Tags containing: "content creation"

News publishers should tell more stories

August 8, 2018 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

The story format is a dominant force in social media because stories-style content facilitates user interaction, which drives engagement. The proof is in the numbers with close to a billion Snapchat, Instagram (and IGTV), WhatsApp (Status), Facebook and Messenger, and Google AMP Stories accounts create and watch Stories. According to a new INMA report, Stories Format: News Media’s Next Social Opportunity, the format proposes a shift in journalism and a new venture for news publishers.

Stories are a mobile-centric social media storytelling format. It’s about using multi-media (video, audio, text, photos, emojis, etc.) across multiple social platforms to tell your tale. Stories also differ from newsfeeds in that they:

stay posted for at least 24 hours.
project the personality of the reporter
serve as an overlay and not dependent on newsfeed algorithms
can offer interactivity
receive top placement on every social media app

News organizations can use the Stories format as an way to connect with a younger, mobile centric audience. In particular, the news media should look to Stories users as a special force to channel real-time, fresh content around breaking stories. In this experience, the user also controls the pace and the order in which they consume the Stories content. News publishers can experiment with Stories and participate in the lean-forward Stories experience.

The Story Principles

The INMA report identifies eight key principles (creates the Snapchat anagram) for the news media to use to create effective Stories:

Suspense and Engagement – build intrigue about your story. Think about developing Stories with multiple uploads throughout the day to build suspense and keep your audience engaged.

Native and Niche – create exclusive content for Stories, nothing repurposed.

Artistic flair – exhibit artistic expression in your Stories.

Personality – ensure your Story captures the reporters personability.

Consistency – make sure your story is update and consistent with what’s happening in the world. Stories live for at least an hour.

Hype – build excitement for your story. Use your Stories as teasers for longer pieces.

Arrange and Prepare – think about storyboarding your Stories to help tell the linear narrative.

Thumb – include interactivity and use the thumb for clicking and scrolling. Polls, voting, quizzes and others are great ways to interact with users.

Who’s Telling Stories?

BBC News, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Financial Times are all employing Stories as part of their news storytelling repertoire. Examples include NBC’s Snapchat news show “StayTuned” has 4 million subscribers. BBC News runs a Friday quiz on Instagram Stories, which questions the audience on recent news facts.

Stories offer a huge opportunity for audience growth and a clear path to user engagement. More features will be introduced, and new experiences will evolve (think Augmented Reality). Monetization must now be a focus and there is a need for a new type native ad experience.

Perspectives

Creating content with intent

August 7, 2018 Jeanette Mulvey, VP B2B Content—Purch

Before bringing your “A” game, you have to know your end game.

With digital publishers facing an ever-increasing need for a constant stream of new and clickable content, it’s not surprising that content creation strategies tend to prioritize quantity above all else. But there’s a smarter way to create content – one that focuses on both quantity and quality while simultaneously developing measurable KPIs.

This process of creating content with intent means identifying what purpose your content serves early in the content development process. The key to doing that is matching your content format and distribution channels with your business needs and developing scalable processes for creating that content as cost effectively as possible.

While every company’s needs are different, the process for deploying this content strategy works no matter what your content goals are. Here are five steps to making it happen.

Get Outside the Content Bubble

Before you start developing a content strategy you need to fully understand what purpose content serves for your business. Delivering content to as many people as possible is not necessarily the most important thing for every publisher. For some, the main purpose of their content is driving revenue or leads. For others, content is mainly focused on brand building or customer retention. However, for most companies, it’s all of the above.

Identifying your goals requires involving all stakeholders in the early stages of the content-planning process. From sales and marketing to social and SEO, make sure everyone’s voice is heard early and often. It will result in a more solid content strategy that aligns with your broader business plan.

Setting Goals

Once you’ve mapped your content strategy with your business plan, you should determine early on what success will look like. If your goal is to drive traffic, figure out what your ideal traffic growth numbers are. If it’s revenue, do the same. Even if you don’t make your goals, setting them early on will give you something to aim for and help you measure your success later.

Keep in mind that your goals may change. You might discover that your intended audience is misaligned with the content you’ve created for one purpose, but in the process discover a new value for your content you hadn’t considered. Be open to adapting and evolving your goals as you learn what works.

Change the Channel

In the age of content everywhere, many publishers are struggling to find a strategy that targets their core audience and instead find themselves trying to be everything to everyone. With limited editorial resources that strategy rarely works. The result is too much content that doesn’t perform well in any particular channel and a watered-down brand that doesn’t resonate with any one, loyal group.

Before you start developing your content, assess where your desired audience likely lives and how they are most likely to find your content. Identifying a few key distribution channels will help you sculpt your content to maximize performance within a given channel.

Target Your Content

Now that you know what your content will be about and where your audience will find it, it’s time to make sure the content itself is packaged in a manner that aligns with those goals. That means identifying what formats and templates work best for your intended audience. While social media loves eye-catching images and clickable headlines, content designed to drive organic search traffic should be SEO-focused and formatted for search-friendly performance.

Aligning your content format to your end goals means again leveraging teams outside of content to gather data and advice on what works and what doesn’t. This will change over time, so a big part of targeting content requires a willingness to innovate and evolve over time.

Measuring Success

The most important step in creating a strategic and purposeful content strategy is the follow up. Find ways to measure the actual success of your content initiatives that are focused on your company goals – not simply based on standard one-size-fits-all approaches. Measuring overall traffic or page views, for example, may not be the best way of determining if what you’re doing is serving your needs.

Make sure your approach to analyzing the success of your efforts is effective by bridging the communication gap between your decision makers and your data analysts. Too often, our data experts don’t understand our broader business goals and end up assessing the data in ways that are logical but not necessarily aligned with predicting the businesses’ desired outcomes.

While each of these steps may appear to be common sense, too often they get lost in the content planning process. Teams are siloed and often don’t discuss strategy until after the content is already created. Discussing each team’s needs and concerns early will result in better performing content and more efficient processes. It may also result in better understanding across teams and shared learning that results in better performance by each.

About the author

Jeanette Mulvey loves telling small business stories. From hardware stores in Saskatchewan to fashion designers in Milan, she’s traveled the world learning what makes entrepreneurs tick and hearing their struggles. As VP of B2B Content at Purch, she is responsible for content and social media and for Business.com and BusinessNewsDaily, where she strives to ensure both sites are the go-to destination for small business advice and inspiration. Follow her on Twitter @JeanetteB2B

Industry-Research

Newsrooms need to step up their mobile game to satisfy the mobile majority

July 25, 2018 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Americans’ changing news habits have an incredible impact on how we function as an informed society. Mobile is now the most common way US adults get news, outperforming desktop or laptop computers according to a newly released study from the Pew Research Center. In fact, more U.S. adults report they get news on a mobile device (58%) than those who get news on a desktop or laptop computer (39%). Nearly all (96%) access news via the internet. The study is based on responses from over 5,000 adults from the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults.

Demographics

Not surprisingly, older adults, ages 65+, are more likely to get their news on desktop than on mobile (47% vs. 37%, respectively). While younger adults, ages 18-29, are more likely to get their news on mobile than desktop (71% vs. 32%, respectively). The research also shows men (60%) often get their news on mobile more than women (56%).
Interestingly, more nonwhite adults (61%) get their news on desktop versus white adults (56%). Partisanship also plays a role in mobile news use. Democrats (62%) are more-likely than Republicans (54%) to use mobile to access their news.
College degree users (66%) are more likely to get their news on mobile than those without a college degree (51%).

Content Creation & Delivery

It’s important for journalists and newsrooms to keep the mobile majority in mind. They must ensure that their work is accessible through mobile devices and create an optimal user experience for these news consumers. And given that almost every reporter is likely to have a phone in hand, news organizations should be working on their mobile journalism. “Mojo” focuses on teaching reporters to produce quality articles by just using their phones.

Undoubtedly, mobile offers a convenience for journalists and content consumers alike. And, given the newly minted mobile-majority, news sites need to hone their mobile skills inside and outside the newsroom.

Perspectives

Unified communications: bridging the gap between B2B and B2C content strategy

June 22, 2018 Jeanette Mulvey, VP B2B Content—Purch

When it comes to content creation, B2B and B2C are a lot more alike than most publishers think.

The philosophical and practical distinctions between these two types of content developed over decades and publishers have come to view them as being so different that they can’t be managed or marketed jointly. Nothing could be further from the truth. The digital democratization of access to content means that B2B and B2C publishers are no longer targeting different audiences at different times. Instead, all content – regardless of topic – is in competition for the same audience.

The smartest strategy for both kinds of publishers is to reconcile the differences between the two and gain the benefits of learning from the best practices of each. Here are four ways to start thinking differently about the divide between B2B and B2C content so that you can build a content plan that leverages the pros and cons of each strategy.

People First

B2C publishers consider readers to be “consumers” – not only of their content, but of the goods and services publishers are marketing. B2B marketers and content creators think of their audiences as entities: businesses, teams, or departments.

In the age of B2Me marketing, it’s time to start thinking of them – all of them – as people. Everyone who comes in contact with your content is a person with ideas, desires and problems. Content that helps inspire those ideas, stoke those desires and solve those problems will be relevant to all readers – whether they are watching a video on the couch on a Saturday afternoon or in the office reading an article about accounting software.

Luckily, your content is created by people who have a lot more in common with readers than you might think. Regardless of content format or subject matter, the first step in any content plan should be to encourage your writers and editors to focus first on who is reading and why. Thinking about the external impact content will have versus focusing on the internal process of creating it is the first step to building successful content strategies for both B2C and B2B.

Forget Selling. Start Relating

Once you start focusing on your audience early in the process, it will change the way you think about creating and delivering content. B2B content, in particular, has long been focused on marketing or selling rather than informing, educating and partnering with readers. When content is focused exclusively on customer acquisition, it’s a one-way conversation that offers little to the reader, but asks a lot in return.

In this way, B2B content creators need to get better at emulating B2C content strategies. Creating content that is relatable and engaging rather than promotional and focused exclusively on selling, builds relationships with readers first. Once you’ve established a bond with your audience that is based on first offering them something they need, you’ll be in a better position to start connecting in a way that is multi-directional and requires something of them in return.

Teaming Up

B2C publishers, on the other hand, have a lot to learn from their B2B counterparts when it comes to creating content that is monetizable beyond traditional advertising and paywalls. B2B publishers have developed multi-stream revenue strategies that allow for content monetization across multiple platforms and at various stages in the buying process. B2C, on the other hand, rarely takes monetization opportunities into account early in the (non-native) content creation process. Too often, B2C sales teams are playing catch up trying to market and generate revenue from content after it’s complete, rather than partnering with content teams during the creation process.

B2B teams have taken the early lead on developing content creation processes that align editorial efforts and sales goals from the outset. The fear that too much input from advertisers will taint traditional editorial processes and impinge on journalistic freedom have resulted in an unwillingness to develop new ways of working together to identify your end-game and develop content designed to get you there.

Open Source Content

The next hurdle for both B2C and B2B publishers will be adapting to the post-expert age of content creation. No longer do readers care who is creating the content they’re consuming. An Amazon review often holds as much sway with readers as a carefully researched professional review. While expert-written, fact checked content is still essential, smart publishers on both sides of the business are finding ways to incorporate user generated content (UGC) directly into their strategy.

Commenting and social interaction are no longer enough to bridge the worlds of expert content and UGC. Instead, both B2C and B2B need to find ways to partner with amateur content creators and provide platforms for them to participate in the content creation process as part of the overall content strategy.

B2B has done that well with community content and crowd-sourced user reviews but struggles with integrating social media and building lasting relationships with outside contributors. B2C has done a great job leveraging social media and integrating it into content. However, building communities around key B2C media brands has been less successful.

In the age of proactive, publisher-driven content distribution we all need to learn from each other. Yes, today’s consumers seek out content they desire. But smart publishers are constantly on the lookout for ways to anticipate their needs and deliver the right content in the right channel. This shift in this content distribution dynamic will drive a continued evolution of digital content away from B2C and B2B distinctions and require both types of publishers to think more broadly by embracing as many of these strategies as possible.

About the author

Innovation

How mojo thinking scored Trinity Mirror a top-shelf podcast

April 27, 2018 Corinne Podger—Director, Digital Skills Agency

As podcast ideas go, it was a cracker. Make a six-part show about Black Mirror and release the entire series for fans to binge on as an accompaniment to the show’s fourth season on Netflix. That was the genesis of Black Mirror Cracked, the brainchild of Trinity Mirror’s editorial trainer Suchandrika Chakrabarti. She also championed the idea of “mojo” thinking, which leverages relatively inexpensive and accessible tools to create compelling content.

“Podcasts have had a huge resurgence, as we all know, and the editors were looking for ideas for new ones, as this format attracts sponsorship and all media companies are looking for new sources of revenue,” she says.

“Having written about Black Mirror in 2016 when the first Netflix series came out, and had good numbers and SEO value from that, I thought a podcast would give us an extra edge, particularly in the US where the show has such a good audience and where podcasts are so popular,” she says.

To promote the podcast on Trinity’s text channels, Chakrabarti arranged an interview with Black Mirror’s creators, Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones. The interview was recorded on an iPhone, with a simple clip-microphone that can be bought online for $11, with a view to writing it up later.

But when Chakrabarti and her producer Daniel Jackson listened back to the recording, they felt it was good enough for a standalone seventh episode, as well as to provide content for the other six. “We decided to put a clip from it at the top of each of our podcasts, because it’s great to have Charlie Brooker’s voice as the first thing you hear,” she says.

Smart Phone Thinking

Using a smartphone was a radical move at Trinity, where most podcasts are recorded in a sound-booth with a professional microphone – but less radical for Chakrabarti and Jackson, who have helped pioneer ‘mojo’ at Trinity for capturing video and doing Facebook Lives in the field. The audio wasn’t perfect, but the pair crossed their fingers that the audience would forgive a slightly rawer sound in return for hearing from Brooker and Jones.

It paid off. Black Mirror Cracked went live on 29 December, the same day as the Netflix series, and went straight to Number 2 in iTunes. In all, it spent four months in “Bingeworthy.”

“The numbers were insane – 20,000 listens in the first week – far beyond what we were expecting,” Chakrabarti says. “They were listening very far into each podcast, too, not getting bored or switching off, so we were definitely doing something right.”

Chakrabarti says American audiences were more tolerant of the podcast’s raw sound than British listeners. She attributes this to the high audio standards set by the BBC, which consistently reaches over half the UK population each week.

“It’s totally understandable that anything less will attract critics. I’d say that we also suffered from putting all seven episodes out at once, because we improved our technique and sound as we went along with the production, but the audience got to hear them all at once,” she says.

“And no one pointed out the Charlie Brooker episode as having worse audio than any of the others, so it definitely wasn’t the smartphone. It was the learning we needed to do along the way.”

A Smart Investment

Black Mirror Cracked added additional episodes, for a total of 22, and completed its run last week. The other equipment used to make it consisted of a podcast microphone from the Blue Yeti range ($130-$270), and a Mac software program called Audio Hijack for recording Skype interviews ($59). Audio editing was done on the free, open-source editor Audacity.

“So our costs, minus our time, were just a shade over 200 dollars, US,” Chakrabarti says.

Other Trinity Mirror departments are now considering swapping the sound-booth for smartphone recordings in the field, particularly when a sense of ‘being present’ is part of the story, like sports matches. Chakrabarti says she wants to see more text reporters give ‘mojo’ – mobile journalism – a try.

As she points out, text journalists are recording interviews all the time and much of what they capture goes to waste. She recommends going into those situations at least thinking the audio might be good enough to publish on its own. Besides, “the combination of my phone and clip mic are small enough to stay in my bag all the time, and of course the device takes great photos and video – so if the chance for a great story comes up, you’ll never miss it.”

Corinne Podger is a digital journalism educator and consultant for media outlets, NGOs and businesses. She is a specialist trainer in smartphone storytelling for television, radio, online and social media, and has taught more than 2500 journalists and communicators to use smartphones for TV and social video, radio, podcasts and photography.

She has worked as a trainer with BBC Media Action, Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Financial Times, Fairfax Media, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Konrad Adenaeur Stiftung and supported learning for journalists from over 30 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Australasia.

Corinne has also lectured on mobile journalism at universities and colleges in Australia, Europe and the United States, and speaks regularly at journalism conferences.

She runs bespoke consultancies and individual workshops on request. To contact Corinne, click here.

Innovation

Do you need a head of apps?

March 6, 2018 Corinne Podger—Director, Digital Skills Agency

Mobile journalism sounds like a great idea for cash-strapped media outlets. Get your journalists to use smartphones to shoot and edit video and photos, and save a bundle versus the cost of DSLRs and pro camcorders.

It sounds simple enough. But newsrooms that are getting on the “mojo” bandwagon have learned the hard way that asking journalists to find and use tools to create mobile content on their own can be a quality control nightmare.

Most consumer video editing apps reduce the size of a video file on export. Some give it a squeeze on import as well, meaning the finished video is fine for social platforms but useless for television. Some audio editing apps will export MP3s, but charge extra for broadcast-standard .WAV files.

A Very British Approach

The BBC recommends third-party apps to its journalists, and even creates apps to help its reporters file directly into the broadcaster’s servers.

So, what’s an editor to do? Well, one way is to appoint someone to curate your apps. At the BBC, where smartphones are increasingly used to create content for linear, on-demand and social platforms, there is a “Mobile Apps” team, which includes a group of IOS developers.

They’ve developed an in-house video recording app that shoots at 25fps (a requirement in PAL-system countries like the UK) rather than the standard 30fps, and which can file video recordings direct to the BBC’s news ingest system. The team also curates an internal-facing BBC Apps Store, where journalists can download bespoke BBC and recommended third-party apps.

The BBC’s internal training department also employs mobile journalism trainers like Marc Blank-Settle and Deirdre Mulcahy who teach reporters how to use a smartphone for radio, photography and video storytelling, and how to use the apps best suited to their jobs. In mid-2017, the BBC published some of that learning during a ‘Mojo Week’ at the BBC Academy.

That being said, the BBC is a huge news outlet with 8,000 journalists, who are also free to try out new apps to find ones that work for them.

Going Dutch

The Dutch broadcaster Omrop Fryslân is a much smaller operation than the BBC, and its in-house mobile trainer Wytse Vellinga has a high level of control over the apps and phones the reporters use to make TV, radio, online and social content.

Every journalist is required to learn to use their phone to create content for all three platforms, and to use a curated list of apps that give the best results. They receive two days’ training and follow-up support.

“If you do not standardize, people tend to get lost in what they can do with their phones,” Mr Vellinga says. “There are just too many different apps out there that claim to deliver quality results – but those results will vary too much for use in a newsroom.”

The Irish Way

A combination of the above two approaches is in place at Irish broadcaster RTÉ, where smartphones are also used across all platforms – radio, TV, online and social. Many journalists at RTÉ use smartphones some of the time, but the broadcaster also has a small team of mobile journalists who shoot and edit on mobile and publish to online and social first, and then, if appropriate, repurposed for television.

The team is led by video journalist Philip Bromwell, who says reporters across the organization are encouraged to use apps designed with reporters in mind – Filmic Pro for shooting, and Luma Fusion for editing – and to adopt consistent styles in their choice of fonts and supers.

“This content could include anything from a reporter taking a still photograph for an online article, to a journalist shooting and editing an entire story on their phone,” he says.

Having an in-house ‘mojo’ team means any RTÉ reporter can get immediate, job-specific guidance from a colleague on which app to use – Bromwell says his team has experimented with more than 50 and narrowed day-to-day use down to “a handful” – and the wider newsroom has a small group of experts to advise on file formats and workflows.

“That said, I also encourage colleagues or trainees to explore and ‘play’ with apps themselves,” Bromwell says. “Mobile journalism is still evolving – none of us has all the answers yet!”

So, while the proliferation of accessible and affordable mobile content creation tools abound, it is important that you set standards for the content. Experimentation is essential, but so are leadership and quality results.

Corinne has also lectured on mobile journalism at universities and colleges in Australia, Europe and the United States, and speaks regularly at journalism conferences.

She runs bespoke consultancies and individual workshops on request. To contact Corinne, click here.

Innovation | Perspectives

Publishers should build products that customers want to pick

February 1, 2018 Thomas Baekdal, Founder, Publisher and Media Analyst— Baekdal.com

The shift to abundance is a very well-known trend in the media industry, and something that most publishers are struggling with. But the dynamics behind this trend are not unique. As soon as you get too much choice in a market, it starts to split in in two very different directions.

The Supermarket Effect

One direction is what I call the “supermarket effect,” where you focus on building scale with content that covers people’s general needs. This works great if you are big publisher, because then you can use your size to drive revenue, even though the value per article is extremely low.

But this is also where the problem is. Because, if your editorial strategy is to be a supermarket, being small just doesn’t work. There is no market for a smaller supermarket.

This is the problem we now see in the media. Most publishers have traditionally been centered around creating “packages of random content,” which, fundamentally, means the they are designed to be a supermarket of content. This worked great for a while. But in today’s world of abundance, it puts a lot of pressure on smaller publishers.

The Local Papers

We see this very clearly when we look at local newspapers (especially outside the larger US cities). Think of it like this: A local newspaper is like a small grocery store with a little bit of everything for the local community. And for many years, it was the go to place for everyone in its community. But imagine what happens when, one day, Amazon opens a Whole Foods store next door.

The answer is obvious, the smaller local store is outcompeted.

Being local is no longer viable, because you can’t compete with Amazon’s many advantages of being able to offer more items, at lower prices, with bigger marketing budgets, Amazon Prime, and a hugely scalable back-end logistic system.

We can see this in play when with companies like Meredith acquire Time Inc. Their strategy is to become a bigger supermarket by consolidating not just how many publications their own, but also how they work. And, as a strategy, this is a good approach if they can build up enough scale.

The Selective Approach

But this isn’t the only way to win the future. Another way is to become the opposite of a supermarket of content … which is to “get picked.”

People use supermarkets when they are just filling their daily needs without really thinking too much. So, the opposite of this is to get people to think and to choose to spend time with you. To do this we have to change the way we exist as publishers. Instead of focusing our editorial strategies around creating packages of content, we must start to build publishing products that people can (and will) pick.

Let me give you an example.

Most traditional magazines do reviews, but they are not designed for people who have a specific need. Instead, they are just published like any other article. This is not what people want when they are looking for a review. There is a very big difference between people who just sit down and flip through pages (or randomly come across links on Facebook), and people who are actually looking for answers. So, what we see now are companies like The WireCutter, which was created in 2011 by Brian Lam, to be a new type of review site that only focused on bringing you very high-end and very detailed reviews.

And look at what has happened. Because The Wirecutter designed itself around people when they need a review, they have become the destination for people to go to when they want to figure out what products to buy.

This is the difference between just having a “supermarket” editorial focus where the reviews are just another random story and having a “product” editorial focus where the content is designed to solve a specific need.

Product Makes Perfect

And this also applies to many other things. For instance, a traditional fitness magazine often has a wide-ranging selection of stories about health, nutrition, and exercise, but there is no real goal or structure to them.

Then look at the digital native publishers. They are not creating random articles. Instead, they are building fitness publishing products. They offer you actual training, they create meal plans for you, and they actively help you achieve your health goals.

A simple example: Compare Women’s Health with The Body Coach.

Consider business publications: Are you just giving business people random news? Or are you helping them do their job better? Are you providing them with content, data, and insights that they can put to work?

Watch YouTube

On YouTube, for instance, YouTube itself is the “supermarket of random videos.” And, because of this, every single YouTuber knows that the only way to be successful on YouTube is to instead do something that people will specifically pick. So, every YouTube channel is defined around a very narrow focus, because you need that to create something for people to connect with.

YouTubers know that you can’t be a supermarket within a supermarket. Meaning, you can’t just give people a little bit of everything in a place where there is already a lot of everything.

This is now the reality of the media.

A few larger publishers will attempt to become the modern supermarkets of publishing and they may succeed. But next to this is another marketplace, where individual publishers create publishing “products” that are designed to be picked. The kind of specialty places that they turn to when they have a more defined moment and want something specific.

This is your challenge for the future. What will you do to get picked?

Thomas Baekdal is a media analyst and publisher of Baekdal Plus.

Industry-Research

From clicks to engagement: The enhanced art of writing headlines

November 13, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

What makes a great headline, and why? How can headlines make the casual skimmer stop and read? While much has changed in media’s shift from print to digital, these fundamental questions haven’t. Editors and writers correctly describe headline writing as an art — but with all the technology out there, there is a scientific way to put evidence behind that art, and help publishers grow their engaged readership as a result.

Changing behaviors

Reading, scanning, skipping, sharing – our reading behaviors have changed dramatically in recent years. Chartbeat data shows that on average, only around half (55%) of readers who click through to content actually read what they land on.

The context of headline writing has changed as well. Media objectivity, which involves writing factually true and balanced content, is sometimes at odds with the goals of social media marketing, which values metrics like shares, likes and clicks. Increasing readers’ engagement with content can align objectivity and editorial integrity with the need to grow audience in a world where more than half of traffic to publisher sites is driven by platforms like Facebook.

However, publishers can support those better reading behaviors. Recent Chartbeat research shows that despite our changing reading and writing habits, there are scientific ways to improve the likelihood that something will get read.

The role of language and technology

In an analysis of around 100,000 headline tests and 250,000 individual headlines, we examined linguistic traits of successful and unsuccessful headlines and found that language really does matter.

What we see is that words like “what” and “where,” as well as numbers, quotations and superlatives (like best and worst) lead to more readership, whereas using question marks or time references can actually hurt. Interestingly, short headlines actually have a negative effect on readership of content as well, whereas notably longer headlines have no effect.

In a separate study, we also looked at the impact of headline testing technology and its ability to improve the number of visitors who read for more than 15 seconds. What we found surprised us. In a comprehensive evaluation of headline tests that use Chartbeat’s multi-armed bandit testing model, we discovered that alternative headlines – ones that, without testing, would never have seen the light of day – outperform the original roughly two-thirds, or 62% of the time. That means most headline writers only get headlines right the first time for 38% of stories. But technology can vastly improve these results.

A headline should not only entice readers to click and see more; it should drive consumption of a story. Of those 62% of stories, the alternate headline saw on average a 78% lift in traffic. It also led to a 71% lift in readership, measured by quality clicks: visitors who spend more than 15 seconds or more of engaged time with an article.

The bottom line

While gut instinct around language matters, technology can enhance that ability to find the right fit between content and audience. This, in turn, can dramatically improve engagement with content.

These days, publishers wear many hats. They have to write, edit, promote, monetize, optimize and grow quality audiences. The good news is that science — both in terms of predictive modeling and engagement-focused technologies — can help us improve the imperfect art of writing so we can better connect with readers and, ultimately, with each other.

Industry-Research

Long-form content and print key to convey insights to the C-suite

June 9, 2017 Bruce H. Rogers, Chief Insights Officer—Forbes Media

In a world of ever-increasing choices in digital content experiences, 140 character limitations, chatbots, filters, conversational interfaces, and virtual reality, it may come as a surprise that senior executives still value long-form, research-based content and, yes, even the printed page for their business insights.

To find out how they want to receive business insights, Forbes Insights and Deloitte conducted a survey of almost 300 CXOs globally. We asked them about the types of content they want to read, what channels they prefer and where they get their most valuable business insights. Some of what they told us may surprise you. The report based on that survey, “Thought Leadership in Action: Strategic Content to Help CXOs Learn and Lead,” explains how to become a trusted, respected and sought-after source of thought leadership.

The study shows that many C-level executives defy prevailing wisdom, with more than one-third of them preferring traditional longer data-based formats, in print. The interest in long-form content may seem counterintuitive. In the era of “snackable” and omnichannel content, CXOs do find value in short-form content. However, they consider it “icing on the cake.” The needs of this particular audience are key: CXOs need to think and act strategically. Thus, they often opt for longer pieces that take them from hypothesis, through case studies, to conclusion, and are based on credible data.

While content needs to be designed for and distributed via multiple digital channels, there is still room for print, with half of CXOs saying that reading business insights in print is still important to them. Print tends to be the preferred format for taking in longer pieces. However, the preferred format also varies by type of publication. Output from consulting firms is usually read online, while management journals are consumed offline.

Our analysis of how CXOs want to receive business insights shows that they are most interested in strategic content. Such content delivers a narrative based on curated data that spells out the hypothesis and proceeds to prove or disprove it. In other words, strategic content provides guidance and actionable takeaways instead of simply signaling issues by presenting reams of data.

Thus, CXOs tend to favor organizations that can produce such long-form, credible content based on deep experience, which can help them set strategy or take the pulse of the market. Business publications and consulting firms come out on top of the list.

Different channels work for different types of content. This includes print, the most traditional—which is favored for longer pieces—and digital channels, which are preferred when reading general news media. What is most important is that each piece of thought leadership is presented on its most preferred channels for a given audience, and that it is designed for each specific channel to make it easily readable.

Bruce H. Rogers is the Chief Insights Officer for Forbes Media. He is responsible for managing the Insights division, which creates and distributes thought-leadership, research-based content for blue-chip customers such as IBM, Google, KPMG, SAP, CIT, and Deloitte and he oversees the Forbes Insights content channel. He is also responsible for the company’s CMO Practice overseeing the group’s creation of content through the Forbes CMO Network section of Forbes.com, and events such as the annual Forbes CMO Summit. Prior to this role, Rogers was the Chief Brand Officer responsible for all integrated marketing, brand communication, research and sales support activities for Forbes Media.

Perspectives

Politics is becoming pop culture news. So what does this mean for publishers?

May 5, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

It is important for publishers to understand what readers are consuming. However, it isn’t necessarily the case that publishers should only write what consumers want to read. While there’s great appeal in producing content with wide appeal, publishers must remain true to their voice while trying to reach audiences.

In the last year, the global political climate has changed, impacting both news production and consumption. It has by no means been a “regular” year for politics – filled with unexpected election results, political scandal, terrorism and major ideological friction points around the world. And this is reflected in consumer behaviors. Readers can’t help but stay tuned into the latest political news. As Bustle editor Kate Ward put it, “Politics is dominating the conversation in a way we haven’t seen for a long time. Pretty much everyone wants to talk about it on a daily basis.”

And we’ve seen this first hand. With everything going on, political coverage dominated Chartbeat’s Top Stories of the year in 2016 as the most engaged with topic of the year. However, what is potentially more surprising is that this trend has held strong. A recent Chartbeat study that measured article production and consumption across online publishers found that across a sample of thousands of publishers, there was a rise in both political coverage and readership.

The Political Effect

And in the U.S., following the election of Donald Trump, politics has been so dominant it is permeating all categories of news including lifestyle and entertainment. It has reached the point that it is even becoming pop culture news.

Let’s look at two major pop culture events that seemingly have nothing to do with politics: The Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards. During the event, Donald Trump has in-article mentions more times than some of the award winners. And while he didn’t quite outshine Adele or Beyonce, he definitely came close, which is hard to do.

“We have absolutely seen an unprecedented interest in political stories from our readers in the past six to 18 months,” said Kate Lewis, digital editorial director at Hearst.

Engagement and Opportunities

This spike in interest has been good for publishers seeking to grow their audience or reach new readers.

Recent Chartbeat research found that readers engage with political content on average six seconds longer than the median for other categories. And when people engage longer with content, they are more likely to return to your site, and even subscribe. In the chart below, you can see that as initial time spent engaging with content increases, so does the probability that a visitor will return to read more in the future.

As Lucia Moses’s wrote in Digiday, “In the Trump era, political news is everyone’s beat.” So the challenge — and opportunity — for publishers in this media climate is: How do you serve as that trusted resource for your visitors on issues like politics, while also being true to your brand voice? Keeping an eye on these changes in reader behavior is critical to optimizing your audience development strategy for the current state of the industry. If covered successfully, capitalizing on the new interest in politics should yield more engaged and loyal readers.

Terri Walter, the Chief Marketing Officer of Chartbeat, works every day to ensure that publishers and newsrooms have the tools and insights they need for quality content to thrive. A digital marketing veteran of 20 years, Terri has worked over the course of her career to position high potential brands and spearhead thought leadership in media and analytics at companies including DoubleClick, Razorfish and Microsoft Advertising.

Perspectives

Do people choose the news? Recent evidence says yes.

March 20, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

There is a broad spectrum of news out there, ranging from well-balanced, high quality content to alternative facts. However, many have expressed concern that the media may not be covering key issues fairly. That, of course, begs the question: Whose version of the story is true?

Recently, The New York Times’ Upshot team and Chartbeat published results from a study of supply and demand in the news. Essentially, we sought to uncover how many articles news organizations wrote about a given event compared to the demand for these articles among their readers, measured by “engaged time.”

Both Sides Have a Story

Chartbeat researchers looked at 148 news publishers, divided into liberal and conservative buckets by The Upshot using scores from a study done at the University of Michigan. They then studied article supply and reader demand of six recent news topics:

Inauguration crowd size debate
Alleged Bowling Green massacre
Muslim travel ban
Michael Flynn’s resignation
Super Bowl LI
The Grammy Awards

The results showed that key issues were covered roughly equally by the left and right.

Demand and Supply

However, while the supply of articles written on each topic was generally consistent across conservative and liberal news outlets, the demand from readers was not. Depending on the topic, conservative and liberal readers each showed different patterns of news avoidance. Could this be due to stronger left-leaning coverage or readership in the media, or variations in distribution methods among publications?

According to Kevin Quealy of The Upshot, there could be another simpler reason stemming from decades of psychology on the subject: People don’t like hearing bad news. “Generally, people prefer information consistent with their beliefs, views and prior behaviors, and avoid information that’s inconsistent,” said James Shepperd, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida who has written extensively on information avoidance.

Polarizing shades of reality may not only be shaped by Facebook distribution or the content supplied from news organizations, but also by what consumers read. It’s consumer behavior that shapes what gets read and what doesn’t. After all, news consumers are the ultimate constructors of their own realities.

(Want to learn more? check out The New York Times’ The Upshot.)

Industry-Research | Perspectives

What 2016’s most engaging content teaches us

February 14, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

From the U.S. Election and Brexit to the summer Olympics; from terrorism to the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, 2016 was filled with stories that 2016 captured our attention. But everyone wants to know what type of content captures the most engagement.

It is heartening to see that it was quality journalism from well-established media outlets, not fake news, that people engaged with most. Chartbeat’s Most Engaging Stories of 2016 ranked the most captivating articles of the year from quality publishers as defined by Total Engaged Time — the total amount of time visitors spent actively engaged in content.

The Chartbeat Most Engaging Stories of 2016 were selected from over 46 million articles on over 50,000 global sites, and registered over 2.5 billion minutes of active engaged time.

From 538’s General Election predictor, which received more Engaged Time than the top five stories of 2015 combined, to personal narrative, longform and interactive, the top stories span categories and formats. More importantly, they teach us many lessons about how news is consumed and shared.

Interactive, data-rich storytelling is alive and well. It’s no surprise that the topic that garnered the most amount of Engaged Time during 2016 was politics, which had nine of the top ten stories. In many ways, this was also the Year of the Interactive. Election prediction pages, live results pages and interactive maps from the likes of 538, BBC, Fox News, CNN and the NY Times captivated our attention and drove billions of engagement minutes.
First person journalism resonates and gets shared. From major investigative pieces rooted in undercover work to the moving letter from a Stanford student to her assailant, first-hand accounts affecting personal and societal rights captured attention as well as empathy. (See “A sexual assault victim’s powerful message to her Stanford attacker,” a first-person narrative from The Washington Post). These powerful, personal narratives were strongly driven by social traffic, demonstrating that when we emotionally connect with a story, we’re more apt to share and discuss it with our network.

The context of premium publisher environments matter.
The articles that made the list and came out on top, regardless of topic, were those that stayed true to a publisher’s voice and audience. According to our research, readers that came direct to a publisher’s site were the most loyal and engaged in terms of time spent. Those who came from social and search were less engaged. In other words: All impressions are not created equal.

Promoting articles is not just an art; it is a science.
It is not enough to just write compelling content anymore. Consumer reading behavior varies by device, time of day and referrer channel (i.e. social, search). It also demonstrates specific patterns based on content type (i.e. breaking news vs longform). For example, as we’ve seen in previous Chartbeat research, in times of breaking news like the election, consumers use search first to find what they are looking for, then after the event, they turn to social to interact and share.For publishers producing quality content, it is critical to understand these audience platform patterns across social and search and how best to promote your stories.

We expect consumer engagement around quality journalism to continue well into 2017.
Publishers didn’t shy away from covering the truth in 2016, and if the early stories of 2017 are any indication, we expect this to continue. In fact, readership so far in January (of politics in particular) is seeing extremely high pageview and concurrent levels, indicating that consumers value quality journalism more than ever.