#H2HChat How Flipboard is Driving Smarter Media Consumption with Marci McCue

All right, we are back for another H2H Chat. Very excited to be here, here with my co-host Courtney. How are you doing, Court?

What's up? I have to mix it up, the greeting.

That was this week's, this week's hello.

That was off the cuff, by the way.

And how's everything going?

It's going great. I, uh, we had a delightfully lazy weekend because weekends are for binge-watching in the Kramer household. And just working on a few, you know, side hustles, as they say.

Yes. Who is not working on a side hustle? Right?

It's all about the side hustle.

But speaking of hustling, we are so excited to be sitting here talking to my favorite app. This app is sitting on my first screen. It's something that I've used now for several years, I think. And when we got the word that Marcy here, who's with us, was going to join us, it gave me such delight. So I can't thank you, Marcy, for being here enough and for chatting with us. Just a quick little introduction for Marcy.

Doing product placement.

We're doing product placement. There we go. All right, so Marcy represents a company called Flipboard. And Flipboard is— well, we're going to let Marcy tell you a little bit more about Flipboard, and then I will probably chime in as well. But Marcy is a member of Flipboard's founding team. Marcy has led the company's communications and content strategy since the launch of the personal magazine in July 2010. Okay, I didn't realize it's 6 years now. Wow. She's responsible for turning Flipboard into a globally recognized brand with accolades and awards from leading organizations and publications around the world. Prior to Flipboard, Marcy was corporate communications executive in charge of corporate communications, which is ironic that you got to do the same thing, or not. Wow. And culture teams at TellMe Networks, a voice interaction company building services for consumers and companies. After the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2007, she continued to work for the newly formed TellMe division at Microsoft. So in the late '90s, she was at Excite@Home. Oh my gosh, I remember them. I remember their logo, actually. That's funny. That is— that takes me back. Heading up public relations for several channels within the portal, she came to Excite after having spent several years building her own communications agency. I'm really sorry to hear that. Clients in health, education, and local government. She started her career in politics.

Oh boy.

In California. I'm sorry to hear that as well. So— Wow,

that was quite an introduction.

It takes me back.

Yeah, I'm of course kidding. These are all absolutely wonderful. And I'd love to talk with you as we go through this about how all of this plays a part in what you're doing now. But welcome, Marcie, and thank you for joining us.

Wow, thanks, Bryan. Thanks, Courtney. It's so amazing to be here. Gotten a chance to watch a lot of these, and I feel like I'm in such great company. So appreciate the invitation, and I hope I can share a little bit about what we do here and answer some questions today.

Good, good. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I thought maybe we could start out just by having you just describe what Flipboard is. If somebody were to ask you, what is Flipboard? and they'd never heard of it before, what would you say?

Oh, it's a great question. I mean, Flipboard is a, you know, it's a free app, but it's used by people to stay informed and to stay connected to things they most care about. It's a way to control your news consumption, a way— this is what we're here to talk about a lot today. It's a way to immerse yourselves in things that you're feeling like you want to learn about. It's used for everything from keeping up on the news, but also really going deep. And that was a lot about our release last week, which is how do we connect you more quickly with the things that you feel like you want to be smarter about? And it's hard today with the stuff, the amount of media that's out there, to really find that, that time for yourself and the things you care about. So Flipboard was built as a place to bring everything to one place, which was the original mission of the company. Informed by social, but also leveraging everything of the internet, all the information that's out there on the internet to bring you a package that matters to you. And really, when we— when you find that place in Flipboard, that's when we find you, you really explore Flipboard more, you spend a lot of time there, it becomes meaningful to your life. I have this thing I call the vision curve, which is, you know, you start— you can be a news reader. Which is great, but there's a lot of that out there and there's a lot of— a lot going on in that space for people, a lot of choices. And there's not a lot of loyalty that happens at that place, right? You get news here, you get news there, and the internet's been evolving and changing. I was at Excite, as you mentioned, back in the day when everybody used a portal. And then over time, it's kind of ebbed and flowed and we became the social web where not just information pointing to information, but it became People pointing to information. So how do you navigate all that stuff out there? And then as you go up what they call this vision curve, you start to become more connected to your user, more connected to people, and you become more important to their life. And so you can use this for reading, but the more you use this for things like discovery of new passions, of sharing, of curating, of putting your own perspective into the market, the more valuable Flipboard becomes to your life. And so it's really a spectrum of usage when you think about what is Flipboard. It depends on sort of where you're coming in that. But I would say I would like it to be a place of not only consuming and enjoying stories that matter to you, but also sharing those things.

It's a great— you're right, it's a little bit of everything, but everyone can pick kind of where they want to play a little bit, which I can see. I'm curious, you know, when you first— when somebody says, okay, well, where should I start?

Right.

How do you get someone started on feeling comfortable in this environment, in the curation and sharing environment? Because that's kind of where you're playing.

Yeah, it's a fascinating question. Like most platforms, The vast majority of people come into Flipboard and, you know, this new release— I'll start there because it's what most people will be experiencing right now. When you open it, we ask you to find your passion. What's your passion? And you can type in Golden State Warriors, or you can type in UX design, or you can pick travel, right? Does it sort of wherever your inclinations are, and then we will build for you and automatically generated what we call a smart magazine, and that allows you to keep up on travel, the Golden State Warriors, or UX design, or marketing, whatever your personal interests are. And you can create as many of these as you'd like. So the idea is that people have more than one passion, something with their work, something with their life, like being a good citizen, participating in democracy, or being an educator or a teacher of other people, or inspiring to people, some thought leadership. And people also have their own hobbies, you know, as we were talking about some things that you kind of like to do on the side. So you can find all of those things on Flipboard and create that sort of smart magazine experience and just read and consume. And, and we do is we look at— we use some pretty sophisticated algorithms built by our machine learning team in Vancouver who've done an amazing job being able to classify by topic. articles that are being shared across our network. And we have about several million RSS feeds and several hundred thousand sort of official publishers and bloggers that we index. We topically sort of classify that content and we package it together and then we check things like your social distance. So if you and I, Bryan, are connected on Flipboard and you're sharing stories that I might be interested in, it's more likely I'll see them than if they're anybody else in the network. So we're able to kind of cross-reference a bunch of topically indexed content against who you're connected with and the things you follow on Flipboard. And we can recommend stories to you based on, on those combinations. And that's a really great use case. And for most people, I say, use Flipboard to keep up on the things you love, connect to people who also share those passions, And you'll see more great content from other experts or other industry-interested people, humans.

Maya's going to have to hit the pause. I don't actually have the button here.

Human experts that share your interests, right? And so that's a really powerful use case. You'll discover great curation, but you'll also discover sort of the best in the industry of stories already happening. I'll juxtapose that with another scenario. If I go to a— there's a gentleman named Mark Weidman in Southern California who is a teacher of high school journalism. And I love talking to him because the ways he uses Flipboard are completely different from that. So when you go talk to a classroom about using Flipboard, what you do is you say things like, get ready for your research report by saving articles. Reading the news is not their primary job or primary goal. They want to collect stories and share about a program they're working on, a project they've taken on, a research report. So depending on who you're talking to, you can start in different places. We, we went to Airbnb Open this year, and because we're doing some fun things with Airbnb, and I found myself trying to describe Flipboard. And it was the wrong description for that group. And pretty soon I realized, oh, what I need to say is, do you have an Airbnb in, let's call it Portland, Oregon? And you want to share the happenings in Portland, Oregon, the concerts to go to, the great restaurants to be at, the news of the different, you know, hiking and biking and outdoors activity. You use Flipboard to create a free digital magazine for your guests. And that's exactly what they wanted. Wow. So that's a different, if you will, pitch of what Flipboard is. The vast majority of people, just like any other platform, come here to read and discover other experts and what they're curating. But the people who curate on Flipboard come in for a different reason than that completely. And that's, that's what's most exciting about marketing, as I was telling you, is that there's a top of the funnel place, which is like, come in to build a smart magazine and have one place for all the stories you wanna catch up on. But the really exciting stuff— I love that. When we become an integral part of your life is when you start sharing on Flipboard and you've made it a place of expression. And that way you can either share with your Airbnb guests, or your 10th grade journalism class, or your local real estate market. And that's when it's really quite exciting. Small businesses use Flipboard to— there's a guy, it's called Pond Wars, he has a show called Pond Wars, or Pond Stars, Pond Stars. He does aquascaping in the— Pond Stars. Yes.

That's why it's

fun. He makes Flipboard magazines with his clients, and he says, make a magazine showcasing to me All of the backyard ideas you like. And then he uses that as a way to discuss their projects. So like I said, I, I think that the easy, the easy— what is Flipboard and why would I use it— is because it gives you the control over what you consume and the ability to focus your, your interests. So then in the morning you can open it up and you can read politics, you can read the local news, you can read about photography. But when it becomes a tool for you to improve those parts of your life that you want to invest in, it becomes really exciting. And so it's a different type of use, but it's— you should— I would like it if everybody was doing both. But most people read.

So I would consider myself a new user, or I should say returning user. I used to use it a lot a few years ago, and then for whatever reason I stopped, and now I've sort of re-engaged with it. I feel like it's more important today, at least for me, in light of what's happening in the world.

Yeah.

In trying to sift through what's real, what's fake. So maybe tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing to help address that issue.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are 2 parts to this. One is the notion that we want to control our, our media. So today you find yourself, I mean, in a world when you open up Twitter or you open up Facebook or you open up any kind of social media, Reddit, and you are sort of at the mercy of the stream. It's coming at you fast. You may have caught something, you may have missed something. You sort of scan looking for trends or big news, but it's a hit and miss thing. And your friends are really— what's in friends or the people you follow are really informing how much you're learning that day. So, you know, if you take a thing about Flipboard, it's kind of a reverse-engineered newsfeed in the fact that we don't orient around what your friends are sharing, but we orient around the stuff you want To see. And then we inform that— we add a layer in there of saying, okay, you decided you want to learn about democracy. And now there are 5 people who you know who are also talking about that topic. It's not the other way around where you have 5 people you follow and then they may or may not be talking about democracy. And maybe they're talking about democracy in ways that are counter to your beliefs. So how— the way you control the news consumption environment is by first picking what areas you are particularly interested in learning about, and then letting the social layer come in second as a secondary class, second-class citizen, if you will. So I think to your point about fake news, so that's one, is being able to be in control of the feed as opposed to it sort of coming at you. The second piece of fake news is a fascinating conversation because we've been— one of the differences about Flipboard is since the beginning, we've had a strong belief in editorial voices, editorial curators in combination with algorithms, right? We don't rely on the algorithm completely. And that's a very different model, I think, than technology tends to come from, which is the data is always right.

Mm-hmm.

The data is going to tell you what's popular. And that's why for the longest time we had cat videos, right? And now we have other type of news that's quote unquote popular. And so the populist movements around content is what's unfortunately driving what you see. And that is— it's hard when you're at the mercy of that, right? You want to be in control of that. And so that blend of editorial and algorithmic We call it a layer cake. For simplicity reasons, we say the input at the base, at the base is editorial input. We put in content and sources that we have vetted, that we know don't have a bunch of pop-up ads and redirects and spam, as well as content that's questionable or that's regularly what we call sort of intentionally deceptive. So that's sort of our rule for fake. If it's intentional, its intention is to deceive the reader, then we downgrade it. If it's reported by our users as hate speech, if there's any other kind of complaint that goes with it that we can validate, or it violates our terms of service. So there's a layer that first goes into the cake, if you will, that is really about the quality of the content. Have we? Is it a reputable source? Is it a source that has bylines on the articles? Is it a source that will do retractions? You know, there are some very clear sort of gates on what is quality content, and not just like I said, it's not just fake or not fake; it's spammy, it's redirect, it's hate speech, etc. And so we look at all of that, and we say, let's we'll create a pool. of content, and it's quite big. Like I said, it's millions of RSS feeds and blogs and good sites around the world. It's a global product. But then on top of that, we can apply algorithms, which is then what we can say is starting to surface things based on how much time is spent in an article. So if there's an article that's getting a lot of views but people are bouncing out quickly, maybe it's a low-quality article.

Um-hum.

And if there's other articles that are doing— people are spending a lot of time on and sharing a lot or engaging with, Maybe it's a higher value article. And then we lay— then the engine can say, okay, based on this quality set, what of that content should be starting to bubble up into our different topics? So if you follow Canon cameras and there's an article that lots of people are talking about sharing, and those people happen to be experts on our platform, wow, that's a good signal to us. This is one that Bryan should see. Mm-hmm. And so we can Layer in editorial view, and then we put in the filters from the algorithm. And then on top of that, our editorial team can start to pick things out that are really particularly interesting— curators that are really good or articles that are particularly insightful. But there's no algorithm for cool, and there's no algorithm for insightful. And especially when you're looking at things like opinion pieces, right? So it takes a combination of those two Factors working hand in hand for you to deliver a sort of a clean, well-lit space that helps readers go deep and really get good quality.

I feel like Twitter is the fire hose

and

Flipboard is that zen waterfall that you sit back and look at in a spa.

Yes.

It's so soothing and it's just— you can look at it and take it in instead of getting whacked in the face with it.

Yeah. And you're in control there, right? You can flip as much as you want or not. You know, it's not like it's coming at you and you're trying to decipher as you go. And, and because we can give you an excerpt and an image, it tells you whether or not this is something you really want to engage with, which is helpful for people to, as they, as they parse through getting caught up.

I feel like you can get lost for days in there too. I mean, not only is it You know, it's like the— I know that app studies sounds and like how satisfying it is to like certain sounds to hear. Well, there's something in your app that when you're flipping it up and it looks like the page is actually flipping up.

Yeah,

I don't know, I find that really fun. Am I a nerd in that way? I'm just like, no, that's fun.

Yeah, and that I think a lot of people, you know, there was a period of time where we really We had a lot of internal debate about scrolling. Because everybody felt like if we let you scroll, you would get through stuff faster. But ultimately, we want you to pace yourself. We want you to read something and not just scroll through.

Mm-hm.

So we really kept— we intentionally kept the flip. And there's one little thing in the new version that you should try that's really my favorite, like, little feature. Is when you've read it, you're in a Smart Magazine or in a magazine, and you've read through a few pages. And then swipe slowly to the right and it folds back down. It's quite— it's nice. You'll like that too. It's

like I did that by accident this morning when I was flipping through and then I flipped to the— what is it, that way?

You kind of close it, right? Yeah.

But then when you reopen it, it flips back to where you were.

Yes,

that's super. I was delighted by that.

Yeah, well, a lot of people, you know, they get interrupted. And then they want to go back to where they were. And so we did that not too long ago. It brought you back to where you were.

I feel like I'm resisting the urge to reach for my phone and just play with it while you're talking because there's all these how-tos like, oh, how do you do this? I want to share a link with someone. I want

to keep—

So let's talk about—

I won't stop you if you want to do

that. I'm sure everybody right now is actually sitting with their phone open as they're listening. So I'm curious, 2 things. One, we talk about content curation, but I'm curious if you can dive in more into what the future of curation really looks like. What is it? What is— I mean, we've been talking about a curator for a while. People have been curating content, but you guys are kind of moving the needle into curating, I think, a little bit differently than before. How would you describe the current content curator and where are we heading?

Sure. So I would say on Flipboard, curation is a fairly lightweight behavior, right? We have the plus. So when you're reading a story, there's a plus on every article. And that plus lets you save the article, add a caption if you'd like, and put it into your own magazine. And when I say putting it into your own magazine, these are hand-curated magazines, article by article. The smart magazine is algorithmically, you tell us what you're interested in and we build the magazine for you. The, the hand curation and the intentional behavior that happens there is a lightweight way of taking a story you've read or a video you watched and curating it into a package. And so how I look at it is that curation should give you another point of self-expression. But bloggers also love to curate each, you know, other content that they find. And sometimes that's— in the past, that's been, how do I reshare, if you will. This is much more about being able to package than just simply reshare, where you can say things like, I'm really into Leica photography and I want to save articles that I think are insightful for other people who are into Leica. But let's also say I want to do wildlife photography. I don't have to curate it all into the same place. I can now make a distinct package for that. So as opposed to, you know, curation today is like you have one vehicle where you end up curating most stuff, either a newsletter or a blog that you have as a sort of one destination. This allows you to create separate destinations and curate by expertise or interest and really showcase a side of you as opposed to everything in one place. So I'll give you an example of Mark Weidman, who's a teacher in Southern California. He has 8 different ways he thinks about curation. And one of them is a get-to-know-you. Right, so he's got all these classrooms and he has these students who need to get— need to get to know each other quickly. And so what he does is he has every one of them make a Flipboard magazine and they're curating about themselves. They're curating their favorite music, 2 or 3 videos, they put in some family photos and articles, and then the end he has them put in what he calls a— I think it's a discussion question. We think of it as a comment, but they put in something that says like, My hope is to cure cancer, or my hope is to be an astronaut. And it allows them to have a discussion about each other. And so that type of curation, I don't think has been really possible before. So where you're actually— it's not just you resharing or repackaging my stuff, it's packaging around your particular interests and needs. So he does one, it's also called Post-Capitalism, where he puts in there articles about capitalism. And he uses it as a discussion place. So curation is very different now, I think, than it has been in the past, where it's been really about me sharing the best of the best, in my opinion. But now it's— you can curate for different reasons and use those as opportunities to share more about yourself or more about your particular different sides of yourself, your work self, Your learning, your favorite hobbies. So you have to really think about curation as more of a point of expression now than it is necessarily just sharing, just kind of one-to-one sharing.

So there's a pro tip that Flipboard could be the new resume, right? That really tells the entire story about you. I mean, can you imagine if you were hiring for a position and they just sent a link to their own Flipboard? Like, yeah, intrigued.

Well, we work with the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and they have all their students made Flipboard portfolios.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, so that's what they do. Because how else do you create a digital collection of your stuff? This is sort of super simple, right? Use the plus, or you can share from your camera roll. You can share— in fact, I learned things all the time about how to, like, save a PDF. One person was asking me, how do I share a Google Doc, right? You know, and I said, I don't know. And he said, well, oh yeah, I have an idea. Somebody else came in the room and said, use it, you save it as a URL, because anything that's a URL can be shared on Flipboard. And so if you save a Google Doc or something else you're working on as a URL, you can flip it into Flipboard using Extension, Chrome extension, or the tool we have on our website.

Oh, great. Well,

there's all kinds. Yeah.

Thanks, Marcy.

Yeah, so, but I agree with you, portfolios are quite powerful, and a lot of times those are in forms that aren't easy to share. So, but as long as you can put it on a URL, it can be in Flipboard.

I have your Chrome extension. I was just showing Courtney where it's located. Do you Do you— what— so, so how, how is this related, do you think, to, you know, what we were talking about before we got on was the idea behind curating something that people that want to share many links at once. And instead they can use a board to do that. They can curate like 10, 20 links, package it together, send one board and say, here's everything you're going to need for research. Is it meant for that? Is that what you're trying to do is help people create lists?

That's a great question. I think it depends on the group. But for example, some of the magazines that you curate, Bryan, are really organized around the type of marketing you want to do. Social media marketing or different types of lenses on the marketing profession. And what's helpful there is that you don't have to send the same email to everybody and hope that I glean one particular item out of that. But you can really target that conversation. So that's a really great way of thinking about how do I, how do I focus my sharing. I think to your point about the links, you know, anybody in any profession, be it, you know, us to clients or research in the classroom or portfolios as Courtney mentioned, if you're collecting stories and today you send an email to people with a bunch of blue links, like here's the coverage report we just had, or here's the news that came out of the event we put together, instead of sending an email with a lot of blue links in it, you can save those into a Flipboard magazine and share the one link. And what's beautiful about that, I remember when we announced, we did an announcement with Twitter years ago. At the end of the announcement, I put all the coverage in a Flipboard magazine and I sent it over to Twitter. They were like, gosh, this is beautiful, right? Because you can change the COVID I made the COVID a picture of Dick Costolo at the time. They were like, wow, this is awesome. I thought to myself, wow, we just did an announcement together and you still don't know how to use Flipboard. That's what's so wonderful about it. It is a beautiful package. It's a way to capture a particular moment in time, an event. Or you can add to it every day if that's what you want. But that— but I do think that instead of emailing your, you know, clients or your small business patrons or your prospective employers a bunch of blue links about yourself or about a topic you're interested in, if you just start sharing into Flipboard magazine, it's persistent. You never lose it, and it allows you to organize things according to the person who is receiving it. And that really is a focusing effort for marketing people who want to focus their communication as opposed to sending a blue link to everybody and hope that one or two of those items is interesting to you.

So we have a ton of questions for you, but I want to make sure that we also save time for everyone else's questions too. And that won't be a problem because we have plenty— we have a ton of questions coming in already without even asking. So

there's

a lot of great questions coming. Thank you. We've got some from Alan Berkson, Mitch Jackson, Phil Wolfe. And keep your questions coming. So as you're watching this, please, I'll try to fit that— we'll both try to fit them in as we go. So keep your questions coming because we're about to transition over. Also, congratulations. Is that what you're— Yes. Yeah, yeah.

You can sense my anticipation.

Go ahead, go ahead. Give them the good news.

Yeah, no, congratulations. We just got word that we are trending nationally on Twitter at number 36 in the country. So congratulations.

Congratulations to you guys. That's awesome.

So good content. Yeah, we've obviously curated some great content here.

Okay. Before we go on, Bryan, I wanted to make sure I Revealed to you how to use Feedly, how to help your feed situation. I don't want to forget that. So I know that Google Reader was super popular and Feedly has been a very popular RSS reader and it has been one of the most requested features on Flipboard since the Google Reader shutdown. And so this release, if you go to your profile page and you go to the magazine tab—

I'm doing it right now.

Okay, you'll notice there's a tile called Make a New Magazine.

Okay.

Okay, if you tap on that, there's a new link there. It says From Specific Sources.

Okay.

That is your new RSS reader. So that right there, we— and not only that, but it's like an RSS reader on steroids because You can curate into that any social tag you want. You can put in there #H2Hchat.

Wow.

You can put in there a social handle for anybody you want to follow. You can put in there any RSS feed or source on Flipboard, magazines or otherwise, so that you have in one place an RSS reader but also a social channel reader. And it's a magazine just about your interests. So if you're very— if you're following what's going on in the country on a particular topic or a hashtag or issue, you can put all those sources into one place. And you have a magazine, a custom magazine built around your personal sources that you want to keep up on.

You have no idea. Well, first of all, Twitter is going off. Everyone is tweeting how much they— you just made their day. I just tweeted out.

The pathway.

Good, good.

All right.

So, and my own, I am, I am now going to consolidate down to one, one app, which is even better.

And so one of the things we'd like you to do is if you create a really great combination of sources, share it as your recipe. Because we want to look, we want to see what people, what, what, what is the best combination of RSS feeds out there. For a particular topic. So we have this new idea of creating recipes on Flipboard.

Oh, I love that. When you share it, you're saying share it out into the open, on Facebook and Twitter and so on and so forth?

Or yeah, share it with us and we'd love to feature it and say, here's what Bryan's doing with his combination of sources and how he's keeping up on a particular topic and the types of— there are sources out there that we don't always hear about that are really insightful, interesting social handles, experts to follow, etc., on a particular topic. So if you're really into, you know, summer travel, there might be some fantastic summer, you know, travel guides out there that you put into your, into your magazine that we could share with other people.

Great. Lots of people taking notes asking, wait, what? How do I do that? So Courtney documented that. in her tweet. If you all want to check out The Path, it's right inside of her tweet. Angus just asked as well. And we got a tweet in from master Flipboarder Scott Monte saying, highly recommended. Curation is underrated. And he's one of the power users on— and a good friend on Flipboard. So thanks to Scott for chiming in there. Okay, that is fantastic.

Just to add on to that, since we're talking about RSS feeds, Janet Fouts. Hey, Janet, thanks for joining. She is wondering if there's a way that we can filter these RSS results.

Just saying, I want only marketing articles from the RSS feed.

Well, I suppose so. An RSS feed is going to be a waterfall of content. So I am assuming Janet's asking, can we go through and just say yep, yep, nope, nope?

No, unfortunately you can't. Once you add the RSS feed in, then it's, it's just in. But there are some organizations that filter their RSS by different categories. So like CNN has CNN Money and CNN Health. And so if you find an RSS feed that feels too broad, Try and see if they have alternative narrower feeds. That's helpful.

And you can train it in the top right. You can say, I want more of this and less of this.

Yes, we do have that. That applies to our topics. So when you— because the algorithm really is looking at what your reading behaviors are and saying, if you're suggesting you want less Politico and more New York Times, Then we can adjust accordingly. But the RSS feeds themselves, when you pick those, you're handpicking it, so we will not interfere.

I see.

We don't want to bother— we don't want to take things away from you that maybe you want. And so when you hand put something together, we won't touch it. We only affect the things that we are watching sort of holistically from the topics. Okay. So if you're doing the pros and cons, if you're doing the mute, and then like in the little 3-dot menu, you can choose more like this, less like this. And then when you pick less like this, we'll ask you to tell us why. So it's not just that you want less entertainment news, but you want less about Brad and Angelina Jolie, or you want more about entertainment from the movie industry, but less from Tom Cruise. So we take some feedback there that helps tune the algorithm so that we know what you want more or less of. But that's in the topic areas, not when you've hand-done something.

Is that a good lead-in to artificial intelligence?

Let's do it.

Okay, go.

That

was your softball.

That was for me to get to do. I love the baton pass. Actually, I'm going to, if you don't mind, I'm going to go right into some questions. I want to make sure everybody's start— we can start down that path and we'll weave that in. Totally. So let's start with the very first question that came up from Alan Burks. And he said, what is the key tip that you would use? Actually, I'm going to jump down to the next one. Sorry. Alan asked, can you talk about any sales enablement use cases, curating content for sales teams? How can companies potentially use this? in their marketing and sales aspects. Is that something that you would recommend?

Well, our sales team would agree with that completely. There's a lot of use cases in a sales and marketing environment. To sell— to use it for sales, I would say the most— one of the most powerful things is to just show a client what their Twitter feed looks like on Flipboard. And it's quite powerful when they can look at their own voice. And they can see what they're saying and how it all— what the narrative is, what story they're telling. And that's a really insightful moment for people to say, like, okay, how can we improve your voice and your storytelling? And let's look at it. Let's look at it in a magazine. Because it's not just a lot of blue links that you can't really visually see together. But when you can see it in a magazine format, you really get a sense of what you're telling the world. So when you're doing a like a marketing consultative kind of role with a client, assuming when we're talking about sales, we're talking about sort of working with clients, and you're trying to assess their voice. It's a great tool for assessment. It's a great tool for competitive research. So if you want to take a look at the whole market, you can follow— let's just say you're talking to somebody in telecom. You can look at the telecom news on Flipboard and say, where— how are we playing to this? How do we participate in the conversation? How are we being thought leaders in this conversation that's currently happening? And then on top of that, you can do things like, you know, coverage reports, event reports. Anytime you need to collect articles to share them with a client so that you can help better sell them on the next event or better help them understand what they could do better in their storytelling or how they sit competitively, I would say it's a sales tool. From that point of view.

Does

that help?

Yeah, yeah, a lot. I can't wait now.

I feel like your mind is blowing on live video.

You're giving me a task list, basically, my to-do list.

I'm not here to give to-do lists. I have my own.

It's a good to-do list, though. Okay, so Mitch Jackson said, is it possible to use Flipboard as a collaboration tool? I actually know the answer to this, and I use this part of this a lot, but creating a new product app or an event or something that several people are doing together, tips to help do this. What do you think about that? Oh yeah.

Yeah, Mitch, thank you. I would tell you that one of the most exciting ways to use Flipboard, we use it internally this way. We have a private magazine. So you make a magazine and it's called the Flipboard Team Magazine. And, or you could name it obviously whatever you want. And we invite everybody who's an employee to participate privately. And it's a place where we share articles. So the sales team can share articles about trends in advertising. The engineering team shares articles about Google AMP or Facebook Pages. We share articles about trends in publishing. We share articles about What's happening in the app stores? What's happening to other competitors in the space? How are people reading news? What's going on with fake news? So it's a private magazine just to our organization. There's about 150 people in it. And anybody can share to that magazine. And when somebody does share, you get a little notification that says, hey, Christine Cook shared this article in the Flipboard team magazine. So as far as collaboration, especially if you want to do it privately. It's particularly valuable because a lot of organizations want to have conversations amongst their team, but it's hard to find everybody on the same platform. And this way you create a Flipboard magazine. It's a private magazine. People get notified when you add things to it. So it's a great way to keep up with what the team is sharing. Then there's other organizations like there's one magazine we use, we talked about a lot called Cybersecurity, and it's curated by about 300 grad students on the topic of cybersecurity. It's a public magazine, but it's a collaborative magazine amongst cybersecurity experts. There's one— well, there's lots on education and lots in marketing of people who are making magazines together, both publicly and privately, to share ideas, to get ready for events, to plan, or just to collect together, because sometimes you don't want to miss what's going on. And instead of sending emails to whole aliases, This is a great solution for that. So I think collaboratively Flipboard becomes a really, really important tool, especially if you want to do private collaboration.

So I'll make a suggestion here to everybody that's watching. I have a couple collaboration boards and I would love to include anybody that would like to participate in an H2H chat collaboration board.

So

if, if you would like to, I'll set that up today. And if you wanted to just follow me on Flipboard, it's @BryanKramer. Then I'll add you to that board and we'll create a collaboration spot for everybody that's on today and start using that. So that would be fun. Let me know if you're in. Tweet me. Connect with me on Flipboard.

So, Bryan, when you do that, or maybe you can tell us all now, what kinds of articles would you like people sharing in the H2H chat?

Yeah. So anything that's around marketing, innovation, or technology. is where we're gonna be focused, and that's what our HTH Chats are about. So if it's any of those 3 genres— Or creativity. Or creativity, right. Yeah, creativity amongst all 3 of those. So yeah, absolutely,

or 4.

So there's an important tip for people as you make Flipboard magazines, especially to collaborate. Just write in the description what kinds of stories you want people to post into that magazine. Because that helps them. Like, for example, there was a woman I make a magazine with, it's called Cuisine Undercover. And sometimes it's hard to tell, like, what kind of cuisine is that, right? And so how do I know what kinds of stories to add there? So she writes a description about the kinds of stories to add there, and they're about making recipes that require only one pot. And so that would— that's a helpful parameters that people can put onto their product and their magazine description. So that people know what to expect when they read that magazine, but also if they're doing it in a collaborative way, what they're looking for their other collaborators to do in that magazine. You can also have conversations there, which is really quite cool to do, is use this little pencil icon and you can add a post that says things like, today's chat is with Marcy. Does anybody have any questions in advance? And you can add a conversation into your magazines too, to the degree you want. To inspire conversation with your group.

That's fantastic. So I, I was just going to ask a quick question before you dive in, because there's 2 questions that are pretty similar. One from Roxanne who said, can you share Flipboard on your website? Will bring more readers to my blog. And in conjunction with that, Alan Berkson said, private magazine seems to clash with internal collaboration tools like Jive and Workplace and coexist. But I think that this is embeddable in both places, that you can embed all your stuff so you're not having to go to different apps.

That's the question I was gonna ask.

Oh, yeah, times 2, times 2. Same question here.

Great, great minds, right? Yes, we are not as sophisticated as I'd like to be on this front, but we have a website called about.flipboard.com/tools. And on that page, there are embeddable widgets. There's one you can embed your magazine. So if you make a magazine on social media, as we do, you can take the embeddable code for that magazine and add it to your website. So to the question about driving traffic to your blog, it's particularly cool when you can make a magazine about your blog content that people go visit and they go back to your blog. It's like this virtuous cycle. And you can organize things as we were talking about. If you're a blogger and you've done Thanksgiving recipes for 10 years, those get lost and every year you have to kind of reinvent the wheel. So this is a way to package up things that you've covered in the past and package them into one place. But you can embed a magazine widget. You can also put on there a link or an embeddable code to your profile. So if you want people to visit your profile, you know, like the social share icons. That are— you get from AddThis and ShareThis and other places. We are in those programs already, but, you know, there's a lot in those programs. So you have to— you can add us from those tool sets if you already use those. Or if you want to go to our website, you can grab them there. And that lets you share your profile. It lets you share your magazines. And if you want to get really sophisticated, you can add it to all of your articles. So people can flip your stories into their magazines.

And my to-do list just keeps

growing. I will not see you for days.

I'm here to help.

Do you have a support group board for Flipboard users?

Yes. Flipboard announced.

Just

say, yeah, you can share my email address. Yeah, if you mention @FlipboardCS community support, they will help you with whatever you need. They're super awesome. There's a team there, they respond to everything within 24 hours. But I'm also available.

Wow,

great, great stuff. So what questions do you have here?

Well, speaking of blogs being embedded onto Flipboard here, Mark Babbitt One of our longtime friends and amazing guy says, our blogs have recently been picked up by Flipboard, thousands of page views per day, but we have no idea how or why. So how or why?

That's a great question, Mark. There's a couple different aspects of that. If you already share articles on Flipboard from your blog, so let's say Bryan takes some of your stories and flips them into one of his magazines. And Bryan is heavy on Flipboard and his magazines are pretty well followed or discovered, then your articles will be part of his curation on our platform. So what happens is somebody on the, on the Flipboard platform, if you're not doing it yourself, then somebody on the platform has discovered your content, shared your content into our network. And then we index it. So we— so our machine learning team can say, okay, this is a website that's credible, that wasn't created in the last 10 days and rebranded 8 times as spam. We look at it and say, this is a credible source. We take the content and we say it classifies as something— marketing, social media, UX design. And then we can assign that content to people reading that category. So if there are people reading about UX design and that's what your blog is about, then your stories are likely to come up in that category. And especially likely to come up if there's people on our platform who are already sharing that a lot. So if Bryan shares your blog posts quite often or it's in a variety of his magazines or it's in a topic that's particularly popular that day, then it's likely your stories will come up. Like, I'll see it if Bryan shares it. I might see it in my marketing magazine that day. So that, that's how discovery happens. It's like I said, it's not driven by algorithms saying this is trending and popular and all of a sudden you're all— we're all going to see cat videos. It's really about, is it a quality source? Can we topically index it? And then is it informed by the behaviors in the community, people who are liking it, resharing it, reading it a lot, or it's being flipped into magazines of people on the platform that we have identified as sort of experts in the field or really good curators on the platform already. So there's a lot of different layers that go into discovery. But we do hear this a lot where people are starting to see a lot more analytics traffic to their blog because of the conversations and sharing happening on Flipboard. And one of the things that we think is going to drive that even more this year is the fact that we've organized by passion. So it's not the big categories. I don't follow just tech. I follow tech with a lens on it as if it has wearables and drones. And so now the network is gonna go look for wearables and drones content, not just tech. So it's more likely that the longer tail of community content is gonna be discovered this year than ever before because of last week's launch. So I think you'll see more and more traffic happening for bloggers, especially on categories where our big publishers don't cover it very well.

So in my opinion, that data that you guys are able to gather is more valuable than, say, the data that we might be able to go access and see trends on Twitter or whatever, just strictly because that is the fire hose. It's unfiltered. It's not being curated. And do you guys have a place where people can go and access those trends that you're seeing?

Mm-hmm. Oh, well, that's a great question too. Analytics on Flipboard, especially for the general population, not advertising partners or publishers, that is very rudimentary right now. That's an area we have to invest more in this year. It's really something that we think people are gonna wanna see. We have a page called, editor.flipboard.com. And on that page, you can see very, very basic behaviors for your curation. So you can see how many articles you posted this month, what day was the most trafficked for you, how many new followers you added, some basic stuff. But you can't really see what's happening when you share an article like this versus an article like that. Like, you can't really see the depth that you're talking about. Courtney, which is like, how do I know what's really resonating or what's really working?

Well, I would be talking about the top layer, right? So collectively across all of Flipboard.

Oh.

So, so, you know, the big data part of it, which is what are those, those master trends that you are seeing? Who are those, those top influencers that like so many people are flipping On these specific categories. I feel like that for a marketer would be unbelievable information.

Yeah, so there's a couple different lenses on that one. If you— when you open one of your Smart Magazines, let's say you've created a Smart Magazine on marketing and you open it up, on the bottom there's a black bar and it's— I call it the black title bar and it says marketing. And if you tap that black bar, you'll see everything that's going into that curation that day. So you can see not only is it being informed by the things you already follow, but there's also a set of magazines called featured magazines, which are magazines that other people— maybe you don't know who they are, you've never met them before, but that they're curating magazines on a similar topic and they're getting some traction that day. Then below that, you'll see this list called Twitter influencers. And so our editorial team has curated about 8,000 Twitter influencers in different categories and just started injecting the Twitter handles of those sources. So what's interesting is now you're not gonna just get the curation that's happening on Flipboard, but you're gonna get by topic the curation that's happening on Twitter. So let's say you're following drones and you see there's some magazines that I follow already that are adding to my drones magazine. Some magazines that I don't know who they are, and they're either new names to me. And then below that are other Twitter handles. So you might see Elon Musk, for example. But Elon Musk's tweets on Trump won't show up, but they will if he's tweeting on drones and energy efficiency, let's just say.

Oh my God.

We've topically indexed Twitter so that you don't have to follow everything Wow. That a particular person is seeing, but just related to things you're interested in.

I hope everyone understands how powerful this just really is. Yeah. I mean, it really is a great tool that you can use. It's the greatest— it's a great combination of human and tech working together to give you what you need. That's fantastic. So somebody was— actually, Angus was just asking, asking if we'd share a small list of all the to-dos for getting up to speed on Flipboard today. I would love to actually help put something together, and I think we could do that for everybody. So I wanted to make everybody aware of that, that we can post something up, and I'm sure we could work with you and your team to get some more action items for everybody to do. So that's certainly something that we could put together for you guys. Great. Let's just use the last remaining few minutes to just talk about the future. Yeah. You guys have come out with this fantastic evolution of your app and your curation tool and tools. What more things are you allowed to talk about that are coming?

Yeah.

Well, I think this goes back to Courtney's point of getting more Exposure. Exposure to behaviors and connecting people together as a community. There are parts of Flipboard that are amazing to read, but when you can find the other experts in that field and connect with them, it really becomes a tribe. One of the things we talk about is the magazines— the original intention of a magazine was a tribal organizing document. It was a place for you to read everything you wanted about a particular thing. And when you go to the news racks today, you'll see you can probably find a magazine on just about every topic, niche topic you want— poodles, you know, DIY, home improvement. And so how can we create— the reason you go to those magazines, like let's take Sailing Magazine or Surfer Magazine, you go there because It's a collection of stories, both news stories and in-depth stories, full-page infographics, if you will, that connect you to that particular passion. But not only that, in the back of it, those magazines, sometimes you'll see community comments or letters, and you feel like you get to know those people a little bit. And it's a place of expression and conversation. And I think that Flipboard is going to continue to drive not just the top level of that curation, but the community part of that curation, so that you can have a real conversation with people who are also into photography, or also into surfing, or also might want to explore, you know, travel in other countries, so that it becomes not just a place of consumption, but a place of conversation. And that's going to be super important to expanding the ways you think about using Flipboard to not only find your passion but connect with other people about your passion. And like I said in the beginning, it's really the inverse of a social network, if you will, where we get together because we're both interested in something, not because we both just happened to follow each other 10 years ago. And maybe our lives have changed, right? Maybe I'm really— I just had a baby and I'm really into parenting right now. I got to figure this whole thing out. How do I do that? And how do I find people who can help me do that? Mm-hm. It might be very different than my social feeds today. So, you know, really investing our time in community conversations, giving people more data about their curation, what's trending, what's doing well, how do they feel about their presence in Flipboard, and what are the other things they could explore. I mean, one thing we did this last year was we created some different handles. One was FlipEDU, FlipMarketer, and FlipBlogger to start to create conversations among these different groups of people who Flipboard so they could learn from each other. Because they know better than I do what they need in the classroom. Or people who are bloggers know exactly what they need from a curation platform like ours. And they're better to talk to each other than me talking at them. And I think that finding, connecting those communities is the way forward for us. And I think it's also why curation will— when curation really matters. Not that you're curating for the wide spectrum, but you're curating for the people that care.

Yeah.

That should be your tagline.

Yeah, there you go.

Everything for people

that care.

Yes.

That would be awesome.

That's fantastic. We, unfortunately, we've run just up against the hour, and this has been an incredible hour spent just learning about things. I mean, I've got a long list of great things to do that I know will go a ways. So thank you so much for taking your time to be here with all of us. Everyone out there, thanks so much for your great questions and for your tweets and ideas. It seems like there's some great ideas generated here today. Again, I actually, while we're sitting here, I set the H2H chat group up on Flipboard, so feel free to, I guess, friend me and I will add you to the group there. And if you want to just reach out and let me know if you'd like to be added, I can do it manually. Well,

it was a total honor to join you. And I feel like that hour did go by fast. It sure did. I appreciate the questions and the conversation and the real sort of down in the depths of what matters to people these days. So thank you, Bryan, and thanks, Courtney, for letting me join you today. Oh, you got it.

Yeah, thank you.

We're not far from you. You're up in Palo Alto, so we'll see you soon in real life as well.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Anytime. Thanks to the Flipboard team. Thank you, Marcy. Thank you, everybody out there. Congrats again on trending. We're now number 36. We've moved up the chart in the United States there, so congrats on that.

And we're off next week.

We are off next week.

It's President's Day.

We'll see you the week after. Same time, same place, a week from Monday. Thank you guys again. Marcy, if you want to stay on for a quick second. We will see you guys all soon. Cheers.

Bye!