bears repeating: This is how people will find your contribution when they search within those sites. (And this should not be any extra work; you should have created this data at the same time the story was written, right?)

Finally, all this is not to say that you should ignore Mother Google by failing to keep up with your SEO best practices. It’s not the active seeking of content consumers that you’re doing through your social media seeding, but it’s still important (and requires much of the same metadata).

Let me know how your “Full Brogan’s” go.

—Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Art from http://www.timboucher.com/

Bookmark hell from ian alexander on Vimeo.

We can argue about what’s the new black, but one idea that’s gaining a lot of credence is that mobile apps are the new websites.

Think about it: If you are a smartphone user, how many apps do you have and how many of those apps supplant the actual website for mobile use? A quick count on my phone reveals apps for: The Weather Channel, ESPN, Facebook, Twitter (Nambu), Pandora, Google Earth, The Wall Street Journal, Fandango, The New York Times, AccuWeather, fring (IM client), and National Public Radio. That’s 12 websites that I never visit from my mobile browser because the apps provide the same content in a sleeker and faster format.

I also have apps that allow me to complete other tasks that would have previously been handled through the browser as well like mapping, getting the surf or ski report, foreign language translation, star maps (the constellations, not celebrities, though, no doubt, there’s an app for that too), dictionary, hurricane tracking, the U.S. constitution and stock quotes. More websites I won’t be browsing ever again.

And then there’s the special category of app that also lives on my phone: the disposable app. These apps mostly focus on specific sporting events like Wimbledon, The U.S. Open, etc, and allow me to get specific updates all the live long day. (I’m still hoping for a Tour de France app next year.)

And while these apps may have a limited shelf life, they were by no means constructed in a slapdash or haphazard way; these are quality apps that meet the needs of serious fans and often involve partnerships with heavyweights like IBM. These apps appeal to enthusiasts, so there is little margin for error.

What else should you think about when planning to include apps in your next content strategy presentation?

1.    Functionality. I love Nambu as my Twitter app because it takes me to web links without leaving the app. But for corn’s sake, don’t overload the thing with features. Think Thoreau: simplify, simplify, simplify.

2.    User Experience Design. This may be your chance to create the lean and mean website you’ve always wanted but can’t ever have because of institutional inertia. For example, The Weather Channel’s website is an ad-choked nightmare with a user interface designed by Hannibal Lecter and a search function run by Mr. Magoo. I never visit it because it makes me angry. I only reluctantly downloaded the mobile app because I hated the website so much. All hail the clever and wiry programming geniuses who put together The Weather Channel’s app. It’s simple, elegant and it just works.

3.    Realize and accept that some apps will have a short life. This does not reduce their value, if anything, even more thought must go into design as you only get one chance to get it right. The U.S. Open tennis tournament just concluded and I will likely never open that app again, but I opened it several times a day during the tournament.

4.    Does this mean you shouldn’t optimize your site for mobile browsing? Of course not. Though, if you are going to make your mobile site crappy (Yes, I’m talking to you CarandDriver.com.) don’t make it impossible to switch to your main site when you see someone’s using a mobile browser.

Where do mobile applications fit in your content strategy? Let me know in the comments.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

Photo by respres

It’s a simple question really—what is your digital footprint?

The obvious first step most people would take would be to consult one of the mainstream search engines.

So sure, you can Google yourself, or if you are feeling particularly jaunty, give Bing a whirl.

Metasearch engines like Dogpile and Mamma can give a broader view, sometimes pulling in more obscure results.

Semantic search is the next step. Kosmix, Clusty and Primal Fusion are just three examples of this new way to search the web.

But if you want elegance and simplicity in the answer to our simple question, there is only one place to turn, Personas, an MIT-based project that began as an art installation.

The homepage is lovely, and, until a few days ago, looked like this:

But, this week, some explanatory text was added:

I have an uncommon last name, Maziarz, so if I do a web search on myself, the results are pretty focused, so I was interested to see what Personas came up with. I ran the search five times, and, interestingly, got five different answers.

The first, and my favorite, due to the outsized presence of the word “illegal,” is below:

I’m not sure where the “fashion” or the “religion” bars come from, but the rest were at least plausible. The other four times I ran the search, “news” continued to dominate (no surprise after 10 years in the newspaper biz), but illegal disappeared altogether and the other fat and thin bars varied.

As the Personas homepage notes, data mining techniques are growing more sophisticated by the day, meaning that even the most faint parts of your digital footprint are being scanned, collated and analyzed by government and corporate entities.

How does the web see you?

—Jonathan

@bentpiton

We may have reached the point in the internet revolution where pervasive broadband access has made everyone a publisher, but this explosion of content providers—most of them roaring pell-mell down the information superhighway—has made the need for savvy editors ever more acute.

This thought struck me yesterday as I was plowing through Flickr, looking for some photos to accompany an upcoming story. The simple search for “student teacher”—and mind you, this was not on the full Flickr library, but just the Creative Commons subset—led to nearly 900 results.

Too many to wade through, but after having exhausted the 7.4 million photos on Shutterstock and not even finding one appropriate and non-cheesy photo, it was off to the wild, wild West of photography, Flickr.

Screen after screen shuttled by, but eventually, I was able to dig up a few gems that could be sent to the stakeholders along with the story.

As I chugged through the 895 items tagged with the words student and teacher, I did find myself longing for a little self-editing from the photographers on the other end. Many of the photos were of dismal quality, the kind of snapshots that in the Fotomat era, would never escape the little envelope and find their way into an album. What, I wondered, was the person thinking who uploaded all 200 shots from a new teacher retreat in China, most of them underexposed and completely bereft of anything resembling composition? And what was with all the shots of the guy scooping out the innards of a watermelon? Why did the photographer feel compelled to take those photos in the first place, and then, later, decide that more than one needed to be shared with the world?

Why wasn’t the photographer editing as he went? When I trained as a photojournalist, I was repeatedly admonished to “Crop with the camera, not in the darkroom.”

Memory cards with massive capacities have made it too easy to take too many photographs. Giant hard drives make it too easy to keep every photo; just download and resume shooting. I am guilty of this at home. There are seven years worth of photos of my dogs and five years worth of photos of my son at home on my iMac.

But yes, only select images have been edited in Photoshop and either printed or emailed to family and friends. I can remember a set of photos, uploaded to a sharing site by a-family-member-who-shall-remain-unnamed, that contained more than 100 images of his young child, all from the same trip to a pumpkin patch or petting zoo. I scanned the thumbnails, but I couldn’t make myself leaf through all of the photos.

Which brings us back to why editors are going to be ever more valuable as the amount of content on the internet continues to burgeon. We may all be publishers, but we are not all editors.

1.    Editing is a skill. Whether it’s text, photos, video or audio, deft editing takes experience and knowledge.
2.    Editing is an art. Having the ear that detects a tin word, the eye that can pull the one image from hundreds or thousands or the touch to slice up an hour of raw video into 10 compelling minutes, there is an aspect to editing that cannot be acquired; it must be possessed.
3.    Editing takes time. If it’s not being done as the writer writes or the photographer shoots, it’s going to have to happen at the editor’s desk. The less care taken on the front end means the more care that will need to be taken on the back end.
4.    Editing takes care. Corralling and curating your content so that it stay fresh and compelling is the only thing that is going to keep your readers coming back.
5.    Editing is necessary. Is it reasonable to ask users to edit their own content? Maybe. Is it going to happen consistently and carefully? Probably not. There are plenty of websites that are just content dumps. Don’t let yours be one of them.

—Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Photo by Jennie Faber

New iPhones hit the stores last week, and consumers—weak economy and two-year contract with AT&T be damned—went home with more than one million of the devices.

Despite the name, iPhones are not phones; they are powerful handheld computers. I own a first-generation iPhone and it can do things that early cell phones could never dream of; in fact, it can do things my first Apple product, a Macintosh SE purchased in 1990, never dreamed of.

Sure it can do all the standard smartphone tricks—texting, calendar, camera, maps with turn-by-turn directions, etc., but where the iPhone really excels is in it’s expandability through The App Store.

There are more than 36,000 apps available for the iPhone and those apps will do just about anything. Apple maintains tight control over the types of apps approved for distribution, but that has not stopped a flood of fart apps from spewing their effervescence throughout the App Store.

Without further ado, here’s a glance at the apps—good, bad and ugly—that grace the iPhones here at Eat Media:

Britta
My five favorite apps:
1.    Camera (Blackberry didn’t have one. Don’t know how I lived without it.)
2.    Maps
3.    Facebook
4.    YouTube (for playing Sesame Street clips to a cranky baby in the car)
5.    Amazon.com

The most disappointing app: Twitteriffic

The app that likely no one else in the office has: iPregnancy

Wendy
My five favorite apps:
1.    History Lite
2.    Wikipanion
3.    Facebook
4.    Pac Man
5.    NPR Mobile

The most disappointing app: UrbanSpoon is a great idea, but always recommends me to go to restaurants in St. Pete and Tampa. None of the suggestions are helpful, and Sarasota seems to be off the map.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has:
1.    The “Festivals” app, which lists every major religious festival this year and next, for eight major world religions.
2.    ”Snow,” which features snow falling across the screen while “Snow!” flashes. For some reason, I haven’t deleted it.

Jonathan
My five favorite apps:
1.    Oakley Surf Report: With a five-year-old obsessed with his Boogie Board, a good surf report is essential each weekend.
2.    Flashlight: Simple, but useful.
3.    YouTube: Time-kill central.
4.    Stars: I love the seasonal ballet in the sky and Stars helps me keep track.
5.    3banana: Note taking that syncs with my desktop computer at home.

The most disappointing app: Adventure. Thought this would be a fun trip down memory lane, but it was just sad to see what used to pass for quality entertainment.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has: Tracking the Eye. Hurricane season is on here in Florida.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

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

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