Artikel-platforms komen en gaan

Mijn eerdere artikelen over artikel-platforms verdienen een kleine update: zoals al gevreesd is eind juli ook eLinea failliet gegaan. De site blijft operationeel in de hoop op een doorstart.

Deze “Spotify voor artikelen” bood flat-fee toegang tot een heel brede collectie aan periodieken, maar wist de dagbladpers nooit aan zich te binden.

Eigenaar Michel Suijkerbuijk wijt het bankroet in VillaMedia aan het gebrek aan marketing c.q. marketingkapitaal, iets waar Blendle veel beter in is gebleken.

Paper en Topics

Ondertussen is de dagbladpers zelf ook met artikel-platforms bezig. Het in 2015 gestarte Paper Magazine biedt 15 geselecteerde hoofdartikelen per dag voor € 6 per maand – zonder toegang tot meer. Vooralsnog lijkt het geen doorslaand succes.

Sinds kort kunnen abonnees van de 4 grote landelijke titels van De Persgroep ook gratis toegang krijgen tot de overige titels en artikelen van De Persgroep via Topics. Topics doorbreekt de beperking tot één krantenlabel en ontsluit nieuwsartikelen op een meer thematische manier.

Het gratis “verdienmodel” is natuurlijk erg interessant voor de lezers, maar het bereik blijft vooralsnog beperkt tot de eigen titels van De Persgroep. Of dit genoeg is om te floreren of te overleven? Wordt vervolgd…

Artikel-platforms – 2 jaar verder

Twee jaar geleden schreef ik een blog over artikel-platforms. Van de 4 besproken platforms ging MyJour naar eigen zeggen gisteren op zwart (alleen is iemand gisteren vergeten een stekkertje eruit te trekken). Tijd voor een korte update.

Exit MyJour

MyJour geeft zelf aan dat het niet lukte een succesvol verdienmodel neer te zetten. Iets waar Blendle ook niet in slaagt, maar wel voldoende investeerders wist aan te trekken.
Volgens MyJour oprichter Verheul is de keuze van Blendle om zich op journalisten en mediabedrijven (en hun bereik) te richten achteraf beter gebleken dan de keuze voor een uitgever-oriëntatie van MyJour.

Waarom wint Blendle (voorlopig)

De NRC noemt ook 5 lessen uit deze strijd: Investeerders, Bereik, Verdienmodel, Marketing en Onmisbaarheid.

Persoonlijk denk ik dat meespeelt dat Blendle (en eLinea) een veel betere User Experience wisten te bieden dan MyJour, en daarmee een grotere schare gebruikers wist te binden die trouw bleven en dus ook bleven betalen. In mijn vorige blog noemde ik dit curatie – iets waar Blendle m.i. goed op heeft ingezet.

De toekomst

Dat vier soortgelijke platforms naast elkaar overkill was is niet zo vreemd. Of eLinea het nog lang volhoudt naast Blendle – we zullen het zien. Het NRC artikel noemt ook voor Blendle een aantal gevaren c.q. noodzakelijke doorontwikkelingen.

Dat Artikelgemist.nl nog bestaat wil ik een klein wonder noemen, ik vind de User Experience dramatisch. Lage kosten en hoge marges op kleine omzetten houden het wellicht nog lange tijden in de lucht.

Should you date your content?

Repost from my Tahzoo Blogpost:

More and more it seems, online publishers (yes, you are a publisher) are publishing content without showing a (prominent) last-modified date. Why is that? And, more importantly, should you follow suit?

Why hide the date?

Without asking each and every one for the rationale behind this choice, I can make an educated guess:

For most readers, the date strongly indicates the content's relevance. If you are doing online research, would you take the time to read a SEO piece from 2013? Would you read any Social Media piece from 2014? Probably not.

The last few years, large groups have joined the Content Marketing movement—and rightly so. The Content Shock (full disclosure: published in 2014) has forced anyone doing serious online research to excel in content curation: weeding out the irrelevant from the excellent in seconds.

On search, Google will try to show the publication date of your content in the result list. Google will show the Title, URL, Date and a (Rich) Snippet, and the reader will use all that to rank the results:

Figure 1. If you are researching CMSes, which would you open?

It doesn’t seem like Google puts a big penalty on not having an (explicit) date, or on aging content, which is a bit strange to me: I have tweaked SOLR searches and usually the date weighs heavy in the relevance score.

But your content is evergreen, and time will not wither away its brilliance? Hiding the date from your publication could help you retain traffic to your hard-earned jewels.

Your implicit promise

Removing dates from your content prohibits me from using its age to ascertain its relevance. You, as a publisher, are making me, the reader, an implicit promise that I will not be disappointed in the timely relevance of your content.

This is a promise that is hard to uphold. Do you check your old content for relevance? Do you update your content to remain relevant? Do you unpublish aged content?

Having implemented many CMSes at a diversity of large content organizations, I know that this is rarely the case. The processes are not in place to do so, and the tools to support such processes are usually poor.

So: To date or not to date?

So, it could be that you are that one writer that keeps all your content crisp. Brilliant! I want to read! In that case, use your last-modified date to show me your hard work.

Do you fire and forget? No problem! Also put include your last-modified date—which will be equal to your published-on date.

Does your content have an extended shelf life? Kudos to you! I hope you have (or build) a reputation for this. I personally have no problem in sharing wayback content from big names—although they will have probably produced something better already.

If you want to provide relevant content to your readers, show the last-modified date. And set it at the beginning of your content so Google and your reader can use it. Google will help you here, because it puts greater value on the last-modified date than the published-on date.

Reading on?

Here's a nice read on experimenting the use of dates: Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts? (2013) Somebody was sorry sharing a 5-year-old piece, without considering it could still be relevant.

Do read the discussion section, including where they say that Twitter users hesitate to tweet anything over 14 days and make other good points about why to not date your content. Usually, it boils down to the “image” of the publisher. Relevance is in the eye of the reader.

De beste Content Marketing van 2015?

The Content Strategist heeft een top 10 met de beste Content Marketing van 2015 opgesteld.
De lijst is een interessante mix van “klassieke” Content Marketing, ruim uitpakkende video marketing en content waarbij de relatie met het merk juist heel dun geworden is.

The Message

Volgens The Content Strategist was “The Message” podcast de beste Content Marketing uiting van 2015. Een mooi gemaakt verhaal waar de naam van GE niet opvallend in voorkomt.

Is dit nog Content Marketing, als het lijntje zo dun wordt? Of is dit een goed signaal: goede content zonder een dikke klodder reclame?

Planned serendipity

Repost from the Tahzoo Blog:

A recent podcast from “This American Life” told the story of a New York literature professor who set a goal to read one shelf of books in her local library. She wanted not just to experience the jewels of the library, but also the average, or even the mediocre books, too. In her quest, she discovered some unknown treasures. This kind of “planned serendipity” stuck in my mind.

Serendipity in CX

As customer experience (CX) experts, Tahzoo tends to focus on patterns: related products, related content, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” kinds of things. We measure, segment, do predictive analysis, and base our personalization on these steps. Usually, we’re right on target.

But aren’t marketing-driven personalization engines killing diversity? Recommendation engines aren’t really that random; usually they are a list of similar items sorted by some function of probability of you—the customer—liking the item.

In one of my previous projects on accessing news articles, the serendipitous finds were often the most interesting ones. We enriched news articles through entity recognition. Entities came from sources such as DBPedia, Freebase and Geonames. With any article or entity we showed related articles and related entities. General news we tend know, so these relations were easily ignored. The unexpected links were by far more interesting—and possibly more valuable.

The same holds for my personal newsfeeds: Who hasn’t blocked Buzzfeed and similar from their timelines? All in favor of the hidden gems, curated and endorsed by your friends and peers.

Business examples

In business, serendipity has often played a big part in the success of startups. Muller & Becker wrote Get Lucky on setting the right skills to seize creativity and unplanned events. So, serendipity and business really do belong together.

CX examples

Just how happy is the union of serendipity and CX? Well, like many marriages, it has been tried with to varying success:

• Stumbleupon tries just that, with tools to manage your serendipity (now that is a real oxymoron). SU started in 2002 and thrived for years but seems to be struggling now.
• Random is an app that tries to serve a combination of relevant serendipitous news. It seemed to be going strong, being backed by Skype founder Janus Friis.
• Wikipedia includes a Random article on its homepage. How often do you hit it?
• Dating is all about serendipity, so for instance Happn uses it in its approach.
• The short-lived photo-sharing App Rando was not only labeled serendipitous but even antisocial for going against mainstream orchestrated and “like”-driven channels.
• The Highlight App seems to survive, whereas the Roamz App has already kicked the bucket.
• Spotify offers a serendipitous function: It plays a few seconds of songs that have been played simultaneously by two people in different locations on the planet (audio alert, and this is not a playlist).
• Google worked on a “Serendipity Engine” for years. Is Google Now the end result? Google Now is an App that pushes you information, based on your agenda, location and preferences without you requesting for it.
• For more examples read Sarah Perez’ TechCrunch article on Engineering serendipity.

Making serendipity work 

From the above examples it looks likes serendipitous functions haven’t been a resounding success. So are there any tricks to make serendipity work for you?

One of the Roamz founders says that you need to have a strong primary product, where you can add serendipity. Serendipity by itself is not a killer feature, but it adds strength to an already strong proposition.

Kiip seems to succeed by capitalizing on “serendipitous moments” by choosing the right time to make an offer, thus conversion ratios can soar. This success is all about choosing the right moment, and by introducing a random factor, a real serendipitous experience is created.

Lastly, to achieve serendipity, you need access to (multiple) data sources that somehow gauge the users’ sentiment. You need to reach them at the perfect, happy moment or otherwise make serendipitous combinations the users cannot make themselves.

Your result list should really be A/B tested— A) with and B) without the serendipitous find. That is the only way to really know that ‘serendipity’ is a better experience.

Managing serendipity 

Add a touch of serendipity to your CX, so your users feel pleasantly surprised by your offers, rather than feeling they are being funneled. Let your UX team be creative, but let the data team make it relevant and productive.

PS: For a regularly dose of serendipity, visit the Tahzoo blog. Better yet, follow it.

In Social Media: Earn, then Own

Repost from the Tahzoo Blog:

In the past few months, some subtle and some not-so-subtle changes have happened in the social media landscape.  Together, I think they teach us a lesson on dependencies that could—or should—influence your Marketing Technology choices.

social media by Sean MacEntee 

TWITTER

On November 20th, Twitter disabled the Tweet count feature. As explanation, Twitter provided a dominantly technical and partly functional response, but left the community guessing as to the business reasons. Access to Tweet count remains possible only through a paid API. It’s not a dramatic change, but if Tweet count was part of your KPIs, I hope you reserved some budget for a fix.

Of course you should keep using your social media channels for your Content Marketing efforts, but business-critical data should be housed in your own analytics platform, not on rented land.

YOUTUBE

With the launch of YouTube Red on October 28th, YouTube offered partner creators a new revenue-share deal. All of the major content creators have been given the choice: accept the new deal or have your content made private.

This could very well be a sweet deal for the content creators, but it is still unclear what cut the creators will get and what the results for paid and ad-supported channels will be, but I do not think the content creators were altogether happy with this unilateral change. ESPN had to remove a large part of its content, not being able to meet the new conditions.

There’s a big chance you won’t be affected by this change, but it leaves us questioning what YouTube/Google’s next change will be. Will that effect you?

YouTube remains an attractive channel to stream video, but if videos are becoming a growing part of your Content Strategy, consider hosting your own videos and be liberated from conflicting ads and other restrictions on YouTube.

GOOGLE+

Google+ has been pushed by Google since 2011, but this year Google+ was abandoned as the Google Identity framework and updated last month to the revamped Google social network. Whether it will take off now is anybody’s guess as it is not part of the Google package deal anymore.

Change is unavoidable, but we must be in control of how we interpret change. And we should be able to react to change fast to seize new opportunities. Perhaps building a Google+ Community or Collection now is your next big thing. Or, perhaps, it isn’t.

FACEBOOK

In the last two years there has been much upheaval about the algorithms Facebook uses to filter your feed. Just search for “Organic Facebook Reach” and you will understand. Facebook offered explanations, but left lots of users baffled or angry, seeing organic reach drop by 50% or more.

So what can you do besides pay for the reach you once got for free? Unlike SEO, FTO (Facebook Timeline Optimization) seems to be the new science. The best overall advice is to do your own multivariant testing, and discover what works for you and your fans.

WRAP-UP

The best advice is to keep earning your audience. Keep distributing your story through your favorite social channels, and engaging potential customers in the process. Get new people into your CRM system so you can reach out to them in a personalized way should be your main objective. And, last, make sure you own all your important content, and distribute it over channels you control. Don’t build your house on rented land!

And, finally, build in the flexibility to change – you will need it!

If you are interested in finding out how Tahzoo can help you adapt to these and other change of the age of digital transformation—perhaps with a free evaluation of your present situation—let us know. We would love to help.

Serial season 2

I am thrilled to see that Serial season 2 has kicked off.
Serial is a podcast from the creators of This American Life, and tells one true story over the course of a season.

I loved Serial season 1 (review in Dutch). I loved the intriguing plot, the art of storytelling, the great soundtrack, the podcast format and the innovative business model supporting it.

I hope season 2 will thrill me (and you) as much as season 1 did.