Presentation by Rachel Lovinger, content strategy lead at Razorfish, at Smart Content: The Content Analytics Conference, October 19, 2010, http://smartcontentconference.com
For those that are not familiar with Razorfish, we’re a digital agency that focuses on creating experiences that build businesses. These are a few of our recent projects…
The research question we posed to ourselves
And what we found is that content needs to be free. Digital content needs to be free to go where and when people want it most.It has to be mobile, and it has to be social.
Of course, the reason digital content has so thoroughly changed the playing field is that it no longer has to be tied to a physical container.
Take, for example, the BBC. This is an interesting case because, although they have been doing broadcast news for a long time, they never did print journalism. They first published text-based news on the web and never had to work out all the details of the print production process. So here’s an article on their website…
But it also appears in many other digital channels: content aggregators, different devices, different social services. They have to be aware of how their content gets to all these places and how their audience engages with it once it’s there.The story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/10168684.stmMobile version of the story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/mobile/business/10168684.stm
We focused on these three areas of challenge/opportunity.[Explain them]
But we found that, for the most part, publishers need to transform the way they approach their business. The key to success in the digital realm is going to be developing new products and services that continue to align with the brand’s core value while providing unique, meaningful experiences to your audience.One of the first steps in that transformation, is making the content they create more Nimble. So, how do they go about doing that?
Primarily, we found is that, what really makes content nimble, what makes it possible to quickly and easily take advantage of new opportunities, form new partnerships, or develop products for new platforms, is to create content that is well-structured and has rich metadata – making it modular, well-defined, and ready to create useful relationships to other content and data. So, beyond HTML and RSS, there are other things that can be done to add meaningful structure to content, and there are tools that can be used to help add useful tags and metadata to content. And the more of this that you can set up in the publishing process, the better prepared you will be to invent new content products and partnerships. Now, we’re going to walk you through an experience to demonstrate some of the concepts and principles covered in the report, and then we’ll talk about the underlying technologies behind it.
Removes the guess work so systems can interpret data
Add structure + metadataDevelop new products more quickly & easilyContent management tools that incorporate a wide range of structure and metadata capabilities Create and publish content encoded with semantic markup and meaningful metadataNot necessary to understand all the underlying codeStreamlines the publishing processMakes it faster, easier, and cheaper to bring new content products to marketExamples: Open Publish, Jiglu Insight
Streamlines the process of tagging content by extracting concepts on a pageSuggests a set of consistent tags for each piece of contentContent producer approves or rejects each suggested tagExamples: OpenCalais, TextWise, Tagaroo
You may have noticed that Yahoo, Google, and Bing have all begun displaying useful information right in the results. They do this by using rich metadata embedded in the pages to highlight specific kinds of content. There are tools that add semantic markup to the content that will help take advantage of these new display features, or validate existing markupExamples: Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool, Inbenta, Semantify
A web of connections between equivalent conceptsKnown IDs become a tool for translating any set of IDs
Enhance content with linked dataImport additional information, assets, services, and user-generated contentImprove SEOObtain additional data and content for application developmentData set may already include map to other desirable data and services
Enhance existing pagesIdentify key conceptsPlace assets and information on the page or link to relevant offsite contentVideo, images, user-generated reviews, tweets, Wikipedia entries, etc. Allows producers to create rich pages without spending a lot of time manually searching for related assets.Examples: Apture, Evri (?), Headup, NewsCred, Zemanta
As a content producer, being nimble is about quick adaptation and preparation for future opportunities
We need to go further than XML, RSS
What will content publishers be doing differently?
The value of content will lie in being able to provide a desired product or service, not just the content itself.MLB has a free iPhone app with some functionality, but also has an app available for purchase, with premium content such as live streaming audio, video, and pitch-by-pitch coverageA variety of different services, for different devices, for a range of pricesSubscribe to team alerts, Player alerts, or get a day pass alerts $.99MLB.com At Bat - $14.99
eMarketer benchmarks its US online advertising spending projections against the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)/PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) data, for which the last full year measured was 2009; online ad data includes categories as defined by IAB/PwC benchmark—banner ads (static display), search ads (including paid listings, contextual text links and paid inclusion), rich media, video (including in-stream, in-banner, in-text), classified ads, sponsorships, lead generation (referrals) and e-mail (embedded ads only); excludes mobile ad spending.
New opportunities for high-value advertising will include unique approaches that use the digital content itself.Media industry and advertisers can collaborate to create ads that are more engaging, relevant, and ultimately more effective.
Ads that are contextually relevant to the content can be more engaging and ultimately more effective.Fairly broad matching
A little more specific…Analyzing content pages for message, context, or mood, and inserts relevant adsCreates highly desirable ad inventoryAudience targeting, without the privacy concerns of behavioral targeting
Semantic ad targeting tools include protection against unfortunate term-matching.
Partner on product development – Either license your content to a developer for a fee, or share in the proceeds of the product they develop with your contentAffiliate partnership – More accurate matching of links to contentValue-add – Offer free content that drives sales of paid services, products, or devices.Reduce costs – Use tools that help automate parts of the process.Make production processes more efficient so you can produce more content, in more formats, often with a smaller staff.
Create unique modes of interaction and the optimal types of experiences for each platformContent must be nimble in order to: Reduce development time for current and next generation devices Anticipate the needs of platforms that don’t even exist yet Make everything seamlessly work together
Track Twitter, social networks, blogs, discussion boards, content sitesTrack a brand, industry, domain or topicWith semantic capabilities:more accurate relevancesentiment analysis Track ongoing stories and audience reactionExamples: Imooty, Inbenta, Lexalytics, Tattler