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M&M’s Blog goes behind the headlines to offer a running commentary on the business dynamics within the international media and marketing industry. The M&M editorial team joins forces with industry experts and local market heroes to balance a bird’s eye view of global trends with the importance of local insight.

Digital Content Curator

• Is curated content king?

  25 May 2011

  The other night, while coming home from work, I picked up the London Evening Standard and stumbled upon Gideon Spanier's wonderfully comprehensive article entitled "Advertising and content collide as digital blurs rules." As the digital content curator of M&M, I could not have come across a more pertinent article to what I do. Although everything Spanier discusses in the article was deeply analysed at the Festival of Media in spectacular Montreux this year, this read honed it all in for me.

  Today's digitally savvy audience see right through traditional advertising. So how can brands cut through the clutter and still touch their audiences? Spanier says that in today's world "[it's] not just advertising around the content but being part of it." Shane Smith, founder of Vice, says "We say every brand has to think of itself as a media brand." And so editorial becomes marketing and marketing becomes editorial. The lines are indeed blurred.

   

  The next day, as I sifted through the news to tweet about, I discovered that BBH's Mark Boyd and Drum's PHD's Mark Eaves are launching a new creative company, Gravity Road. Boyd appropriately says, "We launched Gravity Road as a reaction to clients who wanted bigger, longer term ideas built around quality content that has a clear purpose." Curated content is definitely king, as Shane Smith has said. People love a good story, and if they can truly engage with it, they don't seem to care if it's an advert or not. "Is it an ad? Is it content? It doesn't really matter," says Clive Dickens, Absolute COO. 

  As a recent hire, part of the discussion has been about where exactly my role sits within the company. Should the girl in charge of social media be a part of the marketing department? the editorial? Perhaps, if curated content truly is king, a bit of both!

  Comments (0) | Permalink

  Posted by: Juliet P. d'Arguesse

  Tags: Content, Digital Content Curator, branded content

• The Tweet topic explorer-- a new branding exercise?

  26 April 2011

  I've just come across this Twitter visualisation tool, where you can enter any Twitter account and it will generate a word cloud illustrating all the topics regularly discussed. Created by Jeff Clark at Neoformix, this cool interactive tool uses word cluster diagrams to show the frequently used words in tweets and how they are used together. The words are also colour-coded if they are found in the same tweets.

  This is an example from our @mandmglobal account:

   

  Having just graduated from a Masters in Marketing, I find this tool oddly reminiscent of the numerous brand diagrams I studied. Remember all those theoretical ways to discuss brand identity marketing students out there? Kapferer brand identity prism anyone?

  Could the colour-coding word clouding device be a new more concrete way to analyse a brand? Is Twitter effectively a new branding exercise? A good corporate Twitter account isn't solely about broadcasting discounts and events, but also about expressing brand personality. In fact, in my view, Twitter has become a unique opportunity for brands to show their audience that they are more than just the product. So if a brand's tweets are in line with the brand identity, the 'tweet topic explorer' does an excellent job of delivering a visual snapshot of that brand's personality.

  Personally, as the new digital content curator of Cream, M&M, and the Festival of Media, the 'tweet topic explorer' is the ideal tool to help me keep tabs on managing the brand identies via Twitter.

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  Comments (4) | Permalink

  Posted by: Juliet P. d'Arguesse

  Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Content, Online, Digital Content Curator, Reputation, Branding