Protecting Multimedia: The Rising Importance of Metadata

Multimedia is content: So it makes sense you would protect it like you would any article or publication. But when you want people to share your images or video, it’s hard to know how to protect your rights as creator.

This brings up the issue of permanent metadata.

Metadata is data about data, or more comprehensively, data within an image or video that tells you about it: who the author is, where is originated, etc. You can find this data by looking at a video or image’s properties and looking into its advanced settings. It’s really not as complicated as it sounds. This information is also used by search engines to know exactly what an image or video is about (because search engines don’t have eyes or ears). SEOs call these alt tags and use them frequently to improve search engine’s understanding of a website, and in turn, search rankings.

The issue is this metadata isn’t permanent. It can be altered by anyone at anytime, making protection nonexistent if anyone had the inclination to eliminate your digital affiliation with your work. It is for this reason hardly anyone even uses them.

What is needed is software to make this metadata permanent: a digital thumbprint that would be irremovable from the multimedia. This thumbprint could then be read by search engines and knowing the originator’s site (which would be embedded in the metadata), could boost their rankings, making sharing seamless and responsible. This eliminates the idea of “orphaned” multimedia and protects creator copyright.

Here’s an example. Say you’re a photographer and you post a really cool image of a Starbucks coffee cup. You then share than image and it goes viral, until eventually Starbucks sponsors it in a paid social-ad campaign. Search engines value shares and recognize them as proof that content is valuable. Your website then, which you linked into the Starbuck image metadata, would then get boosted to the top of the search result for whatever keywords were discerned as significant in the meta description.

Cool, huh? There's even more.

While also protecting the creator's work from being used in other campaigns as it no longer being categorized as "orphaned" or unclaimed, permanent metadata could result in further business for the creator as their contact information would be easy to find if a business were so inclined as to contact you to purchase it.

The hurdle is that many businesses like the idea of free "orphaned" images that they can use for marketing purposes. And these business have clout. The hope is that in the future, businesses see that this protection not only protects the Instagrammers but extends to big business as well. That if this metadata became permanent, and a significant piece of that digital Internet structure, they would no longer need their high-power legal teams to protect their assets; they would protect themselves. An innovative idea we should all be able to get behind.

Google Now: The New Benchmark in Data Collection

Asking is such a hassle. What if Google could just read your mind instead of waiting for you to form questions? Welcome to Google Now.

How It Works
Google has compiled all things all people want to know all the time (weather, traffic, schedules, birthdays, etc.) and put them into one application. They've also included a few you probably didn't think of, but will undoubtedly make your life easier such as flights, hotel and restaurant reservations, status of package delivery and even measurements of your physical activity.

Consider it your personal dashboard for all things necessary. Through customization it's possible this app could end up making people more dependent on their smartphones than ever before.

What It Means
Faster, easier and with more integration – those are the trends of mobile marketing. Google Now marks the end of waiting for the consumer to come to marketers, and the beginning of the marketer being aligned with the consumer in a continual wavelength. Once intregrated with someone's life, Google will know everything from how fit they are to what they shipped their cousin last Christmas. This will result in a new level of niche advertising that all competitors in mobile will need to aspire to. Let the race for adoption begin.

Twitter: What It Means to Be Verified

If you’re like me, you’ve long disregarded the blue check mark beside a Twitter username as an ad flag – turns out we were wrong. With a little research we’d discover that this means that an account is verified, or as Twitter puts it, verified business partners that are “high-quality sources of information and trust... at high risk of impersonation.”

Well, who doesn’t want to be endorsed and reduce their risk of impersonation, sign me up!

Unfortunately, Twitter only verifies accounts it deems necessary and does NOT take requests from the general public (ouch). While it’s very possible that this verification is connected to ad dollars spent on sponsored tweets, Twitter hasn’t directly admitted to this. They have directly stated follower count is not a factor in determining criteria.

Another benefit: Once you click on a verified user, their timeline is broken into two feeds – there is All or No replies. This function is built in for businesses and celebrities that frequently respond to customers or fans, that if combined all together, would bury anything said to the general public.

DO NOT USE PICTURES THAT IMPLY VERIFICATION FALSELY. Twitter says any account using the badge in the profile picture or background image without authorization will result in permanent suspension.

Timeline of Facebook's Privacy Changes [INFOGRAPHIC]

Infographic by WebpageFX

When It Comes to Campaigns, Tag Everything

For a brand to be competitive, they need to know what works (and what doesn't). And while this may involve taking a risk on a campaign, that risk can be controlled through evaluating and measuring results.

Using Google Analytics, here are six steps to make sure you are taking full advantage of your campaigns.

 

1. Ensure Tracking Code Is Embedded on Every Page

It’s up to you how you do it, but Screaming Frog’ SEO Spider makes things easy as it crawls your pages and easily tells you which do not include analytic code.

2. Segment Campaign Profile

Create an individual campaign profile for pertinent webpages so you can separate your campaign traffic and conversions from direct (i.e. "Email Leadership E-Blast", "Paid Search Cupcake Ad", etc.)

3. Track Your Social Media Buttons

Using Google Analytics, create campaign tags for said webpages by customizing URLS so there is a tracking code embedded into the link. If you use a URL-shortening service it will even disguise the tag. If you don't, you'll see t.co or Facebook referrals in your analytics, but you won't know specific sources and your data won't be nearly as accurate.

4. Tag Email URLs

Just like your social media buttons, if you just include a generic URL to your email campaigns, your analytics are going to see referrals coming from everywhere (or worse lumped into direct traffic). Create a unique link that you can track success.

5. Omit Company IP Addresses

To ensure accuracy, make sure the people that are working on your campaign aren’t included in your traffic results.

6. Connect Paid Search Advertising

Google AdWords makes this easy. Make sure if you're using the company's budget you've got the ROI data to follow up.

At the end of the day, some of your results will always be credited to direct traffic due to dark or organic social or sharing. No worries, that's still a win for your website; the important part is do your best to know where your traffic is coming from and what they are doing for your website--both for current and future campaign success.

Amazon Gets Social with Pages, Posts and Analytics

It’s a tech trend to find everything in one place: It’s why Facebook invented Graph Search, Google built out Google+, and now Amazon is helping retailers market products from their e-commerce platform.

Essentially, Amazon’s Pages and Posts work intuitively like you would expect them to, as customizable home bases to publish content and update clientele on business announcements. Brands can choose their own URLs free of charge and Amazon Analytics have been built out to measure and tie social interaction to sales. Widgets have also been added to link to social networks along with a special compatibility with Facebook Posts.

While not revolutionary to tech or e-marketing, this is a great step for Amazon toward offering free, in-depth tools to small businesses that can’t afford the powerhouse data firms of Salesforce or Sysomos Inc. It builds on a familiar service and relationship preexisting customers understand and will no doubt be an easy conduit to channel emerging business unfamiliar with social media and analytics.

Video Ads to Hit Facebook This Summer

Since Facebook juiced up their mini-feeds with adverts it has been a touchy subject, but that is nothing compared to the expected backlash of video ads (that we can only assume will be auto-play).

According to Ad Age, Facebook has not finalized the format of the advertisements but it can be expected that they will be housed in either the main news feed or the sidebars, or most likely, both. According to the same article, the ads will be capped at fifteen seconds and the frequency capped to be sure no viewer sees each more than three times per day. The asking price, you ask? According to one executive, the video ads’ ticket price reaches the upwards of a million dollars.

The hopes are to tap into the deep pockets of TV networks with plenty of video to spare, but the real question is whether Facebook can withstand another disastrous hit to a demographic growing tired of the network donning out their information and pinning them with adverts while they provide little innovation in its services that’s actually new (Facebook Home is just an extension of services and Facebook Graph—wait, what happened to Facebook Graph?). They have been patient with the network's slow adoption to mobile and their broken promises of user/marketer privacy, but video will be a hard sell to keep them from migrating to other less ad invasive environments.

Twitter Ads Now Targeted By Keywords

You’ve heard the cliché, content is king, but last Wednesday Twitter announced their own content coronation as they made keyword targeting in timelines the newest feature in their ad services.

The feature will be available in all languages and markets where Twitter Ads are supported and will enable advertisers to target users based on keywords in their recent tweets and tweets in which they recently engaged.

There will be no increase frequency of ads or any great change in how ads are presented. Twitter’s blog announcement compares the setup procedure to setting up search advertising — a market that has long used keywords to run pay per click campaigns.

For marketers, this is great step toward greater real-time target marketing at users with demonstrated interest around their brand. Long live the king.

What You Need to Know: Google Authorship versus Author Rank

There are no shortage of blogs to explain the increasingly importance of Google Authorship and Author Rank — but regardless, here are the basics you need to know.

Google Authorship is your personal stamp for your content, performed by linking your articles to your Google+ profile. Authorship helps protects your work from plagiarism and is entered into your Author Rank.

Author (or Agent) Rank is the compilation of that content to determine your search rank and relevancy. It is used to weed out spammers from search results and improve user search experience.

It is important to note that even if Google+ is not your primary social network, Google Authorship and Rank are of paramount importance to higher web traffic and here’s why.

1. Higher Search Rank

Simply put, Google favors those it can trust and establishing a profile on Google+ with basic matching information is an easy step to ensure your content is given its due place in search results.

2. Stand Out in Search Results

Not only are you higher ranked, but your articles will also be tagged with a thumbnail of your profile picture next to your content along with an icon indicating Google knows you’re a real person.

3. More Page Views

According to copyblogger, another authorship benefit is if a user spends at least two minutes on your page, Google’s algorithm will recognize your site as having value to that user and when they back out, they will be treated to a drop-down of other pages from your domain.

In short, if you've got quality content and you're sharing it via social, you should be claiming it via a Google+ account — your content deserves it.

Content Marketing: The Evangelism of Brand Journalism

Every year businesses spend millions of dollars trying to get on the front page of high profile publications, websites and news stories. They throw themselves at media outlets with time consuming projects, expensive galas and off-brand publicity stunts--all for what? To get ignored, because journalists have a nose for when they are being sold and an even keener sense for what the public is interested in.

But how do you not get ignored? The answer is simple: hire them.

By hiring a journalist you hire an insider to write for your brand. A savant-of-the-printed-word that not only has consumer instincts and writing talent but better methods to keep from being ignored.

One example of a company excelling in branded journalism, highlighted in David Meerman Scott's WebInkNow, is Raytheon. Raytheon is an aerospace systems company specializing in defense, security and civil markets throughout the world. In 2011, Raytheon brought on ex-TV producer Corinne Kovalsky as Director of Digital and Social Media. Kovalsky then picked up Stephanie Schierholz, social media manager from NASA, and Chris Hawley from the Associated Press. Together they have put together a editorial operation to rival a news publication.

"I'm helping to build a news operation," said Chris in WebInkNow. "We are working at Raytheon just like an AP beat to find interesting stories and tell the world about them in a way that engages. We have bureau chiefs in all of our four divisions. They have certain products that they want to talk about so we try to find new and interesting ways of exploring those stories. And we refine the story ideas, assign writers and we're doing a lot of training on editing and getting those stories out."

As far as success, Raytheon has seen a 451% web traffic increase over the year before and is frequently featured in articles from publications like Gizmodo and other tech outlets.

Know of other companies hiring brand journalists to write or run their content strategy? I'd love to hear about them below.

How Honda's #Pintermission Campaign Is Rocking Pinterest

Pinterest is big, but big doesn't always translate into useful for brands, that is, unless you're creative with your strategy.

And that is just what Honda has made strides to do in their recent #Pintermission campaign in which they paired Pinterest with the launch of their new CR-V.

Choosing Pinterest no doubt for their overlapping demographic of young, active families, Honda developed a simple, Pinteresque ad to drum up awareness of the campaign. They then chose Pinterest users with high follower counts and challenged them to take a 24-hour "Pintermission" to test-drive a CR-V. By setting up individual brand boards as well as group boards, test-drivers were able to participate and contribute to the campaign through brand-granted permission.

In an article from MarketingMag.com, it was expected that Honda received 4.6 million impressions just on Pinterest. The campaign also accrued 5,000 pins and 2,000 likes. And all this isn't including spillover into other networks.

It's important to point out, not only Honda's creative use of Pinterest, but an all-network-wide trend of identifying and marketing to influential users. This is shortly after General Motors Canada, along with French-comm company Orange, paired up with Klout to do exactly the same thing.

No longer are businesses merely pairing up with networks, but the power-players within them. It will be interesting to see how much leverage this gives social-media-aficionados in the future and what degree of an active role they will playing in our marketing schemes--because right now, it appears to be big.

Foursquare to Release New iOS

It’s no secret that Foursquare’s success story has grown stagnant; and without action soon, the company could join its buried startup brothers and sisters or be forced to sell its wealth of data to a network a bit more comfortable with action.

But Foursquare hasn’t thrown in the towel. According to TechCrunch, Foursquare’s new iOS release will be a game changer.

Instead of simply recording user data of places visited and giving incentives to be mayor or make a visit (a business partnership it’s hard to say they’ve capitalized on to its full potential), Foursquare will now make recommendations before you even make a decision or know what your next destination is.

Not sure exactly how this would look, but I would imagine it to recommend restaurants around your common meal times and current proximity, bars depending on where friends are currently partying or movies pending recent releases and past habits.

It's a brilliant move for Foursquare; a rising concept in marketing that has been pushed since the late nineties with the tech revolution and the influence of social networks--people are making decisions earlier than ever before and with more influence from peers, meaning to be relevant marketers must get inside these communities and appeal to customers before they even know what they need.

We know Foursquare is a data gold mine, but that isn't enough to beat out competitors. Foursquare needs to take action. We just hope they shape and present it to the user in a way that is intuitive and doesn’t freak them out.

Facebook Home: A Small Step Toward Big Profit

Facebook Home, the latest push from Facebook, incorporates goals of both penetrating the mobile market while delivering the same targeted advertising they have been so successful with on desktop.

In short, as of April 12th in the US, the Android HTC First will roll out with Facebook Home pre-installed. Other Android users will also be able to download Home via the Google Play Store and their other accompanying apps.

At the press event summarized by Tech Crunch, Mark Zuckerberg elaborates on emphasis of Home.

“Today we’re going to finally talk about that Facebook Phone, more accurately, we’re gonna talk about how you can turn your phone into a Facebook Phone. After noting we spend more than 20% of our mobile time on social apps, we asked ourselves — if we’re already spending this much time on our phones, how can we make it easier? What if they were designed around people first, and you could also just happen to interact with apps?”

A great example of this already existing concept is Facebook Messenger--an app that combines your texts with your Facebook messages into one application on current Androids. A great idea no doubt, but it's an app I've seen have its fair hare of double-message doozies. Hopefully, with Facebook Home we'll have more luck.

The takeaway? Facebook is making strides toward truly infiltrating mobile. And with the current spreading chasm between Google and Samsung it can only lead to a greater competition between the search and social network giants.

Klout Picks Up General Motors and Orange

Picking up speed on the international front, Klout has partnered with General Motors Canada and French telecom company Orange to connect high profile users with new products and services.

According to an article from Adweek, GM has signed a one-year exclusive deal with Klout that results in high profile users being offered vehicle test drives. As for Orange, it isn't clear how they're going to use their new partnership, but the move fits in line with other previous relationships with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others.

As for Klout, this move is the second within the last week of big moves for the influence ranking company. End of March, it announced its partnership with Bing to incorporate search into their influence ranking as well as include Klout scores in Bing's search results.

What does this all mean? That Klout isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Despite its haters, Klout has zeroed in on a inter-network service and beat out the competition to land some serious clientele. The real question now is whether users will take to it as avidly as its new partners.

Bing Partners w/ Klout, Search Partners Influence

On March 28th, Bing announced its new partnership with Klout to bring you more information about people when you search. The new partnership is two-fold: Bing will show people's Klout scores in search results (as well as which networks they're active on) and Klout will use Bing's search information to increase the influence ranking of users frequently searched for.

This is good news for Klout as it further legitimizes its heavily criticized method of measuring social influence. By incorporating more organic internet use outside of Klout's select networks, celebrities and thought leaders are represented with a high score even without owning a Facebook or Twitter account.

For Bing, in regard to its rat race with Google, the partnership seems to be a wash. While Bing will be listed as an influential network on Klout, Google+ has been there for quite some time and is doubtful the newly found partnership would be grounds to cut it. Yes, listing someone's Klout score and active networks as quickly as Google lists a Google+ page is an asset, but in the end all Bing can do is show this information--after all, Klout is a middleman, not the actual network--and to harvest user data effectively you must have a network goose that lays the golden eggs [cough] Google+ [cough].

The Three S's of Content Marketing