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Today here at Kapost we launched a new website, The Content Marketeer. It will be chronicling the content marketing revolution. While we might do some telling about content marketing (e.g. 7 Ways to Distribute on Google+) you’ll find us doing a lot more showing, by telling you the stories of content marketing leaders, whether they be brand executives, edtiors or agency leaders.
You won’t hear much at all about Kapost on The Content Marketeer. That’s what this blog is about. Instead, The Content Marketeer will be about the needs, interests and concerns of content marketers. We hope you enjoy it!
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New Release: Custom Post Types, Scheduled Publishing and more
Posted in: Uncategorized Date: September 28, 2011The first upgraded feature is the New “Create Post” button:
This feature allows you to schedule a post to be published in the future, instead of manually choosing to publish each post. Once it is scheduled, it can still be edited and adjusted but when that time rolls around, the post will be pushed to live, onto your publication.
The main part of this feature is that if you want all your posts to have another date field, or another image field, or be a top ten list post this is now possible.
If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
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New Release: faster post page and re-assigning a Submission
Posted in: Uncategorized Date: June 29, 2011We pushed out a small release today that some some bug fixes and a few small features. Among those features are:
- The ability to change the author when a post is in “submitted” state. Now you can choose a new author.
- You can now explicitly change the URL that “View Publication” points to. This is the link in the upper left of your newsroom.
- Small improvement: (a) the categories in the calendar are now grouped together if they are all at the same time; (b) In a non-IE browser, clicking on links on the Post page when in edit mode gives you a google doc style popup now
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We had a great feature yesterday in Media Bistro’s 10,000 Words, Where Journalism and Technology Meet.
Check out the post here: Easily Manage A Digital Newsroom With Kapost!
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You may experience issues with the Kapost service today. The Kapost platform is run on a service called Heroku and issues they are having are the source of our problems (their status message).
We apologize for this outage and we’ll update this post with changes.
UPDATE (5/17 1:15pm PST): Heroku have provided us with some special IP addresses and we have switched over. You should see your pages flying along and super fast now. We apologize for the problems.
UPDATE (5/17 8:30 PST): Heroku continues to see problems. Here is their latest message:
We are still experiencing intermittent connectivity issues for HTTP and Git traffic… We’re continuing to work with our network provider to mitigate these availability issues.
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As we announced today, we at Kapost just closed our funding round. It comes at the completion of our time at TechStars, so I wanted to look back on the program and share my thoughts.
I had heard a lot about TechStars prior to going through the program and logically had high expectations going in. I’m very happy to report however that the program considerably exceeded those expectations. In particular I really valued TechStars for its rapid feedback, its good karma and its investor exposure.
Kapost has undergone really profound changes this summer. In the course of a few month we feel we’ve re-directed ourselves towards a much better path. TechStars gets a lot of the credit for this shift. We had a lot of ideas about changes we wanted to make the business, but TechStars allows you to make the changes very quickly. When you’re considering big changes, it’s tough to have the reassurance and confidence to execute on them. What TechStars does so well is drive a long stream of experienced, insightful mentors at you, who all provide rapid-fire feedback on your business. After hearing a general consensus emerge from such a large number of mentors as well as customer prospects who they introduce you to, you feel much more confident around making a big change to your business.
Secondly TechStars just radiates good karma. The heart of the program is its mentors, all whom contribute on a volunteer basis. David & Nicole are super nice people who could not be more helpful. Numerous alumni stay involved in the program and are looking to give back. And the atmosphere between the different companies in the program is one of real mutual support and friendship. TechStars is just the kind of shiny, happy, friendly place that is a joy to be around.
Lastly, TechStars gives you tremendous exposure to investors. It starts with how the program encourages you to have a really honest relationship with the different investors who hang around the program as mentors. Show them your strengths, David encourages, but also share your challenges and weaknesses. Experienced investors have all been around the block and are familiar with the ups and downs of start-ups. More than anything, they want to get to know the founders and the business on an authentic basis. Only through that do they develop the comfort that leads to an investment. And its sets the stage for the type of candid investor-founder relationship that everyone should want.
The David & team do a great job in preparing you for investor day. Multiple investors told me on that day that our class’ set of presentations was by far the best they’ve seen at any such event. And the credit there I think goes to David’s great presentation advice and process (we practiced our pitches basically every week for the entire program, with feedback from all sort of visitors). Not only does this refined pitch help impress investors, but it really benefits the company to as it better defines just what it does.
So our great thanks to the TechStars program. It has been great for us and we are glad to be in the network and look forward to giving back.
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Today Seth Godin reacted to the pending sale of Newsweek and asked the question regarding media: “Is there a business here?”
He answers yes, but he defines a new form, the “micro magazine,” as the spot where future success lies:
While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that’s awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me.
What’s a micro-magazine? He goes on to define it as:
- Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
- Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
- Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail
In other words he sees a future for media of many properties each going after very specific topics and audiences. Those audiences are contributors of content themselves. But the submissions go beyond just tweets and have longer form style.
And he’s bullish on this format:
There’s room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines . . . expect that once someone figures out how to be the voice of a tribe, the revenue will take care of itself.
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Relevance: Social vs. Topic Networks
Posted in: The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized Date: April 20, 2010
Above is a recent post on Facebook from a friend of mine. It’s typical of the sort of posts that used to illicit a lot of skepticism when people first considered getting on to MySpace, Facebook and then Twitter. “Why would I get on [insert social network name]?” they would say. “I don’t care to read about what my friend is having for lunch / what clothes they are wearing / what they weather is like where they live / etc.”
Folks used to say that, but they’d still get on those services. And they might have been skeptical, but boy did they start using those services anyhow. The ability of those services to allow users “to say in touch” with friends has been phenomenal, and millions upon millions of users spend amazing amounts of time contributing and reading brief posts from their friends about meals, interesting links, runs, baby photos, you name it. (Of course there are differences between MySpace (stalking), Facebook and Twitter (asynchronous, not just social), but I’m talking broadly about the social network phenomena).
Seeing the great success of social networks among friends, many businesses sought to insert similar networks into other sectors of life. LinkedIn has been a runaway success as a “professional social network.” It, however, is primarily used as a directory of people, resumes and connections, and has not come close to Facebook’s success in terms of getting users to come back regularly to consume new content.
Ning has been the leader in “white labeled” social networks that allow users to create a social network for any interest or topic. There are numerous other white label network offerings as well. Ning launched into our industry amid a LOT of buzz–it has raised $120 million from some top flight investors. But Ning and other white label social networks have never gained much traction and just recently news has come out that Ning is really hurting (and from people we know who used to be there, it’s even worse).
So what happened? Why wasn’t the success of social networks able to translate into lots of successful, topic-focused, white label networks. The answer is that content in a social context has different relevance than content in a topic-based context.
Mark Zuckerberg has always had the genius of looking to simply model in technology what is already happening in the real world. And in the real world, communication in a friendship context is casual, it’s short-form, it’s “small talk.” Because of the context of the existing relationship you already have with a friend, you are eager to simply “catch up” and “stay in touch” and the small, pedestrian details of what is going on in that person’s life are interesting to you because that person is your friend. There’s no need for moderation: you welcome that user’s content into your feed because they are your friend.
Social networks–and Facebook most successfully–were created to enable that friendship communication. The tools set up–photo sharing, and in particular the status update–enable just that friendship interaction. The result are posts like my friends above about cleaning his kitchen floor, and millions upon millions of us find this interesting.
Now Ning and the other white-labeled networks saw the success of MySpace and Facebook and built their systems off those models (in particular they’re built off of MySpace which was the market leader at the time). But here’s the disconnect: the friendship content model was being jammed on top of the topic content dynamic.
And let’s look back to the real world. When you are communicating in a topic (not friendship) context, the communication is much different. If you are learning more about a personal passion, say gardening, or are communicating on a professional topic like human resources best practices, the remarks are much more likely to be prepared and of high quality. Often you’d be at a meeting or a convention where selected speakers present prepared remarks or speak through a moderated panel. Importantly, there is a higher bar for quality and relevance in order for the content to be meaningful to you.
If you’re interested in gardening, you don’t want to hear an update from a gardening expert saying “I just got back from walking my dog.” You’d like to hear an insightful post from them on good tips for planting in the spring. But the systems created by Ning and the other white label providers steer the content and communication into that short-form, social-network-like format. And that’s why they’ve fallen down.
But some Internet pioneers have taken another tact. These are sites like BleacherReport (sports), SeekingAlpha (finance), etc. who have looked to cover their topics through a community of contributors. But they understood that using Ning or the social network model would not provide the quality needed for “topic-focused” communication. While borrowing some social networks conventions, they took the blog post as the core content type for their sites. And then to further enhance quality, they used human editors / moderators / curators to direct and filter their communities’ contributions. The result has been great success for this new breed of “crowdsourced publisher.”
It took a lot of (venture capitalist) money for these sites to get to where they are, as existing CMS systems do not provide for this crowdsourced model and all of them had to build their own proprietary systems (BleacherReport has raised $8 million and SeekingAlpha $7 million). In order for more sites to benefit from this phenomena without having to spend the millions to build it all themselves, Grogger provides a platform where any publisher–whether media, brand or association–can easily launched a crowdsourced site.
So the riddle has been solved! The social network model works for social content. For topic-based content, it’s part social network, part blog, and part curation. And it’s all ready to go on Grogger. So start a grog!
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GDGT–Crowdsourced Electronics Content
Posted in: The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized Date: April 7, 2010
GDGT, a site that produces crowdsourced electronics content–closed a new round of funding today. From the WSJ:
Gdgt is one of a lengthening list of businesses built on the belief that real people can deliver better content than editors or generalist reporters. These companies, like sports site SB Nation or more general question-and-answer service Quora, are tapping the social-networking zeitgeist by relying on their users to generate content and using data like one’s social connections and targeted interests to better personalize it.
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Made this video today for a conference application. It gives an overhaul of what grogs do an why.
Please let me know what you think.
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