Social Media Revolution – Video 2

The first video these guys put out a couple years ago was great. This one is simply amazing. It speaks for itself –

Robots for content writing

Oh boy! A new company, Narrative Science, from Evanston, Illinois, is offering machine-generated content writing. Companies who don’t really want to bother having a meaningful online conversation with their prospective customers must be jumping for joy. (I’d post Narrative’s website, but there’s no content on it!! Seriously, none!)

For now, the company offers solutions for businesses who work in data-rich areas, like sports. They take in the data from the day’s game and can spit out copy in short order that, apparently, doesn’t sound half bad. The company claims they need no human author and no human editing. One of those involved in the company calls it the “Stats Monkey,” a telling nickname. Fox is using the service this spring for its website coverage of baseball and softball, and there are others. Again, all those mentioned thus far are very data driven.

Stuart Frankel says the product is perfect for stories about crime statistics, medical studies, surveys, financial announcements and more.

Will it really replace writers?

For now, having read several stories about the software, it’s clear that this solution will replace some of the grunt writing in the publishing industry. What will be lacking is meaningful interpretation and critical thinking. Will software be able to analyze a baseball player’s upcoming season based on a recent injury? No way.

This story is getting a good deal of interest in part because it signals a change in the value of the writer’s craft. I’ve written before about the possibility of content writing getting too thin, but my argument is that when something reaches the volume level that writing has on the Internet, it will invariably be valued less. The solution for writers is to find more channels, and to write more content of a shorter length.

Will content writing always have value?

Also in my reading today I learned of the little camera on the front of Apple’s yet-to-be-released iPhone, the one stolen in a bar. The buzz is that this signals video phone calling. It certainly signals a lessening of SMS, and could possibly hurt Twitter in the long run. But I don’t yet see the end of written content. In fact, no way! The Internet didn’t kill books as predicted. Facebook didn’t kill email as predicted.

I believe content writing will have value as long as ideas matter, and that will always be the case.

The Google Pile-On

Let’s all jump on Google and predict their imminent demise. After all, they’re the most successful Internet companies EVER !

The latest to jump on board is…shocker…Yahoo. Who would have thunk that Yahoo would be attacking Google ??!!??

BBC News has an article on their Technology site in which they give Yahoo the podium to besmirch their arch enemy Google. Meanwhile, Google cares not a whit about Yahoo. Read it if you must, but keep in mind that this is the latest in a long list of such articles.

Read the BBC article. Learn all the ways Yahoo is diversifying, how they focus like a laser beam on their target market. Then go look at Yahoo.com and see if you can make any sense of what the hell they are about. I certainly can’t, so when I see yet another article aiming at Google and predicting their imminent failure, I begin to get really pissed off.

Google is diversifying at a staggering rate. Click here to read just a few of their recent innovations:

Integrating virtual keyboards in Google search -

Lessons learned developing a practical large scale machine learning system -

Building scalable, robuts cluster applications -

How Google Places can help you attract and be discovered by prospects for free –

Am I a Google worshiper? You bet I am. I totally admire the way they focus on the end user and aim all their products at their ideal target. They never seem to get distracted. Yahoo could learn a great deal from Google. Stop predicting their demise and start innovating yourself.

FTC After You? You know you’re doing something right.

When was the last time the FTC was after Yahoo? I certainly can’t remember it. But they’re sure watching Google. Why? Because Google is UP TO THINGS !! They make things happen. They shake things up. The Google AdMob deal is another example.

I don’t blame Yahoo for sniping at the heels of Google. After all, they’re getting crushed by Google. They have every right to be upset. I’m more upset by media outlets who seem to siding with the losers and lifting them up, despite years of failure. Yahoo is a failed model, especially in search. The “press” like the BBC need to report the facts, not agendas.

Content writing with 5 “words”

I’ve always admired content writing that manages to communicate a lot with few words. This one may have gone too far. After all, technically, it uses no works from the English language at all. But, somehow, it says so much.

I’m still trying to figure out precisely what it says…but it says a lot.

How much does your content writing say, and with how few words?

Content writing-change or die

Maybe it’s all the pain and suffering that companies go through to put up their corporate website that leads them to ignore it once it’s launched.
Even those with blogs get ignored. We regularly see blogs that have been put up with a month or two of content on them, and then abandoned for months at a time.

Like your company, your website must change or die

When a competitor encroaches on your retail location, do you change anything in the way you do business there? When the economy takes off again and your business grows, will you make changes in your staffing to meet the demand? If you don’t, you’ll die.

Careful changes in the way you do business will result in higher income. The same is true online. In fact, making changes in your website content writing practically guarantees financial rewards.

Are you intersecting with your prospects changing desires?

Writing fresh content regularly is a great way to intersect with changing consumers. As you plan to launch a new product, put your content writing on your marketing schedule well in advance and let Ion Leap begin to write it early. Then, when the time is right, we’ll launch a “content bomb” that will act as a magnet for Google searches. Once that’s launched, get us busy with the next content push. Your website is never done.

Embrace a process of change

One of our clients, a maker of gluten free products, calls me every day or two with more ideas for changes on the website. We’ve managed her expectations towards this; she now knows this is the normal way a website should be handled – it’s a living, breathing organism. It is, without a doubt, the single most important part of their marketing mix.

We often recommend retainer relationships because they force our clients to embrace change; and they keep Ion Leap on our toes. We know we have to earn that retainer every single day. We literally write content for most of our clients every single day, and the retainer is a very good kick in the pants part of that process.

Another way we build in processes to ensure change is to have weekly status calls. These are very brief, but they are effective in setting expectations of the changes that will happen that very week, every week.

Another little thing we do is build change management into our invoices. At the bottom of most of them is a list of our next steps.

Still another way we ensure change is to use Google alerts and Twitter to notify us of changes affecting each category for which we write. The alerts come in and give us instant ideas for content writing which will position the company relative to the changes in the marketplace. Change. Change. Change.

Siri – the Google killer?

Apple recently bought Siri, the voice activated personal assistant app. It’s cool, for sure. You talk to it, the app takes your personal preferences and location into account and delivers results.

Note the examples they use. They’re all like yellow pages. But let’s think this through from a content point of view. Folks don’t just buy tickets and book restaurants. If the mobile device is to steal share of eye from the desktop, then it must make possible some of the same work I can do on my laptop. For example – let’s say I’m out around town and decide I want to find a gym that has my favorite stationary bike – The RealRyder. I talk to Siri about it and what will she do? She’ll search the content of websites for specific phrases and that will lead it to the RealRyder pages which list gyms in my area that have these amazing machines.

I believe we’re looking at yet another example of how new technology will steal some share from other methods but not completely replace it. Newspapers aren’t dead yet, despite the predictions of the dire predictions of the Internet cognoscente.

I think such devices are great for Ion Leap because they’ll become yet another way to search for carefully crafted content writing. We’ll have to adjust our writing to accommodate this new device at some point before it reaches critical mass, and we will excel at that just like we do now in content writing for websites.

It seems that the latest craze in the tech world is to find some way to bring the deservedly successful Google down to size. I think this could change things, but I ain’t givin’ up my desktop just yet. And I need to find more than just movie tickets and Italian restaurants on my mobile device.

I will be getting this on my iPhone because it’s way cool and likely a great app. But I wouldn’t let Steve Jobs convince you that Google is dead just yet. They’re way too smart for that.

A few (original) words on SEO scams

You know you’re in a commodity business when cute phrases and acronyms take over your conversations. Below are a few which indicate to me that the SEO scammers have a very short life expectancy, thank God.

SEO is in real trouble thanks to the scum out there who perpetrate the techniques I discuss in this post. Ion Leap doesn’t do any of these. We create high value content writing for customers and we base that content on solid marketing strategy, the kind we learned in advertising agencies for over 20 years. We do it this way because it works long-term and creates something that will really help our clients to succeed. The other guys, the scammers, are looking for a quick buck. Here are a few ways they achieve their goal:

Article Spinning – If your company understands the value of content writing, then you have a few choices in getting the actual brute labor of writing done –

• You can do it internally with some of your staff
• You can hire it out to a solid blog writer or content writing company
• You can hire out an SEO company who might end up doing what’s called article spinning

Article spinning is a way they stretch their investment in content writing for your blog or web pages. They basically re-order the phrases in the page, sometimes substituting words using automated thesaurus software. The resultant hash isn’t even remotely useful to the poor prospect out there who finds it. But the client is happier because they see their website slithering up the Google rankings. This technique won’t last long. Google must protect it’s brand and it will spank this technique.

This abhorrent practice is so prevalent that it’s even discussed on Wikipedia.

Link Farming – Those SEO companies who believe that outside links are important to please the Google algorithm often set up a series of servers with websites all pointing links to the others. It’s an easy way to get very low value links aimed at your website. Luckily, Google outsmarted this scummy technique very quickly. They now look for high value links that are surrounded by other good content with similar key phrases. Also discussed in Wikipedia

Imaging Email Spam – In this scam, the SEO “expert” promises you 2,000 hits to your website in a day…a single day! Then they build a junk email with some really random and unrelated photos in it. They spam it out to a few thousand people as junk mail, some of whom open it up. As the recipient wonders why they’ve received such a nonsensical email, the photos in the email show up on the client’s server as a hit to their website. They’ve simply built a link to a photo from their client’s website. No real traffic comes to the website, but your server logs show a hit. The newer email software like Outlook require that you must manually allow the photo to load, so no hit will show up on some poor unsuspecting client’s server log.

Link Bait – Maybe it’s just me, but when a phrase becomes this cute, I smell scammers. Link baiting is a way of putting content onto your website in such a way that other sites will link to it. If your website is taking the honest approach, then you’ll simply put up good content, market that content using social media, phone calls, direct mail, online banners and more and folk will love your site enough that they’ll link to it. If you’re an SEO scam artist, you’ll put up just one page, even off-topic with the rest of your site, in hopes of attracting links.

What to do

Well, we’re biased of course. But we recommend you get to the top of the search rankings the old fashioned way – earn it.

Let Ion Leap get busy on some good old fashioned content writing for you. It works. It works slowly, but solidly. We won’t promise a thousand hits a day, or that you’ll get to page one in a week (or even a month), but you will do very well.

You see, the Internet is just like real life, really. To succeed you must -

• Work hard to get ahead
• Offer your prospects good advice, start a conversation with them
• Sell a good product or service
• Care about people

Market Fresh Content Writing

Freshness matters; especially in content writing. A critical part of SEO success is how often your website’s content is updated. I know the sense of dread some of you must be experiencing as you read those words – ‘ugggh…we have to go back into the website again.’

Updating your website content can be torture…unless.

Companies, especially larger ones, create so many layers into their approval processes that getting anything done can be a nightmare. But there’s a way around that – blogging. We’ve found that the regularity of postings forces companies to “let go,” trust their top people or even outside bloggers, and just give up on trying to control each and every sentence. We understand that there are business categories where this is impossible. The pharmaceutical industry comes to mind. But even these companies can write successfully and often using tight controls at the outset, and then getting out of the way.

The economy isn’t helping you keep your content writing fresh.

Establishing a content writer within your company was tough when the economy was good. Now it’s simply impossible. Staff cuts have forced even more mission critical work onto existing staff, and most companies don’t realize the value of their website’s content. A quick look at business websites out there verifies this. Outdated content is all over the Internet, sitting there, gathering dust. That’s where Ion Leap comes in. Our content writing blog writer teams are subject matter experts, chosen with extensive experience in your category. And we typically will update content 300-400 words at a time, 3 to 5 times a week. In many categories, that’s enough to get your website ranked near or on page 1 within 3 months.

What have you done for us lately?

Google wants their search results to be relevant, timely, and engaging. Their algorithm is getting better and better at detecting content writing that’s simply there for purposes of hammering a key phrase. Ion Leap has very effective ways of giving Google what they want and giving your readers the kind of relevant content they demand. If we write content that your readers will find engaging and fresh, we’ve always found that Google is happy too.

Contact us at the link above and learn how Ion Leap can keep your content writing market fresh.