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Edge Content
Friday, May 04, 2007
It’s time for business to free their web videos
David Kiley, writing in BusinessWeek’s “Brand New Day” blog, likes the way Shell Oilteased him from a snort commercial on MSNBC to the company’s website where he watched an appealing nine-minute video. The tease approach has been effective before: Remember Nike’s cliffhangere commercials that required a visit to the website to see how they ended? But there are other ways to seed a video.
Business usually takes a while to catch up to the rest of the web, but I’m surprised that companies haven’t embraced YouTube’s embed model. If Kiley liked this video so much, why wouldn’t Shell let him show it on his blog where he was talking about it? Why force people to decide whether they should follow the link or just skip it? If the video were right there on Kiley’s blog with a big “play’ button in the center, far more visitors would be inclined to click and watch.
I suppose some lawyers—and even some marketers—would oppose the idea that the company’s content should be allowed to reside on the edge. After all, your video could appear next to an ad for a competitor’s product or even wind up side-by-side with some truly unsavory or objectionable content.
Ultimately, though, organizations are going to have to give in to the notion of edge content, which lets people experience your content wherever they happen to find it; consumers will be increasingly unlikely to want to make a special visit to your website. Widgets are one sign of the growing recognition of the importance of the edge. (Did you see that eBay now offers an embedded widget that lets you display any current auction on a web page? take a look at the demo blog to see how it works.)
Between RSS feeds, widgets, and embedded video, content is moving steadily to the edge. Companies like Shell would do well to consider freeing their own content to be offered and viewed wherever people want it, exposing those videos to a far bigger audience than the one that will make a deliberate trip to the corporate website.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Social media and traditional press releases from the edge
My presentation at IABC’s international conference in June is on “edge” content. While most of you probably are familiar with the notion, it’s an alien concept to most people I talk to.
I use several examples when I talk about content on the edge and how it applies to the work of organizational communicators. One example is the classified advertising service EdgeIO. Under the old model, you sent your classified ad to a newspaper because the newspaper’s reach exceeded that which you could achieve with a 3x5-inch index card tacked to a community bulletin board in a supermarket.
Along comes the web and the process stays exactly the same. Whether you use eBay or Craig’s List, you still send your content for publishing in a central location. EdgeIO changes that model by letting you publish to your venue—your blog. With so many people publishing on their own, the content exists on the edge. By adding an EdgeIO tag to your used car, your vacation rental, or your casting call for that great video podcast you’re going to produce, EdgeIO finds your listing and adds it. You don’t have to send them anything.
Microformats work the same way. When Neville Hobson, Joseph Jaffe, and I had our geek dinner in New York last June, I created a listing using microformat tags and it appeared automatically in a calendar of upcoming events over at the Technorati Kitchen.
Still, these examples are a bit confounding for the typical communicator. Now there’s an example that will be easy to explain. Shannon Whitley, the guy behind PRX Builder (a site that lets you use a wizard to build a social media press release) has introduced FetchWire. I think Shannon pitched me about it; I’ve had a note to self on my desk for a while reminding me to blog about FetchWire. So I went and took a look this afternoon and thought, “Edge content for press releases.”
That’s the idea. FetchWire touts its value proposition this way: “Post a news release to your blog. We’ll fetch it and display it.”
so you have a blog. You want to distribute a press release. Post the release to your blog (presumably a social media press release, of course), adding the appropriate tags. The tags can link to your blog post or your RSS (or Atom) feed. The folks at FetchWire insist that people are subscribing to the service’s feed through the use of keywords; they provide a TagBuilder tool to make sure you add the keywords to your post that people are using in their subscriptions.
The Discussion Tracker lets you see who has posted a blog item about the press release you “distributed” through FetchWire. This clearly is an opportunity to get spammed via blogs: Nearly all the tracker items listed under one press release were links to online pharmacies.
Still, the interface is clean, the categories make sense,
I have no idea how many people actually subscribe or whether FetchWire stands a chance of turning the wire service model on its head. But it’s a simple example of edge content I can use in my presentation. And, I believe it’s further evidence that there’s a future in edge content that offers communicators a real advantage.
I sense a “10 list” on the horizon: “10 uses of edge content for communicators.” Watch for it.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Microformats go mainstream
I reported here earlier this month that Technorati was experimenting with microformats, the tags you can add to content like events or contacts so they can be found, collected, and categorized by sites that aggregate such content. Microformats are part of a larger trend called “edge” content that I find exciting. As more people create their own content on their own sites, it makes sense to use this content “on the edge” instead of the old model, which had people submitting their content for publication in a central place. Newspaper classified advertising—and their online equivalents like eBay and Craig’s List—are examples of the latter. Edgeio is an example of the former.
Still, this remains pretty geeky stujff, but perhaps not for much longer. Niall Kennedy reports that Yahoo! is embracing microformats. Yahoo! Local is supporting the hcard, hreview, and hcal markup—tags that let sites list contacts, reviews (of restaurants, for example), and events listed on blogs andsites from across the web.
According to the Yahoo Local|Maps blog:
We believe in giving you more control over your data and the user experience on Yahoo! Local. With our microformat support, we’ve opened up new data and new possibilities for the developer community to build upon, to make tools that will be genuinely useful to all our users.
With Yahoo! adopting microformats, Google can’t be far behind and edge content may become mainstream sooner than I expected.