You might not have noticed this happening over the last few years, but so-called "old media" or "Mainstream Media / MSM" (which is a total misnomer) is struggling against New Media (bloggers, online journalists and probably people like you). The Old Media fear dilution of their value by the hoards of online authors taking snippets or even entire articles and using them in derivative articles on third party sites. As is often true, there is SOME basis for their concern. Any "author" who uses significant pieces of another's work to serve their own purposes without providing a reasonable benefit to the source is essentially "stealing" value. HOWEVER, what constitutes value to the source is up for debate. A balance of "Fair Use" with reasonable attribution rather than excessive fees and blocking seems to make the most sense and serves society best. In fact, the wise new media company will eagerly promote the use of their work with appropriate attribution and link-back to build and maintain their audience reach. Sometimes this debate is downright humorous. That's what prompted me to share it with you. Exhibit A: WOOT & TechCrunch vs. AP

Fair Use

Authors often depend on the concept of "Fair Use" to use portions of another author's work upon which to frame their own thoughts. For years, there has been a dance happening where some sites are comprised entirely of content from other source content creators and others use small portions of work to create new, complementary content. Source content creators have sometimes embraced and at other times chafed at this behavior. The smartest have benefited greatly by using this ecosystem to build or retain audience. After all, the intelligent reader will follow links to the orginal source to understand context. The NYT describes "Fair Use" as follows:

...vague doctrine of "fair use," which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

This summer, the AP decided to take a stand. The NYT describes how this story began in "The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs", when the AP sought to set pricing for use of even small parts of AP articles with this form. The AP went after several sites to make their point in what AP's vice president and strategy director now calls a "heavy-handed" approach, but only after the bloggers dusted up the issue online.

Woot! Woot! - The Virtual Food Fight

Woot!, an online bargain site that created the "one deal a day" category, showed it's irreverence of Old Media when it took a poke at the AP for quoting content from Woot!'s site without payment. Apparently Woot! had used the AP's form to calculate that the AP should have paid Woot! $17.50 as covered in this article by TechCrunch "Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50". The AP took notice of TechCrunch's article and decided to fire off an email to TechCrunch AND Woot!. Ahhh, a virtual food fight has now started in public. TechCrunch chronicles what happened in "AP Not Amused By The Woot Story, Tries To Play The Oil Spill Card".

Bottom Line

"Fair Use" is a serious and important topic. With content virtualized and omnipresent, the rules for how it can be shared and leveraged must be clear and reasonable. Reasonable - derivative work should add clear, additional value or use very little of the prior work. Cases that seem appropriate to me include:

1. 1-2 sentences used to spawn a related story much larger than the quote. The quote should have its source clearly stated and a link back to the source.
2. Title link only (e.g. Drudge Report) - almost no content used

Value to the source content creator is attribution and a link to source.

Clear - As long as the "Fair Use" laws/rules are unclear, authors will not know where the "line" is drawn and litigation will follow.

Is there a "Safe Harbor"?

In a somewhat related case, Google vs. Viacom, Viacom sued Google over copyright infringement due to copywritten content posted on YouTube without Viacom permission. YouTube's early success depended on the concept of "Safe Harbor". If we don't actively screen content, then how can we know that something infringes and be obligated to remove it? Viacom's basic claim is that YouTube knew that copyright infringement was rampant and therefore needed to be more proactive in enforcement, or something like that. Google won, or did they? The Daily Beast talks about the case and what's next in "Google vs. Viacom: Who Will Come Out on Top?"

I believe that NBC's original outrage over SNL clips being posted on YouTube actually gave YouTube its "street cred" and catalyzed its early explosive growth in the first place. Now YouTube has become a well-used promotional vehicle and "Old Media" content providers have been forced to get more creative to maintain their core audiences. That is the subject of another article...

More information is surfacing about the impact of video advertising on web campaigns. "Last week at the annual ARF Re:Think conference in New York, Hernan Lopez, President of .Fox Networks, and (Gian Fulgoni) presented an analysis of four ad campaigns run on the .Fox Network in the U.K that were evaluated using the comScore AdEffx™ platform." The data set included 80K U.K. Internet users and the campaigns delivered 300 Million impressions (# times anyone saw the ads). The goal of the research was to "understand how display ads and video ads increased visitation to the advertised brands' Web sites and how they increased search queries that used trademark terms or related generic terms." To "cut to the chase", the findings were that video ads and display ads both increased the reach (# people exposed to the ads) and search queries across sectors (finance, travel, public sector and utilities). HOWEVER, video ads increased site visitation higher than display ads with fewer exposures.

Within the public sector placements, video alone had a significant impact on site vistation than display ads alone.

While this is a limited data set, it reinforces that video is impactful to your campaign. Keep in mind however, that other research also shows that not all video is created equally. In my blog post "Online Video Growth & Advertising That Works", I highlighted research by Advertising.com showing that key variables with video include: relevance to the viewer, higher bar required to trigger spending time to watch a video, and production value and impact are directly proportional.

In a nutshell, do video ads, but do them well and targeted at the right audience.

Most of us probably already know that keywords (not just those in metadata) make a difference in your search engine battle to the top (organic SEO), and through that, to the top of your potential customer's click list. It's absolutely not the only thing that matters, but it can make a huge difference in gaining an online audience. I see my web consulting customers making mistakes in this area often and have some great success stories, so it was time to write this reminder about gaining the keyword habit. I want you to learn to speak keyword to improve your organic SEO -- the "free" kind.

Keep keywords relevant.

Keywords should not be used carelessly in your attempts to gain organic search engine optimization (SEO). They should be clearly relevant to what you do. Relevance in this case means words that a customer would use to describe (and search for) your business. If you use industry terms that a customer might not use, then expect failure. Once a customer gets to your site, they need to be clearly rewarded with evidence that your business is truly relevant to their search terms. This payoff should include seeing those keywords again in your messaging as well in the overall context of your site. Good website design also means that the keywords should be fortified with strong "why-to-buys" -- #1 Provider of..., Best, Award-winning... and promotions -- Free introductory offer... so that the customer realizes that you are relevant and the best choice. Your goal is to prevent the dreaded click-back. Click-backs (clicking back away from your site to the search list to pick the next listing) are rejection and a lost sale.

Keep keywords consistent.

If your keywords seem to have Attention Deficit disorder, then they may be ineffective. Some core keywords should be consistently used throughout your site. A select set of keywords can be added to specific pages of your site to highlight its topic. Keep your total keyword list to no more than 5-7 words with a priority given to 2-3 keywords. Keep in mind that derivations of a word make them two different keywords -- rental vs. renting.

Keep your text readable.

Don't get carried away and bristle your paragraphs with keywords such that reading is uncomfortable. Not only will customers be ill-served, but also Google bots may consider it trickery and penalize your ranking. Read through your text and make sure that the text is clear and easily readable. Remember that keywords also should be in metadata that users don't always see (page tags: title, description, keywords; image tags: alt, title, etc.).

Speak keyword.

Make it a habit to throw keywords into everything that you write online. The entire Internet is searchable. so your social media Twitter tweets, Facebook status, LinkedIn status all should be rich in keywords about your business. Remenber also to include backlinks to your site to "bring them home" to your website to close the sale.

Monitor progress. Yours and competitors

Keep your keywords up-to-date and competitive. Remember that your competitors want to be number one in search rankings too and will be trying to beat you. Monitor which keywords are working (and which aren't) for your website AND your competitors'.

 

I fully understand that many of you may not yet be active on Twitter. I sympathize with the confusion as to why you should change your ways, but I encourage you to give it a whirl. There is a whole lot of useful and/or entertaining information out there in bite-sized chunks.

One way that I recommend that customers get their feet wet is to "listen" before speaking. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type a term that interests you. Maybe it's "Tiger Woods" (I hope not), "Job Search" or "Haiti" that might intrigue. One way that those who "Tweet" help you to sort through the millions of tweets out there is through a "hashtag". Hashtags are simply keywords that seek to group tweets around a topic. They always follow a # symbol. Several hashtags can be added to a single tweet.

For example, this one from @Alyssa_Milano: "Congratulations #NOLA. Your city deserves this Super Bowl. #Saints #WhoDat #SB44" In order, the hashtags stand for New Orleans Louisiana, New Orleans Saints, the "Who Dat?" cheer and Super Bowl 44. We use hashtags to help those who search and also to make sure that our tweets fall into the path of those we want to SEE our tweets. It's a bit of deliberate steering of our message. One way to attempt to maximize your audience is to watch what hot topics are "trending" and toss your voice in there with the right hashtags and terms. One tool to check that out is TwitScoop. For grins, go to TwitScoop and choose menu item "Hot Trends" and then click on the largest term below the "Tag-cloud Snapshot" header. The words will grow and shrink based on which tweeted terms are getting hotter and colder, respectively. Sounds straightforward enough.

IDEA: The AutoHashtag

The problem is, that when I'm tweeting, why do I need to remember all of the possible hashtags for whatever I'm tweeting about? To the degree that I get into a hashtag "rut", I start to limit my audienece again to those who already know that I exist. One solution is to add a feature to my Twitter clients (TweetDeck, HootSuite, Tweetie...) that automagically suggests trending hashtags based on the content of my tweet. Then let me choose the ones that I want to keep. I wonder if I can get #autohashtag to start trending?