The Future of Content in the Age of Information Overload
The decline of newspaper popularity has been attributed to the rise of the internet and the proliferation of web-based content. With an extremely low barrier of entry and variable cost, the web allows anyone with a computer to become an independent publisher: As a result, the amount and variety of content online far exceeds print publications in most fields.
So how can newspapers survive and do well as a business in the future? Perhaps by cutting back and going more niche to provide content that features deeper analysis and investigative reporting. In an article entitled ‘The Elite Newspaper of the Future’, Philip Meyer suggests that the money and audience comes from specialized, not general media.
This particular quote explains in greater detail:
I still believe that a newspaper’s most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers.
By news, I don’t mean stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts. The old hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Now that information is so plentiful, we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available.
Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.
Scaling back on the all-you-can-eat content buffet in favor of more exclusive material does not just appeal to a hardcore audience. People get their information from one another, not just through the direct consumption of media. Catering to the leadership audience, the well-educated news junkies and opinion leaders, will help spread your content in the long run.
Will this topical specialization make newspapers profitable? Maybe. If newspapers can’t compete with blogs and online news sites in terms of speed and variety, perhaps they can trump them in terms of depth or trust. After all, feature-length content with solid, investigative reporting is not something you’ll often find on most blogs or personal sites on the web.
Daily newspapers will always be around, although they will be read less as more people come to have persistent access to the internet. A newspaper gives you the opinion of the journalist, but a blog throws in the comments of other readers. The web also gives you instant social interactivity, which is appealing for people who want to connect over what they’ve read.
To be able to share an opinion on what you’ve just read is enormously satisfying. Good content can be one-way but I think its increasingly important to socialize information and make it a facilitator for communal interaction. Print publications of the future would do well to consider developing some form of an online component to complement their offline product.
On the other hand, the problem of information overload is very real. Just think about it. More and more online/print publications are created everyday: to track and read many of them is very time consuming. People will be forced to pick and choose what to read. Some blogs will get dropped from a feed reader, others will remain. It’s easy to predict who survives.
Blogs that just repeat information already published elsewhere are providing value that can be substituted. To put it another way, these sites are completely dispensable. They lose out when a choice has to be made due to time/attention scarcity. These sites are usually the ones that just regurgitate content released on mainstream media or other larger blogs. Their identity is virtually unrecognizable. A great logo and design won’t save them.
Sites that serve as a comprehensive and reliable filter of information on a topic will be read, but they’ll always have to compete with other fast-paced news publishers. To aggregate information is incredibly easy. To process, analyze and situate it within a big picture context while offering an intriguing/unique perspective is considerably more difficult.
Those who can do so will be trusted: they are a valuable knowledge asset for any reader.
Detailed, unique content immediately stands out on its own, even without extensive marketing efforts. People don’t just want to be informed, they want to better grasp a topic in all its nuances. The joy of consumption lies not only in the skimming of a news story but the processing of new perspectives to enrich a personal worldview or professional need.
Publications that provide such content will always have an audience. In the end, it’s just a natural consequence that results from the consumer’s problem of information overload.
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The Future of Content in the Age of Information Overload
How ‘Mini-Funnel’ Websites Can Help You Increase Traffic, Generate Leads and Build Exposure
Search engines are an excellent source of high quality web traffic. They don’t send visitors who ’stumble upon’ your website or accidently clicked on an ad banner. Instead, they send you interested visitors who type in a query while fully expecting to find what they need. They are engaged right from the start and ready to buy, browse or read.
If their desire is well fulfilled by your webpage, you may end up getting a bookmark, customer or repeat reader. Added bonus: search engine traffic is consistent and usually cost-free. Ranking well for several relevant keywords or phrases could get you a steady stream of visitors everyday. That’s why some businesses choose to hire SEO firms/consultants.
There are many factors involved in the actual ranking of a site on a search engine results page, one of them being the use of keywords in the domain name. While the use of a keyword or key phrase does not alone promise a high ranking, it does seem to be a factor to some extent, partially because the domain name is often used as the anchor text for links.
Why do I talk about this? Because one way to get more search engine traffic is to build many of what I call ‘mini-funnel’ websites for specific keyword phrase/search queries. All of these slave websites could be designed as pointers to funnel traffic to your master site. Alternatively, they could be used as a stand-alone site to build exposure/accumulate leads.
Let’s do an example. I recently came across ’Is Barack Obama a Muslim‘ a one-page website created by someone to answer that one specific search query. The domain name and title tag consists of the keyword phrase (isbarackobamaamuslim) and the word ‘No’ links to the U.S democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama’s campaign website. Screenshot:
Just in case the user misspells his/her query there’s also ‘Is Barack Obama Muslin‘, a one-page website created specifically for possible incorrect search terms (the usefulness of this is offset by search engine auto-correction). In any case, this page contains 3 links, one to the Wikipedia page for ‘Muslin’, one to Obama’s campaign site and the other to the site mentioned above.
And then there’s the ‘Is Barack Obama Muslim‘ version of the site with the ‘a’ alphabet dropped. This particular one ranks the highest on both Yahoo and Google for the ‘is barack obama muslim‘ phrase, taking the no. 1 spot and even outranking Obama’s own official website. This appears to be the most established version of the three; Yahoo site explorer shows that it has 10,762 incoming links compared to the hundreds for the two other sites.
These mini-sites were created to provide answers to a specific question, one that is rather popular because rumors of Barack Obama being a Muslim have been circulating through viral emails or blogs. The goal of these two sites is to debunk the rumors by funneling traffic to Obama’s official site, which provides a clear explanation on the topic.
So the strategy is pretty clear-cut here. Create websites to answer specific search queries or deal with specific topics. Then use them to generate leads or send traffic to your home base.
Here are some elements which I think would really make these mini-sites work:
- Single-issue. Deal with too many topics or questions and your webpage will lose its immediacy. It also makes sense, especially if you’re using a keyphrase domain name.
- Reference-friendly. People link to Wikipedia pages because they provide an overview or in-depth info on a specific topic. A way to make your site more linkable is to make sure that it covers the issue in full, through original content and external links.
- Novelty/Simplicity. A single-page website is easily digestible. Two or three more pages may be fine. Use up too many pages and you’ll end up losing the novelty factor and becoming a full site. You don’t have to just use black text on a white background. Clean, unique and topically relevant site designs will always help.
- Viral components. To make people spread the word, encourage them by providing sharing options like an email-a-friend feature or link-to-me banners. Favorite tools that marketers have used include quizzes, videos and polls. Anything interactive.
- Sell elsewhere. The funnel-site is not the place to make money. The injection of a commercial motive might make it less linkable, novel and appealing. Remove or obscure commercial intent by not putting up ads and selling elsewhere (email list or master site).
The Obama examples given above use the exact keyword search query as the domain name/title tag, which encourages people to link using the same words. You don’t have to stick to keyphrases; brandable non-keyword domain names are OK too, although I think its best to at least have some keywords in the title tag, since you’re going after visitors from search.
But then again, search engine algorithms can be unpredictable. Such a site might fall out of favor for some reason and lose its rankings. That’s why its important to give it a good push at the start by promoting it on social media channels to make sure that it serves its purpose as a lead generator/traffic funnel. The resulting links might also help your site develop trust.
So, what do you think of these mini-funnel websites?
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How ‘Mini-Funnel’ Websites Can Help You Increase Traffic, Generate Leads and Build Exposure
What We Can Learn from E-mail Spammers
Imagine you’re a email spammer. Your strategy is to send out thousands of unsolicited emails everyday hoping that some unassuming individual will purchase your product or inadvertently get infected by your malware/virus, so you can phish for credit card and banking details.
So here’s the situation. You’re dealing with millions of people whom you don’t know. You might not even know their age and gender, the basic demographic yardsticks. You can data mine email archives on a zombie computer to create personalized and convincing email messages but you’re always going to be dealing with a barrier of not-enough-trust.
You don’t know the audience well. So how do you increase the chance that they’ll even open up your email and clickthrough on the links within it? By threading on common ground and leading with the familiar. People might not know who you are but they know Angelina Jolie, who incidentally is the most popular celebrity name used by email spammers.
2.28% of all emails sent in July 2008 contained her name in the subject field. As a personality famous worldwide, she’s an alluring referential point spammers use to breach the walls of unsavvy targets. The familiar is powerful. That’s why you’ll see domain urls that are almost identical to official institutions or receive emails that use the addresses of people you know.
But that’s not all, spammers also love to use current events as bait. Events like political elections, conflicts between nations and major sports events like the Olympics are all fodder used to hook unassuming users into clicking on links or videos loaded with Trojan viruses.
When you want to get someone to do something, you need to arouse their interest first. You might not know every single person who reads your site, but that’s fine. Because you do know what they are generally familiar with. Use those references to bridge the gap and connect.
Every single blog post or salesletter you write can be filled with comparisons, analogies, metaphors, name-drops, references and citations that make your offer/idea more vivid. More familiar. More enticing. So focus on getting your audience interested first, because if they tune out right from the start, they’ll never absorb your pitch or give you a second chance.
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What We Can Learn from E-mail Spammers
The Lesser Evil: Being a Better Choice Than Your Competitors
As some of you might know from my Twitter profile, I enjoy following politics and have been an avid spectactor of the on-going 2008 U.S Presidential Elections. It’s very entertaining to see how political parties compete with one another during an election to win votes.
A similar pattern has been repeating itself in the last few months. A candidate makes a statement, his/her opponent absorbs what was said and re-uses it within a campaign ad or a speech, in a manner which weakens the original statement or intent.
The back and forth between the two parties is rapid. A quote from a new interview on TV or print can be integrated into an fresh attack ad in the matter of hours. If someone makes a gaffe or says something politically incorrect, you can expect a rival response condemning it. Everything is fodder to be used in a way which weakens another’s value as a politician.
What’s the end goal of electioneering politics? It’s not just about fighting for a cause and making promises to the people. Sure, most politicians need a strong platform to run on but in the end it all comes down to one thing: being the lesser evil. Or if you’re less cynical, the better choice. It’s all a game of making your opponent look worse than you.
Less qualified, less experienced, less ethical, less intelligent, less patriotic, less in tune with the concerns of the people. If you can do that successfully, you’ll win votes and maybe even an election. Like I’ve mentioned before, political theatre is all about managing perspectives.
The same thing goes for business and marketing. Too often do we believe that we operate in a vacuum. At every single moment, somebody out there is always comparing you to your competitor. Some of them do this out publicly by writing about you in blogs or forums, other do this subconsciously or mentally whenever they are faced with the choice of making a purchase.
To win a customer or reader over, you need to manage their perspectives. You need to win their trust. You need to be the better choice, the lesser evil. To that end, you need an acute understanding and ongoing awareness of your competitors. What are other businesses or sites in your field are doing? What can you do to top their efforts?
Apart from improving the value of your offer, branding or marketing efforts can be created not only to emphasize your promise but the inadequancies of your competitor. Some political theorists advocate the strategy of attacking your opponents strengths instead of their weaknesses, the goal of which is to make people re-question their solidified beliefs.
Of course, these methods do not have to culminate in a overt ‘attack ad’ slamming your competitors. Strong-armed messages will often backfire. Sarcasm, humor and subtle visual references can leech attention from your rival’s strengths and turn consumers onto your offer.
If you’re not doing any ad-based promotions and just want to improve your competitive appeal, try monitoring the web for feedback on your competitor. Understanding how other people feel about them will allow you to revamp yourself accordingly. If they hate a flaw about your rival (e.g poor customer service), advocate your distaste for that particular weakness and take a pro-active stance to promise better-than-others service.
If they love something about your competitor (e.g comprehensive journalism) but crave more meaty or original news, offer content that is more all-encompassing or go in-depth with more feature content on a sub-topic. Turn their strengths or weaknesses into your advantage.
To sum up, this strategy is quite simple: It’s about constantly playing off your competitors actions and their perceived pros/cons. Like political elections, you’ll need to repeatedly adapt swiftly and decisively, in order to position yourself as the better choice than your rivals.
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The Lesser Evil: Being a Better Choice Than Your Competitors
How ‘Surprise’ Helps Word-of-Mouth and Viral Marketing
Emotional engagement is the key to viral marketing success. People share their everyday experiences by communicating them to others in and outside of their network. This social sharing is more rampant when the individuals develop intense feelings like fear, disgust, sadness, joy, anger and surprise.
Of all these emotions, surprise is a necessary ingredient which encourages people to pass on information they come across. Now let’s look at what surprise is and its impact on viral marketing. As partial reference, I’ll use a study from the Journal of Economic Psychology, one that examines surprise and its relationship to word-of-mouth.
What is Surprise and What Causes it?
Many researchers consider surprise a neutral and short-lived emotion that is elicited by unexpected phenomena or what is known as a ‘‘schema discrepancy’’. A schema is a theory that each person has about the nature of situations, objects and reality. The disruption of this schema is what leads to the element of surprise:
In order to have a proper representation of reality, individuals continuously check whether their schema matches the inputs coming from the surrounding environment. This check is, however, relatively unconscious As soon as inputs diverge from the schema, surprise is elicited. Schema discrepancy is the one and only cognitive cause of surprise, but the latter may also be elicited by non-cognitive causes
In other words, surprise is an emotion that occurs when something breaks the habitual pattern of thoughts we have. Such a disruption may occur on a physiological level (e.g loud sounds) or it can be deeply mental (e.g. something that challenges your world view).
Surprise’s effects are immediate: An stronger focus of attention on the stimulus, a heightened consciousness, better retention of memory at the expense of other stimuli. All of which eventually result in curiosity and exploratory behavior. This arousal also intensifies subsequent reactions, the excitation from being surprised transfers over to other experiences.
After detecting the schema discrepancy, the individual will evaluate it: the emotion of surprise is often followed by a positive or negative emotion, what we normally call a pleasant surprise or an unpleasant surprise. An interesting point to note about surprise is that most people will assume that what is surprising to them will also be new/useful information for others.
Using Surprise to Generate Word-of-Mouth
Our everyday reactions to our environment is habitual. Going through the same shop in the mall, we select and purchase items with more or less neutral emotions. Buying a pair of shoes does not involve ’disruptive’ or ‘intense’ emotions. Nothing here encourages us to share this experience with others. But this can change if you add the element of surprise.
For example, if you’re offered an unexpected and attractive freebie (e.g. bottle of wine) along with the product, it short-circuits your schema and generates surprise. You’re now much more likely to talk about the pair of shoes you bought or your feelings about the boutique or brand.
The goal here is to think about ways to elicit positive surprise by enhancing the experiences of your audience in unexpected ways. Making them feel privy to an unique situation encourages them to share or recommend your idea/product/service/brand. What does this mean? Only that one needs to invest time on understanding your audience’s schemas.
Its important to note that surprise can be used as a tool in many ways. For instance, it can used in a stand-alone format, in the form of viral ad or online video with a single message or you can integrate it into your sales or fulfillment funnel. Think about each juncture when you interact with your customer and inculcate elements of surprise wherever necessary.
Surprise can be used in large scale million dollar, multi-media/multi-platform viral marketing campaigns (e.g. The Dark Knight) or in smaller, repeating gestures like birthday cards, freebies and other addons you can attach to the product/service. Viral campaigns are short-term and hence easier to sustain surprise, while other repeating initiatives may lose their power after the audience comes to expect specific behavior and hence, develop a new schema.
In the next post on viral marketing, I’ll like to look at various examples of ads and hopefully determine a generic formula that one can you use to elicit immediate word-of-mouth.
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How ‘Surprise’ Helps Word-of-Mouth and Viral Marketing
The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems
Many have made money and built reputations by solving problems. Doctors cure the suffering of illness, psychiatrists help heal the troubled mind, lawyers protect names from being tarnished, consultants offer marketing advice and a dazzling array of products help to remove any inconvenience you might possibly encounter in your daily life.
Many people are solving problems. They’re all offering solutions to people who need them. Some are giving them away for free. Others are selling them for a price. When problem and solution is a perfect fit, a relationship of trust is built between two parties. If this helps me now, it might help me again. If this solves my problem, it might solve my friend’s problem too.
There’s a connection. The problem solver becomes more popular as more problems are solved for more people. Every time you solve a problem in a way that’s better than others, you add undeniable value to the person in need. After performing a search engine query on a topic, what pages do you bookmark? The ones that offer you the best possible solution.
As a business or website owner, you have to face the challenge of getting people to consume what you’re offering, be it free content on your blog, a piece of merchandise or premium service. You’ll have compete with other problem solvers in the market. Other blogs, other companies in the same field, other service providers. All offering different solutions.
For instance, there are many different products to solve the problem of dirty dishes. A plethora of different washing fluids, sponges, machines and racks. In most scenarios, there are more solutions than there are problems. Solutions themselves become problems to be solved.
Most of the time problem-solvers are already engaging your target audience but that doesn’t mean you should stay away. There’s always room for another solution, especially when its one that addresses the problem with more elegance, more force, more precision or more style.
First, identify the problems facing your target audience. Go deep into the user-generated recesses of the web: monitor forums, social networking websites, blogs and places where people interact and talk online. Understand the problem more deeply than your competitor. Go after nuance. Absorb feedback on current solutions. Know what they want but isn’t available.
Then, create a solution that builds on the flaws of other solutions. Or one that completely circumvents the existing paradigm by addressing the problem from a different angle, using different methodology or a combination of existing solutions. Be daring and creative.
Try going wider for broader appeal or swim in narrower channels to reach hardcore fans in order to gain a support base. The same applies to online publications like blogs on specific topics. What problems do your readers have? How are you solving them with your content? If solutions already exist elsewhere, how can you do better so you’ll be the go-to site?
Nobody is able to constantly solve problems in the best possible way to please every single person. All solutions have flaws because consumers evolve. People are also going to look elsewhere because of boredom. But understanding exactly what problems and solutions are out there, allows you to better score points or gain favor with any audience.
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The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems
The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement
Viral marketing is the process of using peer-to-peer communications in order to rapidly spread information about a brand or message. The term ‘viral’ stems from the concept of a ‘virus’, a self-perpetuating phenomenon which infects whatever it comes in contact with, spreading itself in an expanding outward arc. Your message is the virus. The carriers are your audience.
People encounter specific data or ideas daily and pass it on to their friends and other people in their network. All things equal, one can say that information is shared more rapidly when the recipient has a strong emotional connection with the specific message. They adore it. They despise it. They are deeply puzzled by it. It makes them upset. It makes them happy.
Emotions are inextricably a component of social communication. As humans, we share our emotional experiences as a way to express our individuality and maintain our relationship networks. In a Indiana University study (paywall), researchers pinpointed the six primary emotions with a strong influence on viral referral behavior.
These are surprise, fear, sadness, joy, disgust and anger. In many cases, the more disruptive the message, the sooner it is shared. Surprise, the first emotion, is an essential element of all viral marketing campaigns. It works as a foundation alongside other emotional triggers. Here are the researchers recommendations on each emotion:
- Joy. An emotion suited for irrelevant or fun brands and brands who want to revitalize their image. Suitable for products which promise life enhancement.
- Sadness. Suitable when seeking an immediate response to unfortunate events. Consumer reactions may result in short-term commitments instead of long term patronage. Best to balance sadness with messages of hope or change.
- Anger. Best suited for single issue campaigns that require an immediate reaction to perceived injustices experienced by the target market or general environment/society. Anger is a fleeting emotion and is not suitable for campaigns which require long-term action. Also does not work well with complex or subtle issues.
- Fear. An emotion that is a short-term response to a perceived threat. Must be used carefully and sparingly. Likely to receive mixed responses from target market and best accompanied by proposed solutions which solve the fear-causing problem.
- Disgust. Best targeted towards young males. Suitable for brands with a rebellious image. Should only be used intermittently to avoid unnecessary offense. Males are twice more likely to pass on messages involving disgusting humor than females.
The goal to understand the psyche of consumers has always been a goal for marketers who want influence people. Numerous studies have been conducted by academics/experts and they each give us a snapshot of how people within a specific demographic think.
But bear in mind that the few emotions mentioned in the study cannot define the parameters of each individual’s possible actions and hence, should only be taken as rough guidelines.
Human beings are far more likely to communicate ideas and information with others when they are emotionally engaged. Find the key issues that concern your audience and then inculcate them within your marketing plan to get an emotional response. But know that emotions themselves are fleeting and they can be exhausting enough to be abandoned over time.
I think the element of surprise, either pleasant or nasty, is incredibly important. It jolts people out of their habits of perception and can instantly trigger the instinct to share. This is something I’ll like to talk about more in a separate article tomorrow. Stay tuned!
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The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement
