Audiences drive nearly every business in every industry. Engaging these audiences through advertising is not enough and therefore creative, successful content is necessary to increase engagement with a brand. With perspectives from different aspects of content and from different companies- The New York Times, Google, Timehop, and Huge. This panel helped share the approaches other brands have down to create narratives that attract audiences and help to monetize. This panel highlighted the role of content creators and how lucrative it is for both businesses and also what happens after you create the content, who will watch it? How do you capture attention and capture a dedicated audience? People’s attention span lasts 8 seconds (down from 12 seconds in 2016). Thankfully 2018 is seeing more cyclical patterns and old school ideas are gaining traction today. As creators, the need to think about what the users want from that brand is important.
Emily Wood from Google’s Editor-in-Chief for their blog The Keyword is trying to broaden and reach a more diverse group of people since most of the readers are young men. How do they create content true to the brand and broaden for women. The goal is to constantly think about what is relevant for someone who isn’t bought into Google or tech. Emily also talked about that it is important to keep somewhat regular, predictable content in addition to news. Something also important that she noted was that “the most important thing you can do (for the brand) is bring that human connection.”
Alex Rainert from The New York Times who heads up their Product and Design team is focused on always wanting to drive digital subscriptions. His goal for his team and The New York Times (NYT) is to always understand the readers and understand the content that is being produced by building the systems that allow the content to get in front of the right readers. Since the election of 2016, Alex has seen a lot of interest in people wanting to engage and support journalism. Still seeing the affects from this change. There are other opportunities to expose people to the value of NYT and getting a subscription in place which Alex says they are trying to be a brand built around content rather than just news. From their popular podcast, The Daily, to cooking tips, to the famous daily crossword puzzle, the Times is trying to build around content that reinforces a daily habit for someone to constantly consume and make it a part of their daily life.
Rick Webb from Timehop comes from the perspective where content is basically user generated from past photos on their phone camera roll or social media posts. Timehop produces a daily video which highlights this day in history which helps to keep users engaged even if there isn’t anything from their camera roll or social media to highlight. Due to the ever changing algorithms of social media, Timehop has learned to not rely on these platforms and to constantly keep themselves relevant with what is produced on social media to engage more audiences. Each social media platform offers a different value and there needs to be a focus surrounding how to tell a story on each platform. The key is to always maximize where your audience is at. Instagram stories seems to be the trend as of late.
When it comes to creating content for your own audiences, you have to think about what gives you the authority to speak on a certain topic. There’s a small slice of where your authority lies and that’s what you need to be giving your users. As you start to think about where to post content, think about they why and what is important. Rick gave a great analogy on the history of toothpaste. Why does it exist? Where did it come about? What is its purpose?
What about small businesses? All companies we saw on this panel come from well established brands, but the panel did address an audience question surrounding small businesses with zero budget (which let’s face it, we were all wondering this). Small businesses should spend time getting to know audiences and where they spend their time. Think about the people who are already capturing the attention of your audience? Can you partner with someone through an interview? With any small business or start up, it’s difficult to carve out time for content but it has to become a part of the operation in order to gain insight and to discover what’s working and what’s not. As content gets created, is is super valuable to articulate what your brand stands for and what people can count on when they come to that product.
“It’s great to be small, you don’t have a 100 people reviewing everything that you do, Google does. Enjoy it while you have it.” Emily Wood
At the end of the session, the moderator, Meghan Graham, took some time to speak with us surrounding her background in journalism and her advice for our students at Texas State.