Technorati released a new report yesterday. The highlight? A breakdown of digital budgets

more than half [of total budget] goes to Facebook. YouTube and Twitter each get 13 percent, while about six percent is spent on influencers and 5 percent advertising on blogs.

Or – as pithily expressed in a ReadWrite Social headline, “Brand Marketers Totally Miss Social Media Influencers.”

The moment anyone proves to our clients’ satisfaction (or indeed mine) that influencers influence sales, I’m sure we’ll move away from Facebook’s TV-sized audiences and Twitter’s second-screen opportunities, news-hungry journalists and celebrity-studded firmament. The reality for most big FMCG advertisers is that — if anyone truly believes they are a soap powder or fizzy drink influencer they’re certifiably nuts.

Number Two in my list of things everyone should read: Chapter 4 of Duncan Watts’s ‘Everything is Obvious’. It’s long, but worthwhile reading. Nonetheless for those of you who are (like me) at the goldfish-in-an-industrial-techno-club end of the ADD spectrum, here’s the TL;DR:

marketing strategies that focus on targeting a few ‘special’ individuals are bound to be unreliable.

Watts is the only special individual to whom you should be listening today.

In early February 2011, a YouTube user posted a video with the title, “Zach Walls Speaks About Family”. Almost ten months later, the video was reposted on progressive campaigning site, MoveOn with a new title, “Two Lesbians Raised A Baby And This Is What They Got”. Here’s what happened to the views:

MoveOn.org re-titled a YouTube video, massively increasing its distribution

It’s not a straightforward correlation — after all, MoveOn.org commonly receives ~1.5m monthly UVs, so the additional exposure must have helped a bit. But the video had been posted on Reddit back in February 2011 with the uninspiring-if-informative title “Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa student spoke about the strength of his family during a public forum on House Joint Resolution 6 in Iowa”, so I think it’s fair to assume that the title played a big part.

Headlines have become separated from stories

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to see Tom Whitwell, Editorial Director at Times Digital give his “How To Write Awesome Headlines” presentation. Tracing the development of headline writing, he claims that the patterns of web consumption and sharing means that headline writing has left behind the terrible (by which I mean “fantastic”) puns beloved of sub-editors.

The Sun headline so awesome that they ran it twice (/ht Who Was the Super Caley Sub?, Guardian)

In a world of Twitter, Reddit, news aggregators and curators, Whitwell says, the headline has become separated from the story; putting more pressure on sub-editors to make the headline sell harder.

He notes that:

The difference between a good headline and a weak headline isn’t 5% or 10%, it’s 10x, 20x or more.

…then lists his rules for click-able headlines:

1. Be specific. Why exactly should I read your story, not that other one?
2. Tell the whole story in the headline
3. Don’t try to be clever
4. Don’t try to be funny
5. Play to your niche. Don’t over simplify or patronise in the headline
6. Include lists, quotes, numbers and names
7. Don’t worry about ‘being boring’
8. Write the headline first. Really. Always.
9. Great story which you can’t explain in the headline = crap story

Don’t give it all away in the headline

The next presentation comes from Upworthy (who are a bit like a BuzzFeed with a social conscience). Like BuzzFeed, they are content curators, and like all successful curators, they find content, then

Improve the framing and put it on our site so more people will see it.

What constitutes “improving the framing”? There are some excellent points, but a good third of the presentation is given over to the importance of a good headline. By the very nature of what they’re doing (curating and re-framing stories, rather than creating them) they can’t, as Whitwell demands, write the headline first. Instead their practice is to “write 25 headlines for each story” before selecting the best. It’s a compelling presentation, and it stands out for me because their first and last rules directly contradict Whitwell’s rule.

1. Don’t give it all away in the headline.
2. Also, don’t give it all away in the excerpt, share image, or share text.
3. Don’t be shrill.
4. Don’t form an opinion for the end user. Let them do that.
5. Don’t bum people out.
6. Don’t sexualize your headlines in a way your mom wouldn’t approve.
7. And don’t over-think it. Some of your headlines will suck. Accept it and keep writing.
8. Which reminds me, my mom doesn’t like it when you put the word “sucks” in headlines.
9. Lastly, be clever. But not TOO clever.

I’ve never been good at headline writing, but as I begin to understand the relationship between content, social and SEO better, I am beginning to understand better what skills we need to hire and develop in our organisations.

I’m (finally) thinking more about content marketing. It’s taken me a while to get here, and I’m still not wholly sure what the triggers have been. I’d like to believe, though, that it’s a combination of a few things:

1. I’m beginning to hang around SEO people again. The SEO types I meet are smart, and they seem to be getting excited about the whole content thing. Clearly there’s something to see here.
2. A chat with Neil Perkin. He’s also a properly smart chap, and his publishing background gives him real insight into the area
3. A growing sense that there are better data about this market out there, and better tools to handle those data.

CHALLENGES

Each brief will bring its own challenges of course; but the following seem to me to be some of the more common challenges. I think that they can all be addressed and overcome, but it’s worth being aware of them.

Confusion: As so often, a common marketing buzzword conceals a multitude of meanings. One person’s content marketing might be blogging- or curation-led. Another might be focused on encouraging social review content. Yet another’s might be SEO-led. Or blogger-outreach led. Or sponsorship-led. Or they might be heavily invested in making advergames or video content, and looking for new ways to dress up an old dog. Everyone brings their own expectations and biases; and the common "Content Marketing" terminology doesn’t help make those clear. Like ‘engagement’, and ‘social’ before it, it seems that ‘content’ is already well on its way to being a meaningless marketing term.

I suspect that it probably helps to see these things in terms of what we’re trying to achieve, the problems we’re trying to solve. For example — which of these would you prioritise?:

• Assist in-bound marketing
• Provide incentive for data-capture
• Give marketing teams and client teams opportunities & reasons to email clients, tweet, post stuff to their LinkedIn profiles…
• Improve SEO metrics
• Deliver in-bound links through distributed content
• Increase advocacy through shareable content
• Become the de facto charts used in 3rd party presentations (Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker’s mobile charts end up everywhere, as do eMarketer’s charts)

Compliance: At least a portion of a strong content strategy will rely on news hooking, opportunism & fast response. Yet any half-way-decent in-house legal department will place restrictions on what we can say, and how fast we can say it. Publishers’ workflows are set up to speed the publication process; but that’s rarely true of brands. Brands’ IT services and infrastructure probably won’t help either.

Content calendaring should help a bit; but we’re going to need to thrash things out with Legal and I.T. somewhere along the line; and we’d better have some good answers for their tricky questions.

Competition: There are many other publishers competing for the audience’s finite appetite for content, information and entertainment. Some of them may be our traditional media partners — who, it should be pointed out — aren’t always having the easiest time monetizing their own content strategies. Of course brands want to become publishers, but they’re going to have to recognise that it’s already a crowded market, and the publishers have a lot of experience and talent.

Context: What works off line isn’t always what works online. While the people may be the same, the context has changed; the audience’s attention may be divided, shorter, focused on different goals and activities. For example, long-form content generally falls foul of the tl;dr problem ("too long; didn’t read"). Everything I just said goes double for mobile. Spooging traditional content into a mobile context is more or less doomed to fail.

The audience is also a kind of context: certain kinds of content theme have repeatedly been proven to work well online. We need to understand how to spin our content for different kinds of audience, and to learn to love the niche. This isn’t always easy for marketers who are used to thinking in big, broad demographic terms. And it may be hard for more conservative clients to step outside the television mass market and into the internet mass market.

Cost: There will be finite internal resource, and (given the way this works) we’ll probably want to produce a lot of relevant content, fairly regularly. We need to find ways to get more bang for our content buck. We’ll need to think in terms of re-using, translating and recycling content (a single piece of research becomes 10 blog posts, 2 guest blog posts, a SlideShare presentation, 5 infographics, 2 podcast interviews and one video.)

Do these ring true? What have I missed?

McKayla Maroney is not impressed by Social Share of Voice

There’s a sneaky tendency in social media marketing circles to misappropriate terms from other areas of marketing, and pretend that they are the same thing. We’ve probably all been guilty of it at some point, so this isn’t so much a criticism as an observation. Here’s a case in point:

In traditional marketing terms, a brand’s Share of Voice might be defined as its share of advertising weight within its competitive set. It can be used as an input in the planning process — for example, to decide on the likely most effective timing for marketing activity.

Whereas in social media terms, a brand’s Share of Voice is nothing more than its share of category brand mentions. If you’re interested, here’s a post from social media listening tool Radian6 that neatly sets out the commonly-accepted Social Share of Voice process.

To put it differently: Share of Voice is something brands (through their own efforts) achieve, whereas Social Share of Voice is something that they have thrust upon them.

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Coca Cola has 53m followers on Facebook these days (November 2012.) But it sells ~2bn servings a day. Even if we were to pretend that those 53m fans didn’t represent a saturated market, how much Coca Cola would they have to buy tomorrow to move the needle?

Big brands are increasingly waking up to the “what’s the value of a Fan?” question. The answer is fairly clear. I’ve done my best to obfuscate it in this presentation, though.