You’ve heard the dream.  You’re walking down the street, you pass a store and your phone starts freaking out.  Pants!  2 for 1 pants today and we’ll throw in the underwear for free.  It’s the digital version of walking through a 3^rd world bazaar.  Nevin Jethmalani co-founded an app that launched last week that does that very thing, but he realized the experience can be annoying so his is crafted to deliver much more relevant content.  Notify Nearby does what they all do, uses beacon technology and location data to throw something at you, but with Nevin’s you choose the brands you want to get notifications about.  It’s not so random.  He says promotions do best but product launches and exclusives work too.  The beacon stuff is in NYC right now but the rest of us country yokels can still use Notify Nearby to get brands’ latest content.

 

Did you have a lot of trouble coming up with a name for your baby?  Oh you didn’t know you had a baby?  Sorry about that.  Well Verizon might have a similar challenge because they own AOL, and it might need a new name.  Why?  Well, what do you think of when you hear AOL?  The most disastrous merger in history?  Screeching dial up sounds?  Sappy Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movies?  CMO Allie Kline says AOL has a lot of great brands under it, like Huffington Post and TechCrunch, but there’s a disconnect between those and AOL.  Jillian D’Onfro writes even Google changed to Alphabet.  Do you ever call it Alphabet?  I don’t.  Anyway, brand expert Mark Ritson says this is tricky because AOL has great awareness, but a challenged image.  Let that be a lesson to you brands that play fast and loose with your image.

 

A lot of people use Amazon Echo.  It’s a cylinder-looking thing that can play music, answer some questions and control smart devices in your house like the lights if the devices are connected, just by telling it to do those things.  The robot assistant, Amazon’s version of Siri, in it is called Alexa.  So you’d go “Alexa, dim the lights cause, I’m hiding from the police.”  What’s this got to do with content?  Kevin Tofel writes in ZDNet she can now read your Kindle books to you.  You say, “Alexa, read Green Eggs & Ham,” and she does it for no additional fee.  And a lot more Kindle titles are supported than you might think.  The only thing is, you’ve got to be cool with Alexa’s voice.  Again, what does this have to do with content the way we talk about it here?  Imagine a day probably soon when every one of your blog posts is also a podcast – automatically – because it can be read to people by virtual voices.

 

When I was working and writing for Oracle Social years ago, I often wrote about how few CEO’s were establishing a presence on social.  Okay but now it’s 2016 and…few CEO’s have established a presence on social.  They don’t seem to especially want to communicate with you.  A report from software provider Domo and CEO.com says 61% of F500 CEOs aren’t active on any of the major social networks and only 195 of them are active on at least one.  Kimberlee Morrison writes that LinkedIn’s the one they seem to like most, maybe because of the Influencer program.  There are 1.7% more CEO’s on Twitter, but usage went down.  They tweet on average once every 5 days.  YouTube is the fastest growing, but mostly because PR and marketing teams are putting CEO’s in videos.  It’s not like they’re authentically dialoguing with the public.  But Domo founder Josh James says give it time, a new breed of younger, social-savvy CEO is coming.

 

For every cap and limitation, there’s a way around it, as long as you’re willing to pay.  Verizon Wireless will let you content providers be exempt from data caps placed on its customers so you can get your stuff to them without eating up their usage.  It’s called “FreeBee Data 360,” and it even puts a picture of a little bee on sponsored content that won’t cost them any data.  If your brand sells honey you’re really in business.  You’ll get charged for each gigabyte you serve to people, whether that’s video, audio, an app download, ads, website usage, whatever.  But, there is a length limit of how much data you can sponsor, like 30 seconds of video or 30 minutes of audio.  AT&T’s been doing this same thing since early 2014.  Now, is this fair?  Jon Brodkin writes that the FCC’s crystal clear net neutrality rules don’t forbid this kind of thing but they do look at these things on a case-by-case basis.

 

For years and years, newspapers were able to license content from the Washington Post.  And they still can.  It’s just that, with newspapers kinda struggling these days, relying on them as customers isn’t as attractive a proposition to the Post as it used to be.  Don’t get me wrong, newspapers and news sites are still the main customers for The Washington Post News Service and Syndicate that handles that part of the business, but editorial director Alan Shearer says they’re starting to see more interest from foreign organizations and digital only sites.  To accommodate them, the Post, now owned by Jeff Bezos in case you need a reminder, has a super slick new site.  It’s fast, and it lets you really drill down to find content and images from the Post, Bloomberg News and Japan News.  Michelle Manafy reports the next thing they want to do is get ecommerce going so subscribers can track their items, pay bills, and open the door so anyone, not just subscribers, can pay for and use their content.

 

WhatsApp is up to 990M users if estimates are to be believed.  So you may want to advertise on it except there’s one problem, back when Facebook bought it for $2B both pretty much made a commitment that there’d be no ads.  Now, in addition to no ads, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced they’re dropping the $0.99 annual subscription fee.  Ingrid Lunden writes that what they’ll try now is commercial services for B2C so you can message customers.  How much will that cost you?  No clue.  And it’s not like you can do this tomorrow.  Jan says not one line of code has been written for such a service, but there’s an alleged 10-30 brands working with them on this.  Maybe you’re one of them, you tell ME what’s going on.  One thing that’s got to be at least a little awkward is parent Facebook’s other messaging app Messenger, which is ALSO working on services brands can use.

 

I don’t think Skyword thinks too many metrics is a bad thing.  They just announced a new integration that combines data its content marketing platform gets, with data from Google Analytics.  You’ve heard of Google.  Founder Tom Gerace says now you can get a simpler view of how your content’s doing by combining channel, referral, engagement, and goal conversion metrics from Google Analytics with Skyword’s story and storyteller performance data.  So you can go beyond page-level metrics to look at conversion goals and which creators are getting what you want out of your audience.  See?  I told you it was simple.  Rohit Roy reports that Lauryn McLaughlin at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia likes it, they’re using it.  Tom says, “Brands need a full view of the audience’s experience through the scope of stories consumed–only then, will marketers succeed in creating a content marketing program that motivates audiences to take action.”

 

Want to hear some content marketing stats that are flying around?  Jeff Cohen put some together so stew on these.  Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing says 40% of your prospects are qualified, but not yet ready to buy.  Meagen Eisenberg of MongoDB says for best in class companies, 53% of marketing qualified leads convert to sales-actioned leads.  ANNUITAS CEO Carlos Hildalgo points out that CMOs expect marketing budgets go up 5.5% in 2016.  And Emailmonday’s Jordie van Rijn tells us companies that combine strategic vision and digital marketing do 26% better than average.  Here’s some advice, if you ever run into Jeff Cohen, you might want to have a quotable statistic ready to give him.

 

Congrats should go out for this happy European union. London’s Seven is joining up with German’s C3.  Seven does social and C3 does digital.  It’s C3 that acquired Seven by the way and the first thing they’ll do is use that winning combo of tech and creative to set up a new specialist content network.  The client list stars brands like Porsche, Weightwatchers, Fujitsu, and VW.  The 600 strong combined team includes 40 developers; and 20 digital visual specialists.  C3 Managing Director Lukas Kircher says he’s especially excited about doing socially-powered campaigns, using highly targeted content to deliver audiences at scale.  Seven’s Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Sutherland is aware of the challenge of doing content marketing when consumers are getting more and more squeamish about brands using their personal data and continuing their apparent love of adblockers.

 

That’s it.  Follows are awesome @mikestiles.