9. The Role of Converged Media in Your Content Strategy

“Tweetable Moment: Your content strategy must include paid, earned and owned media in order to reach your target customers.”

—#nextmediaco

As a part of the Centrino 2 (Intel’s chipset) product launch, we decided to go to market a little differently by integrating some of the amazing work we were doing within our Intel communities and combining it with paid media, specifically display advertising. The goal was to highlight long-form blog content written by Intel subject matter experts—mostly product managers and engineers—into a 300 x 250 pixel banner unit via an RSS feed.

We handpicked and tagged compelling content tagged with #centrino2 and dynamically pulled those specific blog titles into the banner unit. The results were amazing, but only lasted a day or two. The banners had such a high click-through rate that the ad had to be pulled because our servers couldn’t handle all the traffic.

This was well over five years ago and is one example of converged media—integrating paid and owned media in the market place.

More recently, a brand doing extremely well integrating paid, earned, and owned media is Pepsi. Pepsi converges its media types in a variety of different ways. If you head over to Pepsi.com, you will notice a Pinterest-like page full of branded and unbranded content about Pepsi. The site is powered by Mass Relevance, a social engagement platform that can curate paid, earned, and owned media in visually appealing ways. Pepsi has integrated several of its in-market contests and promotions on the page, most notably the “Beyoncé’s Mrs. Carter Show World Tour.” Pepsi also uses Newscred, a content marketing platform to pull in licensed content and highlight the top five trending music-related stories from notable sources like the Guardian, ABC News Radio, and Bang Showbiz. And it aggregates tweets and Instagram photos using the #Pepsi and #LiveForNow hashtags.

Another example is a mom-focused community called Social Moms. It is an independent social network of more than 30,000 moms who are influential and highly active across all social media channels: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, blogs, mobile social networks, and more. They work with large and small brands to create word-of-mouth programs that drive “earned media” for the companies they work with. They also use Outbrain to syndicate their blog content on to high-traffic sites such as CNN and others, which drives mass amounts of traffic back to their online properties.

These are examples of what’s being referred to today as converged media. This chapter discusses the role of converged media in your content strategy and gives you actionable recommendations on how to bring this to life for your brand.

Paid media is often considered “traditional advertising” and includes banner ads, paid search marketing, sponsorships, and content syndication (or native advertising as mentioned in the last chapter). Paid media initiatives usually target prospects in an effort to create brand awareness or new customer acquisition.

The advantage of using paid media is that it can scale quickly and easily. If you have a message you want the masses to see today, paid media is the right channel through which to do that. Although paid media is more expensive than the others, your brand has complete control of the content, creative, and marketing spend.

The disadvantage with paid media is that it’s often ignored by consumers because they are inundated with advertising messages daily and not just from your competitors, but from every other large brand with a marketing message and a significant budget.

Owned media is the content that your brand has complete control over, such as the corporate website, blogs, communities, email newsletters, and social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Owned media initiatives typically target to your brand’s existing community and current customers.

Many believe and say that owned media is free, specifically managing social media accounts. And though there is some truth to that, the time and labor investment are worth noting. It takes a lot of time to create content and build a thriving community. You also have to consider working with customer support teams, building escalation models, and preparing for crisis communications. This takes a lot of time planning and collaborating with other internal stakeholders—and time is money. There are other challenges you should be aware of as you think about your owned media. First, most consumers don’t trust pure “marketing messages,” whether in an advertising campaign or on a Facebook page, so it’s important to establish a content narrative that adds value to the conversation, as discussed in detail in Chapter 7, “Defining Your Brand Story and Content Narrative.” Spend time building trust with your current fans first. Then figure out a way to monetize.

Earned media is the natural response of public/media relation’s efforts, ad campaigns, events, and the content you create within your owned media channels. It is not a revolutionary concept either. For the last several decades, brands have been hiring PR firms to reach out to the media to get them to write stories about their products and services. Today, that has expanded to influencers who have popular blogs as well. When someone not associated with your brand mentions you on Twitter or Facebook, within a YouTube comment, or on any other social media channel, it’s earned media.

Other types of earned media include consumers’ social media posts, tweets, product reviews, videos, photos, and general dialog within online communities.

If you study the digital ecosystem closely, it should be clear to you that consumers have become the “news outlet” and are spreading brand messages through word of mouth. Third-party recommendations from friends, family, and colleagues are so much more credible and transparent than what your brand says about itself. Of course, your brand has little or no control over what consumers will say through social and news media channels, so not all earned media is guaranteed to be positive.

Although each of these channels plays a critical role in your content strategy, the real power is when you can integrate two or more of the channels into one campaign or initiative. This is referred to as converged media. The same thinking has led to the recent surge in “native advertising” as discussed in Chapter 8, “Building Your Content Channel Strategy.” Sites such as Buzzfeed, Crave, and Forbes are capitalizing on the opportunity to mobilize their lean but hungry editorial teams to create paid content for brands that live alongside the site’s original content.

In some cases, native advertising is backfiring. In January 2013, the Atlantic published a sponsored post titled, “David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year,” which explained that the Scientology religion had expanded more in 2012 than in any other year since its inception. The article has since been deleted. The post itself caused a stir among journalists, ad folks, and random readers of the Atlantic because many felt that readers don’t come to the Atlantic to read content about Scientology.

Charlie Warzelm, staff writer for Adweek wrote a post a few days later called “The Real Problem With The Atlantic’s Sponsored Post.” He argued that the promoted post from an incendiary organization such as the Church of Scientology from a publication like the Atlantic—whose reputation rests on thought-provoking journalism—rankled a subset of readers unfamiliar with the world of native advertising as well as those who felt that the paid religious content bordered on “blatant propaganda.”

As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Understanding the Social Customer and the Chaotic World We Live In,” customers are unpredictable, and their daily lives are dynamic. And when you combine that with the fact that there is a content surplus and customer’s suffer from attention deficit, it makes it that much more difficult for you to reach them. This is why converged media is important to your brand’s content strategy.

What you do within your owned media channels alone cannot scale or allow you to grow your communities effectively. Of course, it’s good to optimize your corporate website, blog, and online community for search and provide compelling content to your existing fans. That’s a given. But without integrating your owned media initiatives with paid media, for example, you cannot reach the mass market with your content.

The same thing can be said with paid media. Traditionally (before social media was born), paid media was pretty much the only channel for brands to communicate with customers outside of public relations. With the rise of social networking and the increase in general content proliferation, it’s difficult to reach them with just paid media. Plus, they normally reject, filter out, or flat out ignore traditional advertising alone.

Although earned media, assuming it’s positive, is always good for your brand, you cannot just hope that it sustains long term without nurturing it. In addition to general community engagement, you must focus heavily on building customer advocacy. And there is no better way to do this than to integrate earned media conversations into both paid and owned media. Imagine a situation where you are leveraging the power and reach of paid media to highlight customers who are saying great things about your brand. It can be done with converged media, and that content is trusted.

There are many reasons why building converged media into your content strategy is a smart thing to do:

• Consumers need to see, hear, or interact with your message three to five times before they will start to believe in it. The only way to do this is to use various forms of converged media.

• Paid media has reach. In minutes, you can get your content in front of millions of people. And when the content itself becomes the ad that delivers value—like highlighting user stories (earned media)—your traffic and engagement numbers will explode, and consumers will start to trust your messages.

• Whenever you post a status update on your Facebook page, you only reach between 8 and 10% of your current fan base. So by promoting your organic status updates, you can reach a higher percentage of your community.

• By amplifying your earned media and displaying it within your owned channels, you will build brand advocacy by showcasing those consumers who already love your brand to inspire others to love your brand as well.

The truth is, if you fail to integrate and align paid, earned, and owned media, you will be at a disadvantage at getting your content in front of customers and prospects. You should be less concerned about what your competitors are doing in the space and more concerned with the billions of tweets, status updates, and text messages, as well as the 3,000 or so marketing messages that interrupt consumers’ lives every day. Delivering a converged media strategy can help break through a lot of this madness.

According to the Altimeter Group, marketers who fail to learn how to reconcile paid, owned, and earned media today will be at a distinct disadvantage in the future when, in less than 10 years, most media will encompass elements of paid, earned, and owned. To arrive at this state, you must change the way you think about marketing and take this transition from brand to media company seriously.

Converged media has blurred the differences between paid, earned, and owned media, making it extremely difficult to tell the difference between an advertisement and plain content. The Atlantic article mentioned earlier is a clear example of this. The reality is that you don’t need to design ads that look like editorial content. It won’t work because people don’t “like” (literally and figuratively) ads. The converged media model emphasizes that the content itself can and should be the ad.

Instead of investing your entire budget to buy ads within Facebook’s Marketplace (located in the right column of Facebook), sponsored posts can boost the reach of your brand’s content within the news feed, where all users spend their time anyway. Content developed by your community manager—who knows the community better than anyone else—can boost an organic piece of content at a moment’s notice.

I call this news feed marketing, and it works.

According to a February 2013 eMarketer report, sponsored content displayed in the news feed has 46 times the click-through rate of ads in the right-hand column (Marketplace ads). I am not against using Marketplace ads, but rather, use them in conjunction with sponsored posts. Because the mobile Facebook experience is only the news feed for now, sponsored posts are even more important for mobile. Engagement on mobile news feed ads is twice that of news feeds on a laptop computer. Figure 9.3 shows the process by which to promote organic Facebook status updates into a promoted post.

To capitalize on Facebook promoted posts, you must first be focused on creating compelling content daily. This means that the content should be visual, relevant, tailored, actionable and in some cases, real-time. It’s important to note that not all of your posts will be promoted. If you recall from Chapter 7, the content itself should align with your business goals or to a specific theme or pillar that you have already predefined. For example, it may not make complete business sense to promote a post that links off to a third-party article. It might be smarter to promote a post announcing a new product or better yet, one that keeps your fans within the Facebook ecosystem. In either case, your content narrative should have editorial guidelines that you can use to determine whether or not a post should be promoted.

The promoted post can be content that’s planned or unplanned (using real-time monitoring of trends). Platforms such as SocialFlow, Trendspottr, and Rt.ly can help you capture and identify trends. Aligning your content, community management practices, and real-time analytics gives you the ability to deliver actionable insights based on the content performance and behaviors of your existing communities. After your content hits a certain engagement threshold, you can then turn your organic content into a promoted post. Following is an example of how this might play out.

Let’s assume that you have analyzed your last 10 highest performing Facebook posts and the average number of engaged users for each post is 200. An engaged user equals a Like, comment, or a share. This is the most basic way to do this. If you are more sophisticated with Facebook or analytics in general, you might weight a share more so than just a Like or comment mainly because it takes more effort from a fan to share content on to their feed.

The 200 average engaged user number could be your threshold and performance metric that would trigger you to push all future organic posts into a sponsored post, assuming that content falls within your editorial guidelines. The key here is that you will have to monitor the content performance closely for the first three hours, as this is usually the timeframe for when a particular post reaches the 8 to 10% critical mass. The analytics and insights will feed back into your engagement threshold and content performance indicators and will influence all future content—theme, creative elements, time, day, and so on. It’s also worthy to note that SocialFlow’s Crescendo product, mentioned at the end of Chapter 1, can automate this process for you.

Although this is an example of pushing owned content into paid media within the Facebook ecosystem, there is still a pretty big world outside of Facebook as well.

Another option for implementing a converged media strategy is to use the power and reach of paid media to amplify your owned media content; also known as content syndication. Figure 9.4 illustrates how this would work.

This model can work several different ways. Similar to the Facebook example, you can identify a high performing Facebook update and not only push it to a sponsored post, but also turn the post into a display ad and serve it within a targeted ad network outside of the Facebook ecosystem. You can do the same with other forms of owned media content as well: long-form content, white papers, product spec sheets, tweets, and so on. One vendor in the marketplace today has built an engine that can help you do this quickly and at scale—OneSpot.

Austin-based company, OneSpot, can utilize any type of content, either owned content or earned media content, and turn it into ad creative for display, social, and mobile environments. It automates the complete process of ad creation, which can turn your entire content portfolio into a library of display ads.

OneSpot uses machine learning algorithms and big data to analyze both the content and the ads created in the system. It then analyzes the ad inventory available within their ad exchange network, targeting thousands of sites whose users it predicts would engage with your content. It places your ad using RTB (real-time bidding). The algorithms consistently improve their bidding efficiency, allowing you to garner more high quality impressions with the same budget.

The OneSpot platform actively uses your ads and content to move viewers through your purchase funnel or customer journey. By retargeting viewers, their platform serves up your content (ads) based on user behaviors and increases your ability to convert customers wherever they are in the purchase funnel. Based on sites visited and content consumed, content you created can be sequenced—a viewer reading content about “big screen TVs” today can later be retargeted with a content ad with a review of a specific TV model and ultimately content about a specific promotion.

While platforms like OneSpot can turn any piece of content into a display ad, other platforms are syndicating long-form content on to third-party media sites. Many believe that this is a more effective approach, as it aligns more naturally to the way web users browse through and click on content. Have you ever noticed after reading an article on CNN or AOL, a group of links at the bottom with titles that say “We recommend” or “From around the web?” This is what I am talking about.

Outbrain is a content discovery and syndication platform that distributes branded content to third-party media sites using a widget that can be integrated on any site to match its look and feel. Outbrain has two core products that can help you engage your audience with compelling content and also amplify the reach of your existing content. Outbrain Engage is for publishers (such as CNN and AOL) and makes targeted recommendations of other content that reflects their interests, which is based on past behavior and predictions of future behavior. As illustrated in Figure 9.5, content is recommended to your readers based on their content consumption habits.

Outbrain Engage uses a complex series of algorithms to understand your audience’s browsing habits while they are on your site. The platform is able to recommend personalized links based on each individual’s content preferences.

The key differentiator from other content syndication platforms is that Outbrain’s algorithm measures reader engagement with a site after the click through on a link and classifies its content recommendation algorithms into four major buckets:

• Popularity: The content that is trending up in popularity on the site

• Contextual: The content related to the page the person is currently on

• Behavioral: Audience dynamics (that is, what people with similar reading habits have read or have not read before)

• Personal: Broad categories the person reads but are not necessarily related to the page she is on

Outbrain’s other product, Amplify, is for brands that want to increase the reach and visibility of their owned media content. If you aren’t familiar with Outbrain, chances are you have probably come across its platform without even knowing it. The company counts publishers like CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Slate, and brands like General Electric, among those using its widget to suggest links for further reading alongside content on the site. The platform offers one column of stories from the site itself and other stories from third-party content sources. Outbrain is currently embedded across 90,000 sites, generating more than 6.5 billion page views per month.

Assuming you abide by their content guidelines, Outbrain gives you the flexibility to choose which content you want syndicated, and there is also the option to use an RSS feed so that new articles are automatically included for distribution. Their platform works best for brands that are able to produce high quality content consistently. They use a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) model to determine the prominence and reach of content across their network of publishers. You have complete control as you decide what you are willing to pay for others to view your content, similar to Google Adwords. You can start as low as 10 cents per click, although Outbrain recommends starting at around 15 cents and then lowering it over time after your content becomes more popular. This ensures you get more clicks for your daily budget while maintaining your reach, to optimize ROI.

When you use InPowered, you are basically paying for advertising, but it doesn’t really look like an ad. Rather, it’s a collection of stories and articles aggregated together that you have already predefined as the “earned media” you want to promote using paid media. If a user clicks the ad, he gets directed to the article but within an iFrame where other earned media content about your brand can be consumed, emailed, or shared within social media channels (see Figure 9.6 on the left column).

On the back end, InPowered provides you with a dashboard that displays how many people have been “influenced” by the specific content (that is, read the content) and how many of those who read the content have become “influencers” (shared the content). The goal, then of course, is to increase those numbers. You can also browse a list of articles, which are classified as positive, negative, or neutral, based on InPowered sentiment engine. When you find three third-party pieces of content you want to promote, you can bundle them into a single ad, which then runs as a custom unit on InPowered partner sites and which is also distributed through ad exchanges that more closely resemble traditional banners.

General Electric is attempting to do the same thing with its content strategy. It firsts builds a robust long-term editorial calendar and then brainstorms a production schedule that is specifically for “unplanned” or “real-time” content creation. According to Digiday article, “GE’s Take on Real-Time Marketing,” the company assembles the right internal resources: a strategist, producer, designer, and a lawyer and they all sit in the same room during an event to ensure fast decision making for real-time content marketing.

In the article Linda Boff, Executive Director of Global Brand Marketing at GE, told Digiday that real-time marketing is the ability to produce a response through content, experiences, or service to a live event or customer event that delights your audience or customer into engaging with your brand around a shared moment.

And GE has delivered.

On February 11, 2013, which is both Inventor’s Day and Thomas Edison’s birthday, GE launched a real-time campaign that made a significant impact. GE asked their followers on Twitter to share what they’d like to invent using #IWantToInvent hashtag. GE then picked the most interesting ideas and sent them to a design studio that it had partnered with for the day to draft digital blueprints and sent them back to the people who had tweeted them—all within an hour. GE ended up producing 70 digital blueprints over the course of seven hours, ranging from a “Horse Scuba Suit” to a “Doorbell ID” to Boff’s favorite, an “Invisible Suit.”

There’s good reason why some brands are activating real-time marketing programs. Data from Edelman’s clients who are executing real-time marketing programs are seeing 400 to 600% increases in engagement.

Sometimes your brand has to go outside the natural boundaries of your content narrative to break through the clutter—and you have to be comfortable with that. Real-time marketing is needed to reach consumers with low attention spans and that are also inundated with content, media, a multitude of devices, and so on. If your brand can’t act fast and capitalize on the news cycle, you might never get a second chance to get your content in front of them again.

Choosing themes that are relevant for your brand, resonate with audience interests, and are timely helps ensure that real-time content has a long-term benefit instead of just a short-term burst of Likes that amount to nothing more than an increase in data points. There are three descriptors you must consider when evaluating real-time content marketing opportunities:

• Relevant: Align with brand values, orientation, and priorities online.

• Resonates: Map to audience affinities and fan interests beyond your brand.

• Timely: Drive interest and conversation online now.

Ideally, the content you produce in real-time must fall within each of the characteristics if you truly want to reach consumers with game-changing content.

This is where the effective blend of real-time and planned content is key.

There’s a difference between real-time marketing and relevant editorial content. True real-time marketing, where an opportunity is identified and content is created in the same conversation cycle, should only represent a small, but important, percentage of your content strategy. In fact, I would say that real-time content should comprise between 10 and 15% of your overall content portfolio. You can’t just sit around and wait for the news cycle before you create game-changing content. You should already be doing this day in and day out.

The rest of your planned content should be timely, but it doesn’t have to be created on the fly. In fact, it shouldn’t be. You can plan for most content through a proper editorial strategy, as discussed in detail in Chapter 8. For example, you know that Valentine’s Day is on February 14 every year. You also know two years in advance when the Super Bowl is scheduled. However, you’ll never know for sure when a random video will break a million views overnight or when the lights will go out at a major sporting event.

Real-time content marketing works best when you can anticipate the unexpected and react quickly when you cannot. Ninety percent of editorial content can be planned in advance, with a strong editorial calendar that aligns with brand strategy, key announcements, industry-related developments, and audience interests. But the remaining 10% of real-time content provides breakthrough opportunities that can shape perceptions of increased brand relevance and reach consumers who might not know you are.

All content, whether planned or real-time, should be aligned with your broader content strategy that tells the same brand story across all social media channels. Additionally, the execution of a content strategy not only involves a set of editorial guidelines that outline what the brand is or isn’t comfortable talking about online, but it should also help identify teams, assign roles and responsibilities, build workflows for the content supply chain, and determine the right technology to make it all happen, all of which is needed to build your real-time creative newsroom.

Edelman’s Creative Newsroom is similar in concept, but different in operations and content. It is a central place where copywriters, community managers, analysts, creative producers and brand journalists use technology to monitor trending topics within the news cycle in order to create real-time content that’s relevant to your brand’s audience.

The Creative Newsroom has the potential to transform a trending conversation into a brand-relevant visual masterpiece that resonates with your audience in hours instead of days. It’s a radical shift in marketing and communications if you think about it. This idea of helping brands spot a trend, map it to an opportunity, develop and approve a creative concept, post it, measure performance in real-time, and amplify it with paid media—all within a two-hour cycle—has never been possible before now. Figure 9.7 illustrates this process.

Real-time marketing is not for the faint of heart. It’s a hyper-accelerated environment that requires agility, laser focus, and lightning fast decision-making. But fast doesn’t have to be the enemy of good. News organizations today are accustomed to making high-pressure, high-quality decisions on the fly. To succeed, they need the right people, processes, and tools in place to bring a story from ideation to distribution quickly. This is one reason why your brand must think like a media company. Traditional marketing silos, organizational models and thought processes need to be adapted.

The Creative Newsroom works well because it integrates the four critical disciplines needed to deliver smart and effective content—community management, creative, analytics, and paid media. Together, these four disciplines, which traditionally live in silos, can provide real-time content performance data, audience insights, design excellence, and immediate amplification across the digital ecosystem. Each layer of integration increases the efficiency of the creative newsroom process, ensuring that real-time marketing can be executed efficiently and effectively several times over.

The combination of content, brand, and creative strategists with community managers, designers, analysts, paid media experts, brand planners, and a chief editor of the newsroom is a powerful mix.

At Edelman, Executive Vice President Monte Lutz has operationalized the Creative Newsroom, providing real-time marketing opportunities for Edelman clients and including a critical enrollment process that ensures the brand strategists, community managers, and creative teams are aligned on the best style, approach, editorial focus, and goals for the program:

1. Define the Social Persona: The first part of this process is to clearly articulate your brand’s traits into a social persona. In addition to true brand personality traits, this also involves developing filters for tone, including linguistics, attitude, enthusiasm, humor, and cadence. With the persona defined, the next step is to translate your brand’s style guide, assets, ad campaigns, and key art into social-specific guidelines, templates, and creative assets. These will serve as visual markers to ensure that Creative Newsroom content for your brand is easily identifiable in the feed.

2. Determine Audience Affinities: After defining the voice, tone, and persona for Creative Newsroom content, the next focus is understanding the interests and affinities of your current and target social audience to craft an editorial approach that inspires maximum engagement. Using native Facebook and YouTube insights, as well as third-party tools such as Demographics Pro, the Wisdom App, and Simply Measured, the development of demographic, geographic, and psychographic profiles are created for your audience segments.

3. Develop Content Themes: Applying the insights from the audience analysis, the next step is to develop content themes for your Creative Newsroom. This provides a critical filter for evaluating whether news, events, trends, or memes are relevant for your brand and customers. With time a critical factor for success, the framework is essential to maximize efficiency, audience interest, and brand consistency. This framework gives you the license to talk about things that are beyond the brand itself but are still of interest to the community. Creating real-time content about these topics would engage and excite the community in a manner that’s consistent with your brand narrative.

4. Determine Topics to Avoid: It’s equally important to identify the topics that should never be used for your Creative Newsroom content or that should be handled with extreme care. Although most brands are anchored in social or political causes, you should proceed cautiously when creating content about religious figures, politics, natural disasters (unless focused on support), celebrity scandals, or negative stories about another brand or competitor. There are plenty of other memes to jump into without getting your brand into deep water.

5. Setting Performance Goals: Establishing performance goals and KPIs to ensure the investment in Creative Newsroom delivers a commensurate return on engagement and acquisition, as well as brand affinity. From the studies we have done at Edelman, we have found that real-time content typically generates four to six times higher engagement than planned content because of higher relevance and resonance with the audience. It also provides signals to help identify which content is worthy of incremental, paid promotion (that is, converged media as discussed earlier in this chapter).

This enrollment process can be your brand’s playbook for activating the Creative Newsroom.

• Trendspotter programs are designed to help your brand become more interesting and relevant in the news feed. In this model, a team actively monitors the online conversation for stories and trends that have reached a tipping point and are relevant to the brand’s audience. The top stories are selected, and original, real-time content is created, distributed, and promoted to keep your community engaged with your brand being top of mind.

• Newsroom Campaign is your opportunity to turn a launch into a cultural milestone. This approach helps ensure that conversation about product launches, milestones, and brand activations don’t end with your announcement. This model extends the conversation about your brand by demonstrating relevance to the trends and topics that people are already talking about online and develops a regular cadence of real-time content for the extent of the campaign, be it a week, a month, or the holiday season. For example, Oreo’s Daily Twist turned the 100^th anniversary of the brand into a 100-day celebration, where they made real-time content for 100 days straight and also made news headlines daily.

• The Daily Desk is the most ambitious model, yet the most powerful. It is designed to ensure your brand isn’t just catching trends, but defining them. As the conversation changes every day, the Daily Desk can help your brand spot and jump on new stories, trends, and ideas quickly and strategically. Each morning, a Newsroom team meets to match real-time opportunities with audience affinities to engage and excite fans in ways that further your long-term brand narrative.

Within a two-hour creative cycle, the team develops, posts, and optimizes visual content that connects with audiences at the peak of interest for the things they are talking about today, as well as the fascinating things they have yet to discover. The Daily Desk is designed to help your brand spot a trend, create a meme in real-time, and be the most relevant brand in the news feed all the time.

NewsCred sources and licenses trusted content across a broad range of subjects and perspectives, providing you with the tools necessary to drive traffic, engagement, and revenue for your business. With third-party, licensed content from high-quality, premium publishers, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Economist, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, you can develop niche editorial sections, scale email marketing campaigns, power social media channels, and build mobile applications and products.

NewsCred can offer you a selection of products to license, syndicate, curate, and publish content across multiple platforms. From their Syndication Suite, publishers can track, manage, and analyze their content as it flows to third-party sites. The SmartPress platform allows you to publish and manage content, while the tool’s design capabilities provide you with the opportunity to design your own layout to meet the look and feel of your brand. All pages are optimized for natural search, and articles are sorted by relevance and popularity across social channels. NewsCred’s SmartWire technology is the company’s licensing tool, organized article content via filtered news feeds, while editors go one step further by manually curating topical content tailored to your audience interests, content strategy, and brand goals. Following are two quick case studies that show Newscred in action.

When looking to augment their social media following, Pepsi turned to NewsCred to develop its first-ever global online marketing campaign, “Live For Now.” As illustrated in Figure 9.8, the campaign was centered around Pepsi’s homepage (Pepsi.com), specifically the “Pepsi Pulse” platform, the brand’s unique content hub focused exclusively on music and entertainment news. The goal was for fans to turn to Pepsi when searching for the latest track or video in addition to following the industry’s best new artists, musicians, and performers. The NewsCred team built the Pulse multimedia platform, aggregating content from across the Web, curated with real-time entertainment news and social media content. In turn, Pepsi.com gained an 87% increase in traffic and 2,700% increase in social referrals just one month after launch.

As mentioned several times in this book, brands are now turning to content marketing as a viable solution to drumming up user engagement and brand loyalty. The insurance industry especially, keen on attracting customers via thought leadership and education, has become a major player in the content marketing space, leveraging content as a means to draw users to their websites and position themselves as experts in their field.

International insurance and financial services firm AIG turned to NewsCred when looking to develop an integrated marketing campaign with content at its core. The result is CyberEdge, an insurance product and iPad app from AIG intended to help clients prevent security breaches in internal data, hacking, and information and identity theft. The iPad app, powered with licensed, third-party content from NewsCred, includes the latest cyber and security news from leading publishers, information on data breaches, resources including how AIG handles security breaches, a liability cost calculator, information on how to best protect yourself and your company, as well as details on the CyberEdge product itself.