Content Marketing at the enter

adweek reporting:

The press release isn’t dead. It’s just evolved. And PR Newswire sees itself at the forefront of that evolution.

Many people still associate the PR Newswire brand with distributing press releases. But as the marketing world has changed with the greater interplay of paid, owned and earned media, PR Newswire has undergone a makeover designed to help its customers better manage this convergence.
In the world of content-led marketing, earned media has grown from coverage in traditional media to incorporate the shares, likes and links of social media. Owned media—a brand’s websites, microsites, blogs and the content that populates them—has become both a place for the content to drive earned media and a way to help sustain the buzz around a brand generated by earned media. And paid media, once the lead, now often takes a supporting role to drive the conversation forward.
“Marketers and PR professionals who leverage these three media in a holistic, strategic program benefit from consistency of message and end up spending much less to get much more,” says Rachel Meranus, VP of marketing & communications for PR Newswire.
...
“PR today has gone back to its roots of influencing the public directly—without an intermediary,” explains Meranus. “It’s about direct to public, direct to consumer, as well as traditional media relations through ongoing storytelling and streaming of content. Relationship building is still at the core of PR, but it now requires careful listening to online conversations, monitoring of consumer behavior, and identifying and engaging with consumers, the media, bloggers, influencers and potential brand ambassadors.”
To simplify managing those disparate activities, PR Newswire released its Agility platform this past June.
Agility is an integrated workflow platform that lets brands target and distribute content, monitor online conversations, engage with traditional and social media influencers in real-time and analyze the reported intelligence. Instead of having to toggle between different tools and platforms, communications professionals can now manage the lifecycle of a communications program from a single platform with a single log in.
At the center of the Agility platform is a “semantic engine”...
http://www.adweek.com/sa-article/pr-newswire-builds-its-content-marketing-muscle-142433

Eight Digital Trends to Watch in 2013

adweek reporting:
Making predictions in digital media can be a dangerous game. Conjecture such as "2006 is going to be the year of mobile" come to mind. How many of us this time last year even knew what Pinterest was, let alone predicted its popularity explosion? With that being said, Adweek is attempting to make some educated guesses about where this industry might be headed. Here are eight trends to watch for as 2013 unfolds:

Amazon Gets Serious
Amazon has cornered the e-commerce market, so like Bo Jackson, it's been on the hunt for hobbies it can be really good at: a cloud computing platform, a streaming video service, an app store, a tablet, an advertising platform. With all those pieces in place, expect Amazon to begin to tie them together in 2013. The crown jewel is Amazon Web Services, which would allow the company to pipe content and ads to just about any digital platform, including connected TVs.

Ad Tech Shakeout?...

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/eight-digital-trends-watch-2013-146070

Why 2012 was the year of the e-single

paidcontent reporting:

E-singles — stories somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, usually nonfiction, and sold as inexpensive ebooks — are the format for our time. Here’s why.

photo: Flickr / B_Zedan

In January 2012, Evan Ratliff, the CEO of Brooklyn publishing platform Atavist, semi-jokingly described e-singles as “[replicating] journalism’s extraordinary challenges in an entirely new place.” A little under a year later, publishers of all types are looking to e-singles to give them a boost in a digital era...
This weekend I sat on my in-laws’ living room couch and read “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” a longform story in the New York Times , on my iPad. “Snow Fall” marks the launch of a new publishing effort at the Times. The paper is partnering with Byliner, the e-singles startup run by former magazine folk and based in San Francisco, to publish around a dozen e-singles in 2013. (Working definition of e-single: A story somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words — shorter than most books, longer than most magazine articles — usually nonfiction, and sold as an inexpensive ebook.) Byliner is selling an expanded version of “Snow Fall,” for $2.99, at digital bookstores....
Amazon’s U.S. Kindle Singles store now contains 283 singles. In February, I reported that the company had sold two million Kindle Singles; as of September, that number was up to 3.5 million, and Amazon just expanded the program to the U.K., where it will include new entries by bestselling British authors as well as most of the American Kindle Singles. Many Byliner Originals are available through Kindle Singles, and they’ll be crossing the Atlantic for the first time with the program’s U.K. expansion.
How are e-singles actually selling? Several of them hit the New York Times ebook bestseller list this year. A few of Amazon’s Kindle Singles authors have done quite well. That’s a lot for an individual, but not so much for a company. E-singles are cheap, a couple bucks a pop, so they are not likely to drive major revenue for publishers: With most Kindle Singles priced at $1.99, that’s only $7 million or so — and Amazon only takes 30 percent of it, making the revenue basically a rounding error....
http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/24/why-2012-was-the-year-of-the-e-single/

‘Snow Fall’ Tells a Story About an Avalanche and a Newspaper’s Digital Progress

NYT reporting:
With its spectacular graphics and photography, and its beautifully written narrative, “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” was a compelling project, even for those who might not have been particularly interested in the topic.
The effort, which appeared last week, received around 2.9 million visits, and the visitors shared some qualities that are much desired by The Times. First, many of them – maybe as many as one-third — were new visitors to The Times. Second, they spent a lot of time with the project, about 12 minutes, which amounts to eons for a single digital story.
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/snow-fall-tells-a-story-about-an-avalanche-and-a-newspapers-reinvention/

New York Times set to launch mini-books for tablets

TabTimes reporting:

Call them "e-singles" "mini-books" or shorter read digital books designed for the tablets and e-book readers.

The New York Times is experimenting with selling the new digital books with content that can read in a few hours or less.
”Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” the first mini-book, will go on sale Monday, according to a report by the Associated Press. It will be an 18,000-word piece about skiers caught in an avalanche, written by Times reporter John Branch.
Leveraging the flexibility of digital storage, "Snow Fall," is actually an expanded version of an upcoming piece planned for Monday's newspaper.
AP says Snow Fall will sell for $2.99 in Amazon.com's Kindle store, Apple's iBooks, and on Barnes & Noble's Nook.
Gerald Marzorati, the Times' editor for editorial development, told the AP that his company is betting the new format will make long-form journalism easy to read and reach people who don't visit the Times' website or read the newspaper.
http://tabtimes.com/news/media/2012/12/13/new-york-times-set-launch-mini-books-tablets

Guardian kills its Facebook social reader, regains control over its content

gigaom reporting:

After a year-long experiment that saw its Facebook “social reading” app gain more than six million monthly users — and then lose more than half of those after the network changed the way those apps work — the Guardian has decided to take back control of its content.

photo: Flickr user Faramarz Hashemi

A little over a year ago, a big topic of discussion in the newspaper business — apart from the ongoing cataclysmic decline in print advertising revenue, of course — was how to leverage Facebook as a platform for content, and specifically the rise of what were called “social reading” apps, which were like mini-newspapers housed within a Facebook page. The Washington Post and The Guardian were among those who launched these applications, and for a time they drove a substantial amount of traffic, until Facebook changed the way they worked. Now the Guardian has said it is effectively shutting down its app and will be pushing readers from the social network to its website instead, so that it can retain more control over what happens to its content.
The Guardian‘s app now has a large banner ad that says “The Guardian app is changing” and links to a blog post on the newspaper’s website by product manager Anthony Sullivan. In that post, Sullivan notes that the paper launched the social-reading app in November of last year as an experiment in how to use social platforms like Facebook to increase the readership of the Guardian’s content and allow people to share it more easily. Those goals have been achieved, he said, with millions of people — more than six million a month, at the peak usage of the app — engaging with the paper’s stories, many of them outside the Guardian‘s typical demographic:
 ...
Although Sullivan’s post doesn’t go into specifics about why the paper decided to make this shift, there have been a couple of major changes in the way that Facebook handles social-reading apps over the past year, and they almost certainly played a role in changing the Guardian‘s mind about the benefits of allowing the giant social network to have so much control over its content. The biggest change was to alter how frequently links to stories from the Guardian and other social-reading apps showed up in the Facebook stream of real-time updates from users, which are all based on what the network calls “frictionless sharing” from apps....
http://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/guardian-kills-its-facebook-social-reader-regains-control-over-its-content/

Financial Times now giving away free Nexus 7 tablets

TabTimes reporting:

Just weeks after British newspaper The Times started offering subsidized Nexus 7 tablets and The Financial Times has gone one better by offering Google’s tablet for free to print or digital subscribers in the U.S.

The offer, first detailed in the print newspaper today, will be offered to readers signing up for a one-year digital or print subscription and will run until December 17. The deal only applies to Google's 8GB Nexus 7 tablet, which usually retails for $199.
A digital-only subscription to the FT starts at $447 per year, while annual access to both the print and digital editions comes in at $597.
Such news marks the second time a prominent newspaper has offered the Nexus 7 at a discounted rate, following a similar offer from The Times of the UK earlier this month.
http://tabtimes.com/news/media/2012/12/12/financial-times-now-giving-away-free-nexus-7-tablets