copywriting

Digital Consultant links for May 31st through June 6th

These are my links for May 31st through June 6th:

Well, what is a good digital music strategy ? Part 2 – Social Networks – Virginie Berger with some useful advice and stats on the potential for promoting music on social networks, and some tips to be more successful (like apparently adding 'video' to your video title is a winning tactic).
Public Enemy’s New Sellaband Target – Fan funding – getting your 'fans' to pre-pay for your material to fund its production costs – is a great new innovation in the music industry (I recently fan-funded the new Thomas Truax album and received my pre-release download of it today), but this reflection on the difficulties established group Public Enemy have had meeting their targets suggests fan funding may not yet be a mature enough funding mechanism to replace the role (particularly in sales and marketing) of the music industry.
The State of Online Video – A new report from the Pew survey of American life showing 7/10 adults are watching video online, with a large rise in humourous, eduactional, TV and film and political videos, with an increase in user-created content.
Experiments in delinkification – Nicholas Carr, academic and author of 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?', on why hyperlinking in text may be a distraction from the idea you are conveying, and an experiment with putting links after the text like footnotes in a book. I agree partly with this idea, but actually there's another issue (that newspapers and even some credible online publications like Mashable) that hyperlinking encourages users to leave your site rather than 'stickiness' of moving to elsewhere on your site. It's an interesting balance that needs to be struck between providing context and value to what you write, and making sure the hyperlink doesn't detract from either the flow of your idea or the user journey on your website.
Content is everything, so just do it – This is something that has bothered me for a while: the 'signal vs noise' ratio that we all have to be producing LOTS of content (status updates, links on Twitter, blog articles) in the drive for attention and search engine indexes. Of course this is a nonsense, you should write what is good, when you can (I ususally recommend to clients some sort of minimum commitment per month of types of content e.g. status updates, video, news article depending on the needs they identify). Ideas are good, volume is bad.

Digital Consultant links for May 9th through May 16th

These are my links for May 9th through May 16th:

How to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines – A great 29 page e-book by Copyblogger author Brian Clark on how to make great web writing copy that also pushes all the SEO buttons. Some very useful tips, as a long pre-amble to promote his Scribe software which I admit has my interest: you enter your copy and the software gives you tips on how to improve it better for your chosen keywords.
The Internet Conference: Powerpoint Presentations – Susan Hallam organised the Internet Conference last week in Nottingham, an impressive collection of speakers and presentations from major e-marketing, e-commerce and SEO experts. Here's are some presentations from the day.
Matrix: How Facebook’s ‘Community Pages’ and Privacy Changes Impact Brands – Jeremiah Owyang's review of how Facebook's latest raft of changes are affecting brands: mostly as a negative effect. Facebook strategy is to aggregate the web, including wikipedia style aggregation, which negatively affects brands as well as personal privacy. In other news, web people vote overwhelmingly to say they prefer Facebook's 'fan' to 'like' status – which seems to have had the affect already of diluting loyalty to a Facebook Page. http://polldaddy.com/poll/3183296/ Overall, Facebook's endless tweaking and twisting seems to be having a negative affect on it's community. It's international gathering of staff to discuss privacy issues this week may signal a sea-change in their steam-roller approach to aggregating and connect all user data.
Is Your Social Media Strategy Just Digital Flyering? – Good article by Andrew Girvan on lessons from theatre producers on the digital equivalent of flyering – Twitter broadcasting. Some good tips on doing it better: running special promotions, targetting groups of interest, and of course making your Twitter presence be conversational.
From Realities to Values: A Strategy Framework for Digital Natives – No great answers here but a useful framework for understanding how to define and consider the needs of 'digital natives' (or the under 28s as this article defines them) when planning a digital strategy including content creation, engagement and advocacy.

Digital Consultant links for March 31st through April 6th

These are my links for March 31st through April 6th:

The Collective Intelligence Genome – Fascinating findings from research from MIT's Centre for Collective Intelligence showing ways you can use open source development or 'crowd sourcing' as part of a production or decision making process.
One-third of users willing to pay for apps – Interesting mobile stats: just 35% of mobile users willing to pay for apps, highest in iPhone users, lowest in Android, although Blackberry users pay far more than iPhone users on average per app. This is definitely the growth area for digital content and services development, showing users will pay up for mobile content. But it shows that the serious money isn't in iPhone and producers should look at spreading their production and distribution across multiple mobile platforms.
SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) – Regular readers of this blog will know I'm no big fan of SEO (or 'snake something oil' as one social media guy I know described it) but in recent months I've mellowed on the subject – when using good navigation, good content and good structures supports people to find and discover good content I'm all for it and there's no doubt it's the affordable way for a small business to draw traffic to their e-commerce site. This is a brilliant guide – one of those that you can read and learn about 80% of what you need to know about SEO in one quick hit. Which is good because it means less time spent reading about SEO…

Digital Consultant links for December 3rd through December 4th

These are my links for December 3rd through December 4th:

Crowdsourcing business documents – Spudaroo is yet another crowd-sourcing website, but this crosses contest with Elance, by asking writers to submit articles, blogs and business plans against a client brief and the client selects a 'winner' to pay a set fee too. As a professional writer I worry about this trend: the marketplace is great for clients, but exploits out of work freelancers by getting them to complete work they are likely to not get paid for and making a skilled profession into an 'X Factor' style competition.
GooTube mulls fee-TV streams – Looks like Google's YouTube are looking to cut a deal to charge folks $2 to stream a TV show fresh off telly just once – yet the iTunes model is a download-to-own model for a similar price. Four years on since I last worked in IPTV, it's the old chestnut again of DRM and how people want to access and keep content. My bet is that the free-to-stream is the only model viewers will stomach (unless for 'premium' content like football matches), but download-to-own, following the DVD model, will have some legs – but maybe only very short legs.

Digital Consultant links for March 31st through April 6th

Digital Consultant links for December 3rd through December 4th

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