Originally posted on Advertising Age.

All of the social media hype has, to some degree, diverted attention from the bigger storyline to emerge over the last few years – the meteoric rise of long-form, streaming video viewing.

Unlike Twitter and YouTube, which propelled ordinary geeks and moms to cult-like status, the Hollywood content community here has been the runaway winner. There’s more demand than ever for professionally created and curated content.

However, a new dynamic is emerging that could completely upend the economics – that is if it doesn’t break the Internet first.

First, a look at the trend lines.

For years streaming video was a two-foot viewing experience that took place largely at desks via PCs. While YouTube’s user-generated and viral clips dominate short fare, long-form streaming video is coming into its own and on different platforms.

The entertainment community – with the help of partners and in a race against piracy – has been aggressive in making their content available as on-demand streams rather than solely as downloads. This means that studio content is now far more widely available than ever before – and it’s “couch friendly” too. Online video has become a seamless archipelago that spans a one-foot experience on smartphones and tablets to a ten-foot experience on set-top-enabled TVs.

Consider Netflix, for example. The company’s on-demand video rental service is available on dozens of connected devices. This includes everything from the Roku set-top box to mobile and tablet devices.  By one measure, Americans are eating it up.

Sandvine reported last week that Netflix alone represents a staggering 20 percent of all downstream US Internet traffic during what’s normally primetime (between eight and 10 p.m.) This is remarkable given that the overwhelming majority of Netflix subscribers – 98% according to Sandvine – are not streaming content yet.

Xbox Live, which carries Netflix and other content, is seeing a similar pattern. Larry Hryb (aka Major Nelson), Xbox Live’s Director of Programming, blogged last week that 42 percent of Xbox Live’s more active 25 million US users are streaming an average of an hour of television and movies per day. (Disclosure: Microsoft is an Edelman client)

Digital primetime is here. Madison Avenue should be giddy with excitement. Hulu served nearly 800,000 ads in July, comScore reports. What’s more, the proliferation of interruptions are not stopping Hulu users from watching an average of 2.6 hours of video per month.

But there are potential challenges ahead as Xbox, Netlfix and Hulu supplant the TV nets as the new kings of primetime.

For starters, as more Americans become “cord cutters” we may opt for ad-free on-demand rentals or all-you-can eat subscriptions. The appeal is interruption-free viewing. Some 13% of Americans intend to cut the cord in the next 12 months, according to Strategy Analytics – a market research firm.

However, the more scary scenario is that all of this video consumption and cord cutting could push the Internet to a breaking point.

Nielsen reports that 64 million people watched at least part of the World Cup online. That’s a drop in the bucket by what we’ll see in 2014 when Brazil hosts the event. The Internet may not be ready for it.

Akamai President David Kenny says that in five years the average user will consume two hours a day of HD video. To accommodate this insatiable demand, the Internet will need to increase capacity 548 times from where it is today. Factor in net neutrality debates, cable companies squaring off with TV networks and it’s easy to be pessimistic that there’s enough “shovel-ready” broadband projects underway to pave the way.

Advertisers, not just the content community and distributors, have a significant stake in the future of Internet video. However, the debates around net neutrality and capacity aren’t front page concerns for most us. They need to be.

The danger is that the ad community will be left out of the debate. Even worse it may not have a voice in creating viable ad-supported ways for the providers to invest in infrastructure, just as millions of cord cutters flee cable TV for ad-free content and push the Net to the limit.

Image credit: jeffgunn

It’s no secret that information is exploding, but just how much may shock you.

Americans consume 100,500 words a day, according to a study by the University of California at San Diego – and that doesn’t include any information at work.

What’s worse, as more content is digested digitally, we now scan and skim. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that on the average web page users read at most 28% of the words.

While both of these studies focus only on the US, the “Attention Crash” is a global problem – and it’s not going to get any better. This means that the single biggest challenge PR professionals will face in the next 10 years (and perhaps beyond) is in how to secure enough “surface area” to create behavior change.

The good news is that we’re not alone. The media too is struggling to capture fleeting attention spans. Consider this: the average Internet user spends six hours a month on Facebook, according to Nielsen (no relation to Jakob). Most news sites are lucky if they get 20 minutes of a user’s time per month.

However, the media, more so than the PR industry, is successfully coping with these changes by increasingly turning to traffic-generating search engine optimization tactics. Page-view journalism, like it or hate it, is the new reality. And we can learn from the media.

Writers and editors at Hearst Media, for example, use a tool that suggests relevant Google-friendly keywords. The Huffington Post runs two different headlines on a story as it’s published to determine which is stronger – and then it abandons the weaker one. Bloggers change their headlines weeks later to cater to Google. And a rising assortment of content mills (AOL’s Seed.com, Demand Media and Yahoo’s Associated Content) assign thousands of stories to amateur scribes. Payment rates are based on keyword volumes/search demand – i.e. their traffic potential. (The image below shows how AOL uses Seed.com to recruit writers for its network.)

With this in mind, here are three simple tips to help you implement a more traffic-friendly PR campaign.

Use search data to inform message development/story ideas

Google knows more about me than my own mother. The same is true for you. If you’re thinking about breaking up with your significant other, Google knows. Looking for a new car? Google knows. You get the idea. Put your sailboat into these winds and your programs will go further.
 
Start with Google Insights. On this site you can see how the world thinks and searches. This information can be used to help shape messaging strategies and program that increase the likelihood that any earned media will find its way into high-value search results. View Google as media.

Write web-friendly copy

Brevity rules online. Web users are very mission-oriented. This means that any messages that are meant to be consumed/reverberated by others via screens need to be very clear and literal. This is especially key for content that you hope to see spread on Twitter. Write headlines like tweets. For more, see this forthcoming book from Yahoo.

Create and generate socially connected content

Content is king today. If a company isn’t creating or effecting content on a regular basis, they will be invisible. However, in a world where everyone can create, it’s becoming critical that all of the content we generate be socially connected.
 
Three great resources here are rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube and SlideShare. Consider prioritizing these sites over traditional press rooms and/or turn to emerging services like Presslift that already have strong SEO.

Originally posted on Forbes.

As I write this column it’s the morning after the long Memorial Day weekend and the web is brimming with activity. Google searches are spiking for Ted Koppel, who’s 40-year-old son was tragically found dead. Twitter, meanwhile, is abuzz over WGM – short for the primetime Korean reality show “We Got Married”. This is perhaps a direct reflection of the service’s growing global appeal. Finally, over on Facebook word is spreading of a scam featuring what’s deemed as a “hilarious video”. A CNN news story on the hoax currently has over 10,000 shares.

All of these are disconnected events; a Polaroid snapshot of our psychology at a single moment in time. Some of these memes are ephemeral. Others may be lasting. However, our success as marketers increasingly hinges on having a deep, real-time understanding of our networked environment and how these themes can impact our programs. Enter situational awareness – an essential skill every CMO-level executive and their staff must build and evolve.

Situational awareness, according to Wikipedia, is “the practice of being aware of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the near future”. It’s common throughout the intelligence community. The White House Situation Room, for example, operates a 24/7 Fusion Center that pulls together 3,000 sources of information into three daily briefings for the President. For more, see this fascinating short video.

What’s important to note is that situational awareness is not a substitute for client/brand monitoring, reporting or measurement. Rather, it’s a complementary set of processes that help you form gut insights that make marketing, public relations and/or digital engagement more efficient and effective.

Most CMOs will not need the intricate web of systems that the White House employs. Yet every marketer should be required to make situational awareness part of his/her daily workflow. It all needs to happen in a focused way, at every level and in both client and agency organizations. The good news is that situational awareness can be quite simple. The bad news is that very few people have created the daily systems or habits required to succeed. Here are three simple tools to add to your workday to get started.

Google Trends

Many marketers look first to Twitter and Facebook for consumer insights. However, they often overlook Google. This is a mistake. Far many more people search than those who engage on social networks. Therefore, Google knows more about you than your own mother. And, much the same, day in and day out it can tell us a ton about what we’re thinking as a society. The Google Trends home page is about as good a barometer as any for what the US and the world is thinking about right now. I try to check into this page several times a day. In many ways, it’s like a 24/7 supermarket checkout line.

Seesmic Web

One of my colleagues described Twitter as the new daily newspaper. A blogger who I met recently at a client event described it as “Google with a brain”. While Twitter’s audience pales in comparison to Google or Facebook, there’s no doubt it’s a critical treasure trove of information for what’s top of mind among opinion elites like the media, celebrities and influencers.

One of my favorite situational awareness tools is Seesmic Web, which only requires a browser to run and can sync with mobile device clients that the company has created for every platform. I keep the site open in a tab in my browser with various lists of people who serve as my window into the online world. Over time, this helps me build a deeper understanding of what makes this entire network and its micro communities tick.

ItsTrending

While it doesn’t have the same ecosystem of tools that Twitter supports, as Facebook slowly opens up its data it’s ushering in all kinds of new tools. Some of these are invaluable for helping us shape aggregated insights into the mindset of those who have elected to live more public lives on Facebook.

ItsTrending is one such tool. The free site data mines Facebook for the most popular links, images, news stories and videos on an array of topics. Several visits a day are all you need to develop a deeper sense for how Facebook themes and memes can impact your programs.

These are just three – there are hundreds of others, many of them are free. What’s key, however, is to find the right tools and package them into your workflow so that you have a gut feel for the various online environments you are engaging in daily and how the macro themes can play a role in success or failure.

Image credit: Laurence Tucker

Many marketers chase technologies and new channels – e.g. “bright shiny objects.” It’s the trends, however, that are more important and often overlooked. Here are the three key trends that companies should begin to pivot into now.

This is the year that businesses will recognize they must:

“Real-time is the New Prime-time”

In December, when Queen Rania of Jordan spoke at the Le Web conference in Paris, she said “real-time is the new prime-time.” Her highness doesn’t just say it; she lives it. The Queen of Jordan has an active presence on a variety of social networks where she engages and inspires people around the world, all with the intent of driving awareness and engagement for her charitable interests. She engages in real-time in order to ensure she gets heard.

If an institution, such as Jordan, can be engaged in real-time then why not every business or NGO?

Consumers have finally migrated from thinking about the web as pages that we browse to an Internet of infinite “streams” where information cascades in real-time, often from friends. Twitter and Facebook feeds are two such streams. However, it goes deeper. News sites like the target="_blank">New York Times are embracing this model too by organizing content by date and time, rather than by priority.

The challenge here for companies is attention – it’s a finite resource. Information will scale, humans can’t. As a result, businesses will need to focus less on securing surface area and more on time and attention. One solution is to become a real-time business. However, this requires scale. One way to achieve scale is by synchronizing employee engagement and digital engagement strategies.

Digital Visibility

The average American visits 87 domains and 2,600 Web pages, according to Nielsen. Outside the U.S., these numbers tend to be smaller. What’s more, fresh data indicates that just a few sites dominate the mix. A target="_blank">comScore study released this week found that Facebook alone accounts for seven percent of all time spent online.

The upshot of all of this is we are entering a new era of target="_blank">media agnosticism. Faced with infinite choices, we’re drilling down deeper into fewer sites and accessing much of the rest via Google.

Google is the number one site in almost every country; this means that news drives search and search drives news. But search results are now more real-time and socially driven. The visibility rewards go to businesses that create quality content that’s socially connected – and do so again and again.

The Data Decade

Finally, Internet users tend to be very mission-oriented. In other words we need to know what we want and then go seek it out.

However, things are changing. We’ve entered so much information into little white boxes – ones owned by Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google and others – that the machines can surface what we want before we even ask. In other words, the we can actually know what we don’t know. (What’ya know?)

Welcome to the Data decade. In the next ten years products, news and information will find us through algorithms and the lens of our friends. Companies that take a data-driven approach to comms programs will be in a better position to succeed. In the months ahead I will show you how anyone can easily data mine from their desk to easily understand, anticipate and address such unmet needs.