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.

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.

The Three S's of Content Marketing

The Evolution of Remarketing

It’s generally more cost effective to improve sales with current customers than seeking new ones—but what about the ones in between? Those that have demonstrated interest in your product but for whatever reason never converted to a sale.

In the digital marketplace these people are everywhere from the ones that abandoned their shopping cart to the ones who got halfway through your site and exited for whatever reason. You were so close, if only you could give them a second chance—that’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing is marketing to audiences with a demonstrated interest in your product or service but did not convert. Traditionally, it’s meant people that have visited one of your owned services and using that information to piece together an ad tailored to their interests. Tailoring typically involves three steps:

1. Custom combination lists

This is going into Google Adwords and creating customized lists of non-converters.

2. Segment users and determine duration/frequency

Once you have these lists, segmenting them into more specific categories that you will then allotment duration of time in between visit and ad as well as frequency once time period is over. Often it’s beneficial to use a focus group to determine best practice for lists as a whole.

3. Personalize messaging

Arguably the part that is the most fun—creating ads that target each segmented list and implementing them across decided time tables.

And this practice of remarketing doesn’t just have to be limited to non-convertors or even data harvested from your own website. This is a great practice for upselling to current convertors who perhaps still left five items in their shopping cart and maybe just didn’t feel like dropping all that cash in one day. Hold onto that data and hit them with it next pay cycle. People’s finances change every two weeks but their interests do not.

Also there is new software being developed which provides data for users that have demonstrated similar interests. An example is Microsoft’s Search Companion. It enables you to take keyword data from a user’s search behavior to understand their interests so you can remarket where others have failed. 

Lastly, it should be worth mentioning if you’re going through all this trouble—don’t use the same messaging you did before. The whole point of remarketing is not only timeliness and persistence, but to come at the sale from another angle and that means coming up with new ad ideas and more informed concepts. If all steps are successful no doubt your CRO and ROI will rise.

So happy remarketing people, and be sure to keep it fresh.

New Twitter Ad API: Bring on the Campaigns, and the Doozies

In the gold rush to harvest marketing dollars and user information, Twitter has finally taken the next step to monetizing their service by building out an ad API to allow marketers to purchase ads through their already existing dashboards.

To the consumer, this doesn’t mean much, but to marketers—Twitter just got a lot juicier.

More Campaigns, Better Engagement and Stronger Targeting

No longer limited by running a single ad at a time, marketers can now roll out, manage and track multiple Twitter campaigns successfully. The APIs also enable brands to use those dashboard tools to listen and engage more accurately, both improving the user and advertiser experience.

Outlined in AdWeek, Michael Lazerow, chief marketing officer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud explains.

"Because we have a robust listening solution and engagement solution, we can listen to what people are saying [on Twitter about a brand] and engage with them and take any of their tweets and promote them.”

Needless to say, this thirty party sponsorship could take some getting used to from the user end, but in reality it is no different than getting a power retweet.

So say a user tweets about in an Oreo they prefer the cookie to the frosting. Using your dashboard you pick up the mention and can either engage them with others who side the same, or more interestingly argue the opposite. Once you get them in the same thread together you can let the sparks fly and sponsor the genuine adverts that come up in conversation.

Where It Can Go Wrong

While post sponsoring is very much about timing and spontaneity, brands should be wary that sponsoring a tweet carries the weight of the brand just like an advertisement. Whereas it used to take days or even weeks to get a print ad approved it now takes the click of a button to sponsor a customer’s thoughts. And with targeted marketing getting better and better, customers have a low tolerance for mismatched adverts or poorly put together ideas.

Take for example this post sponsored by Miracle Whip under #SEO, a hashtag typically used by people with e-marketing and development backgrounds. A properly thought up campaign would be use hashtag #mayonnaise, #sandwich or #tuna and leave the #SEO for businesses such as SEOMoz, Screaming Frog or other similar focuses. Instead Miracle Whip has blindly hopped on a keyword that gets a lot of results and they end up looking out of place.

While it can be easily corrected by deletion, you could have thousands of impressions in just a few seconds—not to mention the few that are likely to take screenshots. This can leave your brand looking, to say the least, open mouthed and foolish.

Can you think of other poorly done examples? Is your brand sponsoring tweets? How successful have the results been? I’d love to hear your comments below.

The Death of SEO and the Rise of Quality Content

While an important component of any marketing campaign, Search Engine Optimization has long felt like catching bees with honey.

As the initial step in a growth cycle it makes sense that search engines assumed keywords linked to relevant content. Unfortunately this idea has become saturated with advertisers using black-hat techniques to cloak their lack of content with repetitive phrasing and blatant link schemes. In the past Google has taken a hole-patching approach with updates called Panda to down-rank websites that downgraded user experience. If this doesn't sound innovative enough to be Google, you'd be correct because it turns out they were just buying time.

The Google Penguin Release

With the Google Penguin release announced in April 2012, the concept of SEO as becoming obsolete was confirmed. Search engines are getting smarter and their algorithms more complex. Keywords will no doubt remain an important asset but the Penguin release marks an important shift in perspective marketers from cheating the system to producing quality content.
So how does this new algorithm work? In Forbes, Ken Krogue puts it best.

"Google used to think if you linked to someone on the Internet they must have valuable content. Now Google seems to believe that if you promote content with social media it is more indicative of relevant content and less likely to be faked."

While this may simply lead may SEO specialists to become social media strategists it shifts new importance on social media platforms. And with social media platforms users are given more opportunity to filter and react to marketing strategies. So what is a marketer to do? Engage with quality content.

Content is King and the Metrics of Engagement

You may be able to fake content but you can't fake shares (at least not easily). Twitter and Facebook may have their fair share of fake accounts but like Google, their digital czars are getting better and better at zapping them out of existence.

And to get shared you have to be relevant, or at least interesting. In the same article by Krogue in Forbes he gives an excellent list of "14 Approaches for Generating Real Content."

1) Research important questions.
2) List good/bad examples.
3) Passionately tell a story.
4) Highlight recent trends.
5) Survey best practices.
6) Compile prove tips.
7) Point out a problem.
8) Recognize who.
9) List what.
10) Warn when.
11) Show where.
12) Debate why.
13) Demonstrate how.
14) State the so what.

In conclusion, the death of gaming the system has been marked. So choose your writers carefully, it's time to get real.