How can you have your article on CNN and 10,000 leading outlets? The answer is Native Discovery and

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. And today I'm going to talk about native discovery and content amplification. Now I'm talking about this because I was given an SMS by a good friend, Mark Campman, who's a social media expert. And he warned me that I may be posting too much content on Facebook and that, that may hurt me. And I didn't realize, but it seems as though if you are posting too many posts on Facebook and maybe also on LinkedIn, you can have your account sort of downgraded in some way. So I guess a bit like, you know, manners at the dining table. If you're doing all the talking, then eventually someone asks you to stop talking. So it was with that that it got me to thinking about strategies that we can use that are off the main path of using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, for example. Now, what I've done over the last 25 years is to build brands myself for clients using my own agency, East West Public Relations, but I've also built my own businesses over the last 25 years, including importing Morgan sports cars to China. So I have some experience in building a brand and I've done that largely through public relations. And I want to talk about content syndication today, or what the people at Outbrain and Taboola call native discovery. Now, in public relations, we have earned media, which is what people think of as traditional public relations, which is where you ring up the journalist and you pitch a story. If they like it, they ask for more. They may do an interview. They may take the press release. They may Take a case study, for example. The second kind of PR that we have is owned media, where we own the channel. So we own our own Facebook or LinkedIn channel, and so we can put what we like on that. And but as I've been told by Mark Getman today, I may be putting too much into my own channels. The third is the shared media, which of course are the social media 2-way streets where someone has taken my content and then is amplifying it themselves. And you could even look at things like TripAdvisor or Trustpilot where people are starting to share views about us and our companies whether we like it or not. And the third group of media is paid media. Now, in the past, traditionally paid media, or what we used to call above-the-line advertising, as opposed to below the line, or what then became through the line. And it used to be below the line was direct marketing, and through the line became sort of paid-for insertions into publications. Paid media now, with the way that companies like Outbrain and Taboola are defining, is what they call native discovery. Now, I've used this myself actually for some clients some years ago and even for my own content, because when you look at the bottom of your, for example, CNN, or in Singapore, the AsiaOne website, or even BBC, you're going to see coverage or articles that aren't really articles contributed by the journalists themselves. But they look like proper articles. They don't have a PR headline or an advertising headline. What they have is a headline that could just be an article. Things like, you know, should you take out extra equity on your home after 65, for example. And what you'll find is that long-form content has been provided by a publisher, by a company that has paid to send out long-form, i.e., you know, articles as opposed to adverts, or could be a video. And it's the equivalent of the old, what we used to call advertorial supplements. So paid content is now distribution and exposure that we've paid for, and it can include search, social media campaigns, display ads, and so on. Now, with, with Outbrain, um, I've used that with really good effect, and I'll go into how that works in, in just a little bit of time. The reason this is working is because in the recent years, in the last 5, 6 years, content marketing has exploded, with 89% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing, apparently according to Nielsen research. And that's because editorial and informational and entertaining content works best. Viewers now, as we're looking at screens and we're controlling what's on the screen and surfing and, and moving on if we don't like it, means that advertising in the old banner ad networks that we used to have in the late 1990s, early 2000s are largely gone because people like Safari and Google put ad blockers. So we used to have a little banner or even a sidebar on the browser, but now those have gone because what the browser owners realized was that that was their revenue and they weren't going to give that away to ad networks. So the way to get in front of people is sometimes through giving them great articles that they will run But what we can also do is to share content through what we call these content syndication platforms. Now, the people at Outbrain, they call it native discovery because what happens is that content goes into content that is being read by the viewer already or watched by the viewer already. So So just in the same way that advertising has become targeted according to the search or what we've seen already, this is of course where all the, the cookies are coming in. What the native discovery does is it's basically saying if someone's reading about mortgages or about pensions and so on, we can send them long-form content that's also relevant to that particular area of interest. Now, it can carry some SEO risks, some search engine optimization risks, because if you have repetitive content, uh, going across lots and lots of channels, um, we can actually be penalized apparently by people like Google. But fresh content syndicated across multiple platforms is good for our SEO. So I think my, my view is you can use the same content 2 or 3 times, maybe not all on the same day, but over a period of a month, and, and fare no risk whatsoever. Now there are platforms like Medium where we can post our own content, whether it's photos, audio, videos, and so on. And these really are, if you like, shared content. In my view, it's like a group blog where everybody is participating, and it becomes sort of like a self-publishing platform. There's another one which is called Scoop.it, which also starts to collate content from around the web and automatically compile it for us. I think those are not really content syndication in the definition that I like to use, which is really taking content from one place and sending it across multiple platforms. A bit like we're doing with repurpose.io for our video, for example, creating audiograms from Buzzsprout, using repurpose.io to create audiograms that are automatically sent through to our YouTube account and to our Facebook account. So there's Medium, but there's also, for example, SlideShare. And I'm always amazed that more clients don't use SlideShare, especially for B2B. To give you an idea of the sort of potential of SlideShare, there's a recent share by Ogilvy, social media trends in 2020, and it has 598,375 views. Now imagine if you're any agency to have half a million people look at your PowerPoint presentation, normally preserved maybe for your, a few clients and a few staff. That's pretty amazing, right? By any advertising standards, that's fantastic. And that's free. So 80 million people use SlideShare every year, apparently, to learn about topics quickly from subject matter experts. And you can categorise them. So it was founded in 2006, and I have been using it for quite a long time myself. And I put company presentations on there, and I put pitches on there where we created content that clients or companies decided not to use. We don't put anything proprietary to them, of course, but it was acquired in 2012 by LinkedIn. And although, um, the integration isn't one where, you know, you log into LinkedIn and you automatically go to SlideShare— you have to log in and out— there are some 18 million uploads in 40 content categories, and it's one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. So For any B2B client that I have, I always recommend getting product brochures and any marketing materials at all and knowledge into SlideShare, and it's free to post. Now, I mentioned Outbrain. Outbrain.com is a site that I've been using, and what I do then is I post content on there. For example, a long-form article that might be a white paper written by a client. And then I can choose quite specifically on a cost per 1,000 basis. So I, what I've done in the past is spend $50 to $100, and we've got even 20,000 to 30,000 impressions and 2% to 3% click-throughs back to the website of our client. And that's the key difference with Outbrain compared to, for example, having an article on a website published, you know, with just editorial. Without Brain, if someone clicks to read the article, it's taken back to the host website. In other words, if I have a client white paper and I've got it on their website, I can then buy traffic. I can buy readers by geography. By publication type and by price and also by duration and by budget. So I can bid basically to be on the front page. So if you've got a lot of budget, you can even be, for example, on CNN or the BBC or Asia One, which obviously are major outlets. So that's the content that you're seeing on the bottom of your browsers. Now, Outbrain helps over a billion people discover content apparently every year. And it's eclipsed by Taboola, which, uh, taboola.com, which is really the other game in town. I had heard at one stage that Taboola was buying Outbrain, um, but now I look again, that doesn't seem to be the case. So, uh, there are 2 games in town. Um, Taboola though has more of a sort of a paid management system. I spoke to them when I was running Uh, campaigns for Morgan in China because I was looking at using really Taboola's outlets into the main publications, for example, like South China Morning Post. And at the time, what they do is they then have account managers and they manage your content distribution much more like an ad management team. And they claim 1.4 billion users per month, which I imagine is the aggregate of these 10,000 publishers where 10,000 publishers around the world use Taboola to provide the additional content. They also claim they've got 50 times more data than the New York Public Library. Now personally, I haven't been into the New York Public Library, but I'm sure it's terrific. But that gives you a measure of the scale of digital data just on one of the platforms. Now Now you need to have a bigger budget with Taboola. They don't have prices on the website because what happens is you, you sign up and you get an account manager. So I started this sort of conversation because I was warned by Mark Kampmann, who's an Instagram expert and has the book called Flirt, all about digital media marketing, saying we need to be careful that we can, if you like, saturate Facebook and YouTube and Twitter with too much content, which I have to say I find a bit of a surprise. But if that's the case, another thing we can look at is the content syndication. That does take a little bit of budget. It doesn't cost anything to post things to medium.com nor to SlideShare, but those 2 platforms really are posting and hoping people, or having people come and find the content. What I call content syndication, and what Outbrain call native discovery, is really where your content is placed through one portal, one platform, and it's distributed on your behalf to multiple platforms. In the case of Taboola, 10,000 publishers. Outbrain also claimed to have thousands of publishing outlets as well. So that distribution transportation creates huge opportunities, but it does have a small amount of cost. So great value. Get anything that you've got that you can use on SlideShare and embed the link wherever you can, because SlideShare enables you to embed those slides into, for example, WordPress or into any other website. You can even embed them and link them into your LinkedIn, for example. But I recommend if you've got some good long-form articles and content, maybe you're changing up, for example, how a car industry is going to change with regards to NEVs, for example, or in-wheel motors. It's another potential client or company we work with called Protean. Look at Outbrain. As a way because it has a scalable cost and is very targeted, and it does bring traffic back to your own website. I know it because I've tried it. I've used it with clients to really quite some success. Now, as we've said before, digital marketing and public relations is 20% content development and 80% marketing. Content syndication is part of the amplification part of Speak PR, which is our 5-stage methodology, which is to storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. Content syndication is a valuable way to leverage your current content using platforms that are out there so that people can find and read or watch What you've got to say, how you add value to the marketplace without having to do really any extra work, but just leverage leverage the technology. It's there to serve small and medium-sized business owners like me and you to get our word out. So with that, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on syndicating your great content. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please do rate us. You do that by going to the bottom of your iTunes or your podcast, and you'll see something saying rating, and you, and you log in and you can fill in the form there online. If you would like to get more information about Speak PR, it's all available on our website at eastwestpr.com, as is a subscription to our weekly newsletter, which goes out every Friday around the world. And if you'd like to write to me directly, please do, jim@eastwestpr.com, or find me on LinkedIn. I'm linkedin.com/in/jamesjim. So with that, I wish you a great day. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Speak PR.