Content Evangelism, or, Why Big Media Should Pay Its Readers

Tonight I emailed someone I follow on an un-named social network. It felt a little bit creepy and a little bit exciting, much like friending a not-quite-mutual acquaintance on Facebook once felt. I have been following this person for over a year, and almost all of their posts resonated with me because we share a similar aesthetic sense of what it means for something to be well-done, or successfully designed, or generally pleasing to the senses.

So why, after nearly a year of asymmetric loyalty (web voyeurism, almost) did I reach out today? The answer is relatively simple, but it tells a complex story about how media trends are changing. I wanted to know where this person found the inspiration for their posts, many of which contain fantastic photos seemingly culled from a vast repository of design-oriented source material that I can't find, despite what I consider relatively exhaustive searches.

What's more, I'm convinced that any sources this person returns to me will be of a higher quality and have a higher degree of relevance than the results of a continued search on my own (I'll follow up and let you know if that's true). While I often preach the benefits of social curation, and Pinyadda's design places this act at the very center of our user experience, this struck me as a particularly tangible example of how and why this type of connection is important.

I'll be adding all the sources I receive to our index (and tagging them under the 'Design' topic) so that all of our users can enjoy them. I'm willing to bet that most of these sites will have content whose quality far outpaces the quantity of their audience. And hereinlies the beauty of content-specific aggregation: other users will be able to find them and follow them, without having to beg and plead with their followers in a creepy, email-based way. Good content finding its audience is what we're all about, and I'm proud to be part of a company that's trying every day to make that vision a reality.

The story, then, has two morals:

1) Social curation is incredibly valuable. By following this un-named design maven (who may not even know I consider them as such) I was privy to hundreds, nay thousands, of awesome articles, posts, photos and music that more accurately matched my tastes and preferences than any publication or blog, no matter how niche-focused, might have. This isn't to say I don't like niche blogs (I do, a lot), but instead that humans like me will almost always do better at finding the stuff I like.

2) Good content will find a way to find its audience. I truly believe that the end result of the disruption we're seeing in the media industry will be a complete eradication of barriers to distribution and the ultimate triumph of content. I think that Pinyadda and others like us can play a huge role in helping consumers and producers of content find each other. If we provide readers with the tools to find the content they want and then make it easy for them to share it with each other, we can create viral marketing and distribution loops that move faster and wider than all the trucks in the history of newspapers ever could.

This is what big media doesn't seem to understand, and it's the beauty of the web we're helping to build: when people find great content, they want to support it, evangelize it, and help it be found by others. It's not a chore or a burden but a real feeling of goodness that comes with adding value to other people's daily lives, if only in small, small ways. Instead of trying to find ways to trick me into paying for their content, big media should be trying to find ways for me to pay it forward.

Do you have any blogs or publications you find yourself evangelizing, even by accident? I bet you do, and I'd love to hear about every one of them in the comments.

What Domino's Could Learn From Sean Ellis

Dear Dominos,

Thanks for reiterating the critical feedback you received from customers in a $75mm ad campaign and subsequently not making the necessary changes to satisfy your customers taste buds. It's a great example of how not to go about finding product market fit.

When I first saw Domino's video ad (no, not the one from a few months ago where employees blew snot rockets on some very unlucky customers' food) I gave immediate props for taking on their “harshest critics” and was interested (and hungry) enough to place an order for delivery. Result 1: Domino’s counts a $16 incremental sale, directly attributable to the campaign. The delivery smell quickly brought me back to my late-night, freshman fifteen and I was as excited as ever to try the new recipe. A few bites later, and the verdict: slightly spicier sauce, maybe less-greasy cheese and the same tasteless, cardboard crust. Domino's ad campaign had tricked me into believing they had actually made a good pizza, but upon taste instead lived up to being a “sad excuse for real pizza.” Just about everyone I’ve asked has voiced similar sentiments. Result 2: Let down customer.

Where does this seem to leave Domino’s? In the short run their execs may clap for any incremental sales (Result 1). But in the long run some of those incremental sales may turn out to be forever lost customers, like me (Result 2). And as for measuring how viral the campaign was… well, let’s just say customers liking the product seems to have been an overlooked but critical element.

The campaign shines a nice spotlight on one of my favorite learnings from Sean Ellis and core to what we’re focusing on here at Pinyadda: the importance of the customer in achieving product/market fit. If customers were more involved and engaged in creating and taste testing with the chefs to create the new Domino’s recipe, I bet we’d see different results – like brand enthusiasts (“hey I helped create the new recipe!") and a product that lives up to the new branding (“wow this is yummy enough that I want my friends to try!”).

And so ensues Pinyadda’s 2010 focus – the customer.

After months of ramping up features and then stripping them down to minimum viable product, Pinyadda is focusing on achieving product/market fit. We want to test our hypotheses of what the product is, what problem it solves, and who is using it. So our focus is iterating on who exactly our customer is and how we can build the product to best meet this customer’s needs.

As part of this effort we were recently brainstorming homepage language across a spectrum of market segments (we’ll then move to A/B testing these). We ended up with 5 sets of taglines, each set emphasizing different Pinyadda value propositions. Check them out below:

Set 1: RSS readers aren’t meeting the needs of their most prolific users.

• Better than your RSS reader.
  
• The smarter, social RSS reader.
  

Set 2: Popular information sharing platforms contain non-threaded conversations, suffer from information overload, are too hard to organize/filter, and have character limits.

• The easiest way to find and share articles and blog posts.
  
• The news you want from people you trust.

Set 3: It’s getting more and more difficult to find the news and information that’s most interesting to me personally on the web.

• Your personalized information assistant: articles and blog posts delivered just for you.
  
• Spend less time finding news, and more time reading news.

Set 4: News is meant to be discussed, but emailing links to people clutters inboxes and takes too much effort.

• A better way to send and receive links.
  
• A separate inbox for discussing links.
  

Set 5: I wish there were one place to see and discuss what’s happening in my industry instead of subscribing to loads of newsletters, trade publications and large portals.

• Free, real-time news on your industry.
• Recommended industry news from peers and colleagues you trust.

Did we miss anything? How do you use Pinyadda?

(As we strive for product/market fit over the next several months you can be assured we are listening intimately. We will be building the product – from taglines to new features – in tandem.)

Capturing the Cat-Herders

In my last post, I mused philosophical about the segment of media that exists between large media outlets (many of the "Old" variety) and the platforms that enable simple sharing and dissemination of all forms of media - for simplification purposes, the Twitters of the world.

The gap between the publication of "iron-core" original content and simple retweets is filled by cacophony of voices that represent the professional and advanced amateur segments of the blogosphere. These are the folks producing consistent, medium-to-high quality content, often using other media as a starting point or central focus. Generally speaking, this is the "here's my take on this issue" crowd.

The value of this type of media production is the context it provides for larger issues, or the refocusing of those issues for other populations. The context can be subject-based ("what this means for science"), geographically-based ("what this means for western Kentucky"), or demographically-based ("what this means for hemaphroditic cat-herders"). In each case, the original value of the content has been augmented by way of analysis and personalization. It's good stuff.



From the standpoint of the media industry, however, it's a serious problem. People are repurposing content that cost good money to produce and disseminating it to thousands of niche audiences that are hard to find, nearly impossible to market to. Potential advertising revenue is flying out the door and into the ether, newspapers are closing, the proverbial sky is falling.

But the problem isn't that value of content is declining - in fact, I'd argue it's increasing. Instead, media is faced with the gargantuan problem of creating a new system to capture the value of a fast-paced, diffusion-based content ecosystem. From my perspective, there are three things that need to happen in order for advertisers to take advantage of these niche audiences and begin capturing some of the value being created by the landscape of content production.

1) Content Standards - Somehow, some way, we need to create some meta-data standards that allow individual content items to be discovered. This is not, like the AP's failed attempt, a measure to increase ownership and prevent dissemination. It's exactly the opposite - a measure to ensure that the cat-herders can easily find content that's relevant to them, and so the marketers and advertisers can find the cat-herders and make relevant offers that add real value to their lives.

2) New Aggregation Systems - As sources become more abundant and more diffuse, expecting each of these small content publishers to exist as a standalone destination site isn't realistic. We need new aggregation systems that go beyond simple source aggregation (the RSS model) and include the ability to aggregate content by topic, using the meta-data referred to above and more importantly, leveraging the power of the social web to help like-minded users discover relevant content. Think Digg meets AllTop meets a personalized RSS bundle. This is, in some ways, the cable channel model, where shows are packaged according to interests and subjects (Golf Channel, HGTV, Food Network, etc) with one key difference: the content produces aren't subject to those that control the pipes, allowing for much more niche-focused content to be produced and discovered by its audience. The critical mass necessary to support topical programming is orders of magnitude lower on the internet than on television. Getting readers in one place, even if content comes for a thousand of them, will allow more of the value to be captured.

3) Intelligent Ad Networks - Where are the cat-herders today? What are they reading? These are the questions that the next generation of advertising technology will have to answer. Matching static display adds with individual pages or sources is a losing battle and can never achieve the kind of relevance the web demands. The internet is increasingly becoming a narrowcast ecosystem, and trying to apply advertising techniques from the broadcast world is a lost cause - but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Instead of doing demographic surveys and guessing about who might be reading a publication, the increasing specificity of content production is doing the targeting for advertisers. It's no secret who is reading the cat-herder blogs, but the advertisers will have to create new systems to reach them. Following the social media pulse and gathering real-time traffic metrics will be key to helping future advertisers find out exactly where their customers are, when.

This is a complicated market to tap, but the players (there will be many) who help to create solutions for an industry in the midst of disruption will reap vast benefits while at the same time helping both producers and consumers of content.

Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.

On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.