Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Be A Tool, Not A Diversion



by Bryan Boettger, Tuesday, July 30, 2013 2:55 PM

Linkedin. Facebook. Twitter. Foursquare. Pinterest. YouTube. Vine. Instagram. Facevine. Linkederest. Twitsquare.
There are so many social media platforms now that it's hard to tell the real names from the fake ones. There's so much competition out there for eyeballs and time, it is not enough to simply be a diversion. The platforms have to elevate to the status of "tool."

You, too, should strive to be a tool.

This is a time-tested theory. How many books have you never finished reading? Likely it is because the books never elevated from diversion to tool. It's difficult for a diversion to work for 150 pages, let alone 350. Once a book becomes a tool for escape, emotional outlet or learning, it is more likely to be used to completion.

I had a similar experience with my Apple TV. Our family would use it periodically, but we were more attached to cable television. Then my son started getting more interested in "Yo Gabba Gabba," then "Super Hero Squad," now "Wild Kratts" (definitely check out Wild Kratts if you aren't familiar with it.).

Apple TV suddenly became a tool to watch the same shows over and over and over again on Netflix. And even more importantly, it was a tool to avoid inappropriate commercials I didn't want my son watching.

The same is true for people's usage of social media platforms (Don’t worry, we are almost to how this applies to your brand. Trust me.). A look at the platforms:
Facebook diversion: see what people are up to
Facebook tool: stay connected with people far away
Twitter diversion: follow funny hashtags
Twitter tool: source of real-time information
Pinterest diversion: browse beautiful images
Pinterest tool: inspire creativity in your life

Now, here is the interesting thing: the same rule applies to YOUR presence within these social media platforms (See, you can trust me). Your brand must become a tool for your followers. Books, as mentioned before, become a good model.

Just like a book, ask if your brand will be:
- mental escape
- emotional outlet
- learning tool

One addition: purchase resource. The purchase resource function could come through discounts, early access, product education or usage tips -- the right method depends on what your brand is.

It's important to differentiate among escape, outlet, tool and resource because it’s likely one of the four is most applicable to your brand and your followers (keep in mind, this can change from platform to platform). Choosing a focus and remaining disciplined enough to stick to it will result in followers knowing what to expect from you and digging in.
The other important aspect: It makes it easier to deliver ROI. Fragmented focus means fragmented ROI. Disciplined focus means traceable ROI.

This is not to say a mix of the four isn't appropriate. Still, a majority of effort should go into the focus, with periodic tangents onto the other three areas when appropriate.
So, go on. Get out there and be a tool.

5 comments on "Be A Tool, Not A Diversion ". 

Ronald Stack from Zavee LLC commented on: July 30, 2013 at 3:38 p.m.
Very insightful!
Pete Austin from Triggered Messaging commented on: July 31, 2013 at 3:22 a.m.
A word to be a wise: if you're ever in the UK then it's really not a good idea to call someone a tool.
Pete Austin from Triggered Messaging commented on: July 31, 2013 at 3:24 a.m.
But I love your categories of "facebook tool", "twitter tool" etc. Exactly sums up a lot of social media users.
Katarzyna Pietka from Implix commented on: July 31, 2013 at 4:24 a.m.
Thank you for this inspiring article. I guess many Sunday users of social media should read it to realise the potential of SM platforms. It's great proof that social media are not time wasters if used wisely.
Bryan Boettger from The Buddy Group commented on: July 31, 2013 at 4:54 p.m.
Thanks everyone for the comments!


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/205707/be-a-tool-not-a-diversion.html?print#ixzz2afKXAQw9

Chromecast's Less-Is-More Mobile-to-TV Connection Could Be Brilliant


 by Steve Smith, Tuesday, July 30, 2013 8:41 AM
Google did a few things brilliantly in the new Chromecast streaming media device. First, its low $35 pricing means some slice of consumers (the geekier ones) will forgive its many trespasses and try it. This does not make the two-screen wizardry any more accessible to the great majority who do not yearn to tinker around with their TV gadgetry. But it does make the device a no-brainer impulse buy, especially if they don’t have existing means to get Web video to the TV, particularly  their Netflix account.

Which makes me wonder why Google isn’t emphasizing the Google Play compatibility with Chromecast over YouTube. Google Play is among the undiscovered gems in the Google portfolio, in that it carries a good share of the same on-demand fee-based content as iTunes and Amazon. The combination of Chromecast and Google Play gives on-demand movie and TV rentals to the many millions who do not have those accounts or OTT devices that carry them. As much fun as it is to throw the YouTube video you found today onto the TV screen for all to enjoy -- and that is no small thing, by the way -- Google Play is what makes this a digital entertainment hub out of the device’s diminutive box.

On a technical basis, so far I have found Chromecast to be superior to Apple’s AirPlay in performance. Throwing material from my iPad to Apple TV has always brought with it performance headaches. There is inevitable stuttering and buffering going on, at least on my network, even though all the iOS devices are using the higher-end 802.11A/N band to connect. The YouTube, Google Play and Netflix videos I threw from iPhone, Android Nexus 7 tablet and the Mac laptop were snappy and fluid. Initial buffering was always present in some measure, but the stream held true and in high resolution throughout.

Also brilliant is the ability to build a TV queue in YouTube. Once a video is already running from device to TV, your device is free to roam for more videos -- and now has the option to add them to the list. You can even delete some from a queue list visible on the device. I have not succeeded in using multiple devices to create collaborative lists, but that would seem to be a cool next step.
While Netflix, YouTube and Google Play all optimize video sent through Chromecast for the optimal experience. I found that the surprise feature of Chromecast is the Chrome browser itself. Among the many ways of viewing Web pages on a TV I have used in the past decade, this is by far the best. First, it fills the screen in the correct aspect ratio. Second, the Chrome browser works with the Chromecast device to eliminate the menu and window structure of your laptop screen. It is a true screen-filling experience. The rub for now is that it works only via a Chrome plug in from a laptop. The great next step would be tablet support. Throwing Web pages onto the screen that people are finding on their devices around a TV could be an interesting experience.

But the real payoff for this great Chrome support is that video that is not compatible with Chromecast yet still can be played. We tried CNN news videos at full screen from laptop to Chromecast, with very good results. No doubt many people will try to get the rich and free Hulu experience onto their TV from a laptop. That worked too, but the resolutions we found were notably inferior.  Likewise, when we tried to run video from our Amazon Instant Video account from laptop to TV, the results were merely tolerable.

As Apple Insider pointed out the other day, technologically, the Chromecast seems to be Google TV technology without the Android components. They read this as a sign that Google is moving away from Android as its cross-platform technology and toward the Chrome technology and branding. The impact for the consumer is that it frees Google from its own mobile ecosystem and allows a device like Chromecast support all mobile and PC OSes. This of course is another of the brilliant pieces to the Chromecast model. Much of what we were doing in our ad hoc living room tests this weekend was coming from iOS and Mac devices.

The implications for mobile devices are also profound. Google is intending the control and the technology and innovation to happen on the devices, not the streaming media box itself. In fact, Chromecast itself is quite deliberately stupid. It basically looks like a screensaver most of the time. There is no interface here. All control is offloaded to the individual apps. Rather than struggle yet again to reinvent TV with a costly OTT platform, Google is inviting developers simply to tweak and reimagine the stuff they are already creating for a two-screen experience. Google is inviting the development community to innovate a two-screen experience rather than have to rethink their apps as TV channels, although that is one possibility here. 

Just with the technology of queuing already in place and the easy background activity possible while the stream is playing on the TV, one can imagine any app becoming both a personalized TV station and a second-screen experience all in one.  Despite Apple AirPlay’s much wider third-party support, Chromecast has impressive versatility, performance and device-agnostic support that make it a real contender.   

1 comment on "Chromecast's Less-Is-More Mobile-to-TV Connection Could Be Brilliant". 

Bobby Campbell from Adkarma commented on: July 31, 2013 at 1:45 p.m.
TV is Dead long live TV....I wonder if traditional media, cable broadcast and agencies have fully grasped how fast this all is moving?


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/205635/chromecasts-less-is-more-mobile-to-tv-connection.html?print#ixzz2afJWCbeA

Welcome to the Nate Silver Business Model

Posted: July 30, 2013
Paul Michelman
Paul Michelman is executive editor ofstrategy+business.
 


 
 

Welcome to the Nate Silver Business Model

Since the dawn of the consumer Internet, established media enterprises have been struggling to fully embrace the personal brands of the popular individuals who write or produce for them. Case in point: Andrew Sullivan. One of the Web’s first independent blog superstars, Sullivan took a Homeric journey from Time to the Atlantic to Newsweek/Daily Beast, before finally winding his way back home to running his own branded space, ultimately absent a corporate owner.
In spite of Sullivan’s huge following, none of his adoptive corporate parents could figure out how to sustain a long-term relationship between his big personal brand and their existing publishing models. Apparently, the people who gravitated toward Sullivan tended to read no further; those who preferred the magazines he wrote for often didn’t follow Sullivan. This undermined the potential advertising premium that was the original rationale for bringing them together.
But a strategy taking hold in the world of sports media offers new hope for a permanent reconciliation between personal and corporate news brands. Or at least it might.
With Bill Simmons’s Grantland (owned by ESPN) and Peter King’sTheMMQB.com (owned by Sports Illustrated), we have seen the emergence of spin-off partnerships that combine the attraction of personal reputations with the breadth and power of corporate-scale marketing. Several factors distinguish Grantland and TheMMQB.com from the models that failed with Andrew Sullivan. First, the Grantland and TheMMQB projects grew organically out of a long-term relationship between the corporate brand and the individual. Simmons and King built their reputations as contributors to the parent company, not independent of them. Second, although the new properties do leverage the brands “Simmons” and “King,” respectively, each also includes a range of other contributors who bring their own voices to the platforms. Grantland is not “all Bill Simmons all the time.” It is a multifaceted media property in its own right, but one that embodies the spirit of its founder and editor-in-chief. That’s actually a tried and true model for launching new media assets—similar to Oprah’s O or Martha Stewart Living.
These relationships seem to work, at least when there are enough resources behind them—and a lead figure who appears regularly both in his or her personal spin-off and in the legacy enterprise channel. By continuing to participate in their owners’ core programming, these media stars create a virtuous circle: providing direct value to the parent while continuing to broaden their own reputations and driving greater interest in their properties.
All of which brings us to the recent announcement that Nate Silver is leaving the New York Times for Simmons’s home, ESPN (and, thus, reconnecting to his sports roots). The conversations that led to this marriage doubtlessly included a great deal of focus on Grantland, as it appears to be the model Silver and ESPN will follow. In the coming months, ESPN and Silver will relaunch Silver’s websiteFiveThirtyEight.com under the ESPN umbrella. But unlike his nearly-sole-proprietor arrangement with the New York Times, in the new iteration “Silver will serve as editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months,” according to ESPN’s announcement of the deal. In other words, just like King’s TheMMQB.com and Simmons’s Grantland, Silver will not just offer his own comments and opinions. He will convene others and build a center of interest.
This model seems to work well in sports, so why not apply it across the news-media landscape? Let’s look more closely at the circumstances that have enabled it. We sports fans—well, not all of us—tend toward the obsessive. We expend obscene amounts of time and untold subscription fees to feed our passion, enhance our waging success, and gain an edge in our fantasy leagues. When a sports writer or analyst captures our fancy, we happily overindulge.
But there is another factor at work here. The Grantland site bleeds beyond sports into other domains. In this way, Grantland attempts to fully mine the value of the Simmons’s brand—part of his appeal has always been how he weaves popular culture into his work. One would imagine that Silver’s relationship with ESPN will push the model even further, connecting sports to economics and politics, with Silver—like Simmons—playing the dual role of corporate-network personality and editor-in-chief of his own property.
The three-way combination of powerful personal brands, strong corporate support and the passion-fueled built-in audience creates the opportunity for these new ventures to gain traction. The unique personalities and interests of their founders give them the chance to retain that audience for the long haul.
Are there other individual stars who carry the brand weight in the right kind of topic area to launch their own thing? The answer to that question is certainlyyes. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s gadget-obsession-fueled All Things Digitalhas grown into a recognizable franchise within the Wall Street Journal brand.
A deeper question is: Can the right type of personality and franchise create an obsessive topic area where it didn’t exist before—say, in conventional urban journalism or in business news or even in the kind of service reporting that attracts people to a management-oriented website? That may be the crux of the media challenge during the next few years: to attract the obsessive and make it normal. Few partnerships have demonstrated their ability to do this so far, but ESPN, in particular, appears to be giving it a solid go. It would be interesting to see if Entertainment Weekly or E! could make this work with, say, the next Siskel and Ebert, whomever they may be—or less obviously, if the New York Timescould crack the formula when it comes to providing a window on current events.

Daniel Pink’s New Pitch

Published: July 29, 2013

 
 

In today’s markets, we are all salespeople.

Daniel Pink didn’t plan a career exploring the world of work as much as he gravitated toward it. After studying linguistics at Northwestern University and law at Yale, he became an aide to U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and then served as chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore. “When I had the opportunity to dole out assignments, I kept the ones about work, labor, business, economics, and technology,” he recalls.
In 1997, disillusioned by the realities of politics and burned out by the workload, Pink quit to write under his own byline. An article published in Fast Company later that year became the kernel for his acclaimed first book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (Warner Books, 2002). It plumbed the transition from employee to self-employment by millions of people much like Pink himself, and established a format that Pink has been following ever since: presenting a highly articulate, accessible synthesis of a topic or trend and a practical tool kit for putting it to work at work.
Several more books followed, bringing Pink into the ranks of the world’s leading management thinkers and speakers. His most recent book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others (Riverhead Books, 2012), explores a topic ripe, perhaps even overripe, for Pinkian synthesis. The very nature of selling has been fundamentally altered by digitization, which continues to render long-accepted sales conventions irrelevant, yet, paradoxically, makes salespeople more important to companies and customers than ever before.
S+B: We used to hear that selling would cease to exist as a function—that salespeople would be disintermediated by the Internet. What really happened?
PINK:
 Those predictions underestimated how ingenious we would be at creating new products and services, all of which needed to be sold. Yes, we have fewer people selling music, but people are now selling artisanal foods and cloud computing.
The predictions also missed the rise of small entrepreneurship, which means more people are selling their own services. Someone like me isn’t categorized as a salesperson by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I spend a huge amount of my time trying to get other people to do things. Moreover, sales is no longer always a discrete function. The software companies Atlassian and Palantir, for example, have no formal sales forces. They say that nobody’s in sales because everyone is in sales. Then there’s non-sales selling. For instance, most of the jobs that have been created in the U.S. in the last 10 years have been in education and healthcare, which are all about selling behavior change.
In 2000, one in nine people in the U.S. workforce was in sales; today, one in nine people is still in sales. And none of the salespeople I interviewed in the course of doing the stories that led up to this book fit the old sales stereotype. They weren’t wearing plaid jackets and patting me on the back all the time, and I didn’t feel the need to cleanse the oil off myself afterward.
S+B: So how would you define selling today?
PINK:
 I don’t think there’s a catch-all term to describe selling, but for me,moving is the closest word. I’m trying to get you to go from here to there. I can persuade you that the Washington Nationals will win the National League this year, but I’m just changing your mind. Selling is an exchange. If we’re colleagues and I’m trying to get you to join my team, you’re exchanging your time and talent for the opportunity I’m giving you. It’s not denominated in dollars, but I still think that’s sales.
I recognize there are headwinds with sales because of the negative connotations. I’d like to bike into those headwinds and take back the idea of selling, not in a namby-pamby, defensive way, but in a slightly more sharp-elbowed, muscular way. I say in my book that I want people to see the act of selling in a new light. It’s more urgent, more important, and also more beautiful than we realize. It requires some fundamentally human skills, and it has become increasingly conceptual. As the VP of sales of the Italian candy company Perfetti Van Melle told me, “We’ve gone from selling Mentos to selling insights about the confections business.” You can’t get any more conceptual than that.
S+B: You propose changing the ABC sales mantra “Always be closing” to “Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity.”
PINK:
 These qualities encompass what you should do and how you should be if you want to move other people. For example, attunement is the ability to understand where someone else is coming from; it can also be called perspective taking.
There’s a difference between perspective taking and empathy that I might have conflated in my book A Whole New Mind [originally subtitled Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (Riverhead, 2005)]. I’ve since come to realize that empathy is related to understanding someone’s emotional state or feelings, whereas perspective taking is much more cognitive and analytical—it’s understanding someone’s interests. I think interests is the key word here.
The facts say that both perspective taking and empathy can enhance your understanding of someone else, but if you have to go with one, go with the analytical. I think the evidence says very clearly that people are able, especially in negotiation and sales situations, to reach a better deal for both sides when they’re focused on interests.
S+B: There’s a great quote in the book from the last Fuller Brush Man about sales being “an ocean of rejection.” How is buoyancy different from the power of positive thinking?
PINK
: A lot of the power of positive thinking was not built on any evidence. It was built on beliefs, some of which turned out to be right. But it wasn’t guidance from an empirical perspective. [University of North Carolina professor] Barbara Fredrickson has shown that positivity enhances well-being when it’s in the right balance. She has a three-to-one ratio: Your positive emotions should outnumber your negative emotions by three to one. But if the ratio is above 11 to one, you’re in la-la land.
Studies have also shown that purely positive self-talk—“You can do it,” the Bela Karolyi school—is better than nothing. But it’s less effective than interrogative self-talk. Asking, for example, “Can you do this?” The early proponents of positive thinking would find that abhorrent: You’re questioning your ability? But interrogative self-talk leads to preparation and planning.
Also important is changing the way you explain things. You can ascribe outcomes to internal or external causes. If you lose a sale, it’s probably not entirely your fault. But if you explain it that way, it’s going to be debilitating. If, after a rejection, you say, “Well, this always happens,” that’s just not true. [University of Pennsylvania professor] Martin Seligman’s research has shown that if you adopt an optimistic explanatory style and widen your ability to explain things with accuracy, you’ll be better off.
S+B: You define clarity as “the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems that they didn’t realize they had.” What role does framing play in that?
PINK:
 Framing is curation, in a more conceptual sense. You’re looking all over the place and I’m saying, “What’s significant is what’s here.” I’m helping you separate the signal from the noise. If you frame choices in a digestible way, people are more likely to pick something.
If I’m selling you a great used car that has a minor nick, I’m going to be tempted to park the car in such a way that you won’t see the damage. But research by [Tel Aviv University professor] Danit Ein-Gar and [Stanford University professors] Baba Shiv and Zakary Tormala says that I should point it out, because the nick creates the context for everything else. It helps frame the valuation of the car. In some ways, you’re widening the frame when you do this. You’re saying, “Oh, there’s a nick there, but look at everything else. The totality of it is really good.”
Of course, this depends on how essential that nick is. There’s a big difference between a blemish and a scar. If it’s small thing, then widening the frame is actually helpful. If it’s a substantive defect, then you have to either explain that the defect doesn’t matter as much as customers think or lower the price.
S+B: In your final chapter, you propose extending Robert Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership to sales. Why are service, purpose, and meaning such a pervasive theme throughout your books?
PINK:
 When you sit down and talk to people about their work, you realize that they’re spending at least half of their waking hours on the job. Their work is a window into who they are. And I think that as human beings, we aspire to do something meaningful. All of us ask ourselves, “OK, why does what I’m doing matter? What is my purpose?”
What’s exciting for companies is that appealing to a sense of purpose and meaning is very effective. [Wharton professor] Adam Grant has done some great research in this area. In a study of people in a call center raising money for a university, he found that employees who spent five minutes before their shift reading letters from people who were on the receiving end of the scholarship money they raised more than doubled their sales results.
S+B: To Sell Is Human is a pretty rare sales book. It doesn’t provide the reader with a sales process.
PINK:
 I did that consciously, because I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all process to selling Winnebagos, to asking somebody out on a date, to getting your kids to clean their room, or to pitching your idea to a book publisher.
I didn’t want to give people a set of custom Legos that builds only one particular castle, even if that’s an awesome way to build that particular castle. I’d rather give people a rich set of basic building blocks, which they can fashion into a process of their own and constantly evaluate. Sales processes tend to be very algorithmic. And when people get wedded to a process or to an algorithm, they miss all kinds of other clues and opportunities that could be really valuable.
Reprint No. 00204

AUTHOR PROFILE:

 

What Pierre Bourdieu taught me

FT

July 26, 2013 5:29 pm

Journalists should take nothing for granted but, instead, look at all the silences in the world and ask: why?
illustration by Leigh Wells/Courtesy of the British Library©Leigh Wells/Courtesy of the British Library
This diagram shows that seemingly dull everyday items are important for reproducing social and political hierarchies.
The works of Pierre Bourdieu, the French intellectual, have defined how I view my job as a journalist today. These graphs illustrate this.
In the first chart, Bourdieu shows how subtle cultural signals reproduce the position of the elite, even for something mundane such as food. These cultural patterns are rarely discussed openly.
In the second chart, Bourdieu demonstrates that it is not just what we discuss – or debate – in public that matters but what we don’t discuss that is really important, in terms of reproducing the status quo.
If nothing else, the charts show why journalists should take nothing for granted but, instead, look at the silences in the world and ask: why?
diagram content: Molly Watson©Cambridge University Press
This diagram should be mandatory reading for journalists, politicians, academics and everyone else. it argues that what really matters in society is not what people talk about, but what they ignore because it seems boring or irrelevant.

The business case for defining Digital Identity and How to Value it correctly

Valuing Identity in today’s Digital World
Link to the study: https://www.unboundid.com/resources/whitepapers/files/Compass_Intelligence_Maximizing%20the%20Value%20of%20Identity_Custom%20Report_July%202013.pdf

Data Finally Migrating Into Other Media



by Laurie Sullivan, Tuesday, July 30, 2013 7:45 PM
Some 71% of marketers said data integration delivers more relevant messages to segmented audiences, 68% attribute a rise in clicks and traffic, and 63% cite more efficient media buying and planning, according to a study released Wednesday. Quantifying the value of the data remains the biggest challenge for marketers.

The BlueKai Data Impact Report reveals that data-driven marketing rose 227% in the past six months since the prior study, with display ad targeting becoming the seventh most likely use. Some 36% of respondents said at least a fifth of their marketing budgets are driven by data, up from 11% in December 2012.

When asked how much data drives digital marketing, 33.3% said between 75% and 100% of their budgets, followed by 33.3% at between 50% and 75%, 22% at between 25% and 50%, and 11.4% up to 25%. The study, which relied on more than 100 marketing executives and media buyers, shows that marketers are mostly concerned about expanding the use of data to various marketing disciplines. 

Cory Treffiletti, senior vice president of marketing at BlueKai, said more marketers have begun to see the value in data, so they are finding ways to quantify the value. Search, social, analytics and mobile topped the list in December. The study shows a shift in marketers, moving from using data for targeting, retargeting and display to search, analytics, mobile and social.

The majority of executives cite analytics as the No. 1 reason for the expanding use of data, followed by email, and search, social, video and mobile. Last year's survey ranked search, social, analytics, and mobile, respectively, in the top four. In the report released today, display ranked No. 7 in terms of importance.

"Integrating the data into a search AdWords campaign would enable the marketer to identify one of their customers and deliver to them a retention message, rather than acquisition message," Treffiletti said. "Using the data in a search campaign takes into consideration the audience doing the search."

The BlueKai study also found that more than half of respondents spend less than 25% of their marketing efforts on mobile marketing. Although mobile remains top of mind for marketers, it is still an untapped resource and channel for data-driven marketing initiatives. When asked what percentage of marketing efforts is  invested in mobile, 51.7% said up to 25% of the budget, 50.8% said between 25% and 50%, and 14.2% said between 50% and 75%.


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/205675/data-finally-migrating-into-other-media.html?print#ixzz2aehf0qZo

Instagram Video Gets A News Channel



by Steve Smith, Wednesday, July 31, 2013 9:11 AM
While some of us complained that the 15-second Instagram video feature was an invitation to tiresome repurposed TV spots (yeah, that is me I am looking at), NowThis News is getting us to rethink this from another angle. The micro-but-not-nano streaming media format in Instagram is also an invitation for media brands to make it short and sweet.

NowThis News may be onto something in the Instagram Edition it announced yesterday. The young-skewing mobile-first video content is getting special versioning and custom news items fed into the Instagram platform. It turns out that 15 seconds is just the right length for your usual headline read and a sentence or two of context. In the few early videos already posted to the feed, we have had a mix of straight news items as well as animated slides that tell the news story without narration.  

Ultimately, NTN plans to release 15-20 Instagram videos a day in a format that is native to Instagram. The company also distributes stills and animations on Tumblr and Pinterest as well as Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

To this brand's credit they seem to have developed discrete content approaches to the different social platforms. The Tumblr feed, for instance, alternates images with headlines to stop-motion clips of things like unboxing the new Chromecast doohickey from Google. The company is sort of a BuzzFeed for video in that it blends a wide range of breaking news with social-sharing bait, including cute animals.

While I think Instagram Video is likely too long for all but the most entertaining branded content pitches, it is perfect for nibbles of editorial content. Instagram is not a bad feed in which to encounter a fleeting animated headline with a news or human interest item from a trusted media source. I think NTN has already figured out that you don't want to rely too heavily on the TV talking head format. Edited static images with animated headlines and/or voiceovers work nicely and recognize that people don't always have their audio on or appreciate audio tracks running when they are in public.

Once we stop thinking of these emerging short-short video formats as novelty acts and begin to see their actual communicative potential for all kinds of information, we will get some cool experiments in video information architecture.      


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/205739/instagram-video-gets-a-news-channel.html?print#ixzz2aedCtcXs