Content Wise

It's Hard for Brands to Make "Friends" on Facebook

Today's New York Times Digital Domain column describes the challenges and offers cautionary tales in using social media to promote brands:

When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”

When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.

The Times report discusses in detail Procter & Gamble's attempts to use Facebook to promote Tide, Crest Whitestrips, and other products.

Twitter Stars on TV News

The microblogging tool Twitter now has its own television show, sort of.

CNN's wired anchor guy Rick Sanchez is doing a daily newscast (3 p.m. Eastern time, noon Pacific) that features tidbits generated by his audience via Twitter and other social and mobile media. Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion and Craig Stoltz at Web 2.Oh Really? have the details.

Personally, we've got a love/hate thing going with Twitter. By getting users to answer the question "What are you doing," it pumps more personal grunts and groans into the ever-raging mudslide of mundane musings on the Web. And yet, we've found it can be a handy way of glimpsing the activities of family, friends, and colleagues. (Michael's feed is at http://twitter.com/mgoldsf. Susan's is dormant at the moment.)

Perhaps more intriguing, people keep trying to use Twitter to commit actual journalism and online marketing, something that all publishers should be exploring. We did a tiny experiment in team Twitter coverage of Stanford's magazine and book publishing course in June; we'll try it again more seriously for the upcoming workshop on Web publishing.

Checking Sanchez's Twitter feed just now we see he has more than 15,000 "followers" and is tracking 13,000 feeds. Say what you will about the quality of his show. It looks like he claimed a big-time presence for CNN in the "Twittersphere" and found a promising new conduit to the audience.

Promote Content With Clear Headlines & Social Links

It's not enough to simply publish content on the Web and hope that the audience will come. You have to work the system.

Writing at Poynter Online, Managing Editor Mark Russell of the Orlando Sentinel shares some strategies that work for his newspaper's site:

1. Write Web-friendly headlines that are readily picked up by search engines and clicked on by searchers. This means using quick, informative, concrete language. Some recent examples from the Sentinel's site:

• Kidnapped teen's dad: 'Watch your children'
• 10 held, 3 at large in cocaine roundup
• Polk residents can recycle tires, phones, ink cartridges

It also means avoiding the clever turns of phrases that may amuse your colleagues but leave the Web audience scratching its collective head. For instance, "Commission to dive in on pool." Oops--that was a rare instance of The Sentinel ignoring its own advice.

2. Submit article links to social recommendation & networking sites. Russell describes two recent cases in which the paper attracted considerable attention for local stories by putting links to them on Facebook.

Make Your Message Memorable

Why won’t that ridiculous urban legend about kidney kidnappers ever die?

There are several good reasons, all of them instructive for those of us who spend our days trying to craft engaging content and messages with staying power. You can learn the key to the kidney legend, and a bunch of other strategies for developing riveting ideas, in a useful new book:  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die.

Following their own advice, authors Chip and Dan Heath explore six basic principles of stickiness in an entertaining string of practical, surprising, authoritative, and, yes, memorable case studies, exercises, and guidelines. Some highlights:

• When searching for a powerful example, check the possibilities using the "Frank Sinatra test."
• Did you know that the "curse of knowledge" threatens to doom your article, your headline, your presentation, the title of your book, the organization of your Web site, and pretty much anything else you're trying to put across to an audience?
• Assignment: Using Bambi as your focus, develop an unforgettable message about the low risk of shark attacks.

(Visit the Made to Stick site for a generous excerpt, which includes the kidney caper.)

We're putting Made to Stick on our bookshelf next to that other indispensable little guide about compelling communication by Strunk and White. We’ve nicknamed the Heath brothers' new volume "The Elements of Stickiness."