Really excited to share this post our team at space150 worked up this week: Meerkat: Mobile Live Streaming Best Practices and the below infographic.
Can’t wait to see how this kind of technology is adopted consumers, and then by the major social networking players. It has the potential to disrupt what we’ve thought of as best practice content and mobile engagement strategy. Exciting stuff.
Read the post here.
First a robot wrote an LA Times article about an earthquake. Now the AP will have a robot write baseball articles.
Rather than fear or dismiss this, I’m interested in thinking through how algorithm-based editorial could be used on the branded content side at scale. And from a hyper-localization perspective.
We shouldn’t discount the need for humans in the editorial mix, but we shouldn’t overly rely on it just because we always have.
Automated Insights, a company that provides language generation software to The Associated Press and other organizations, announced Wednesday the news cooperative will use the software to produce thousands of stories about collegiate sports.
The Associated Press will begin publishing automatically generated sports stories this spring, beginning with Division I baseball, according to a press release.
“This new partnership will allow AP to cover more college sports of interest to our members and their audiences,” said Barry Bedlan, AP’s deputy director of sports products. “This will mean thousands of more stories on the AP wire, which will remain unmatched in the industry. Every college sports town will have some level of coverage.”
via AP will use software to write NCAA game stories | Poynter..
Excited to share our latest initiative to help brands tell their story and engage their audiences…
Per Eric Helgesen:
“It became clear there wasn’t a CMS leveraging best-in-class technology from the media world that was also tuned to the unique needs of brand-centric content operations, so we decided to address the gap ourselves by building Mediaco Publish.”
Weber Shandwick releases its own content management and publishing platform for clients.
Proud to work with such a smart team.
The analogy I’ve used for years is: Don’t build houses on rented land. But this one is way better…
“Brands will always have more control over owned spaces than rented ones,” Thomas said. “By and large, I view owned spaces as the farm and rented spaces as the market where you sell the crops—you can personalize your stall, but you can’t design the market.”
via Brand Publishers That Want to Own Their Data Are Ditching Facebook for Microsites | Adweek.
That’s not to say social isn’t important. It’s critical. But if you put all of your efforts into a platform you don’t own, you’re at the mercy of platform architects – and their prerogative to monetize, change algorithm or disrupt design.
So many good quotes about the current state of brand publishing, brand journalism, native advertising and content marketing here from FT. A must-read…
The invasion of corporate news: The lines between journalism and PR are rapidly becoming blurred as business interests bypass traditional media to get their message across
“People these days don’t care as much about where the story comes from as long as it tells them something,” says Tomas Kellner, a Columbia Journalism School-trained former Forbes journalist who now edits GE Reports.
…
General Electric’s online news site has evolved from a list of press releases to a virtual magazine using animated gifs, professional photography, videos and infographics (“all the different points of entry we used at Forbes”, Kellner notes) which features tales of innovation, science and technology from around the giant industrial group. Many are engaging and informative, and some – such as a feature on a Japanese indoor lettuce farm powered by 17,500 GE LED lights – get as many as 500,000 readers.
…
The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom is not involved in sponsored content but its commercial team tells advertisers it can “deploy sophisticated storytelling techniques in order to help brands create content-driven connections with audiences”. For some reporters and editors, this is tantamount to media being complicit in its own displacement. Yet few readers have protested.
For PR Week’s Barrett, this point is at the heart of the debate over whether “brand journalism” counts as journalism. “Is it news? At the end of the day, the consumer decides,” he says.
…
As trust in business has fallen, the appeal of telling stories that humanise companies has grown. The history of advertorials shows that brands have long wanted their advertisements to look like news, but as the subjects of news increasingly want to decide what counts as news, and as they get ever more skilled at doing so, they are posing a challenge to journalism’s traditional storytellers.
Appropriately, the challenge may have been summed up best by the words of their new digital competitor at GE: “Our content has to be as good as theirs, if not better.”
Definitely read the whole piece: The invasion of corporate news – FT.com.
Greg Swan, Always turning up the 🎶
