Tag: collaborative economy

SMW NYC Recap: Day 3 From Social@Ogilvy

Posted on by Heather Taylor

Day three at Social Media Week was all content, content, content — from Vice’s discussions on long form video to JWT stressing our need to change as images take over the web.

The Social@Ogilvy team pulled together the best five ideas that came out of the day’s sessions. Let us know what you took away from the penultimate day at Social Media Week New York.

  1. Great content will come from anywhere
    We need to be more creative with multimedia in an age of social and mobile. At one time, text was the main tool of reporting news. But with more people creating rich media content, mainstream reporting has discovered new ways to use multi-media.

    Anything that doesn’t entertain, engage and inform will not break through the noise. Ironically enough, the most accessed and engaged content on the NYTimes.com website isn’t even a feature or news story. It was a quiz that identified your regional dialect though a clever quiz…written by an intern!

    This is proof that great content can come from anywhere, not just professional sources.

  2. Things designed to be shared will have higher value
    Trust is the most profound part of this collaborative economy. In a sharing economy, buyers and the sellers are peers, and entrepreneurs are designing things that are more easily shared because we want them to go through many hands. Thus, things designed to be shared will have higher value. For example, people drive 80% less when they use Zipcar than if they owned their own vehicle—and 40% of users have never owned one, which has led to our streets being filled with 40,000 fewer cars.

    As Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and Buzzcar noted: “You have to be building community in everything you’re doing.”

  3. Longform video works…if you do it right
    The whole notion that people don’t want to watch long stuff on the internet is not true. People are watching longer videos than ever before and not just the 2 minute plug & play. Of course this only works if they are packaged effectively. It’s more about how you package and showcase a story than having a well-known celebrity in your video.

    Where do publishers like Vice and Motherboard get their stories for videos? By reading everything and being early to report. It’s about working with what you’ve got. If you have a good story, go out and make it.

    “When we look for a great character, we look for someone is going to be open and has a great personality,” said Motherboard’s editor-in-chief, Derek Mead.

    A cleverly staged moment in a long form piece, can result in a genuine emotional reaction from your viewers but if the story drags on, it won’t work no matter the length of the video. Always leave them wanting more.

  4. Images are supplanting words
    Imagery is supplanting text and changing the way we process the world. Reading is no longer fundamental. People process images 60,000x faster than text– this has enormous implications for our communication.

    The web contains 40% images and social has 70%. The popularity of image-sharing over social media has a great deal to do with the crunch for time. 60% of social users create and share images on their social channels and the balance of curators vs. creators is shifting.

    Our short visual vocabulary is spurring new creativity – we need to create something compelling in a glance. What are we losing as we move toward visual? Context. Images can be taken out of context. The entire web has been set up to look for words…what happens if the text starts to disappear? The rise of rich content demands smart tagging and automated categorization solutions for indexing.

    Does communicating visually jeopardize the relationship between a brand and consumers? Now brands need to be able to speak visually as well as LISTEN visually. The key challenge for brands is devising how to relate to audiences in each image sharing social network.

  5. Content lasts longer on Pinterest
    Each day there is 60+ million users, 100s million pins, 1B+ connections on Pinterest. It’s a very aspirational platform and allows you to show who you want to be. On the other hand, Twitter is about what you are doing and Facebook is about who you are.

    It makes sense that the half life of a tweet is 5-25 mins, the half life of a Facebook post is 80 mins, and the half life of Pinterest content is >1 week. This means you MUST think about quality rather than quantity when you pin, and determine what the best content is around the topic that you can curate? It’s especially important as pins are more than images. Rich pins provide context, commercial foundation, and addresses stale links.

    As content lives longer, if you want to get people for the Christmas rush, posting in November is too late. The optimal time to pin for Christmas is August or September due to the long half-life.