People are racing around, on their mobiles, mobile has a smaller viewport, so you might make the assumption that you should stick to publishing shorter content when mobile is the target.  But not so fast.  Pew Research, James L. Knight Foundation and Parse.ly found people spend almost twice as much time with long-form stories on mobile than short ones.  And longer stories attract readers about as much as shorter stories.  But Rande Price writes how users find the story, time of day, and topic matters.  Content consumption mostly happens in the morning and late at night.  Long form articles do best when discovered through internal links, then comes direct or email links, external sites, search, then social.  Lastly, people who read long-form articles are more likely to look at several articles on the site.

 

You’re out there doing what you thought you were supposed to do, pushing relevant, targeted content to the peoples.  But your problem just might be those peoples, because a Rapt Media study says their trust in pushed content is going down, they’re keeping brands that push too hard at arm’s length, and they like discovering content on their own thank you very much.  Laurie Fullerton reports in The Drum the rejection rate for online ads is 43% and 95% are doing something to not get ads.  I’m not terribly interested in depressing you but here come some more numbers; 67% think brands are pushing too much stuff, and 55% don’t think it’s interesting or relevant.  Verdict: while it’s cool content marketing is happening, the public’s impression is we’re just putting out a lot of crap they don’t care about.  Yay us.  But there is a reward if we get the quality of content right, 63% would feel better about a brand if it did ever give them content they liked.

 

Hey, my job is to just bring you the news, I’ll let you decide whether it’s good or bad after you hear it.  You know how on Soundcloud you can follow along the wavelength of the audio track and see the reactions people have to what they’re hearing along the way?  TechCrunch says Facebook Live has something like that for recorded versions of live streams.  Because they know at what point in the broadcast the most engagement happened, they can put a reaction graph up that basically points to the most interesting parts of the video.  So people would have the option to just skip over what you, the video artist, intended them to see and just glance at highlights.  It’s really not the planned experience.  Also, if this catches on videos will start to be made differently, intentionally loaded with big grabby moments.  No visible spikes and people might skip the whole thing.

 

You’re a brand.  You spend a lot of time, money and effort building up an audience of fans on Facebook.  You get them to willingly Like your page and ask to see updates from you.  Then Facebook says hold on, thanks for helping bring all those users to Facebook but we’re not going to let most of your own fans see your posts.  We’re not going to let your content compete on its own merits either.  We’re going to choke off organic reach and make you pay for access to your own followers.  What do brands do when a platform treats them that badly?  Use it MORE of course!  A Quintly study shows post frequency on it by brands in 2015 went up 36%.  SocialTimes reports it was up 14% on Instagram and down 2% on Twitter.  The secret to engagement appears to be stay small.  Engagement was tops on all 3 networks for brands with 1,000 or fewer followers.

 

Maybe your job is to get people to fork over their hard earned dollars to a well meaning charity and use content to do it.  If so, you should know what kind of content has the exact opposite effect on people and makes them clutch their debit cards ever so tightly.  Abila and Finn Partners surveyed United States Americans who donated to at least one non profit in the last year, and 72% of them said poor content affects their decision.  What do they mean by poor content?  The highest number, over a third say that would be vague content.  Sometimes overly-clever comes out vague.  Next at 25% comes content about programs they have no interest in.  That’s followed very closely at 24% by boring content.  Did you know even charitable people don’t like to be bored out of their skulls?  It’s true!  eMarketer reports their favorite way to get content is in short, self-contained emails.

 

I’m going to sling 3 words your way and see if your heart starts racing with excitement, or if you burst out laughing.  Paying for podcasts.  Which reaction did you have?  Benjamin Snyder reports that one Swedish company, Acast, isn’t laughing.  They’re trying out a subscription model for podcasts so that if people really like and value a show, they can express that like by supporting it with moolah, which is Swedish for money.  Also, this gives podcasters the freedom to not mess with advertising if they don’t want to, and let the quality of the show make or break it financially.  Will any podcasters want to do this?  15 of them are signing up for it at launch.  Acast CEO Mans Ulvestam says they’re also going to let current podcasts sell bonus content.  I know it all sounds crazy but hey, the Swedes gave us Abba.

 

Okay babies, put on your hotel robes, open up a bottle of wine and tell Echo to play Marvin Gaye because I’m about to talk about the sexiest part of content marketing there is, the topic that gets everyone’s heart racing.  Translation.  Yeah I told you it was gonna be hot.  Translation platform smarting Smartling has acquired VerbalizeIt because its business is translating audio, video, and other multimedia.  Econtent says Smartling’s second acquisition of the year gets it hundreds of VerbalizeIt’s customers.  So apparently this media translation tool is so awesome the investors on “Shark Tank” were fighting over it, and now it’ll be integrated into Smartling’s platform and founders Ryan Frankel and Kunal Sarda will stick around and take leadership positions.  As unsexy as you might find it, having translated captions and transcripts adds a ton of juice in terms of search and accessibility.

 

We all know the new mission in life is to completely eliminate the written word and no longer require writing of any kind, and Facebook is playing around with yet another way to eliminate combinations of letters that convey messages.  You know how you can include an image when commenting on someone else’s post?  Well in some test countries you can include a video.  Venturebeat reports over 100M hours of video are watched on Facebook as it is, so clearly users like doing that.  All you do, if you’re one of the people getting the test, is tap the camera icon, and when you reply with a video it behaves just like other videos on Facebook, they won’t play by themselves…kinda like I was in college.

 

Music labels are starting to think about stuff other than and beyond music because, you know, they want to survive and stuff.  Warner Music UK is now jammin’ with something called The Firepit.  Billboard’s Georg Szalai says it’s a creative content division and “innovation center” in London that’s already got some projects in the pipeline like online and TV formats, live and campaign content, feature-length projects, and digital artist specials.  CEO Max Lousada said, “It’s not enough for people to hear our artists’ music or see the content they create, we want them to watch, engage, react and connect.  Placing the creative process at the heart of the organization will give us a dynamic space in which we can pioneer rich, immersive experiences for fans and unlock new promotional and commercial opportunities for our artists.”  That was a long quote.  The Firepit will be led by Stefan Demetriou who’s done stuff like produce a 4K Ed Sheeran concert film.  He’s friends with Taylor Swift ohmygod ohmygod!

 

If I said I was going to tell you about Marsbot, what would you think that is?  I would have guessed it’s a mechanical dog to keep the first Mars colonists from going stark raving mad, but I’d have been wrong.  Marsbot is a standalone app launched by Foursquare.  And what it does is text you a recommendation for places you can eat or drink, wait a minute cause here’s the interesting part, without you asking it to.  Maybe it will tell you where you can get a drink on Mars.  Ken Yeung writes it uses where you are and your travel patterns to suggest stuff.  But you have to help it at first by letting it know if you’re a gluten hater, your favorite cuisines, any ethnic foods that put you right in the bathroom…then it can tell you where to go.  Foursquare doesn’t sound enormously confident with it right now, Product Manager Marissa Chacko said, “It’ll take time for Marsbot to learn about you and for us to refine how it all works.  No one said inventing the future would be easy.”

 

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