Blogging in the dark: The vital data no one has (or talks about)

by Ian Greenleigh on August 31, 2010 · 10 comments

Blindly searching for the data we don't have. (Flickr photo credit: Pranav Singh)

There’s something that’s been bugging me lately, big time. It’s not your average annoyance, or mild setback. It’s a huge problem for all of us in social media marketing, but no one seems to say much of anything about it.

Let me illustrate the issue with a real-life scenario, though there are countless others:

You’re hired as a social media manager or consultant to a company that sells something, B2B or B2C—whichever. Dreaming up a social strategy to generate conversions from qualified prospects (email subscriptions, webinar registrations, contact form submits, etc.) to fill the pipeline for your company’s overall sales and marketing efforts is central to your job description.

Because you’re smart, you know that simply creating and distributing content on your own blog is only half the story when it comes to blogs. Outreach in the form of blogger relationship building, commenting and guest posting form the other half. Of course there’s more, but let’s keep it simple and continue…

So, which bloggers do you engage with, and where do you comment? You can find blogs that other bloggers say are the best in your industry. You can look at lists like The Power 150 that are informed by a mix of data, including traffic and external links. You can piece together which others think are the most important in just about any niche you’re trying to market to, but you’ll be comparing apples and oranges.

The truth is, no matter what numbers you look at, the numbers that should really matter to you simply aren’t there. Anywhere. Because you want to be on the blogs your prospects are on.

Who reads these blogs?

I don’t mean how many people. I don’t mean from where their IP addresses originate. I mean:

What industries do they work in?
What are their job titles and/or roles?
How often to they read this blog?
How influential is this blog to them, and how much do they trust what’s on it?
What other blogs do they read?

Try finding that information. It’s simply not there. So how do I back my decisions, as relate to external blogs, with data? I don’t.

If you were a media buyer for television campaigns, you would know where to place your ads. All the data would be there—who watches what programs at what times on what channels. It’s why you see ads for for-profit colleges on daytime TV.

Lots of other web marketing strategies can be backed by data. Search ads can be informed by myriad useful numbers. The decision to purchase banner or interactive ads on 3^rd party websites is usually based on data provided by the site owner on audience.

So why not blogs?

We need a Nielsen of blog audiences.

I’ve tried in vain for months to locate a single useful source for blog readership demographics.Yes, it would be difficult to create. But it would also be insanely lucrative, and incredibly helpful to those of us in the industry (and the DIYers).

Until then, we’re just blogging in the dark.

Why don’t you think we have this tool and/or service? Am I missing something? Or is this data far less important than I believe it to be?

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Lessons on content curation from the shadow world of intelligence gathering

by Ian Greenleigh on August 23, 2010 · 6 comments

A suspected NSA listening post. (Photo credit: Flickr user Schrottie)

Content curation, reduced to its most basic functions, is a process of filtering and reporting. What we extract, from where, at what frequency, and to who or whom we deliver our results all depends on our objectives and abilities.

To really master something—anything—we need to study the techniques of established experts. If I’m learning chess, I might learn the basics by playing with some fellow beginners, but to truly grow into an advanced player, I’ll need to watch the old Russians in Palisades Park.

But who are the masters of the content curation craft? My own tracing of the history of content curation was intentionally limited to the Internet era, but in truth its roots go much deeper. Curation has long been a necessity in the realm of intelligence gathering for national security, and it’s there we’ll find our true experts.

Mind over machine

Echelon is an immensely-powerful “listening” network comprised of orbiting satellites and ground stations that monitor the world’s civilian telecommunications. Jointly operated by intelligence services in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the system is used in the “sorting [of] captured signal traffic, rather than [as] a comprehensive analysis tool” (Wikipedia). Intelligence expert Gordon Thomas writes that it “sifts tens of billions of snippets of information, daily, matching them up,” and it has been estimated that “90 percent of all traffic that flows through the Internet” also flows through Echelon.

Here’s where curation comes into play:

“Suspects, names, key words, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses are all sucked up by NSA satellites—either circling or geopositioned around the earth—and downloaded to the computers. There the data are coded into ‘watch lists,’ then fed into the system that takes the lists on secure lines throughout the U.S. intelligence community.”

-Gordon Thomas, “Gideon’s Spies”

Human analysis of these lists is next, because even Echelon is far from perfect. For instance, it’s often stumped by “noisy or degraded signal[s],” and the linguistic nuances of “dialects and patois”.

But even at the initial gathering stages, human sources are seen as highly valuable, working in parallel to the supercomputers that process the data fire hose. “A spy on the ground could judge a conversation in its setting, obtain finer details that are lost to even the most sophisticated electronic surveillance.”

Tools to empower, not replace

What does this mean for our version of content curation? Simple: Tools are no substitute for the human brain. We might be building amazing programs for sentiment analysis, for instance, but curation can never be fully automated. After all, our brains are still the most powerful and efficient computing devices on the planet. A certain amount of automated sifting may be necessary given the staggering (and rapidly increasing) amount of data we encounter in our daily lives, but this sifting should always be near our information “intakes” (feeds, email reports, Twitter streams, etc.), and nowhere near our “outputs” (what we share through our blogs, tweets, emails, etc.). There is a point in every content curation cycle at which the human touch is necessary. This point differs for every use case and goal, but it always exists and it always adds value.

Avoid “shiny object syndrome,” and realize that looking for the one true curation tool that will take all the effort out of the process is ultimately self-defeating. Your time is much better spent learning and sharing, while developing personal processes that help you do this.

Isn’t that what your end users want, anyway? I suspect that most of us prefer to see this human footprint in the curation we consume. We want to know that the content we’re reading has been hand-selected by someone we trust as an expert, and not a lifeless set of algorithms—no matter how advanced.

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If the Old Spice videos are “viral”, Michael Bay’s films are indie

by Ian Greenleigh on August 18, 2010 · 0 comments

In case you’re curious, a search for “old spice viral” gets you 392,000 results. MSNBC calls their recently famous campaign “viral”. So does Time. And Salon. And Mashable. Pardon my French, but viral my derrière. Time for a little comparison.

In this corner, Old Spice:

A Proctor & Gamble brand (disclosure: many P&G brands are clients of Bazaarvoice, my employer)
P & G is the “6th most profitable corporation in the world, and the 5th largest corporation in the United States by market capitalization” – Wikipedia
Old Spice hired Wieden + Kennedy to reinvigorate their brand
W + K is “one of the largest independently-owned advertising agencies in the world,” and “the most awarded agency in the world.” –Wikipedia
Total Old Spice YouTube channel views: 132,108,567

Here’s Jason Bagley of W+K talking about the campaign on CNN:

In this corner, Justin Bieber:

16 year old pop superstar
Has been backed by Usher and LA Reid
Has won too many awards to list here
Two platinum albums in two years
Most viewed YouTube video of all time (290,959,772 views), with “Baby”

Here it is:

Have you heard “Baby” being referred to as viral? I haven’t. Why not? I suspect it’s because “Baby” debuted after Justin Bieber was insanely popular. There’s nothing fresh or “ guerrilla” about it—there’s no great story to its success. Tweens have “Bieber fever”, and it’s burning up the charts. He could post a video of himself doing math homework and it would get millions of views, tweets and Facebook shares (not to mention oceans of drool).

Old Spice’s campaign is brilliant. It’s creative as hell. Sales shot up. But it’s not viral. Justin Bieber and Old Spice are both household names, established brands (even at 16, in JB’s case). Wieden + Kennedy is the best ad agency in the world.

Justin Bieber + vast production resources + fan base in millions = Win

P&G (“6th most profitable corporation in the world”) + W+K (“most awarded agency in the world”) = Win

Neither = viral

Why? It’s a matter of resources. Both equations equal an overwhelming probability of success. Is something that’s such a sure thing really viral?

I thought viral videos were scrappy. I thought they weren’t sure things. “Charlie bit my finger” and “Evolution of Dance” (#3 and #4 in all time views, respectively) weren’t sure things. Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” (#2) was, but I don’t hear anyone calling it viral.

Again, kudos to Old Spice and W+K. They could care less if we call their work viral or not—it was (and is) a beacon of success in our world of ugly, brainless ads.

But it’s as viral as a Michael Bay film is indie.

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The past, present and future of content curation

by Ian Greenleigh on August 13, 2010 · 2 comments

A lot of us were curating before we knew what to call it. The word still doesn’t appear in most dictionaries, so myself and others have been chiseling out a definition post-by-post. Etymology is one thing, but to fully understand curation we need to look at its evolution.

The Weblog: From diaries to news

Justin Hall: The first blogger (Flickr photo credit: Joi Ito)

From Wikipedia:

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer’s Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs.

While blogs began as a way to chronicle the lives of the authors, they soon became popular ways to share news updates, opinions and discussions about myriad topics of interest. In this latter form, they involved curation; at its most basic, the selection and sharing of content with others.

The blogroll: Betting on past content

I won’t get into the “is the blogroll still advantageous” debate (today, at least). This blog doesn’t have one; the Bazaarvoice Blog does.

Wikipedia’s definition:

A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).

Here was the next step in curation, in the sense that links to blogs were selected based on some criteria, theme or goal. Blogrolls are often just a set of permalinks to whatever the blogger reads. The links will be there on the homepage, at least, until the blogger changes them on the backend—so blogrolls are static, or maybe semi-static.

They’re also pretty lame. As a form of endorsement, they get the job done, especially from an SEO perspective, as they pass on “authority” that search engines consider in rankings. But are we endorsing every post published on every blog we’re linking to? No. We’re saying, “go there and poke around, because I like to do that.” We’re not featuring any of the content we like to poke around in on our site, at least not through the blogroll. We’re passing along our recommendations for sources of content, not pieces of content.

In general, we’re failing to remove blogs from our rolls if their quality begins to suffer: We’re betting on past content. True content curation is as granular and selective as we’d like it to be. Blogrolls just don’t cut it.

“Best of” and “Top X” lists: The incomplete standard

Lists aren't very sexy. (Flickr photo credit: Fanboy30)

Posts that highlight a number of other content pieces from external sources are relatively easy to compile, publish and distribute. One-off posts on breaking news and updates are popular and arguably valuable as well. They don’t take too long to create, and they add value through curation by informing readers of things they may have missed, passing along link juice and social cred, and maintaining a varied content mix in general.

These posts, however, have two major drawbacks. First, the content management systems they rely upon (like WordPress) aren’t made for rich media. They’re made for vertically-linear, mostly-text updates. Workarounds abound in the form of plugins and code, but piecing together a seamless curation experience takes far too much effort and behind the scenes tinkering. Second, gathering and sharing the content still relies on 3^rd party tools. We need to leave the system to find content before we share it through the system. Bookmarklets remove a step, but don’t deliver a completely fluid experience.

Social media streams: Better than fire hoses, but…

Platforms like TweetDeck have come a long way. Things like native URL shortening and picture upload and viewing make it less necessary to go elsewhere in order to find and share information. However, the amount of content we can experience before needing to click on a link to see the original source is limited. Most filtering still relies on manual friend selection and Boolean strings, and is tedious and complicated to implement. The big advantage of these social networks is near-perfect control of shared content. The stream we share was created by us.

The future of content curation: In and out in a single experience.

The idea is pretty simple and intuitive, but far from achieved. Curators need the best way to both find and share content.

In:

A backend through which streams of every popular content type can be digested easily, natively and in full. Part reader, part viewer, part gallery.

Out:

Aesthetically-customizable, rich output to a public frontend. Modular. Shareable across popular social networks. Full control over publishing—as wide or narrow of a stream as the curator cares to share with the world.

We’ve arrived when I don’t need to leave.

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Curation, attention deficit and the exaflood

by Ian Greenleigh on August 8, 2010 · 6 comments

Overwhelmed by a conversation about being overwhelmed.

I have a column in Tweetdeck devoted to all mentions of “curation”. Added shortly before I started searching for a working definition of curation, it was the perfect solution to the problem of keeping up with all the latest murmurings on a topic that continues to fascinate me. Content on the subject was being published at a digestible pace, and it seemed we all had time to reflect, analyze and, if we cared to do so, publish our own thoughts, either in comments or on our blogs. Of course, there has always been noise—automated, RSS-fed or query-driven bots aren’t easy to filter out, and this is the path that many feel will lead to success in social media. Nor are the digital brown-nosers, retweeting verbatim the words of their chosen gurus, without adding anything at all of value. But even with these annoyances, the curation conversation stream, it seems in retrospect, was relatively clear, lively and exciting.

This week, I realized that I’m no longer able to follow and participate as easily as just a few months ago. Indeed, since my first curation-related post on June 11^th of this year, 3,996 additional posts, whose titles contain the phrase “curation”, have been published on blogs across the social web.

From this Neil Perkin piece, we get a quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

“Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created. In the last two days, five exabytes of information have been created, and that rate is accelerating”.

“Exaflood” is a term coined by Brett Swanson, and it’s an interesting way to imagine what we’re up against, from both the infrastructural and intellectual perspectives.

A familiar feeling sets in—that of being overwhelmed by possibilities.

Ask anyone that truly knows me: I have too many ideas for my own good. These ideas are just as often great as they are a distraction from other ideas, more worthy of my devotion. But singular devotion has never been fully possible for me, the way that you’ll meet someone every so often that tells you they knew they wanted to be a firefighter since they were 6 years old—and followed through with this dream to its fruition. Maybe this condition is merely symptomatic of my lifelong struggle with Attention Deficit Disorder, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’m probably just more predisposed to being overwhelmed in this way, and my ADD exacerbates it to the point that I spread myself far too thin, putting in a little work here, a little development there, some planning for this and that, while ultimately getting nowhere with anything. My two biggest achievements thus far in life (degree from UT and Social Media Manager job at Bazaarvoice) came through a willing, conscious effort to maintain a sustained focus that is uncomfortably contrary to my nature.

That itch feels familiar... (A panel from "Calliope", written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Kelley Jones & Malcolm Jones III)

In Neil Gaiman’s story, “Calliope”, his Sandman character casts a deeply-debilitating spell on a human villain: that of an unyielding, constant barrage of good ideas. Without the ability to execute on them, our villain feels bludgeoned by them. To a far lesser extent, I can identify. Before seeing a thought through to its resolution or transformation into something of value, I tend to encounter another “shiny” thought and pursue it with the intellectual excitement I once had for the thought I now abandon. People without ADD encounter this, too. In a sense, social media has led us here, to a place where we all feel overwhelmed to various degrees. Perhaps others don’t become quite as overwhelmed, but none of us possess the mental resources to categorize and process the swirling mix of ideas that spins around us nearly every time we interact via social media. It’s impossible.

One of the reasons we create, more than in any other time in history, is because we have been given access through technology to millions upon millions of others—a potential audience that didn’t and couldn’t exist before the Web and social media. So now that our creative endeavors don’t have to remain our little secret; now that we can almost guarantee that our work will be seen, we are driven to create it at a feverish tempo, and driven to share it with as many people as we’re able. Similarly, now that we have access to this fire hose of information that contains, somewhere in the stream, the stuff we’re really after, we become fixated. After awhile, we become overwhelmed.

Curation maximizes cognitive efficiency.

Our typical style of consumption:

We turn on the fire hose (Twitter, Alltop, whatever)
We adjust the signal (try to create streams more suited to our tastes, make columns in our Twitter clients)
We simultaneously absorb and refine—but it’s still too much

The ultimate promise of curation:

We are delivered only the content that meets our predefined criteria (and it’s enough to digest without being overwhelmed)

We’re not there yet.

That much is obvious. But I’m seeing some promising, if scattered, developments that indicate we’re well on our way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I see something shiny I simply must attend to.

Bonus! Ian’s latest recommended reading on content curation:

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Don’t be “that guy” in social media

07.22.2010

Social Media Day was a rollicking good time, and my friends at Pinqued couldn’t have done a better job. And still, that guy showed up. This time, he took the form of a Clear Wireless salesman that stood out like a Bush ’04 bumper sticker on the back of a San Francisco Volvo. But even [...]

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Content curation: Definition before innovation?

06.24.2010

Although I’m right in the thick of the content curation definition debate, I’m starting to think it’s fundamentally a distraction from real innovation. It’s a bit like beginning a project by holding a meeting in which all you do is plan future meetings that will—ostensibly— lead to project completion. Maybe we should focus more on [...]

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Unobtrusive pop-up surveys for your blog? Try KISSinsights

06.21.2010

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the readership of my company’s social commerce blog. Who are they? Where did they come from? Which type of content are they looking for? Recent findings, like one that found that “80% of blog traffic comes from first-time visitors“, have only made me more curious. Ways of asking [...]

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What corporate blogs can learn from the world’s best ads

06.17.2010

The best ads don’t feel like ads. They don’t set off those “someone’s trying to sell me something” alarm bells that grow more acute as we mature. They stand on their own, as distinct works that punctuate the worthlessness of the other messages we encounter daily. The best corporate blogs give to their readers before [...]

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Fresh insights on social media and content curation marketing from a young professional in the field