'Why' is becoming as important as 'when'

From Jonathan Stray at Nieman Journalism Lab:

Interpretation: analysis, explanation, context, or “in-depth” reporting. Journalists are increasingly in the business of supplying meaning and narrative. It no longer makes sense to say that the press only publishes facts. 

New research shows this change very clearly. In 1955, stories about events outnumbered other types of front page stories nearly 9 to 1. Now, about half of all stories are something else: a report that tries to explain why, not just what.

This is an interesting development for both the brand journalist and the traditional publicist. It means reporters are no longer as "event driven" as in the past. The why in the 5Ws and the H is becoming as important as the when.

For brand journalists, this means there is a growing audience for explaining the more detailed, more nuanced, more analytical story that explains the why.

For publicists, if offers more opportunity to break into the mainstream media with stories that offer analysis and with third-party experts who can answer the why.

How Twitter is reshaping the way we tell stories

From Rita J. King at Co.Exist:

Twitter forces us to learn how to play compelling characters in a shared biography, a snapshot of this moment we are living and sharing right now, but I can’t help thinking about a comment made by Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent. He talks about context in the mainstream media, and the need for more space to explain ideas that go against the grain of the status quo. Twitter also has a context problem: when you come late to a conversation, for example, and only see a couple of previous tweets.

Is Google being unfair to sponsored content?

Sam Slaughter at Digiday, on Google's announcement that it plans to weed out sponsored content from its Google News feed:

I’ve always felt it’s better for brands to err on the side of DIY — and Google’s announcement pushes the needle even further in that direction, especially in the long term. Sponsored stories are a great way to reach an audience, but they’re a little bit like a sugar rush; tons of eyeballs and great short-term results, but then the story’s gone, and it’s taken the audience with it. No Google means no long-tail traffic; that audience you rented went and moved on up to the East Side.

Objectivism for Dummies -- making the complex simple to understand

In contrast to her novels, Ayn Rand's philosophical writings can be dense and difficult -- and thus daunting.

Anticipating this, Rand distilled her Objectivism into four familiar maxims:

1. Metaphysics: “Wishing won’t make it so.” (Objective Reality)
2. Epistemology: “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”(Reason)
3. Ethics: “Man is an end in himself.”(Self-interest)
4. Politics: “Give me liberty or give me death.” (Capitalism)

"If you held these concepts with total consistency as the base of your convictions," Rand wrote, "you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life."

If Ayn Rand could boil down her entire philosophy to just 27 words, what stops us from making our most complex ideas just as accessible ? (Other than stubborness or laziness, that is.)

Brutal simplicity is a virtue.

Content is an investment, not an expense. Here's why ...

David Meerman Scott says:

Thinking of your content as an expense like advertising means you always underspend. 

For example, if you spend $5,000 in a given month on Google AdWords, the only thing you are buying are the resulting clicks of your ads appearing against the important phrases people search on to find your business. But as soon as you stop paying, your clicks stop too. This is the classic example of a marketing expense 

However, if you spend $5,000 in a given month to hire a freelance journalist to write a bunch of interesting blog posts relating to important phrases people search on to find your business, you will have assets that live on forever that will drive people to your content from the search engines for years to come. The content will have value many years after it has been paid for.

New white paper: 'Should Your Brand Take a Stand?"

From Bulldog Reporter:

WrightIMC conducted a survey of more than 3,000 consumers with diverse regional, economic, and age differences. Research was also conducted on controversial positions or viewpoints from five major U.S. brands in the recent past and how it affected business: Chick-fil-A and same-sex marriage; Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood; Hobby Lobby and contraceptives in employee medical plans; J.C. Penney and Ellen DeGeneres as spokesperson; and Starbucks' support of same-sex marriage. The survey data and case study results form the basis of the white paper.

Want more readers? Write stories and headlines that offer clear benefits

From the Function Writing Group blog::

Want people to read your post? Tell them what they’re going to get out of it. 

Like a gorilla swimming laps in Lake Michigan, useful headlines are easy to spot:

• How-To’s
• List Posts (Like, say, 6 Ways To Teach Your Gorilla To Swim)
• What Blank Means to Blank 

Headlines used most frequently by copywriters, bloggers, content managers and anyone else who wants people to read their work immediately convey benefit, usefulness and education. I use these all the time. 

People are busy and are constantly asked to manage a surplus of information every day. Let’s make life easy for new readers.

New ebook: How would the Mad Men of the 1960s have approached content marketing?

Shannon Johnson at Hubspot says:

Knowing how complicated our media landscape is these days, what would an ultra-popular, uber-successful vintage ad campaign have to look like today to make as big of a splash as it did in its time? What would Wendy’s have to do to turn “Where’s the beef?” into a modern day catchphrase? How would Volkswagen’s “Think Small” campaign have to be executed to make the Beetle the most popular imported vehicle? 

These are the questions we explored with the help from a handful of advertising and creative experts in a recent ebook, Traditional Turned Inbound: Reimagining 5 Iconic Ad Campaigns From the Past.

Make your web site feel like a mobile site

Tobin Dalrymple at the Content Marketing Institute says: 

Mobile is an entirely new medium and it comes with a unique way for people to interact with content. It’s all about touch, swipe, and that feeling of a full-screen, laid-back experience — simulating the “couch surfing” vibe. This is why some content publishers opt for creating a social magazine-style experience, in the spirit of Flipboard, to deliver content to mobile users in the most dynamic way possible. 

The benefit of this approach is huge. Aside from providing a more familiar and enjoyable reading experience, your readers tend to view more pages, and spend far more time with your content compared with other websites that were built with click and scroll in mind.Why  

An added benefit to this approach is that marketers are given a natural way to show full-screen ads and/or call-to-action widgets. So, for instance, in between your full-screen articles, you can sneak in a white paper download CTA (call to action) or a newsletter sign-up request without interrupting the experience.

Creating content: It's always about your audience and never about you

From the Daily SEO Blog: 

If you're planning to succeed in your content marketing efforts, there is one big thing that you have to understand right from the start: it's not about you. It's never about you. It's not about your company. It's not about your product. It's not about your service. It's not about how great your company/product is. It's not about the amazing charity work your president does. It's not about how fun it is to work at your company. It's NEVER about you. And the minute you try to make it about you, that's when you lose their trust, and that's when you lose another potential customer 

Repeat after me: It's ALWAYS about them, never about you. This is content marketing. It's not sales, and it's not advertising. If you want to do sales and advertising, that's perfectly fine, but just don't do it in your content marketing. Write for the reader, always.

My two cents: Yes, it is always about the reader. Content should always focus on what the audience will want and will need to know. But if you don't think content is about sales, don't ever tell your clients. I guarantee clients believe creating content is about sales -- or they wound't pay you to generate content.

If you can't deal with that, but want to stay in the game, here's a suggestion: Think of what you do as the first stage of diffusing an innovation. It just happens that the innovation is your client's product and the diffusion process leads to sales.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Wordpress ... Do you REALLY have to be on EVERY platform?

Joe Pulizzi at Content Marketing Institute sez:

In many cases, it’s smart to weave your story onto multiple platforms. It’s entirely possible to have a killer webinar series, amazing blog, outstanding video program, and cutting-edge digital magazine all at the same time. 

You may decide to focus and work to dominate one platform. How about a killer podcast series? What about an amazing print newsletter? Maybe a blog is just the platform for you. 

Yes, you construct your strategy before choosing your channels, but don’t feel obligated to be active on every channel that your customer uses. The international travel magazine, Monocle, has just a print magazine. No iPad version. No Facebook page. It works for the magazine and its readers. 

Sometimes simple and focused is better.

Brand journalists: David Pogue shows us how to construct a great Top 10 list

In this video, New York Times tech columnist David Pogue demonstrates for brand journalists how to create a useful and interesting Top 10 list:



The only difference is that a brand journalist would design a Top 10 list where each point relates back (directly or indirectly) to the client's product or service.

(Perhaps it goes without saying, but "Top 10 list" is a general term. Shoot for a minimum of three things on your list and make 10 your maximum. Anything in between will work fine.)

How to write a feature story in six steps

Writing coach Ann Wylie offers an ideal structure for the brand journalist who is learning to compose the feature story:

1. Lead: Illustrate your point. Show, don’t tell. Make the lead concrete, creative and provocative. Think anecdote, human interest and juicy details.
2. Nut graph: Explain your point. Now you can tell. Here’s where you summarize your story into a nutshell, or deliver the key point.
3. Background section: Fill in the blanks. Do you have a term that needs explaining? Does your story require an understanding of context or history? Include that background information here.
4. Body: Develop the story. Avoid the “muddle in the middle” by arranging the body of your story into discrete sections, organized thematically, sequentially or hierarchically.
5. Wrap-up: Restate your point. In the nut graph, you tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. In the body, you tell ‘em. Here’s where you tell ’em what you told ’em.
6. Kicker: Illustrate your point. Leave a lasting impression with a provocative kicker. Bonus points for circling back to the lead.

When I was a newspaper reporter, we called this structure the Wall Street Journal feature. Almost every WSJ front page feature is structured this way.

The nut graph can be tricky. I suggest you write it first, then build the rest of the story around it. If you lose your way, go back to the nut graph and remind yourself what the story is actually about. Stay on course. Less is more.

Stop complaining and start creating content that search engines like

George Freitag blogs at portent.com:

Lots of SEOs complain about Wikipedia always being in the number 1 spot, but few can argue that it isn’t the most relevant result for most searches. 

I realize not everyone can be Wikipedia, but as long as people are linking to you because you’re useful, you will be in good shape. 

How do you do this?

• Create resource pages about your industry.

• Create some data oriented blog posts.

• Make an instructional page about how to use your product or a related product.

This is how links were always intended to be used and that’s why they were ever a ranking factor in the first place. These pages are naturally good content and links to these pages will tend to be good links.

5 common mistakes that hurt your page rankings on Google -- and all are easy to fix

Google's Matt Cutts explains the five most common mistakes that web sites make in setting up their search engine optimization.

They are:

1. Designing pages that are unfriendly to Google's web crawlers.
2. Failing to use keywords on the page in everyday language and in HTML.
3. Thinking too much about generating links and too little about creating compelling content.
4. Investing too little time in creating a memorable title and an enticing description.
5. Failing to take advantage of Google's free webmaster tools.

A good brand journalist can easily fix problems 2 and 3, and can influence 1, 4 and 5.

The best way to engage an audience with your content

"Trust Agents"author Chris Brogan says: 

Ownership. Give them ownership. 

My children both teach me this. My daughter likes various cartoons that she watches on YouTube or Netflix, but when she breaks out the sketchpad and starts creating her own characters for the stories, that’s when there’s something there.

Yes, it's a scary idea (especially for the lawyers). But if we want our content to spread, then brand journalists have to look for ways to give audiences a way to contribute to the content. We also have to act as change agents within our client's corporate culture.

The problem with retweets: How do you correct an error that goes viral?

From Mat Honan at Wired.com: 

Here’s the problem with the way the current system works. Let’s say you tweet something that turns out to be incorrect to your 100 followers. Let’s say 5 of those retweet it to their 100 followers. At this point, some 595 potential people have seen it. (Or at least spambots, but bear with me.) You realize your error, and issue a correction on your Twitter feed. Your 100 original followers may see the update, but it leaves 495 who do not unless those same five people again retweet you. 

In short, while the automatic retweet button on Twitter lets people spread information far and wide beyond your followers, there’s no way to makes sure those same people see your attempts to correct it.

How to build a useful form to help brand journalists to prioritize requests for content creation

Another great idea for the brand journalist from the Content Marketing Institute:

Often requestors only have a vague idea of what their needs are when they ask for content to be created. The request form helps them drill down to their most essential needs — which will help you identify possible ways to incorporate them into your existing content plan, or to minimize the revision process so that you can free up time in your schedule to produce additional content. 

Moreover, the improved communication facilitated by the form helps you produce content that is more targeted, more appropriate, and better able to deliver the kind of results its requestor expects. Marketers also would be wise to use the form themselves, to help flesh out and prioritize their own ideas for content creation.

CMI also encourages content creators to generate a mission statement to help triage these requests:

If you receive content requests that do not support your mission, it may not be worth your effort and time.

Follow this link to find CMI's template for creating a form to prioritize content creation in your company.

Write copy that sells your company's ecosystem instead of just its products

Brian Barrett at Gizmodo says:

Apple isn't a hardware company, or a software company. It's not iOS or iMac. Apple, like Google and Microsoft and anyone else that wants to survive in the 21st century, sells only one thing: an ecosystem. The most powerful one in the world. 

What Apple realized before anybody—and what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have slowly but aggressively come around to—is that the act of buying a phone or a tablet or a computer isn't an isolated incident. Gadgets don't exist on islands. They're one-way tickets to platform archipelagos, to fiercely guarded fiefdoms where everything works in harmony within walls that are high and strong. And the longer you're inside, the harder it is to leave.

A good idea for any brand journalist. If you want customers to adopt your ecosystem, you have to persuade them that it fits their wants (emotion) and meets their needs (logic). The first step is making prospects aware of the ecosystem and how it matches up with their views of the world. That job often falls to the brand journalist.

When looking for a story to tell, look for one that sells more than a product; sell the ecosystem.

Playbook: 42 tactics and 50 case studies in content marketing

The Content Marketing Institute offers a playbook for the brand journalist that covers 42 specific tactics and 50 case studies. You can download it as an e-book or you read it on SlideShare:

2011 CMI Content Marketing Playbook from Content Marketing Institute