social – Anna Wahrman

Junk at scale vs. quality in proportion

October 12, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

SF Weekly recently published an in-depth look at the Bleacher Report, a sports-centric site whose content is populated almost entirely by its readers. As the article notes, it “[tapped] the oceanic labor pool of thousands of unpaid sports fanatics typing on thousands of keyboards.” The site is user-generated content taken to its logical extreme, for good and bad. The good being the scale of coverage; the bad, the poorly written content.

But now it’s gone pro, hired real writers and editors, and been polished up — and the “lowest-common-denominator crap,” editor King Kaufman says, has been gussied up. The site is now owned by Turner Broadcasting, which snapped it up this summer for a couple hundred mil. Not bad for a site that was built on the backs on unpaid superfans.

I’m not interested in the Bleacher Report per se, but I am interested in the idea that nowadays, crap at scale matters less than quality in proportion, because it’s part of a larger trend sparked by disparate forces in the evolution of the Internet. They’ve come together to wipe away a short-lived business model that called for garbage content that ranked well in search but left the user unfulfilled. This model’s most prominent proponent was Demand Media (and its sites, among which are eHow and Livestrong), but certainly the Bleacher Report qualifies too.

The article does a good job explaining how Bleacher Report (and Demand) initially found so much success — basically, by cheating search engines:

Reverse-engineering content to fit a pre-written headline is a Bleacher Report staple. Methodically crafting a data-driven, SEO-friendly headline and then filling in whatever words justify it has been a smashing success.

The piece also touches on the larger context of the shift from what it calls “legacy media” to the current landscape:

After denigrating and downplaying the influence of the Internet for decades, many legacy media outlets now find themselves outmaneuvered by defter and web-savvier entities like Bleacher Report, a young company engineered to conquer the Internet. In the days of yore, professional media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on information. Trained editors and writers served as gatekeepers deciding what stories people would read, and the system thrived on massive influxes of advertising dollars. That era has gone, and the Internet has flipped the script. In one sense, readers have never had it so good — the glut of material on the web translates into more access to great writing than any prior era. The trick is sifting through the crap to find it. Most mainstream media outlets are unable or unwilling to compete with a site like Bleacher Report, which floods the web with inexpensive user-generated content. They continue to wither while Bleacher Report amasses readers and advertisers alike.

But that being the case, we’re now entering a brand-new era, one that will attempt to combine the scale and optimization of the new guys with the polish of the old. And we’re seeing the end of the SEO-engineered-dreck model for three reasons:

1. The rise of social media as currency
2. Google’s Panda algorithm change
3. Advertiser interest

1. The rise of social media as currency
Used to be, back in the aughts, when you were looking for (for example) a podiatrist, you’d Google “podiatrist 10017.” You’d get pages and pages of results; you’d sift through them and cross-reference them to your insurance provider, then go to the doctor, discover he had a terrible bedside manner, and decide you’d rather keep your darn ingrown toenail. Nowadays, your first move would probably be to ask your friends on Facebook or Twitter, “Anyone in NYC have a recommendation for a good podiatrist who takes Blue Cross?” And you’d get a curated response from a dependable source (or even a few of them).

Plainly, social media users endorse people, products and articles that are meaningful. You’d never tweet, “Great analysis of how to treat an ingrown toenail on eHow” (at least not unironically). But you might recommend an article from Fast Company on the latest from ZocDoc.

There will always be a place for search — it’s one of the main entryways into any news or information site, and that’s not going to change anytime soon — but good quality content from a trustworthy source is becoming increasingly valuable again.

2. Google’s Panda algorithm change
In early 2011, Google changed its algorithm in an update it called Panda. This meant that, broadly speaking, better content ranked higher in Google’s results. Its advice to publishers regarding SEO was basically, “Create good content and we’ll find it.”

No longer could Demand Media’s and Bleacher Report’s search-engine-spamming formula win them page views. In fact, Demand Media completely retooled itself in response, saying that “some user-generated content will be removed from eHow, while other content will run through an editing and fact-checking process before being re-posted.”

In other words, quality started to matter to users, who let Google know it, and Google responded accordingly. The result was a sea change from how it had been done, leading to a completely new business model for Demand and its ilk.

3. Advertiser interest
Advertisers have long shunned poor quality content. From the beginning, they almost never wanted placements on comment pages, which can feature all-caps rants, political extremism at its worst and altogether unsavory sentiments (which is why many news sites feature comments separately — you thought that tab or link to comments on a separate page was a UX choice? Hardly). The SF Weekly article quotes Bleacher Report’s Kaufman, who says of its transformation to better quality stuff, “This was not a decision made by the CEO, who got tired of his friends saying at parties, ‘Boy, Bleacher Report is terrible.’ Bleacher Report reached a point where it couldn’t make the next level of deal, where whatever company says ‘We’re not putting our logo next to yours because you’re publishing crap.’ Okay, that’s the market speaking.”

So it is. A longer story for another time, but neither advertisers nor publishers are getting a lot of bang out of banner ads, CPMs and click-through rates. Increasingly, the least you can do to appeal to the market, if you’re a publisher, is create good content. How to do it without breaking your budget and while devising new technologies, maintaining your legacy product and operations, and appealing to readers…well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a rich woman.

Meantime, even though “critics from traditional journalistic outlets continue to knock Bleacher Report as a dystopian wasteland where increasingly attention-challenged readers slog through troughs of half-cooked word-gruel, inexpertly mixed by novice chefs,” they’re making money like you wouldn’t believe. They don’t break stories, they own them (the same is true of the Huffington Post).

Time for the “legacy” to embrace the future.

Being busy and the fetishization of the offline

July 3, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in two articles I’ve recently read about the intersection of “real life” and those we live online.

The first argues that “being busy” is an artificial creation or, as Tim Kreider puts it, “a hedge against emptiness.”

[People are] busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.

He says that busyness is “something we collectively force one another to do,” and he goes on at length about how he hates being busy (“Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve”) and has instead taken to an “undisclosed location” to focus and write.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. …The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.”

The piece has some really lovely passages, and I consider it a romantic idealization of what life can and should be. That’s why I’m anxious — it’s my surroundings! Who doesn’t want to drop out every once in a while and just be with nature, man? And this guy is doing it! He’s so right.

Then I read this piece by Nathan Jurgenson. In it, he argues that, in fact, the only reason we feel peaceful and like we’re actually accomplishing something when we’re offline is that it’s in direct relief to being online.

The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook. People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for. …Maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses.

Take that, guy who just bragged about his personal time-outs!

“The clear distinction between the on and offline, between human and technology,” Jurgenson writes, “is queered beyond tenability”:

It’s not real unless it’s on Google; pics or it didn’t happen. We aren’t friends until we are Facebook friends. We have come to understand more and more of our lives through the logic of digital connection. Social media is more than something we log into; it is something we carry within us. We can’t log off.

This piece also gets a lot of things right, and I consider it, as I did the Kreider article, to be a romantic idealization, this time of our lives online.

They key is to somehow find a happy medium. It’s not moving to rural France, and it’s not constantly taking pictures of the things and places you’re seeing instead of experiencing them. It’s somewhere in between, and that, to me, is the challenge of the technological times in which we live.

Hyperlocal news in context

July 2, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

The New York Times quietly announced that it was ending its three-year-old experimentation with hyperlocal journalism, and on its heels, the Neiman Journalism Lab wrote a piece following up with some of the players and laying out five specific lessons learned. These lessons are:

1. It just doesn’t make sense for big media companies to pay their staffs to go hyperlocal.
2. Hard-hitting hyperlocal coverage benefits from some professional journalism.
3. Create a platform that makes it easy for people to participate in diverse ways.
4. Understand the power of email.
5. Don’t abandon experiments in “innovation land.”

Hyperlocal — which I define as small-time stories that are confined to a geographic area but which are incredibly important to that area — is a serious puzzle, one that no one has found a good solution for yet. When hyperlocal had buzz — probably back two or three years ago now, when it wasn’t yet clear that it was such a quagmire — the indicators were that as papers were shutting down left and right, folks needed an online equivalent for news and such. The argument was that print papers were closing down because their “business model” — which is to say, putting interesting and germane copy around relevant ads — was failing, but online news would somehow be the answer. For some unknown reason, but probably because it was much, much cheaper, the people running these new hyperlocal startups (or sometimes online versions of existing papers) also convinced themselves that, in addition to going online instead of print, they would also do it on the cheap: Instead of paying experienced beat reporters to do good ol’ writing about the day’s local news, a model that had worked forever, they would instead fired those people, “engage the community” and hire “citizen journalists.” In retrospect, that didn’t work so well.

According to the Times‘s Jim Schachter, it turns out it’s “impractical” for the New York Times, being a national and international news org, to turn to hyperlocal coverage. Well, yeah. Despite the fact that the Times itself has a well-read City Desk (read: hyperlocal news), it’s not their model to start an equivalent in Wherever Else, USA. They know New York City. They have a giant, well-recognized brand in which local places want to place their trust and their ads. It’s a good combination — it’s a business, in fact! — called “the news media.” It’s “scalable” in that it works (or used to) in almost every community across the world.

Another now-obvious hyperlocal lesson learned: Professional journalists are good at writing and editing. Non-journalism-skilled “citizens” aren’t necessarily good at that stuff. Extrapolating, when readers want information, they want it to be relevant and clear. They don’t want to have to work for it. When these waters are muddied — trying to parse what a non-journalist is trying to say among possibly irrelevant, definitely badly written prose — it is not a fun time. Readers’ response to this isn’t to get even more engaged and volunteer to be the citizen journalist, much as the bottom-liners at media companies wish they would. It’s not even that they get riled up and want to comment about the quality. What readers do is, they just stop reading.

The thing is, though: People care deeply about and do want to read about local news. They care about school board meetings and and city council decisions and high school sports scores and local heroes. They just don’t want to go to the board meetings or ball games themselves. They don’t care that much. Plus, they’re busy doing their own jobs.

So these are two key realizations of the hyperlocal business: You have to provide relevant and well-written copy that doesn’t ask anything of the readers other than to read. (And maybe, if it’s well-written and relevant enough, they might actually pay for the privilege and/or comment on a story.)

Another essential understanding is recognizing and respecting a corollary phenomenon: the rise of social media as a determiner of local relevancy. The Neiman article doesn’t touch on it at its own embarrassment, since engagement is this area is absolutely insane, off-the-charts, disruptive, phenomenal, revolutionary, whatever word or phrase that means a new paradigm has been created. That a new paradigm for social interaction occurred simultaneously yet oppositionally with the attempt at a new paradigm for local news is a coincidental but unfortunate event (unfortunate, that is, for these news sites).

My understanding of the fourth finding, “Understand the power of email” is that people like newsletters. But in my experience this is neither true nor relevant. However, the third lesson, the idea that technology must facilitate participation, is huge, and it’s another key point to answering the question that Schachter proposes: “How do you prompt communities into the act of covering themselves in a meaningful way?” I don’t have the answer (does anyone?), but I think social is playing no small part in this, too, and one need only see all the check-ins and status updates to see that people do like participating in the community around them (and, in turn, telling others about it in order to either humble-brag or exacerbate their followers’ FOMO or both).

I almost want to (badly) paraphrase Mean Girls by saying, “Stop trying to make hyperlocal happen.” But actually, I do think hyperlocal has a place in our evolving news, online and social ecosystem. Hell, I think algorithms have a place. It’s early days yet. But it seems to me that what successful products have in common, and what they all come to realize sooner or later, is that above all else, they must serve the reader (or user). It’s so incredibly obvious yet so often overlooked. And as soon as hyperlocal sites incorporate this truth into their businesses, the better the experience will be for readers and the online news industry at large.

Trusted brands rule social

June 11, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

UCLA and HP researchers have determined that successful tweets have common — and predictable — characteristics. Per this fascinating piece in the Atlantic, the researchers’ algorithm can predict a tweeted article’s popularity “with a remarkable 84 percent accuracy” based on the principle that news’ social success can be defined by source, category, language used and the celebrity factor. But the striking thing is just how much the “source” part accounts for:

“What led most overwhelmingly, and most predictably, to sharing was the person or organization who shared the information in the first place. …Brand, even and especially on the Internet, matters. Online, the researchers are saying, the power of the brand is exactly what it has been since brands first emerged in the Middle Ages: It’s a vector of trust. ..When it comes to news, trust is actually much more important than emotion. Shareability is largely a function of reliability.”

It’s all a part of the trend of consumers having conversations with brands and vice versa — instead of being overtly bought and sold as in days past — and the resulting trust rewarded to brands who do it well. Extrapolating, content marketing and social marketing, which help brands build that trust and have those conversations, have with this study been proven out with measurable statistics.

As recently as last year, many brands’ strategy could be summarized by the following (ridiculous) two-pronged approach: 1. Chase SEO (damn the quality of the result); 2. Pray for something to (somehow) go viral. But the Internet changes with alarming rapidity, and the past year and a half has seen a major shift away from these tactics. SEO baiting abated, thanks to Google tweaking its algorithms to rank better content higher, and brands acknowledged that since viral content is by its nature unreliable, they shouldn’t rely on it.

This isn’t to say that search and innate shareability shouldn’t be considerations for brands — they absolutely should; they are foundational. But the new forward strategy is reaching users where they are (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), giving them something reliable and useful, and earning trust in return.

In the case of so-called old media, they must become trusted sources again in this new landscape. Successful new brands (Fab.com to name one) are taking it even one step further with an almost post-branded attitude: Their online presence not only establishes trust with consumers, but their conversational and understanding tone also unpacks branding itself and exposes undisguised sellers as outmoded entities that peddle wares to you but don’t really get you.

Reaching consumers and establishing trust by getting them isn’t a new concept in advertising and marketing, but it’s one that must be repeatedly learned anew as consumer attitudes evolve. It’s a snarky world, but it’s the one we live in, and brand strategies must evolve or perish.

Is Facebook destined to fail? Don’t bet on it

May 30, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I know Michael Wolff is a provocateur, and I take just about everything he does, says or writes with a large grain of salt. But this Technology Review piece about Facebook being “a bust” is just ridiculous in its arguments and assumptions. He basically makes a few on-the-nose observations, draws all the wrong conclusions, then dismantles his original thesis.

Basically, he writes, Facebook is destined to fail because it’s ad-supported.

He makes a correct, if rather obvious, observation: “At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media.” And he is right when he says that “the daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency.” And of course he’s on target when he reports, “I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.”

But there’s nothing new there — any of it. We already know CPMs don’t work. As an industry, we’re testing out (or should be, anyway) new revenue streams to see what will work. Pay walls? Maybe — but the jury’s still out whether non-print-subscribing users will put up money for the website only. Cutting jobs (and quality)? Likely, except while it helps the bottom line in the short-term, it erodes trust between reader and media in the long-term. Better targeted ads? Probably, yes, until everyone opts out and/or the government bans it. Running the exact same stories on different local channels to save on news-gathering and ad sales teams? I hope to the heavens that stops really soon. Meantime, our collective time is probably better spent thinking up new ways to do business online and encouraging and learning from those companies who are testing new ways of doing business — like Facebook. Otherwise, you’re just a hater.

So his conclusion that “Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it” is an utterly hyperbolic eye-roller. And his acknowledgment that the company “has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits” is actually an argument in favor of the very thing he claims to want fixed a mere paragraph before. Not only should Facebook “reinvent advertising,” it must. Because the way things work now for consumer websites, as Wolff acknowledges, isn’t working. And I think it will. Or at least I wouldn’t bet against ’em.

Wolff draw parallels between Google and Facebook, yet somehow fails to draw a similar parallel for Facebook’s growth potential. He praises Google for its ad system, acknowledging that it also “didn’t have the big idea at the company’s founding, either,” but dismisses Facebook altogether: “Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway.”

“Big” is right — it has redefined all those things, so therefore it can and will create its own, new reality. So when Wolff says that Facebook’s strategy is “Just wait,” I say, “Hell, yes.” The company, in its brief life, has completely flipped the script on all the items he mentions. They just did it. They’re doing it. It is, in fact, as Wolff says, “the bridge to new modes of human connection.” And that is the opposite of being “left in the same position as all other media companies.” Most other media companies are failing at the ad-web business. We know this. Most other media companies (and, frankly, non-media companies) are drafting off of what Facebook is doing — and following its rules and ecosystem, just as they did with Google in years past.

I’m not Facebook’s biggest fan; it often pisses me off as much as it pleases me. But I’ve seen it change the web business from the front lines these past few years. Jobs are being created — “Social Media Editor,” “Social Marketing Manager” — that didn’t exist only two or three years ago, and these are being directly guided by Facebook (and, to a lesser degree, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.): its game, its rules. As Google did with “SEO,” so Facebook is creating an industry around its product.

I guess the most (and the least, after all these words I just typed) I can say is this: I’m looking forward to the day when I can say, “I bought Facebook at $29.”

Keeping up with users

May 8, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Two very interesting pieces, and made more interesting when juxtaposed. One is a fascinating look back at Technology Review’s app-creation process and attendant drama. The other is about how those annoying Social Reader apps, after a moment in the sun, are being shunned by users.

The thesis of both seems to be that brands are stumbling in the dark to understand user/reader behavior. And just when they think they’ve found the light, after spending hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars, users look, shrug and move on.

From Jason Pontin, the EIC and publisher of Technology Review:

Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites. Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated, because they had hired Web developers who knew technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Publishers were astonished to learn that iPad apps were real, if small, applications, mostly written in a language called Objective C, which no one in their WebDev departments knew. Publishers reacted by outsourcing app development, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unbudgeted.

The ground of the Internet is constantly shifting, and brand and businesses have to keep up. It’s very expensive, frustrating and often fruitless to try, but keep up one must.

No one really knows the answers. No one really knows why some apps are successful and others aren’t. Or why communities spring up or fall away. Why sites run hot then cold. Engagement, sure. Great user experience, yes. Brand loyalty. Easy tools. Peer motivation. Curiosity. The urge to be heard. Bragging rights. Belonging. Good deals. FOMO, especially with social.

Like magazines before them, sites and apps, and programming languages, and CMSes, and devices (and on and on) heat up, run hot…but then — poof! Gone. Or at least diminished.

Truly, no one knows. Many people have theories, but that’s all they are, because this technology stuff is brand-new. But it’s important to note that it’s not a waste of time to theorize, build upon that theory (aka experiment), test it and learn from it. As a matter of fact, that’s all we can do: Learn, adapt and with any luck succeed.