Tuesday night, the inimitable SchneiderMike, senior VP of the digital incubator at Allen & Gerritsen, held court at Meadhall for a meeting of Content Strategy New England, talking location-based marketing as it relates to content strategy. He literally co-wrote the book on location-based marketing, and his passion for the topic is infectious.
Despite the noise and the distraction of about a thousand beers on draft, Mike dropped a ton of valuable insights, some of which I have captured below:
The biggest opportunities for content strategy beyond the checkin come from the semantic web. How can LBS leverage data — history, tips, friends, etc. — to enhance context and create more informed user experiences?
People expect an experience around a place. What are the content types within an experience? Is place a content type? A place has structure — how do we define that?
A huge challenge for content strategy around location is fragmentation. A place can exist in multiple databases. As much as possible, we need to own the standardization of our venue data across all platforms and enable our content to be served across all of them.
Food for thought: there’s no W3C standard for location. Relatedly, we need to expand our editorial style to account for location.
We need to start thinking of the web as a giant database.
Ditto – An app that addresses your intent, most relevant at or before the decision point for what you want to do, semantically leveraging structured content and metadata to make recommendations.
Forecast – Another app centered around intent, sharing your upcoming plans with friends.
“Media organizations have a shit ton of content,” and they’re adapting it for LBS.
Apps should be smarter by looking at checkin history, friends, etc to make recommendations. Draw conclusions. Leverage rating data against location to make real time recommendations.
Can content enter the Uncanny Valley and be too participatory? There are good and bad uses. Be relevant and useful. Don’t overreach beyond reason.
“We’re all layered.” As content strategists, we need to understand these layers and how individuals want to use those layers. What channels make sense for which content/engagement? Use the right channel.
We need to wrangle these data streams in a social CRM.
Re: daily deals, these will continue. But we need to make deals feel like content
We need to push smarter, more relevant deals — things we know they want. Groupon is a Ponzi scheme. Apps like Level Up type stuff will grow, integrate into point of sale system.
Foursquare does not look at itself as a media channel, and it needs to. Brands need to know impressions and “dones” (for tips). That’s how we’ll get to effectiveness. How effective is History Channel? Who knows?
Checking in to TV shows is gaining in popularity, as a means to find others who share your passion.
There is multiple screen convergence happening while watching television.
Hashtags add context and community to the viewing experience.
Checkins are an unnatural behavior; there must be a great motivation to do so.
Earlier today, I asked on Twitter: “When it comes to creating content, what does ‘quality’ mean to you?” I got a range of great responses and had some good discussions. I’d love to hear your thoughts, as well, in the comments.
This year, I attended my third Podcamp Boston which is always a great, affordable opportunity to learn and network from some of the smartest web marketing people in the area.
One of the great things about Podcamps is how attendees are empowered to shape the conference in a way that makes it most valuable to them, whether it’s by creating ad hoc sessions or how many presenters actively turn to members of the audience to enhance the discussion with their questions and input. Last year, Katie Cohen and I ran an ad hoc discussion about content strategy, which was a fun and fulfilling exercise. I came away resolved to propose a formal session this year — and I did!
I described my session, “Get Smart About Content,” to some people as “content strategy lite,” covering the high level principles of ensuring your content is sustainable, useful and goal-driven.
It was a great session, made great (in true Podcamp fashion) by the smart questions and helpful insights shared by the (packed!) room. Thanks to everyone who participated. Below, I’ve shared the slides (enhanced with some additional details) as well as a Storify of some of the key points tweeted during the session. Thanks, Podcamp organizers, for the great opportunity!
UPDATE: Thanks to Jess Faulk of Simmons College for recording the session!
On July 22, 2011, I was honored to deliver the keynote address at HighEdWeb Arkansas to an audience of approximately 100 higher ed web professionals from the region. The title of my talk was “Once Upon a Semester: Storytelling as a Framework for Higher Ed Web Marketing.” You can watch a capture of the audio and slides from the talk here (or view the slide deck via SlideShare).
My talk revolved around four core elements that shape storytelling as a framework for higher ed web marketing:
Empathy - Emotions drive effective storytelling. Can you evoke an emotion that is appropriate to the context, or drives action?
Holistic approach – Think about the story arc of our web content and web user experiences. Does it carry the user to a resolution?
User as Hero – At a university, our users are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We need to help them be awesome. We are Excalibur to their King Arthur, Sam to their Frodo.
Purpose - Stories should support the brand by contextualizing our efforts to advance it. We also have to account for the brand storytelling role of our audiences — as “fan-fiction” authors of our brand, are they adhering to canon? Is this canon something people are aware of?
Thanks to the folks at HighEdWeb Arkansas for giving me the opportunity to keynote the conference. For just a day and a half, it was an extraordinary experience packed with useful knowledge, smart people and Southern hospitality. Hope to see y’all next year!
I delivered this presentation at SUNYCUAD on June 9, 2011. This post will be updated with additional links and insights as they come up. I would love to hear your thoughts, or examples of other higher ed news sites you think are doing it well.
Since forever, I’ve been a weather nerd. Perhaps it came from growing up in South Florida, surrounded by thunderstorms, hurricanes and other tropical phenomena. I still vividly recall when I first learned how the Florida afternoon thunderstorm cycle gets conjured each hot and steamy day — when the easterly sea breeze off the ocean collides with the westerly wind from the Everglades. Boom. No, that wasn’t thunder; that was the sound of my young mind being blown by knowledge. Where did I learn this? From my local TV meterologist.
Flash forward several years, and I’m in New England, where weather prognostication (both professional and amateur) is serious business. With more seasons and thus more flavors of weather to deal with, it can’t be easy to be a meteorologist in Boston. When snow is due, an eager or beleaguered public (depending on personal preference and what part of winter we’re in) hang on every inch in your snowfall prediction. Lately, with the transition to warm weather being torturously slow in the wake of a wearying winter, any forecast with a high below 50 or the hint of a flurry draws out the pitchforks.
But whether it’s 70 and sunny or a snowpocalypse, the local TV meteorologists are out there in force, engaging with the masses. And by “there,” I don’t mean their TV stations. I mean the internet.
True Confessions
Before going any further, let me come clean: I am a category 2 weather nerd. I’ve got the National Weather Service forecast for my ZIP code bookmarked. I’ve been known to click on a forecast discussion or two — caps, jargon and all. I probably check the forecast at least a half dozen times in any given day. But despite these proclivities, I know I am not the biggest weather nerd around.
While I’m coming clean, let me add the following: barring an extraordinary emergency, I don’t want TV news, local or cable.
Partly Nerdy
I think it all began when my friend Liz — also a weather nerd, perhaps Category 1 — began evangelizing to me about the WHDH weather blog. She swore by the forecasts of Pete Bouchard, as conveyed not through the Ch. 7 newscasts, but through the blog. So, while I continued to mainline National Weather Service forecasts, I often supplemented them with a WHDH weather blog chaser. I came to appreciate it for the human voice it brought to my weather experience.
As I got more involved with Twitter, I began following both Pete Bouchard and Dylan Dreyer on Twitter. Pete hews pretty close to all weather, all the time in his tweet stream, but he’s great at responding to people and having a back and forth. Dylan is more prone to talk about food, TV or her dog, which is also fun.
This was all well and good, but I soon got introduced to the man who would become my Twitter weather boyfriend: New England Cable News’ Matt Noyes.
@MattNoyesNECN
Noyes wears his nerdiness and unabashed love of all things weather on his sleeve. He throws around terms like Norlun trough as casually as most people talk about cold fronts. (He’s even got the second result in Google for the term.) He teaches his 2,600-plus Twitter followers words like graupel (soft snow pellets) and rejoices when they pick them up. He hosts a technical live webcast every weeknight, in which more than a hundred people can regularly be found watching Noyes parse raw weather data aloud. He is an avid tweeter, sharing everything from real-time weather info for specific towns, props to fellow NECN staff, Wendy’s drive-thru angst or moments spent with his dog. He’s not afraid to get technical and detailed about everything from conflicting forecast models to cloud formations, but he is very good at explaining weather phenomena (most recently when the report about radioactive rain in Massachusetts came out last week).
So, what is Matt Noyes, really? He’s an influencer. He’s an expert. All of those annoying social media titles, they probably apply. But above all, he’s a weather man. That what matters, and his expertise and the manner in which he uses the web to share it is what makes him stand out. When I want to know what’s happening with New England weather, he has become my go-to source, almost completely because of the way he uses Twitter.
The new 12 Z GFS has a much stronger storm over Nantucket Friday night with rain and wind. Rain changing to a burst snow overnight and Early Saturday before pulling away with strong WNW on the backside . Quite a different look from it’s ooZ weaker morning solution.
But wait, there’s more!
I leave you with GFS ensemble 500 mb for Friday April 1st. Look at the eastern trough in place, the merging of the polar and subtropical jetstreams.
What???
Before we get into an uproar about how Joe Joyce isn’t blogging for his audience, please recall my statement above about how weather in New England is serious business. Because it’s true. Everyone, to one degree or another, is obse–let’s call it enthusiastic. They’re enthusiastic about the weather. For the most enthusiastic of disciples in any given field, nerds are sages. They are revered, and they are indulged. We want to learn from them, to stoke the flame of our fervor. The above babble about the GFS ensemble (which, no, is not a new boy band called Guys From Southie) is just what people didn’t know they wanted to know.
What's this? Who cares? It's awesome.
In broadcast news, where complex stories are diluted to the most accessible 15 or 30-second news droplet, I think it’s fascinating that we can get such an in-depth look at what goes into the weather forecast through the forecasters’ online outposts. On the web, we get a multidimensional peek beneath the hood of the preparation, the science and the analysis that goes into what is just a two-minute segment on the evening news. It makes local weather a real multichannel experience, with each channel bringing something for which it is uniquely suited. TV gives the high-impact overview, blogs provide added depth and insight, and Twitter is where they chat about it all and answer questions one-on-one. And this doesn’t just happen for the epic snowstorms. This happens for your typical spring day, too.
These forecasters, by simply being their nerdy selves, are doing a hell of a great job sharing their expertise and building community around weather, but also marketing their stations. Because Matt Noyes wins on Twitter, I have heightened respect for NECN, even though TV news is not part of my media consumption habit. I’ll hype him to people who do watch TV news. And when The Big One looms and I feel compelled to immerse myself in the news surrounding the next huge storm, you can get which station I’ll be tuning in to.
So, lesson learned from the Twitter meteorological corps? Own your nerdiness. Revel in it. The people who care will love you for it. And around here, hate mail after the 12th storm of the winter is just how we show our love.
One Sunday night last October, Rick Allen and I were in a cab from Logan Airport, having just returned to Boston from Las Vegas where we both spoke at the Stamats Integrated Marketing and Technology (SIMTech) conference. It was late, we were jet-lagged and exhausted from not just the Stamats conference but from HighEdWeb two weeks previous. October was a heck of a month — an awesome month, but an exhausting one — and we were beat.
Still, as the cab wound its way toward my house (first dropoff), something that had been on both of our minds finally bubbled to the surface — the idea for a higher education blog focusing on what we both held dear: content.
Rick has carved out quite a reputation for himself as the authority on content strategy in higher education. Last year, he launched a one-man assault on the higher ed conference scene, dropping content strategy knowledge at HighEdWeb, HighEdWeb Regional, PSEWEB, SIMTech and AMA Higher Ed. Beyond all that, he founded the Content Strategy New England meetup group, where he has lured content strategy luminaries such as Erin Kissane, Mandy Brown, Ian Alexander and Kristina Halvorson to speak over the past year.
Rick’s focus on content strategy and measurement naturally complements my emphasis on web content creation, social media content and the broader communications spectrum (video, news, etc.). We quickly realized this and thought we had a lot to offer the higher ed web marketing world if we put our heads together. (Selfishly, I also realized I had a lot to learn from him.)
So, one week later (Halloween!), we met at a coffee shop and hashed it all out. By the time we stepped out into autumn’s tomfoolery, Meet Content had been born.
(It’s worth noting that almost every domain permutation of word + content has been taken. If meetcontent.com hadn’t been available, we may have named the site dishwashercontent.com or something.)
Why Meet Content?
As many of us in higher ed (and other fields) have bemoaned, content often gets short shrift on web projects. In social media, people get excited about their Twitter accounts without really thinking about what they will be tweeting. We craft beautiful websites with no research or measurement in place to gauge whether or not the content achieves its goals (or, for that matter, what are our goals?). For some, content is a big part of their job — or they intuit that it should be — but they are not trained content professionals.
To us, that all spoke to a need to simply get to know what content was all about, from creation to measurement, types to distribution, soup to nuts. Also, while content may seem shiny and fun, it also requires a lot of work. With Meet Content, we wanted our community to feel that they had a friendly, accessible resource available to help walk through the challenging parts.
So, this blog is a bit of an adventure for us, but we couldn’t be more excited. A little corner of the web devoted to us nerding out about web content in higher ed — too awesome! We can’t wait to hear what you think. (And won’t you follow us on Twitter and Facebook?)
Expect to see more of a focus on dynamic context as content strategy addresses location-based experiences.
That phrase, “dynamic context,” blew my mind. It better expressed something I had been explaining as “hypertext for real life” — basically, the enhancement of our everyday lives via real-time content and information accessed through a range of embedded interfaces. (Think VH1′s “Pop-Up Video.”) Foursquare is one such interface; a QR code is another. So checking in is like turning the key on an engine of information.
The PWW… is about blurring the line between online and offline by tightly coupling two things: a person’s real-time context and all of the information available on the Web. By “tightly coupling” I don’t simply mean using a person’s location to make searches location-relevant. I mean a new set of user interactions that simply didn’t make sense before we had real-time user context, like location.
The check-in, says Holden, is one of those interactions. Its power lies in using data to unlock physical-world opportunities, whether it’s a business promotion or chance encounter with a friend.
The check-in converts location to place, which is far more semantically rich than simple location, and it is real-time — it means “I’m here now.”
A history of an individual’s check-ins “are the physical world equivalent of a Web clickstream,” says Holden — or, as he called it in his talk at Where 2009, a “footstream.” This data “can be accessed in context, in the moment, e.g. to provide highly personalized recommendations for the real world.”
The Multichannel World
The underlying framework for a successful dynamic context is a rich and connected community. “The social web simply shortens the distance between us,” Dave Allen of NORTH was quoted as saying at Portland State University’s Digital Marketing Conference in December, and location/experience-based services thrive on our connectivity.
It’s a virtuous cycle: by adjusting my position in the network — by following and unfollowing — I improve the diversity and quality of readage I see, and by passing along the best of what comes along, my followers are better off. My actions improve their respective positions in the network too. And those of their followers, and so on. I am actually improving the entire network, by better positioning myself.
Why this, why now? Because the new reality is multichannel. As Tamsen McMahon recently observed on Twitter, “The new reality: currently carrying on a conversation with one person on three different platforms.” The hypertext is all around us, and we are developing tools to leverage — and keep up — with this new reality.
Teressa Iezzi, editor of Creativity magazine, told NPR:
Now, with smart phones and location awareness and tablets, you’ve got multiple screens speaking to each other. I think you’re going to see a lot of the most interesting things in advertising happening with that.
But how do we define where these interactions are taking place?
Experience vs. Location
In the first post of this series, I said: “The idea of location is morphing such that it really means experience.” And the power of these location/experience-based services is in providing dynamic context to our experiences.
A new Android app, Hashable, is centered around this premise, providing a new way to “check in” to the people we meet, log information and grab more context about them in real time.
Drew Davis of Tippingpoint Labs recently provided a great example of how business can be transformed when there is rich dynamic context. California wine country, apparently, is all over LBS, making them a valuable way for visitors to navigate the different offerings and chart an itinerary, and creating a new playing ground for competition among the wineries. It’s great for business. For the tourists, their wine country experience gains a whole new level of context that drives their decision making.
Of course, the idea checking in quickly became something that transcended physical location and embraced shared experience (see: snowpocalypse, heatpocalypse and any other flavors of weather-pocalypse — heck, a brand is a type of experience). “Squarendipity” is an example of dynamic context, where information received from a geosocial service influences your actions in the physical world — in this case, going to find your friend who just checked in at the Starbucks across the street. Also, look at Runkeeper, Tripit, Redpint and the like. Running, traveling and even drinking have — like TV shows and outings to the bar — become experiences that are enhanced both socially and informationally by the web.
Even business applications of Foursquare aren’t bound to GPS coordinates — this December Mashable post outlined multiple ways to use Foursquare for marketing without a location. Some suggested ways include creating a fake location that raises awareness around an issue or idea or building your friend network to broaden exposure to your tip and to-do content. Both are great examples of creating dynamic context (particularly, to Bloomstein’s point, as part of a content strategy).
In addition to purchasing convenience, a real-world hyperlink can trigger multimedia or crowdsourced wisdom that can help you in a pinch. Imagine, for example, needing to re-thread the belts on a child’s car seat, but not having the manual in front of you to show you how. There is no need to Google the product or scavenge through your file cabinet for the manual; just scan the QR code and have the manual or a how-to video appear right on your phone.
QR codes have found a wide range of uses, from mobile web business cards to TV commercials. Honestly? While I love QR codes, I am not betting the bank on them. I think they are the first iteration of what will eventually become a more sophisticated interface for adding dynamic context to the physical world. They are important to explore now, to see how these new interfaces work and what the potential applications are. But will we be using QR codes in five years the same way we do today, only with much wider adoption? I don’t think so. The principles will be there in wider adoption, but not QR codes per se. Look, for example, at how this Old Navy ad employs the app Shazam — it’s already happening.
Something that really excites me, about which I have done some preliminary geeky chatting with my friend and mobile expert Dave Olsen about, is near-field communications. Dynamic context should be smarter; it should intuit where you are and what you need, based on settings you configure. Near-field communications will remove the need for a human to electively take action to acquire information. It will be like flicking a switch that reveals all of the dynamic context already around you. If you want it to, information will find you.
Coming next: Conclusion, and what’s next for check-ins?
The panel was moderated by Michael Morisy of Muckrock.com.
The event began with the panel discussing what CMSes do well. Gardner-Smith said that while they do what they were intended to do well, they need to catch up to the sourcing and distribution methodologies driven by social media. Systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla do a better job of managing content flow, distributing content and integrating social features, but they could do more.
Gaffin said that CMSes excel at templated content but are not good at ad hoc content creation, or pulling together disparate content types (e.g. photos, graphics, text) into a package.
Phelps pointed to a more fundamental problem — the lack of available resources to develop a CMS to meet an organization’s needs. WBUR, he said, has hacked its installations of WordPress to death, but many web publishers lack those technical skills or resources and end up using a product that they can manage but is unsatisfactory to their needs. Later, Gaffin made the point that reporters can’t be expected to learn PHP; they don’t want to know how to make something bold, they just want to make it bold.
Buytaert lauded open source CMSes (and in turn, the open source communities) and their commitment to keeping up with an “exploding” web. He pointed, however, to the need to get better at the mobile experience, since so much online traffic is moving there.
Next, the panel explored how much the expectations of the real-time web have pushed the ways they produce content. Phelps, who offered many insightful comments over the course of the evening, noted that the standard blog post format just doesn’t cut it anymore, since they aren’t able to pull together multiple sources of information (e.g. Phelps’ Twitter feed with the content from the blog he runs, Hubbub). WBUR plans to launch a “mini-post” format that essentially weaves in Twitter-style updates with more longform blog posts, allowing for more frequent updates with a significant labor uptick. “It’s all coming together,” he said.
Gaffin hailed the instant nature of Twitter (see @universalhub), but observed how it is bad at a conversation of more than two people. He pulled up an example from yesterday morning of heavy commentary around MBTA bag searches. Gardner-Smith, whose Pinyadda curation service is employed on BostInnovation, echoed Gaffin’s sentiments and talked about the “value-added curation” on BostInnovation (example) and bringing the community into the content experience.
Morisy asked about the need to control the medium, which I thought was an odd question, but Phelps replied thoughtfully. For years, he said, the medium was the message, but on the web, content can appear anywhere. So he tries to create content that can thrive anywhere, which means sharing blog posts with minimal markup that may not translate where in other feeds or formats, taking SEO into consideration when writing and crafting easily excerptable copy, keeping in mind that bloggers may comment on his content. These may be seen as dirty tricks by some, Phelps acknowledged, but nowadays, content is consumed the way the user wants to consume it, so we might as well make our content as compatible as possible with a wide range of uses.
The conversation then turned to mobile. Gardner-Smith cited the quick jump BostInnovation has seen to nearly 13% of its visitors accessing the website from a mobile device. Our consumption of information is broken down into short bursts — on the bus, at the breakfast table — that helps drive mobile. Buytaert echoed how mobile would be a “very big shift” for CMSes, and Drupal was working hard to do it right.
Transitioning to the appification of news, Phelps derided the iPad-centric publication The Daily, saying it was “ridiculous” to tailor content to one device. “No one group is more or less entitled to good information,” he said. Gaffin noted how to web is already routing around The Daily, with Tumblr blogs sharing the publications headline (and showing that it is not that great). What happens to the well-funded newsroom of The Daily if the app flops, speculated Phelps?
Gardner-Smith is also anti-appification, saying that while apps are beautiful, he is pro-web standards and the open web. The economics of the app store, he said, will fall flat against a generation of users who have grown up with a free content ecosystem and will not pay for a native app that offers content they can get elsewhere for free. The content economy, he said, is a link economy, which cannot be replicated with a native app. Buytaert, while he cited his desire for a “beautiful” news experience, echoed the point that he gets his news from multiple sources, which are difficult to combine into an app.
Moving on to the idea of the walled garden vs. link economy, Gardner-Smith predicted a move to a “branded content ecosystem,” since publishers will need to find money somehow. Phelps brought up WBUR’s tried and true model of asking users for money and “amazingly, it continues to work.” Services like Spot.us and Flattr came up as models for community-funded reporting.
Morisy then turned the topic to the recent Gawker redesign and asked panelists for their take on it. While Phelps did not hide his distaste for it (he called Gawker “dark artists”), he said there were many lessons to be learned from it, including the new emphasis on Facebook throughout the Gawker sites. At WBUR, Facebook competes with Google for top referred. “Friends don’t let friends read bad content,” he said. Gardner-Smith echoed this, noting how the new design highlights visual content and a good user experience. On the new Gawker sites, he said, every side door looks like the front door, an acknowledgment that visitors come from all directions.
The panel closed by touching on content distribution through social networks. While Facebook makes sense for Phelps and Gardner-Smith, Gaffin focuses on Twitter because of his emphasis on more breaking and less feature-y news. Phelps explained how WBUR hacked their story pages a bit so they would look better when shared on Facebook. Why is this important? Because stories linger longer on Facebook, hanging around in people’s news feeds. He echoed the earlier point of how it is difficult to aggregate conversation on Twitter, but Facebook makes it easy. In addition, Facebook places a high value on engagement (particularly likes and comments). WBUR will often tack on a question to a story post on Facebook to kick off that engagement — or even click the first “like” themselves, acknowledging that people are more likely to participate if others are participating.
All in all, it was a great panel, though I was surprised at the omission of topics like gamification, location and curation — particular the lack of mention of Storify, which seems to address the Twitter conversation aggregation problem most of the panelists decried. Hmm, I think we need a follow-up.
Third in a series of posts about the rise of check-in services
Originally, this post and the previous post were all wrapped up into one, but it got a little unwieldy. So let me just recap a couple of the core principles with which I opened my last post:
Watching a TV show or visiting a website is as much of an experience as patronizing a restaurant. It’s driven by the same motivations to seek value. And as a value-rich experience, content demands the following things to thrive. (And these are not new or only true of the web — if you think about it, this is true across history.)
Order (schedule, structure, organization, purpose, data)
Community (conversation, audience, shared interest)
Mobility (sharing, accessibility, malleability)
Alright, let’s get to it. When it comes to blogs and websites playing the check-in game, Wayne Sutton, social sentinel that he is, summed it up succinctly:
Offering a way for visitors to check-in to your website or blog provides a way for you to reward them with badges, points and can increase time spent along with social sharing. Just like with a few popular location-based applications these platforms are building on the success of adding game mechanics to increase visitor loyalty and engagement. There’s always talk about moving beyond the check-in and rewarding customers, in this case you could reward your visitors if they check into your website or blog.
Gamification (using game dynamics to boost engagement with content)
Loyalty (rewarding advocates over time)
Push video content (boost and measure video consumption)
Revenue generation (through context)
Reward collaboration (take advantage of cross-blog content creation — like hashtags on steroids)
Achieve your goals (tying content to desired behaviors)
Web check-in services like MOJO, Badgeville, OneTrueFan and Meebo (Sutton rounds up a few more) use similar principles — giving users ways to earn points and win badges while allowing site owners to get a better look at how visitors use their site — when and how often they visit, what and how they share. Meebo also tries to connect site visitors who have similar interests (an interesting application, in light of the rise of niche websites).
It will be interesting to see how the application of game mechanics to content evolves, since gaining understanding into how people behave around content is only going to become a bigger priority for content creators of all stripes. One of the areas where this will have the most direct applications is online news, particularly as the journalism industry continues to struggle to adapt to a web-centric world. Studying how people behave with online news will be important to figuring out what’s next for news on the web. Researchers are exploring ways to better predict how users will share and discuss news content online.
With this in mind, one of the most interesting of the aforementioned services is Badgeville, which is focused on “helping publishers improve their audience loyalty, gain true insight into their communities, and increase behavioral conversions on desired outcomes.” Here is Badgeville co-founder Kris Duggan talking more in-depth about how the service works:
Chris O’Brien, a blogger for PBS’ Idea Lab and Knight Challenge award winner, recently launched a project called NewsTopiaVille “to explore how game mechanics can be applied to reinvent the way we produce, consume and interact with news.” The seeds of this idea can be found in a blog post from last year, in which he asked “Do virtual goods have anything to teach us about the economic value of news and information?” (Or more to the point, “Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online?”)
I can imagine any number of areas where game mechanics might address some of the most important and challenging questions facing news organizations: How do we improve commenting? How do we get more people to participate in creation and processing of news and information? How do we think differently about monetization?
This will be the next step for content behavior beyond check-ins and leaderboards. The Wall Street Journal’s usage of Foursquare, to share tips and offer badges, has been interesting as a foray into bringing the media property into new contexts, but the next step is to apply those check-in and game dynamics principles to the content on its own turf.
Tuesday night, the inimitable SchneiderMike, senior VP of the digital incubator at Allen & Gerritsen, held court at Meadhall for a meeting of Content Strategy New England, talking location-based marketing as it relates to content strategy. He literally co-wrote the book on location-based marketing, and his passion for the topic is infectious.
Drew Davis of Tippingpoint Labs recently provided a great example of how business can be transformed when there is rich dynamic context. 
