As corporations want the benefits of replacing original branded (and expensive) Web content with (inexpensive) social media and user-generated content, curation is the only way to make that content effective at engaging an audience. Just because you have 45 blogs and 10 communities and 32 webinars in a quarter doesn’t mean you’re attracting and retaining a mass audience. For that, you need to curate that content into something meaningful.

I’ll use the example of TED to explain. TED certainly qualifies as content that engages—events sell out more than a year in advance, your application to attend needs approval, the cost to register ranges from $3,750 to $7,500, and—from my experience—the audience hangs on every word of every presentation (or TED Talk). What components of TED curation could be applied to corporate social content? My observations:

1. They identify a compelling theme for the event. Something that summarizes the audience benefit, informs expectations, and delivers context. This year’s was “The Rediscovery of Wonder,” or, more specifically, “A universe of possibility. Grey infused by color. The invisible revealed. The mundane blown away by awe.” Could your corporate blogging program support a monthly theme?
2. That theme is supported by a dozen or so topics or sessions—phrases that convey the common bond holding multiple speeches together. Topic labels included “monumental,” “majestic,” “mindblowing,” “deep mystery,” “radical collaboration,” “threads of discovery,” “knowledge revolution,” and so on. Even on the TED website, you can sort talks by themes (or topics)—e.g., “women reshaping the world” includes 36 talks about women’s role in the world. What topics would you use to categorize your corporate blogs and communities?
3. And then there is the content itself—the 18-minute speeches. If you think of each TED speech as an equivalent corporate blog post—e.g., content in a different medium—it might be curated thusly:

• Bloggers have to be experts in their fields and must have substantive information or a strong point of view. They aren’t allowed to promote your company or offer marketing fluff in their posts—because none of that has any relevance to the audience.
• Their posts must stick to a uniform length. No rambling. No begging off and writing just a paragraph or two. Posts are drafted and edited and “approved.”
• Their posts must be accompanied by visual information (every TED Talk comes with a PowerPoint) and the visual must meet certain criteria to ensure quality. In other words, it’s been reviewed.
• Blogger biographies give you just the right info and no more—a photo or illustration of the blogger, their title, a paragraph that describes something they’ve achieved or what they do (I don’t care where they went to school or what awards they’ve won), and a factoid that illustrates why you should care about their opinion. An example from the TED program guide: “Bruce Aylward is a Canadian physician and epidemiologist who heads the polio eradication programmme at WHO, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).” Factoid: “99% decrease in polio cases since 1988.”

Wait a minute, you might be thinking—blogs are supposed to be authentic, personality-driven, unedited (non-curated) missives by people who have something to say. I would agree, but as corporations have expected more and more employees to blog, I believe there’s a big difference between a “corporate blog” and a “personality blog.” And I would classify most of what I see being written by our clients as “corporate blogs”—content in need of editing, SEO support, graphic polish, topical context, and, well, curation.

All this sounds like a lot of work, huh? I’m sure that Kelly Stoetzel, director of TED Content and TEDActive, would agree with you. But it’s a model that delivers results. And it’s a model that is born from an editorial mindset—after all, Chris Anderson, TED’s host and curator (that’s really his title) has a background in journalism and publishing, as do most of Tendo’s editors. If you’re really serious about ensuring your social media program attracts, engages, and keeps your audience coming back for more, how can you afford *not* to do that work?

How are you curating your blogging program and social communities? Can you see the value in it? Why or why not?

For more on content creation, read this post from my colleague Siobhan Nash.

• Trying to fit blogging into an already full plate of job responsibilities.
• Unrealistic expectations about the time required to blog effectively.
• An inability or shyness about or resistance to expressing opinions, positions, and other provocative thoughts in writing—perhaps because it’s not often required, the skills are lacking, or confidence is low.
• A tendency to default (especially under time pressure) to writing about insular topics that attract very few comments—what the company is doing or what a specific product will offer rather than the  real problems customers are facing and the solutions they need.

And so, faced with these challenges and more, some of our customers have secured our services to ghostwrite their blogs. Other clients eschew ghostblogging, claiming that it flies in the face of the authenticity that social channels require.

My own opinion is that ghostblogging has a time and place and, when done correctly, can address many of the challenges I cite above. I’m not against it, by far; after all, blogs are not the first social channel to leverage ghostwriting—many book authors use ghostwriters and executives and politicians use speechwriters all the time. But I do think there’s a right and wrong way to approach it.

With that, here’s the start of my “Ghostblogging Best Practices” list:

1.       Ghostblogging is most appropriate for high-level executives or others whose success hinges on an effective and ever-present public footprint (that can’t be sustained without outside help). That doesn’t mean it’s not appropriate in other situations (see No. 5 below), but it’s often appropriate with an executive audience.

2.       Ghostbloggers should begin their job with research into the spoken and written persona of the person they’re supporting. Conducting face-to-face interviews, watching videos, listening to podcasts of speeches, and/or setting up frequent phone calls are all ways to expose the ghostblogger to the “recipient” blogger’s voice, tone, attitude, passions, and so on.

3.       The ghostblogger’s job is to facilitate the post but not write it word-for-word. In other words, the ghostblogger can craft the post’s angle around the contents of a white paper or source material, but the opinion about that material should come from the recipient blogger. Many times, the blogs we ghostwrite at Tendo are littered with instructions like “fill in the blank” or “write a sentence here that summarizes your thoughts about this.”

4.       The recipient blogger should *always* review and contribute to the ghostwritten post, but should be able to spend significantly less time on it than on his or her original posts.

5.       Ghostbloggers can be effective in supplying source material to individual or group bloggers. For instance, a ghostblogger can shoot video of a user group discussion, write a few paragraphs explaining the context, and hand it over to a recipient blogger, who adds some analysis and opinion and posts it as his or her own. Or a ghostblogger can interview an audience segment to craft a “Three Questions”-type post. The ghostblogger does the work, asks the questions, transcribes the answers, and hands the text over to the recipient blogger to supplement with opinion and analysis. In this case, “ghostblogger” might not be a suitable label—perhaps “blog researcher” or “associate blogger” is more accurate.

What do you think? Does your corporate blogging policy allow for ghostblogging (or “team blogging,” as my last example describes)? Please comment below or take the poll to the right. I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Oh, and by the way, I wrote the entirety of this post, but another person edited it ;->.

So how have East Coast drivers learned the navigational habit of moving right to let faster drivers pass on the left? Is it a cultural phenomenon? Or is it the signs along the highways saying, “Slower drivers move to right lanes?” Is that all it takes? Have you ever really noticed all of the signs on highways? There are tons of them. Some tell truckers to avoid the left lanes. Others tell you how fast you should go. Still more indicate where exits will lead and how many miles you’ve gone. Directional signs tell you whether the exit road goes north or south, east or west.  Or toward what town.

As I drove from Boston to New Hampshire to Maine and back again, I started thinking of highways as a big Web page, and exits as calls to action (yeah, call me a Web content geek). The highway signs were equivalent to Web navigational aids—telling me where I was along my journey, how cautious I should be (e.g.,”road work next 6 miles”), where I could go from a certain point, how far my destination was, etc. And I wondered, if we create Web pages with navigational aids like highway signs, how much more effective would they be? What can Web content strategists learn from the navigational aids that have been supporting the world’s highway systems for decades? Should we adopt standard symbols (think Stop signs or Railroad Crossing icons) so that Web audiences learn a common visual language for navigating a content journey?

What do you think? How do you help your audience navigate the Web journey you offer them?

A common misstep I see is the tendency to rush toward social media without a clear idea of why. Facebook pages, proprietary communities, and Twitter accounts pop up all over without a clear strategy behind them. This doesn’t bother me as much as another habit I’ve noticed—because, after all, social media is relatively new (in the grand scheme of things) and companies will figure out their strategies soon enough, especially after diving in.

The other habit, though, is a bigger concern. Some companies rush toward social media with the assumption that that’s all there is—that social media should replace other communications channels and, for instance, that Web content is so “yesterday.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Rather than trade social media for other channels, I believe companies need to integrate social media elements with existing channels in ways that benefit both. Integrate community discussions into your Web content (and link from one to the other); bring your case study company representatives in as guest bloggers; include a real-time hash-tagged Twitter stream on your events landing page.

This blog post from SandersSays captures my point perfectly:

“When I asked him what his social media strategy was, his answer surprised me:

“You don’t need a social media strategy—you need a brand strategy that leverages social media. Don’t get off the brand strategy just because there’s a new communications channel; that’s how you lose the plot as a brand. Technology is the tail, not the dog.”

Wow. He’s spot on. I saw this back in ‘97 when companies had to quickly create an “Internet strategy,” often wasting tons of money on agencies, consultants, and painful meetings. What they eventually realized was that they needed to integrate this new communications channel in their brand promise/fulfillment approach to their customers. Those that did succeeded wildly in the coming years.”

How are you integrating your Facebook pages with your Web content? Or landing pages with Twitter streams?

The first thing I noticed as I began reading the book were the long and melodious sentences so full of rich detail that I could envision and smell and taste exactly what Conroy was describing (typical of vintage Conroy). Consider this sentence:

“When I turned left on Tradd Street, I looked like an ambitious acrobat hurling papers to my right and left as I made my way toward the Cooper River and the rising sun that began to finger the morning ties of the harbor, to dance along the spillways of palmetto fronds and water oaks until the street itself burst into the first flame of morning.”

I was struck by how accustomed I’ve become to the short, terse, bulleted prose that Tendo typically develops for clients’ websites. The criteria for one client requires sentences to be generally 20 words or less; paragraphs are fewer than 75 words; and no more than three paragraphs should appear in a row without a visual break. So the Wired article struck a nerve with me.

Carr cites research that concludes:

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

He also points to a 1990 experiment that claims the mental calisthenics required of hyperlinks—figuring out whether the link is worth a click, clicking on it, adjusting to a different site’s format, evaluating whether the info is of use, clicking back, etc.—causes us to forget what we’ve read. We’re not retaining the content we skim on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal also excerpted Carr’s book in its Weekend Journal but presented a counterpoint from Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky argues a different point entirely, one based not on research but on historical analysis: He points to Gutenberg’s press and Bible translations, followed by contemporary literature and the mediocrity that followed, as evidence that all new media has a disruptive influence initially but that history proves the medium worthy. And that the “linking together” of the Web lets us “tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about.” And that the social Web’s model of participation has enormous positive effects over television’s consumption model .

As of this writing, 64.7 percent of the WSJ respondents to an online poll agree with Shirky—that the Web makes you smarter. I’m not sure I agree, especially in light of my recent Pat Conroy experience. (For other discussions on this subject, check out GigaOm’s and Slashdot’s posts.)

An article in Monday’s New York Times, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price,” reinforces Carr’s position (and it includes pretty cool interactive tests to gauge your ability to ignore distractions). It focuses not just on the Web but on our growing addiction to gadgets and the multitasking we’re forced to do to consume a fast-growing influx of information and media. “Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress,” according to the NYT piece. Even after you stop multitasking, “fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

I can’t help but wonder if Carr and Shirky are asking the right question when they address whether the Internet makes you smarter or dumber.

• Consider the goal. Could it be that consuming information on the Web is just offering us more of the type of experience we’ve done for years: scanning, researching, applying judgment to whether information tells us what we need to know, etc. Isn’t that type of experience more about reaching a conclusion or making a decision rather than learning and retaining and deep thinking? Is the Web allowing us to make better decisions more quickly?
• Where’s the soul? I would argue that scanning on the Web makes us more soul-less than brain-less. Compared with reading Conroy, scanning the Web involves no sense of taste or smell or emotion. Interacting on the Web might involve that—think of comment threads and the YouTube video of the guys reuniting with the tiger (made me cry) and Facebook posts from old friends. But scanning the Web involves very little emotion.
• Form serves function. What does Carr’s research and argument say about the state of content on the Web? If it’s only meant to help you make a decision, maybe terse, bulleted content that’s easily scanned appropriate. But if it’s intended to teach or instruct, perhaps more complex language is not only appropriate but also called for. And would an instructional piece be formatted for easy (and attractive) printing so you could consume it more easily (as I did with the Wired article)? And if it’s intended to provoke, like a blog post, what’s the best format? A podcast? A video?
• Consuming print vs. online. Another relevant question might be this: How many Web users actually try to read online articles? When I find something of interest on the Web, I either print it out to really absorb it, or I save it somewhere so I can print it out and fully absorb it later. So the question isn’t whether I read content online (vs. scanning it), but whether I print it out to read it (vs. reading it on-screen). And whether reading print material rewires my brain in the same way than does consuming Web content.

What do you think? As a corporate marketer, how are you tailoring your Web content for different purposes? As a Web user, do you agree with most WSJ readers that the Web makes you smarter?

This week I sat in on a webinar that outlined the latest eye-tracking data for the Web. I was interested in these five findings:

1. The F Pattern. Studies show that we read horizontally first, then track down the page, forming an “F” pattern. Also, time records of online viewing show that most people *scan* web pages—they don’t read them.
2. The Golden Triangle. When looking at search results, readers spend a lot of time in the top left corner of the screen. A Yahoo study found that putting thumbnail photos or videos next to search results improved click-through rates, and Google found that thumbnail images in search results help users more quickly decide whether the result will be useful. A picture really does say a thousand words…
3. Banner Blindness. Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy founded by Jakob Nielsen, the guru of Web page usability) found through heat maps that users ignore Web ads. Plain text on a Web page gets read in the golden triangle and face photos draw eyeballs, but ads are completely ignored.
4. Talking Heads Bore. Studies show that online video of a talking person loses the user’s attention—users start looking at things in the background of the person in the video, or anywhere else except the person talking. The lesson? If you’re going to shoot video of a person talking, keep it really short (less than one minute) or use a photo instead. Sometimes video isn’t the right medium for your content. The most successful use of video on the Web, according to eye-tracking studies, is when you need to explain a concept or demonstrate some type of process or product.
5. Email Introductions Ignored. In e-newsletters, the studies found that most users ignore the introductory text. Sixty percent of users look at just the first two words and then skip down the page.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out these sites:

• http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines_book.pdf
• http://useit.com/eyetracking
• http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/methodology

My research led me to this post at Cyberjournalist.net that examines digital infographics used by various news sites to explain data about the B-52 bomber and other weapons. Take a look at the differences in these:

• The Minneapolis Startribune.com offers data on lots of different war weapons, including photos, specs, crew, and armament info (see screen shot at right).
• USA Today has a Flash-enabled infographic with specs, armament, photos, and inventory data.
• Elmundo.es features what look to be effective graphics, if only I could read Spanish.
• The New York Times applies digital movements to pretty detailed graphics to convey data, munitions, cockpit, and other airplane parts information.

My favorite from the list above is the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s. Here’s why I think they’re successful:

1. They break down and/or categorize the information into easily clickable weapons, tabs, and/or sections, which gives the audience control and invites interaction with the information.
2. The content isn’t overwhelmed by the graphic. You notice the information first, not the cool shadows, sounds, textures, and colors. I couldn’t say that about the USA Today example, for instance.
3. They feature a consistently applied hierarchy of information. Notice that all of them have headlines and decks, and then supplemental text that pops up as the graphic moves.
4. The graphics are simple and straightforward—they aren’t so complex as to require squinting and/or up-close viewing. I found the New York Times graphics a bit too complicated for use online, for instance.

What do you think? Which site’s graphics depicts information about wartime weapons most successfully online?

One thing about bees is that they rely on their hive being in one location. Move the hive too suddenly or too far, and they won’t come home—they’ll just keeping going back to where the hive used to be. So the way to move a hive is to move it a couple inches every day until you have it at its new location.

I think Web audiences are a lot like bees. I’ve managed lots of redesigns in my publishing career, and every time new designs launch, mailboxes flood with angry readers saying they liked everything better the way it used to be.  Sometimes a planned series of design “phases” or iterations will be less disruptive to the audience than a wholesale abrupt change, especially when a redesign is not serving as a brand refresh necessarily but more of a reconfiguration.

The redesigns I’ve managed that launched as entirely different publications/sites—with new sections, old sections in new places, all new type treatments, etc.—did so because a refresh of the publication and audience was in order. Sometimes you change your brand because you need it to appeal to a specific/different customer segment. Other times, you change it because you want to reach more customers and offer more value, without losing any one customer segment. That’s when we could take a lesson from bees.

Email me or follow me on Twitter at @cziems and I’ll give you some of my first batch of honey.

• Funny
• Tells a story
• Uses images/visuals
• Has personality
• Inspires learning, thought, action, sharing, passion
• Solves a problem
• Teaches
• Is new or offers a unique perspective
• Makes the complex simple
• Easy to digest
• Resonates with reader—connects—personalized
• This acronym for compelling content seems to sum it all up: SUCCESs = simple-unexpected-concrete-credible-emotional-story

Almost universally, compelling content has these effects on readers:

• Makes them come back or subscribe
• Draws people in
• Makes people share or want to share the content
• Compels action
• Makes them read to the end

The comments—especially those defining compelling content as personable, passionate, resonating, something you want to share—made me think about the intersection of social media and more traditional content, and whether/how social media is shifting readers’ expectations of what they want from an article, or a blog post, or the newspaper or anything they read. I took a risk last week by writing about my new dog in a weekly “business” email, but I got more response from that than I usually get when I focus solely on business issues. Was it the photo? Or the subject? Or the fact that it was personal?

How can social media be integrated into your corporate Web articles so that readers respond in ways that social tools are encouraging—e.g., they can comment, they can share the article (via email, Digg, etc.), they can subscribe (RSS), they can be drawn in with visuals or polls or rich media or any element that invites a click so they can experience a different facet of the subject, they can take an action based on what the article has taught them by clicking on something that offers a next step, they can see how many other readers ranked it highly or shared it, etc.

I loved how some of our HP clients worked together this week to make sure blog posts teased the audience about the fiber channel over Ethernet story, and then tweeted about the article once it was launched. And the article’s most visually prominent call to action was an invitation to join the conversation on the blog itself.

I wonder, as Web articles support marketing campaigns that incorporate Facebook pages or Twitter accounts or a video series, how corporate marketers can effectively integrate those elements into the articles. And how the organizations might have to work differently to ensure articles and social media elements are well-coordinated.

Check out the follow-up post to the above, How to Get in Touch with your Readers Needs [and Produce Compelling Content], for the author’s principles (he focuses on blog content, but I think the concepts apply to other types). And let me know what you think!