You have an internal marketing team, and you manage a team of freelancers—writers, designers, editors, etc. Email and Google Docs are your go-to forms of communication and collaboration. Unless your freelancers don’t have Gmail accounts, then the system breaks down. Freelancers can’t access your documents, so you have to email company assets. But those documents are constantly being updated, and you never remember which version you sent to which freelancer. So, you have to search through countless email threads to find the right one.

Now, instead of doing important work, you’re just retracing your steps to determine who knows what and what needs to happen next.

Alright, our journey is over, and you’re safe and sound now back in good old 2024. While this scenario was typical for marketing teams in 2010, many who haven’t discovered the wonder of content marketing platforms still experience these headaches. Perhaps you’re whispering to yourself: “Shoot, that’s me! What is a content marketing platform?” If so, that’s okay, we’ll bring you up to speed.

What are Content Marketing Platforms?

A content marketing platform (CMP) is an online software solution that allows businesses and marketers to collaborate across teams to strategize and streamline their content marketing processes.

I know what you’re thinking: That sounds a lot like a content management system (CMS). Sure, they both deal with content, but they serve different purposes in the overall content lifecycle. Here’s a quick breakdown of their differences:

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A CMS is a broader tool used to publish and distribute marketing content. It allows non-technical users to easily publish content across channels, edit webpages, and manage layouts (e.g., platforms like WordPress and Magento).

Content Marketing Platforms (CMP)

A CMP is a more specialized marketing tool designed for the entire content marketing process. This includes planning content strategy, creating content, scaling content production, analyzing performance, and distributing content across various channels.

Essentially, the biggest difference is that a CMS is primarily for publishing content to your website, while a CMP is for planning, strategic alignment, content creation, and optimizing content performance.

How do Content Marketing Platforms Work?

CMPs act as a central nervous system for your marketing efforts, helping your team streamline the content marketing process from strategy to results. Here are some of the specialized tools CMPs provide to improve your content marketing process:

Strategic insight: Develop a data-driven content strategy with features like keyword research tools and competitor analyses. Easily identify content gaps and potential audiences.

Organizational alignment: Store, update, and distribute your marketing strategy in one centralized location, effectively breaking down silos between internal and external teams, like freelancers and full-time employees.

Content calendars: Visually map out your content plan with dynamic, drag-and-drop calendar features. Keep your team aligned and organized with a unified calendar to schedule content creation, distribution, campaigns, and project deadlines.

Campaign management: Create and manage multi-channel campaigns within your CMP. Ensure all marketing activities (blog posts, social media posts, email blasts, etc.) align with overall strategy.

Workflow management: Assign tasks, track progress, and set clear deadlines for content creators, editors, and other team members.

Collaboration tools: Share documents, provide feedback, solicit feedback from company executives, streamline legal review, and communicate with your team using built-in messaging, text editors, and task management tools.

Our new dual-editing feature is a real-time collaboration tool that boosts the speed and ease of collaboration when several people are working on a document. Contently is the only CMP that enables real-time collaboration in-platform.

Content performance tracking: Analyze content performance across various channels using detailed analytics.

Team coordination: Keep your team aligned with notifications on project progress, campaign performance, and team activity.

Why Do I Need a Content Marketing Platform?

Every business and marketing team is different. So, is it fair to say they all need a CMP? Yes. Yes, it is. You just need to find a CMP with the right features for your team. So, let’s talk about the benefits of CMPs and what you should look for when shopping for a CMP:

Increased Bandwidth

Marketing teams are always spread thin. But what if you could double, triple, or even quadruple the size of your team? With a CMP, you have access to a powerful network of vetted writers, copy editors, designers, art directors, photographers, videographers, and much more. Suddenly, your marketing team is able to focus on strategy while producing more content.

Without a CMP, marketing teams are forced to pause content creation and publishing while they focus on strategy. But CMPs allow teams to maintain their momentum and continue operations while finalizing their marketing approach.

What to Look For:

Not all CMPs offer a talent network. While some CMPs integrate with freelance marketplaces or offer features to collaborate with external contributors, a built-in talent network of freelancers is not a standard feature.

But the best enterprise content marketing platforms will provide trusted freelancers within their platform. For example, Contently has vetted and trained each of their 160,000+ freelancers in their talent network.

Gain Strategic Alignment

Every good campaign starts with a good strategy. With a CMP, you can document your strategy upfront, create alignment within your team, and provide visibility to your in-house team and freelancers. With custom analytics, you can track each of your audiences, determine how your content is performing, and measure your progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

What to Look For:

Look for a user-friendly platform that allows each of your team members to customize their dashboards. Whether it’s your CMO or marketing manager using the platform, they can create a dashboard that shows the information and metrics most important to them.

You also want a platform that allows users to provide story briefs or specific instructions to individual freelancers and internal team members. Share insights into audience personas, voice, and strategy without having to attach a 70-page brand book to every assignment. Contently also allows users to templatize their story briefs, so they don’t have to start from scratch with each project.

For your freelancers, use a CMP with a quick link to content strategy, so they can quickly reference goals, audience, and tone with a click of a button.

Scale Content Creation

CMPs can function like growth serums for marketing teams by eliminating repetitive tasks, like scheduling social media posts or resizing images for different platforms. Content templates and pre-designed workflows allow teams to quickly create content consistent with brand guidelines and established processes.

With detailed analytics, teams can see which content resonates with audiences and quickly make improvements. This data-driven approach accelerates the optimization process and helps teams focus on high-performing formats and topics.

What to Look For:

To improve your optimizations and increase ROI, make sure your CMP allows you to test different monetization channels, perform A/B tests, and personalize your content and marketing campaigns using customer data.

For marketers looking for a way to justify their content spend, Contently offers the Content Value Tracker. It actually calculates how much your organic traffic is worth in dollars.

Achieve Brand Compliance

Streamline brand compliance and ensure consistency by incorporating legal and brand requirements into your project briefs, templates, and workflows. Even with strict brand guidelines, you can use brand management tools to flag blocklisted words and phrases and apply a uniform style and tone to each piece of content.

What to Look For:

The best content marketing platforms will include automated quality control features. These tools can scan for plagiarism, assess content for reading level, correct grammar, and optimize for SEO. The best CMPs will also provide AI-generated recommendations on writing quality, such as misused words and double verbs.

Contently’s workflow tools also ensure each team member knows what is required of them and when their tasks are due. Once a freelancer completes a task or meets the project requirements, they are paid automatically through Contently.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs About Content Marketing Platforms

How do content marketing platforms facilitate communication between external freelancer and internal teams?

Content marketing platforms often provide features like built-in messaging, task management tools, and collaborative document sharing to facilitate communication between internal teams and external freelancers, ensuring seamless integration regardless of the tools they use.

Can content marketing platforms assist in identifying and filling content gaps in a marketing strategy?

Yes, content marketing platforms typically offer features such as keyword research tools and competitor analyses, allowing users to identify content gaps and potential audiences, thereby aiding in refining and filling gaps within the marketing strategy.

Do content marketing platforms offer functionalities for brand compliance and legal requirements within content creation?

Many content marketing platforms integrate legal and brand compliance requirements into project briefs, templates, and workflows, while also offering automated quality control features such as plagiarism detection and grammar correction.

If you’re ready to make your work life immeasurably better and add a CMP to your content marketing process, start your search here.

The post What Are Content Marketing Platforms and Why You Need One appeared first on Contently.

A couple of months ago, we released our second annual study of freelance creatives on The Freelancer. We asked freelancers about a range of topics from how they find work, how they market themselves, how much they work, and more.

One thing was clear: Freelance creatives don’t use co-working spaces, and they don’t supplement their income by working for sharing economy giants like Uber and Airbnb. From a total of 1,119 freelancers, only 3 percent of respondents said they worked mostly in a co-working space—and only 1 percent of part-time freelance creatives claimed to be a part of the sharing economy.

There were plenty of other important takeaways from the study that tell us a lot about how the gig economy is developing. Here are 11 of the best.

Click here for more on the methodology and demographic background of the study.

1. Eighty percent of respondents have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher. By contrast, 33 percent of the total U.S. population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, a 47 percent gap.

2. Seventy-six percent of respondents freelance by choice. Despite the inherent complexities of the lifestyle—wage instability, lack of benefits, tax complications, and so on—creatives largely go freelance because they want to, not because they need to.

3. Overall, it was a good year for freelance creatives. Fifty-five percent think their lives as freelancers have improved in the past year, and only 13 percent believe it declined. That’s a drop from last year, however, when 65 percent said life as a freelancer had improved.

4. Freelance creatives are mixed when it comes to the predicting the future. Thirty-five percent expect freelancing to become less difficult, 34 percent think it will get more difficult, and 31 percent think it will stay the same.

5. Among full-time freelancers, income is at a comparable level to U.S. averages. Forty percent of the labor force’s yearly income falls under $20,000, compared to 35 percent for full-time freelancers. About 8 percent of full-time freelancers make more than $100,000 per year, compared to 6.6 percent of the U.S. labor force. Given that freelance creatives are overeducated compared to the general U.S. population, however, full-time freelancers are being under-compensated relative to their education level.

6. Freelancers receive payment in a variety of ways. Direct deposit, mailed checks, and digital payment (such as PayPal) are used about evenly, suggesting a majority of people don’t have to deal with dreaded lag times of three-plus months just to receive a check.

7. Social media is a critical part of life for many freelancers. Sixty-five percent have social media profiles that they update and use regularly for their work, and more freelancers ranked social media a 10 (on a 0–10 scale) for importance to their work than any other number.

Of all the social networks, LinkedIn was most important, followed closely by Twitter and Facebook. Instagram, Tumblr, and “Other” made up 7 percent of the total. If you’re looking for freelancers, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the places you’ll most likely find them.

8. The majority of freelance creatives (57 percent) find work online.

Of that 57 percent, the majority of work comes from professional references. Digital platforms, cold pitching, and social media are the other major sources of work, but there’s a sizable gap between references and the rest.

9. The majority of respondents either complete an even mix of work between media companies and corporate clients or work more for media companies. In total, 67 percent of respondents had worked with a corporate client in the past year.

In terms of why freelance creatives work for brand clients, the reasons are mainly financial: 67 percent said they think working for a brand is either “financially necessary” or “a financial bonus.”

But that doesn’t mean freelance creatives are ashamed of the work. Only 4 percent thought working for corporate clients is “something to hide,” and a plurality (39 percent) of freelancers post their brand work on personal portfolios. Plus, 48 percent of respondents said they found working for brand clients to be “something I’m proud of” or “personally rewarding.”

10. Of all the hurdles freelancers face, almost half of respondents selected securing enough work as their biggest challenge.

11. Finally, we asked whether freelancers would take full-time job in their field with identical pay, plus benefits.

Compared to last year’s results, there was a downtick in freelancers who would stick it out over taking a full-time job. Excluding those who were only freelancing on the side, 25 percent would go full-time, compared with 30 percent last year.

Overall, it’s obvious that while many freelancers are happy to be where they are, plenty are not categorically opposed to traditional employment. Until there are similar protections and benefits to full-time work, that may not happen for a long time.

Click here to read the full analysis of our study on The Freelancer.

The post Study: Only 3 Percent of Freelance Creatives Use Co-Working Spaces appeared first on Contently.

This warped system leaves freelancers with few places for empowerment. But those who want to fight back can now take action using Pay Me Please, a website built for journalists to expose publishers that failed to fulfill payments for work.

Iona Craig, a freelance journalist based in Yemen who writes for The Times (of London) and USA Today, thought of the project after multiple BBC outlets withheld her compensation. To launch the initiative, Craig teamed with Beacon Reader, a Netflix for journalism where donors fund a particular writer for $5 a month in exchange for access to every story on Beacon. Five months later, 103 jobs have been listed on Pay Me Please from around the world. Some of the discredited publishers—like BBC, Al Jazeera, and the Associated Press—might surprise you.

As the BBC owes many freelance journos money. If I’m not paid in 10 days I’ll be creating an open source doc. for all to add their dues to.

— Iona Craig أيونا (@ionacraig) October 20, 2013

 Reliance on Freelancers

In an email, Craig wrote, “Big news organizations are relying on freelancers more than ever these days. Unfortunately their payment systems for freelancers don’t seem to be keeping up with that pace of change.” Most freelancers, not just journalists, deal with a financial lag likely lasting between two weeks and three months as their invoices snail through various accounting departments. But even veteran journalists like Craig can get stiffed. “It happens,” she said. “And it’s often some of the biggest names in the media industry who are the worst culprits.”

If a company snubbed a salaried employee without cause, it would be sued and forced to pay. When publishers do it to freelancers, the legal disputes can get more complicated, especially for writers, photographers, and videographers who may not be able to afford legal fees. Since Craig travels constantly and works thousands of miles from her clients, hunting down money becomes a logistical issue. As she argued on Beacon’s blog, “a return ticket to stake your claim will often cost more in travel expenses and time spent not working than the money you’re owed in the first place.”

(Editor’s note: This is an issue important to us at Contently and a primary reason we pay our writers immediately upon submission.)

Thus far, 16 payment disputes on the site have been settled, but according to Craig, some writers haven’t even needed to openly shame publishers to see results: “When they’ve threatened to add publications to Pay Me Please, journalists have told me just the threat alone has been enough for them pay up immediately.”

When payments are settled, the publishers aren’t erased from the list. Instead, the job remains highlighted in green and the price is crossed out. It might be a small detail, but keeping the publishers listed is one way for writers to see what news outlets have been deceitful, even after those outlets eventually clean up their deception. And for publishers concerned about bad press, a link exists at the bottom of the page if they’re interested in settling a debt.

Closing thoughts

Pay Me Please is still a relatively a hidden site, but the more people know about it, the more useful it can become for journalists looking to force accountability. One writer even received payment for work more than five years old. Craig would prefer if she didn’t have to resort to “naming and shaming,” but at the moment, her creation is one of the few tools available to disenfranchised creatives.

“As I’ve said to many people who’ve asked me to work for free,” Craig explained, “I’m running a business, not a charity.”

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? It’s something we created at Contently because we believe in a world where marketing is helpful and where businesses grow by telling stories that people love.Take advantage of our tools and talent and come build that world with us.

The post This Site Should Terrify Publishers Who Don’t Pay Up appeared first on Contently.

But truthfully, startup skills are not just useful to the self-employed app developer or forced-into-freelance journalist. The habits — and the mindset — of successful entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly valuable in every 21st century workplace.

Having spent most of my life around entrepreneurs — and having attempted to mimic their best moves in my work as a business owner, then freelancer, and now startup founder — I’m convinced that the following habits will make anyone twice as successful, not to mention employable:

1) Systematizing repeat tasks

Entrepreneurship, by definition, is the art of creating systems that generate more value for less effort. Startups realize that the opportunity cost of doing mundane tasks adds up quickly, preventing them from doing the high-impact work they have set out to do.

Though this is a mindset more than anything else, there are all sorts of tech products you can use to automate repeat tasks in your work right now. Sanebox for hiding email you don’t need to see during the day. LastPass and Dashlane to save all your passwords, so you never have to keep track of more than one master login. And one of my favorites is IFTTT, which lets you set up automatic If>Then triggers for almost anything. For instance, IFTTT sends me a text message on mornings when the weather forecast says rain (so I don’t have to waste time looking it up or heading back to my house when I forget my umbrella), and it sends all my gMail attachments automatically to be backed up to Dropbox, so I don’t have to hunt for files online when I need them.

If your time is worth $25 or $50 or $500 an hour, then fork over the $15 for someone else to do your laundry for you and work on something for two hours instead. If you have to do tedious data entry to create a report every week, set up a spreadsheet to pull in and add the numbers for you. This is the entrepreneur’s philosophy, and it can make you more productive than almost any other thing.

2) Great storytelling

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.”

This Native American proverb is painted on the wall of my office, reminding everyone in the company that narratives — and the ways you tell them—matter.

Entrepreneurs are constantly pitching. Ideas, products, investment opportunities. The most important element of a successful pitch is the story. Great startups are fantastic at painting a big, ambitious picture that gets people excited. Indeed, if there’s one skill that will get you noticed and remembered, it’s the ability to give a great speech, make a riveting presentation, and write compellingly. Entrepreneurs spend more time preparing and honing these details than most lackadaisical powerpoint junkies out there, and that’s because for a startup, everything hinges on them.

3) Carving out “heads down” time

Interruptions eat up a huge amount of the average person’s work time. Great startups have the habit of finding ways to protect their people from needless distractions. And smart managers block off swaths of their calendars for “productivity time.”

4) Split testing and iterating

A hallmark of the Lean Startup movement, entrepreneurs are wont to constantly pit two or more approaches against one another and let data inform their decisions. What should the home page call-to-action say? Split test two different sentences and see which gets more clicks. How do I get more people to respond to my emails? Test different subject lines, lengths, and endings like “Thanks for your help in advance” versus “Warm regards.” What kind of outfit makes me look more professional? Try two different styles and keep track of the compliments.

(I realized this habit had spilled over to my regular life when I found myself “split testing” salsas at a taco joint the other day.)

Truthfully, we’re not all as good at making decisions with our guts as we think we are. But a good split test doesn’t lie, and entrepreneurs are constantly pitting their test winners against new ideas.

5) Looking for 80/20s

There’s a strange phenomenon in work that almost always holds true: if you examine your life, you’ll often see that only 20% of the things you do account for 80% of the results you get. Being productive and being busy are two different things. If you want to quadruple your productivity, focus on the 20% first, and if you can, cut the other 80% that just makes you busy.

6) Rather than planning, doing

Too many of us have meetings about meetings, and end meetings with lists of follow-up conversations to be had later. But startups, for which every second counts, have a habit of taking on-the-spot action. Instead of promising to email an introduction for you, a startup founder will pull out her phone and write the email while you sit there. Then the issue doesn’t have to take up future brain- or calendar-space.

7) Ditching meetings … but taking every networking meeting

Most meetings are worthless. They usually have too many people, who feel obligated to talk because they are there, and they’re almost always too long.

“Meetings are typically scheduled like TV shows. You set aside 30 minutes or an hour because that’s how scheduling software works,” write Jason Fried and David Hansson in their book, Rework. “If it only takes 7 minutes to accomplish a meeting’s goal, that’s all the time you should spend.”

Startups often hold meetings while standing up, so the desire to get the meeting over with outweighs the desire to dilly dally on unimportant things. And often they simply cut meetings in favor of asynchronous coordination over email.

However, entrepreneurs also know the importance of serendipity in their work, so they make a point to network as much as possible. “I take every [networking] meeting,” says Michael Ventura, CEO of digital innovation agency Sub Rosa. “Because in our industry, you never know what could happen.”

(P.S.: The way I solve the dilemma of having networking meetings eat into important work is by dividing my weeks into “heads down” days and “explore” days.)

8) Asking “why” like a five-year-old

Entrepreneurs aren’t satisfied with the status quo. They ask “why” over and over again until they get to the bottom of things, rather than ascribing superficial blame on people, or worst of all, accepting the explanation, “That’s just the way it is.”

This relentless inquisitiveness in fact, helps entrepreneurs find and fix the 20% wrong that causes 80% of their problems.

9) Seeing every “it can’t be done” as an opportunity

This is the mindset from which innovation springs. To an entrepreneur, convention means average, and impossible means profit potential. People who see the opportunities in the can’tsin their work — and seize them — create positive change, get promoted, and work happier.

What’s the deal with the Content Strategist? At Contently, storytelling is the only marketing we do, and it works wonders. It could for you, too. Learn more.

The post 9 Startup Habits That Will Make You a Better Content Strategist appeared first on Contently.

For a magazine column last summer about the intersection of technology and publishing, I interviewed a number of smart thinkers about how brands should be self-organizing to create engaging, provoking, and ethical content (as opposed to inane social media filler). 

Neil Chase, Master Content Strategist 

What’s the point of building a “brand newsroom?”

Most businesses share — and have shared for centuries — the same basic goal: Build a quality relationship with current and potential customers.

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, that was a two-pronged challenge. You attracted people through various forms of advertising, getting their attention by purchasing a presence next to the material they were reading or watching or hearing or driving by. That business of advertising was a specialty best left to professional agencies.

Some businesses created their own media, but that wasn’t easy. The cost of making and distributing it was just way too high compared to the payoff.

Today, a business can create and distribute quality content that engages people, and do it much more easily. But creating content is a new skill for most companies, so it requires new capabilities and expertise. Building a brand newsroom gives the business control over its messaging and content — and the ability to create and distribute content quickly.

How should a brand newsroom be staffed? What are the essential roles?

The staffing will vary depending on the kind of company, but one key role is essential: Someone in charge. It can be a “chief content officer” or a “managing editor” or a head of communications, but there has to be someone with a strong understanding of three related but very different things:

• The brand’s goals, messages and products, and potential audiences

• The art of storytelling, whether from experience in journalism or communications or both

• The technology, tools and partners needed to produce and distribute content effectively

Depending on the goals and volume of work, that person might hire professional journalists — either on staff or freelance — to research, report, write and publish content. Along with photo and video and graphics professionals. And the technical help — again, sometimes in-house and sometimes with outside vendors or consultants — to make the publishing work well and efficiently.

Where should a brand newsroom ideally sit within a large organization? How much autonomy and/or interdependence should it have?

The brand newsroom must embrace and follow the company’s culture, but it also needs the ability to change that culture. To make a closed company more open. To make a company that’s nervous about publicity more comfortable with it. To help a company that operates in a regulatory environment able to do more than it thought possible before. To try new things, use new technology and break bad old habits.

So the brand newsroom needs to be connected to the top level of the organization. Perhaps it’s part of the office of the CMO. If it’s tied to one division or silo in the company, it won’t be able to work efficiently to serve the entire company. This is sometimes a major culture change, but it’s an important one.

What should a brand expect from an operating budget / resource allocation standpoint?

A brand newsroom can often pay for itself. The first step is to look for existing people or resources that might be moved. Perhaps a smart, innovative person working on one division’s marketing can be more effective with a companywide role. Perhaps the editorial and workflow software used in one corner of the corporation can be licensed for the whole company. One department’s photo library and another department’s library of content might be assets that are already owned and can be of use to far more departments.

As long as the key people are in place to run the operation and take responsibility, much of the rest of the staffing can be freelance and based on need or campaigns, to help with the costs.

The best-run operations fit into one of two financial models:

a) This is a branding expense, like every other branding expense we’ve ever encountered, but it’s one that can be more easily targeted and adjusted and measured, so it’s a very smart one.

b) This is a business unit with reasonable goals that translate to revenue. Those goals might be tied to lead generation or online transactions or increasing the sizes of social audiences or other metrics that a properly equipped storytelling team can reasonably expect to achieve.

What are the common hurdles to making a brand newsroom effective?

[There are two things]:

Silos. If a division expects support from corporate for its initiatives but instead senses that the effort is more companywide, they’ll be less likely to participate. So dedicate resources to helping that division make its own work better first, then find the synergies that bring the efforts together.

Dinosaurs. Companies with strict regulatory environments or old-fashioned security rules have those processes in place for a reason. They can’t be ignored or steamrolled; dinosaurs don’t roll over that easily. They have to be addressed by smart, creative, consultative people who go in and understand the regulatory or security issues, learn from the people behind those issues in respectful conversations, and come up with sound, innovative solutions.

What are the common pitfalls you’ve seen brands do with their newsrooms?

The big one is lack of support: Hire a smart journalist or content manager and say “Go be my brand newsroom.” Then give that person a badge with access to all floors of the building and wait for results. This person or team needs to be thoughtfully introduced into every corner of the company, one department or division at a time, with a clear explanation of the mission and goals and how this is going to benefit everyone. Nobody who thinks she’s running a great operation wants to see someone from corporate come in and change things.

Final thoughts?

Don’t think of brand journalism as an ad campaign or a short-term initiative. It’s a cultural change, one that will bring great benefits if you invest the planning and resources and from-the-top support to make it work.

What’s the deal with the Content Strategist? At Contently, storytelling is the only marketing we do, and it works wonders. It could for you, too. Learn more.

The post Why (And How) Brands Should Build Newsrooms appeared first on Contently.

Enter FanBridge, a New York startup that created new product called Channel Pages to help artists find brands and brands find artists to form creative partnerships and collaborations.

We talked with FanBridge CEO Spencer Richardson to learn more about Channel Pages and how it can connect brands with YouTube stars and content creators in sports, comedy, social media, film, TV and more.

Tell us a bit about Channel Pages. What is it?

There are two core types of relationships that the platform is designed to enable. Channel-Channel collaborations and Channel-Sponsor collaborations. The primary pain point we’re serving with the former is channels previously not having a search tool they could use to find other similar-minded/sized channels collaborators. We provide some general collaboration ideas like video swapping to increase audience reach, or jointly making new videos together (to split production costs) etc., but we’ve also seen new types of collaborations form via the platform we could have never dreamed up.

In terms of Channel-Sponsor collaborations, we’re addressing a similar pain point for CMOs and marketers as the Channel-Channel collaborations — in this case enabling brands, small and medium businesses, agencies, etc. to source targeted partners for paid campaigns.

Like the Channel-Channel collabs, the output of how these parties can work together is infinite. Some businesses simply need help producing content relevant to their target audiences, and so are using Channel Pages to find channels to build content for them in a style that is already proven to resonate with their target audience (ie. which is directly measurable via Channel Pages profile data).

Your product seems unique in that it caters to YouTube artists and YouTube marketing. Should marketers care about YouTube and how your product differs from a curation tool that allows a brand to find a video artist on Odesk.

Marketers largely already understand the growing significance of video as a tool in their arsenal for attracting new clients and developing stronger relationships with existing ones; however, the future role of YouTube specifically within these video strategies remains uncertain for many. That said, with Channel Pages we feel that we’re bringing the conversation to the creators directly, and anticipate iterating on the product to provide clearer, higher performance, and more authentic ways for marketers to engage with YouTube as a video distribution and sharing platform.

This is the pool of connections from which all other performance benefits on the platform emerge.”

oDesk is an amazing tool for sourcing a very broad array of talents, particularly within cost-effective emerging markets. However, the purely freelancer approach to video creation entirely eliminates the benefits of the creator actually having skin in the game and a proven fan audience that verifies that their content/ideas truly resonate with the sponsor’s target audience. Further, the creators own audience and authenticity are assets they are bringing to the table, providing for additional content testing & distribution benefits post production – which oDesk simply does not have baked into their mercenary style value proposition.

Video content performs well. Tell us more about performance improvements in marketing you’ve seen or expect from your product.

There are two types of performance improvements we are focused on when it comes to maximizing the ROI marketers experience from use of Channel Pages. First, Channel Pages search performance – whereby the quality, availability, and relevance of results we measure by the percentage of searches that convert into a collaboration getting off the ground. This is the pool of connections from which all other performance benefits on the platform emerge.

Like the Channel-Channel collabs, the output of how these parties can work together is infinite.”

Second, is the performance of the collaborations themselves relative to the marketers objectives versus alternative approaches at their disposal for generating lift in ROI. Often, marketers measure these kinds of initiatives on a case-by-case basis, using their own set of performance metrics and benchmarks; however, inside of Channel Pages, we expect our back end algorithms to improve recommendations made to channels and sponsors based on a growing set of data tied to the historic performance of collaborations formed via the platform – alongside tools marketers can use to standardize how they track distribution and engagement across audiences, creators and environments.

The bottom-line opportunity for marketers in Channel Pages optimizing the collaboration marketplace is enormous, with several studies from companies like Neilsen, eMarketer, etc. already demonstrating anywhere from two to five times lift in campaign CTRs, recall and purchase intent when comparing collaborative “native” advertising vs. traditional pre-roll and banners. A disparity that is growing everyday as consumers are increasingly desensitized to such “peripheral” advertising.

Want your business to tell great stories like this one? Contently gives brands the tools and talent to tell stories that people love. Learn more.

Image via Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

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A prime example is GE, a brand that’s long been ahead of the curve when it comes to content. Last Friday, September 20th, they invited six influential Instagram photographers/aviation nerds to geek out at their state-of-the-art aviation facility in Peebles, Ohio and test the world’s most advanced jet engines. Those invited included Dan Cole (@dankhole), Jessica Zolman (@jayzombie), Chris Ozer (@chrisozer), Christian Cannon (@seacannon), Michael O’Neal (@moneal) , and Adam Senatori, (@adamsenatori), who won GE’s Instagrapher contest in 2011.

To build hype for the #GEinstawalk event and increase user engagement, GE also held a one-day contest on September 4th in which they asked fans to comment with one-sentence explaining why they’re the biggest GE #avgeek.

By all appearances, #GEInstaWalk was a success. The contest garnered over 1,100 likes and hundreds of comments, and the influencers posted some stunning photography and videos on Friday. Each post got at least 2,000 likes, with some getting more than 10,000.

Whether it’s independent commercial producers, one-man-band videojournalists, or experienced photographers victimized by the collapse of the newspaper industry, brands now have access to creative talent that up until recently was locked behind the walls of big publishers and studios.”

Brands are only going to get more opportunities to engage with the 150 million-plus active users on Instagram. That’s because ads are coming to the platform within the year, in both photo and video form. No one knows what Instagram’s ads will look like yet, but they’re likely to be posts inserted into users’ streams like Facebook ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets. Brands will likely also get the option to pay to have their posts appear in a higher percentage of followers’ feeds, like they can on Facebook, and promote hashtags, like they can on Twitter. It should present a fantastic opportunity for brands to connect with users in creative ways through visual content.

Instagram aside, we’ve seen that there’s already a huge demand for visual storytellers to work on behalf of brands. Content marketing is still overwhelmingly dedicated to the written word, but brands are realizing that there are plenty of other creative ways to tell their story.

For brands looking to create engagement, visual content is an easy win. It’s no secret that photos, videos and infographics are incredibly shareable – just ask the guys at Upworthy, which has been called the “fastest growing media company in history.” Research by M Booth shows that for the top 10 brands on Facebook, photos are shared twice as much as stories that are purely text, with videos being shared a staggering 12 times as much as both combined. That’s a fairly persuasive argument for brands to dabble in visual content – to say nothing of platforms that are more purely image-focused, like Tumblr and Instagram.

And there are incredibly talented freelancers out there who can help brands take advantage of this trend. Whether it’s independent commercial producers, one-man-band videojournalists, or experienced photographers victimized by the collapse of the newspaper industry, brands now have access to creative talent that up until recently was locked behind the walls of big publishers and studios. We can’t wait to see some of the cool things they’ll do with it.

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Coke’s New Website

On Monday, Coca-Cola revamped its website, putting an emphasis on the history of the company, reports The New York Times.

The new site include articles on the environment, health and sports, and entertainment, and photo galleries, audio and video clips, opinion columns, and interviews will be posted as well.

Ashley Brown, director for digital communications and social media at the company, said, “We have this belief in great, real content and creating content that can be spread through any medium as part of our ‘liquid and linked’ strategy.”

Change-Up in MTV’s Programming Department

Susanne Daniels, who led the WB network and programming for Lifetime, has been appointed as MTV’s new president of programming, the Times reports.

While MTV’s reality shows like “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom” have done well, its scripted shows haven’t. The network is bringing on Daniels, who was responsible for putting “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Gilmore Girls” on WB, along with “Army Wives” and “Drop Dead Diva” on Lifetime, to ramp up its scripted division.

Pitfalls of Content Marketing

Tom Webster, vice president of strategy at Edison Research, writes on his blog about the downside of content marketing and the traps professionals often find themselves in. For example,while people will always want content, sticking to an editorial calendar is not always the best option. He says he only puts out his best ideas and does not stick to the calendar if he has nothing to say.

Writers are also not always experts — the people who figure out the ideas and information are usually not the same people writing about it, which content marketers need to remember.

He also cites Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell in his third pitfall, which is not to confuse information and evidence. He says that writers need to be trying to prove their theories wrong instead of finding facts that supporting them. Ideas should be formulated after finding out the facts on both sides of an argument, instead of taking an idea then trying to prove it after (such as Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” theory).

Content Marketing vs. Search

According to a study from the Young Entrepreneur Council, when performing a Google search, conversion rate of guest posts on websites was about twice that of search, Forbes.com reports.

Instead of simply putting out press releases for products, companies need to create content on websites related to the product. Distribution is also necessary — companies need to contact bloggers in the industry and get them to write about products/services to appear high on searches.

Of course, marketers should be looking to educate customers with their content instead of sell to them.

Red Bull is the Most Powerful Branded Content Publisher

According to CoolAge and goviral’s Social Video Equity Report, Red Bull is the number one social video strategist for 2012 out of 100 brands.

Hannah Syrocki writes, “Brands were audited based on volume, total views and engagement for content uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook in 2012, before being evaluated by goviral for quality, purpose, innovation and audience relevance. This then produced the final social video equity score.”

Google came in second, while Samsung came in fifth, and Apple came in 11th.

Finding Paying Blogging Gigs

Business Insider posted a list of where freelance writers can find jobs. Included on the list was ProBlogger, which is a job board, Blogger Jobs, Elance and oDesk, People Per Hour, and Freelance Writers Den.

Writers can also put “(your niche)” plus “write for us” into Google, or “top (your niche) blogs” and find websites to write for. They might be able to find jobs just by cold calling local businesses and asking if they’d like their own blog writer.

Wonderful Pistachos is Holding a Twitter Contest

According to Mashable, Wonderful Pistachios is holding a contest on Twitter that will award the winner $10,000.

A new video ad challenges viewers to enter the contest, which involves unscrambling a @getcrackin tweet.

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