Monthly Archives: February 2010

Google to Rein In Content Farms?

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Matt Cutts on This Week in Google

Matt Cutts: Raising the Bar

Is Google poised to slow the growing domination of its search results by content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content? At the end of last Saturday’s episode of the podcast This Week in Google, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, suggested that it would: “If your business model is solely based on mass-generating huge amounts of nearly worthless content, that’s not going to work as well in 2010.”

Cutts’s remark came in response to a question by host Leo Laporte near the end of the episode. Though Laporte only learned about Demand Media a week earlier in his This Week in Tech Podcast, as he glancingly noted, he left no mistake about where he stood on the merits of its approach: “it seems like a way to game Google by creating a lot of pages with . . . barely adequate content in a niche area [in order] to drive traffic.”

Though Cutts avoided taking a position on Demand Media itself, he made it clear that Google was looking to address the generic problem:

“Within Google, we have seen a lot of feedback from people saying, Yeah, there’s not as much web spam, but there is this sort of low-quality, mass-generated content . . . where it’s a bunch of people being paid a very small amount of money. So we have started projects within the search quality group to sort of spot stuff that’s higher quality and rank it higher, you know, and that’s the flip side of having stuff that’s lower-quality not rank as high.”

In response to a question from co-host Jeff Jarvis, Cutts gave some specific ideas of how Google might try to adjust for the content-farm effect:

“You definitely want to write algorithms that will find the signals of good sites. You know, the sorts of things like original content rather than just scraping someone, or rephrasing what someone else has said. And if you can find enough of those signals—and there are definitely a lot of them out there—then you can say, OK, find the people who break the story, or who produce the original content, or who produce the impact on the Web, and try to rank those a little higher. . . .”

Jarvis, it should be noted, is not a cookie-cutter critic of Demand Media. He argued that Demand’s system for determining what content readers and advertisers want is “very smart.” But he seemed to agree that its resulting product is ranked too high on Google’s results. In the link economy, he said, it becomes an “ethical matter” to support original content by linking to it “at its source.”

Jarvis took Cutts’s thoughts further by stressing the growing importance of “Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook,” or “human recommendation of content,” as a way “to get past this notion of spam and content farms.” The more Google and others can capture the value of this social-media validation, he said, “the less this content-farm chaff is going to be a problem.”

In a BuzzMachine post published on Monday, Jarvis expanded on the topic of how content will be discovered in the future. Thanks to new tools like Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, he wrote, “human links are exploding as a means of discovery.” Earlier forms of discovery, he said, have been prone to manipulation, but in the new “content ecosystem,” where we “discover more and more content through people we trust,” quality will again rise to the top.

Well, here’s hoping.

Editorial Walls: The Good, the Bad, and the Virtual

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A post last week in which I wrote approvingly of editorial walls provoked some discussion of the merits of the term. That discussion might have been sufficient for me if it hadn’t been for a coincidental tweet over the weekend from Josh Gordon. Without comment, he linked to an old blog post from the Specialized Information Publishers Association titled “The Wall between Editorial & Marketing: You Have To Be Kidding!“. The gist of the post was to bemoan the continuing inability of editorial and marketing people to work together effectively. That’s not a function of editorial walls I had in mind.

Since it appears that the editorial wall concept can be subject to multiple interpretations, a brief summary of what makes for good, bad, and—in the case of content marketing—virtual editorial walls might be useful.

The Good: Few if any would argue against the idea that there should be clearly delineated separation between editorial content and advertising content. The editorial wall is simply the rule that promises the reader that, to change the metaphor, there will be a bright line between the two.

The Bad: What the editorial wall should not do is imply that editors must never talk with advertisers or must limit their collaboration with marketing or sales staff. Unfortunately, the true function of the wall is often confused with this false one, by those on both sides of it.

The Virtual: In content marketing, you could argue, the editorial wall cannot exist. By definition, such content is, however indirectly, a form of advertising. But, also by definition, content marketers need to recreate some kind of distinction between their straightforward advertising and promotions and their journalistic content. A real editorial wall may not be possible, but perhaps a virtual one is.

In the end, the term editorial wall is just a catchphrase that does not do justice to the subject it denotes. As conveyors of information, we have an obligation to do so ethically—whichever side of the wall we stand on. If the metaphor does not help us meet this obligation, then by all means let’s find another.

An Editorial Wall for Content Marketing?

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A central challenge for B2B content marketing is to keep copy free of promotional efforts. Traditional B2B publishers have handled this–with varying degrees of success–by erecting editorial walls, barriers to separate “church and state.” There are rules of engagement that limit just how much advertisers, via the publisher’s sales people, can influence editorial. But in content marketing, church and state are one and the same–the advertiser is the publisher, and by definition, the editor works for the advertiser.

One solution to this problem is what might be called a “virtual” editorial wall.

Though this may not have been her intent, Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions has proposed just such a wall this week. First, she wrote about how to control the editorial influence of various corporate interests, such as legal and corporate branding. She followed this up with a post describing how to use an “editorial style baseline” to “to keep your content on track with solution developers, brand stewards and legal folks.”

Her baseline document aims to steer writers away from talking about their company and brands, and towards focusing on the interests and concerns of the reader. As she puts it, the baseline is a “way you make sure your content doesn’t slip back into company-focus which can diminish the levels of engagement you’re working so hard to build.”

In other words, a kinder, gentler editorial wall.

I have yet to see a discussion of editorial walls per se in the context of content marketing. But as traditional B2B  editors move increasingly into this field, it’s a concept that can be useful. Albee’s baseline might be one good place to start that discussion.

Editors Need to Think Like Marketers

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Social media may be taking over the world, but in B2B publishing, many pockets of resistance remain, particularly among editorial staff. Paul Conley has been worried about this trend for years now. As he put it in a post last year, B2B journalists have been “adopting the techniques of conversational editorial more slowly than . . . the public relations and marketing executives of the industries we cover.”

How can B2B journalists catch up? Well, here’s a radical prescription. Think more like marketers.

In a recent post, RBI‘s Dan Blank wrote about the reasons editors at his company like—or don’t like—Twitter. (Like Blank, I’m using the word “editor” interchangeably with “journalist”.) The pros and cons he cited were all legitimate, but also circumstantial.

According to his editors, Twitter works or not depending on circumstances like whether readers use it or whether the editors have time for it. In companies that lack a social-media advocate like Dan, training and corporate support can also be issues. There’s no shortage of compelling excuses not to be enthusiastic about social media.

But the reasons editors tend not to love social media go a lot deeper than circumstances. My sense—and I speak as a long-time editor and manager of editors—is that the resistance has deeper roots.

Let’s think again for a moment about the difference between the attitudes of editors and marketers towards social media, as crystallized by Conley:

Journalists . . . are making incremental adjustments to the new world, but marketers and public-relations professionals . . . are morphing like crazy. Most of the marketing people I know love the new world. They’re excited. They can’t seem to believe their good fortune to be working in a field where the rules are being rewritten. But many journalism folks I know can generally be described as somewhat less than thrilled.

Why such a difference? I suspect it has to do with the way each type has traditionally viewed content.

Editors tend to have a craftsman’s view of their copy. It is a product that succeeds or fails on its own terms. It’s either good or bad. How it affects the reader, though important, is not the crucial test. You know when you’ve produced something good, even if no one ever reads it.

For marketers, the only important question is how their copy affects readers. The measure of its success is simple: if it doesn’t produce leads, it doesn’t work.

For editors, the copy is an end in itself. For marketers, it is a means to an end.

Granted, I’m making gross generalizations here. Writing of course is about communication, about interacting with an audience. But in the old print world, there were steep barriers to that interaction. The printed page is opaque, fixed. You can’t see your readers through it.

The new media, by contrast, are transparent. Your audience is much more immediate and interactive. Copy is no longer a product, but a process. The work editors produce is not fixed, but constantly evolving, being reworked by the interaction of writer and reader. In other words, content is now a conversation.

It’s not surprising that marketers love the world of new media. It brings them closer to their target. Editors, though, may feel cast adrift, having lost control over their product.

It may sound like heresy to them, but editors would do well to emulate marketers when it comes to social media. Like marketers, they need to look beyond their copy to the audience itself. The copy is no longer the end. Instead, the end is the conversation with the audience, whether through comments on blogs, Twittering, Facebook pages, podcasting, video, or any other new media methods.

Don’t worry, editors, it’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of a new one.

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UPDATE 2/17/10: Dan Blank offers more details on RBI’s experience with Twitter in a eMedia Vitals blog post.

Hire Your Future Competitor

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On his excellent B2B Blog last Friday, Chris Koch reflected on Forrester’s recent decision to make all its analysts move their blogs into Forrester’s web site.

Forrester claims the move was made to protect its intellectual property. Koch’s view, though, is that Forrester’s motivation is to do the very thing it urges clients not to do: exert control over the way its employees use social media.

Though he doesn’t cite it specifically, I have to wonder if a related motivation isn’t to avoid creating competitors. As Koch notes, “The most powerful example of one of these personally branded blogs is Web Strategy by Jeremiah, by Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst who left Forrester prior to the policy change.”

While Forrester obviously wants its analysts to be well-known, it probably doesn’t want them to become so well known that they don’t need their employer anymore. The corporate brand wants to dominate its personal brands.

That might have been a smart business attitude for a content company once, but it’s dead wrong now.

In the publishing world, it used to be that when you interviewed editors and writers, you looked for evidence that the candidate would stay with you long-term. Likewise, most candidates wanted a chance to build a career within your company.

For the employer, it meant minimizing your hiring and training costs and benefiting from the ever-increasing experience of staff. For the employee, it meant not just job security, but continuing opportunities in experience and career advancement. It was, of course, a pairing of unequals, a master-servant relationship. But in the publishing world of old, it was the only way for the individual to gain access to the machinery needed to do the work.

That relationship has changed dramatically in the last decade. In the new-media world, individuals no longer need employers to build and maintain a publishing career. With the tools necessary for online publishing now essentially free, the employee has become, in terms of production, the equal of the employer. As Jeff Jarvis put it four years ago, “The empowered individual can create a media company, using blog software; create a manufacturing company, using somebody else’s factory and somebody else’s distribution; create a multinational enterprise, using nothing more than a Skype line.”

In such an environment, it makes no sense to hire people because they are likely to stay put. What you want is just the opposite: people who are likely to burst through personal and professional boundaries, to innovate, to try out new and untested ideas and technologies, and to build up their personal brands. In other words, you want editorial and journalistic entrepreneurs.

The best employees in the new-media world are those who have the potential to become the employer’s strongest competitors. As an employer, your goal should be not to repress, but to nurture their competitive instincts. If you don’t, you won’t be maximizing your own competitive potential.