Perry

Hewitt

Tag: strategy

  • Listen up: how to advance an audio strategy

    Audio is the perpetual bridesmaid at the multimedia wedding celebrated on the web today. That’s not to say people haven’t long recognized the value of audio files distributed over the internet. Major milestones include the creation of PRX and the mainstreaming of podcasting, the iTunes store (now 10 years old with 50 billion downloads), and the relatively recent arrival of SoundCloud for more social and embeddable audio. But most people looking to create a comprehensive online presence don’t stop and ask “What’s my audio strategy?” They should, and here are three ways to do it.

    1. Resist the knee-jerk, “let’s make a video” answer for content you want to call attention to. Remember that good video can be difficult to make — and that it requires great audio to be watchable. Evaluate your content resources (story, people, space, equipment) and decide whether audio may be the best fit. Pro-tip: if you do make a video, consider separating out the high-quality audio as a discrete asset, and make both available to your audience.
    2. Consider audio less as a companion retelling of your text piece, and more as a way to add depth and color. Here’s an example of a Harvard Gazette article about Cambridge Phone-a Poem enlivened by one of the poems read by its author, Allen Ginsberg.
    3. Remember that NPR’s oft-cited COPE model applies here: create and store your own audio, but publish it everywhere. Holy wars are regularly fought over the virtues of streaming versus downloading: enable both through as many platforms as feasible. The goal is to keep the content in a format that remains accessible as long as possible with minimal deprecation. Multiple custom players served only on your own website is pretty much the worst way to achieve that audio longevity.

    Audio is too often an undersung web content hero beyond the context of radio online. Make sure it has a seat at the table as you plan your next online initiative.

  • When lines blur: medium and content in online publishing

    We all like clarity — bright dividing lines that indicate what we’re accountable for and where we should fear to tread. Back in the old days of newspaper publishing, roles were clear: the journalists wrote the copy, the photographers snapped the images (but not too many of them for a Serious Publication), and the business side handled the unseemly aspects of the work, like advertising and circulation management. For the most part, people knew how to swim in their own lane to achieve a clear result.

    medium message word cloudBut along came the internet, and all the intricacies of online publishing emerged once people realized the new world wasn’t just a Quark-to-HTML export function. Along with disrupting who could capture and report the news (with highly variable quality), the internet has also made murky the clear dividing lines dictating where the content drives use of the medium, and where new opportunities in the medium drive the content.

    Two recent articles highlight different aspects of this complexity:

    Om Malik weighs in with a terrific piece on the opportunities for journalism in a post-Snow Fall world. Lauding The New York Times for its innovation, he points out:

    There is a failure in the media business to understand that the medium and the content are intertwined much like those lovers on the walls of Ajanta and Ellora caves. … Now take all of that as context and then understand why I keep harping on the point that Snow Fall-type products are a brand new media, a whole new style of storytelling and a model for 21st-century journalism

    There is a remarkable opportunity here for online publishers ready to adopt a forward-thinking digital strategy. The winners will be those willing to blur the content type lines — and they will get there only by embracing innovative techniques for delivering shareable content made possible by the rapidly shifting digital medium.

    Next, Karen McGrane surfaces important issues with how we think about and design the content management systems that underpin how we actually do online publishing. We need to separate content from presentations to preserve meaning and structure for an orderly and semantic web. It’s hard, though, as she writes:

    And yet, we know that medium and message are intertwined so tightly, they can’t be easily split apart. Graphic designers rail against the notion that “look and feel” can be painted on at the end of the process, because design influences meaning. The more skilled we are as communicators, the more we realize that the separation of content from presentation is an industrial-age feint, an attempt to standardize and segment tasks that are deeply connected.

    The very tactical way we create, edit, and publish the content has implications for how we both structure and perceive it. Without continuous investment in these systems (unlike the one-off printing press capital cost), content creation will struggle to meet the shifting of the digital medium. Beyond the system itself, there’s a new need for people who have an outward-facing awareness of all the mobile and social places the content will live, and the rendering an sharing opportunities inherent to each.

    Bottom line: As the bright lines previously dividing the medium and the content blur, there’s a need to re-think the capabilities and approaches supporting each. How does this new murkiness change what the content is, how it’s created, and how it gets pushed it out into the world through a lens of realtime context? Successful organizations will innovate often and measure fast, and operationalize the kind of nimble experimentation required to succeed.

  • Email is dead; long live email

    Email is the Rasputin of digital behaviors. 2011 saw a peak in the “email is dead” theme; people complain incessantly about email deluge and time spent in the dreaded inbox; and teens are resisting it (although they’re spending more time online via mobile). Good articles abound about how to fend off email and manage it. And yet, nothing has taken its place: services like Yammer don’t seem to have found the social substitute, and layoffs are beginning.

    The lingering existence of email was summarized neatly yesterday in TNW — email just works, and has a low barrier to entry. People are still finding innovative ways to cut through the inbox clutter and deliver results. And Mailbox, which has taken about a million and a half reservations, is exploring new ways to advance mobile email into productivity (and was promptly snapped up by Dropbox).

    In a fast moving digital environment, it’s frustrating to think that a highly imperfect and widely derided application around for nearly two decades is still where we should be sinking time and effort. But ignore email at your peril — it’s still bread-and-butter for most digital initiatives.

  • What happens in Vegas, Austin, etc. …

    life of the partyWhat happens in Vegas, Austin, or anywhere else is bound to stay with you forever these days. Many of us now live our lives in public, and embrace social media for the benefits of community and connection and in spite of the risks of indiscretion and overdisclosure.

    The kids are onto this. High school students applying to college change their names on the social web: Allison King becomes that TheAllie Regal — a code close enough for friends to decipher, but far enough to fool the Google. Apps like Snapchat and its less successful Facebook clone Poke hold out the promise of ephemeral content: what better way to foil permanence than an image that self destructs in less than ten seconds? The app even alerts you if a sneaky recipient attempts a screenshot of the content.

    For adults with established usernames and search results, interim transmogrification is less feasible. Instead, we’re left to do what we can to avoid the most frequent areas of social media faux pas:

    • too vitriolic (don’t be this guy)
    • too much lifestream (hard to be as compelling as the Feltron report)
    • too much life of the party
    • or, God forbid, a post sent from your company account rather than your own

    Spending a lot of time on the social web, many of us will commit one or more of these errors at some point. What’s the mitigation plan? A personal strategy of focusing on planting grass rather than pulling weeds — delivering consistent value through the content you share — is generally wiser than time spent on remediating the missteps. Delete, apologize, and move on.

    For those of you headed to SXSW, be careful out there.

  • Social media strategy for leadership

    Six social media skillsToday large organizations face a pervasive gap in social media competency among their ranks. A recent Stanford GSB report highlights that executives are aware of social media opportunities and risks, but that few have put into place the kind of systemic practices that advance an organization. As a result, there’s a lack of understanding of and preparedness for the rapidly changing terms of communications and engagement. Leadership risks being well equipped for fighting the last war.

    McKinsey Quarterly makes a similar argument, and identifies six social media skills every leader needs [free registration required]. The six skills are divided into Personal Level (Producer, Distributor, and Recipient) and Strategic/organizational Level (Adviser, Architect, Analyst.) Using GE as a case study, the article describes each role in detail and how strong execution can have an impact on culture and outcomes.

    The role of the social media leader as architect and enabler across the organization is particularly powerful. The word is out on the social media revolution: with their parents on Facebook and their kids on Snapchat, employees are by and large eager to get on board with new technologies. Leaders who develop an organizational culture that celebrates and empowers rather than censors and condones social media adoption will identify more loyal champions and idea generators among its ranks.

  • Share of watch as new share of wallet

    watchThe term “attention economy” has been bandied around just about as long as the commercial internet — I found this Wired piece referring to attention as the new currency dating back to 1996.

    Last week, three separate events illustrated ways that products are trying not only to compete with each other for existing time, but also to create and capture new time for media consumption.

    The first of these was the launch of Guide, Leslie Bradshaw and Freddie Laker’s news venture with a twist. Guide turns online news, blogs, and social media into video that you can watch anytime, anywhere. It’s reminiscent of Qwiki (before its recent pivot), but acts more as a customizable aggregator. I use Google Reader to aggregate news sources, but am keenly aware that I am always behind (847 unread at last glance) on my reading. What if all those RSS feeds could be read to me while I’m commuting?

    The second event was Chris Hughes’ talk at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about his digital evolution of the New Republic. He spoke to a digital strategy addressing the usual suspects: mobile, social, and analytics (with Chartbeat shoutout). The consistent theme was meeting users where they are — and using new means (fancy cross syncing, complete audio tracks of content) to make the news readily accessible to them.

    Finally, Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs speaks to the rise of social TV, and the strong desire to understand and manage second screen time. According to Nielsen, 85% of mobile owners use their tablet or smartphone while watching TV at least once per month, and 40% do so daily. All those people tweeting through presidential debates and Game of Thrones episodes represent a new behavior — previously untapped time.

    We’re nearly two decades into the so-called attention economy. As products vie for our increasingly limited attention — is “share of watch” the new “share of wallet?”– we’ll see more innovative approaches to create, understand, and capture media consumption time.

     

  • Social sector must embrace risk

    For social impact organizations to scale in the same way entrepreneurial tech companies do, investors need to increase their tolerance for non-moral failure. They need to foster a culture of innovation and risk-taking. … Most importantly we have to stop pumping support into struggling ventures because we are afraid to see them fail and be prepared to back again those who have learned from their failures. Smart people are more willing to attempt disruptive change when they know their value will not be destroyed if it doesn’t pan out.

    – Sir Ronald Cohen and William A. Sahlman in HBR blogs on the importance of building a tolerance for failure and risk-taking in social enterprise. Two related thoughts:

    • The corollary piece of advice is to start small – venture capital has ample homerun cushion to pay for all those strike outs and singles. Small, iterative projects that succeed or fail advance learning in the organization and promote risk-taking without betting the store.
    • Being willing to stop doing something marginal is far more difficult to do than walking away from an absolute failure. The former is an important skill to cultivate – smart people with high aspirations and a lack of tolerance for “just OK” in an area where “great” is well within reach.

  • Are effective school behaviors harming women in the workplace?

    Department of Labor poster: America will be as strong as her womenDo Women Need to Realize that Work Isn’t School? Whitney Johnson and Tara Mohr point out in HBR that behaviors that enable young women to excel in school may serve them less well in the workplace. Johnson and Mohr argue, and I agree, that all employees and particularly women need to become more comfortable with behaviors like questioning authority, embracing improvisation, and engaging in self-promotion. (N.B. Approach the last of these far more carefully than your male peers.)

    I’d add another important item to their list — learn how to disagree, and how to get over it. Engaging in conflict in the workplace and managing it toward resolution is part of the job, particularly in the fluid modern workplace where the need for constant adaptation can cause friction.

    While school doesn’t always prepare us for that conflict, athletics may. Anecdotally, I’ve observed that many women who can tolerate workplace conflict well have participated in team sports. We know athletics correlate with career success; a 2002 study found that 82% of women in executive-level jobs had played organized sports in middle, high or post-secondary school. Discipline and focus are two obvious benefits, but I’d argue that team sports in particular offer participants experience in managing conflict and achieving resolution.

    Image credit: U.S. National Archives: Department of Labor poster 1941-1945 

  • Survival traits for 2013: agility and adaptation

    “I don’t believe in futurists that much anymore – they are usually wrong,” he [Ito] says, responding to a label that is often applied to him. “I’m calling myself a ‘nowist,’ and I’m trying to figure out how to build up the ability to react to anything. In other words, I want to create a certain agility. The biggest liability for companies now is having too many assets; you need to learn how to be fluid and agile.

     

    ‘It’s kind of a spiritual thing,” he continues. “You want to have your peripherals wide open and adapt as quickly as you can. I think that will be an important survival trait of people and companies in the future.”

    – Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab on trends to watch in 2013.

    I couldn’t agree more. Your organizational goals and digital strategy need to be declarative and not reactive – but peripheral vision, fluidity, and agility are vital for success in a rapidly changing digital environment. Without understanding the speed and direction of the changes around you, it’s easy to bury yourself in a five-year-plan to nowhere.

  • Context is everything: preview button

    “The fact that we can even offer a ‘preview’ shows how tight the association is between content  management and delivery….The existence of a preview button reinforces the notion that the desktop website is the “real” website and mobile is a satellite, an afterthought.”

    – Karen McGrane, in Content Strategy for Mobile