Why Media and Corporations Should Allow Content to be Embeddable

Categories: Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Theory, Widget StrategyPosted on August 12th, 2008

If you work at an online media company, or are a stakeholder for content on a corporate website, forward this to the decision makers and engage in an email or in person dialog.

How Media and Marketers are Missing an Opportunity
A few days ago, I embedded a slideshow of fantastic images from Beijing’s opening Olympic ceremony. An embed is code that I can easily paste into my blog post, and it will show media (such as a youtube video).

[The community will 'scrape' content that is valuable to them, often without attribution. Get ahead of their behaviors for your content and package it for them]

Within a few hours, a commenter informed me of the actual photography source, the Boston Globe. Essentially, someone grabbed each of the images from Boston.com and then uploaded them to DocStock.com and tagged them “public domain” with no attribution to the Boston Globe.

Essentially, The Boston Globe got ripped off, as they either paid for those photos, or sent a photographer out to capture the images. Photo ripping (or video, audio, or content on your webpages) isn’t going to go away, content on the web is distributed, and holding it close becomes more and more common.

Also, I do give Boston.com credit, the images they posted on their site shows them all on one page, unlike the annoying slideshows from other online news outlets that force you to click to see the next image. For Boston.com this has made it much easier for individuals to download photos and share without attribution, hence my call for them to get ahead of the curve.

Media and Marketers Should Provide Embeddable Content
Instead, The Boston Globe should have created the images in an embeddable media player or slide player that allows the images to quickly be shared from blogs, facebook profiles, and anywhere else those may talk about the Olympics. They should have links back to their site, give due credits, and even make a dynamic “learn more” at the end of the slideshow that they can change at will to recommend other content as it comes around. There are many widget developers that offer these services, that can also help content spread within Facebook and other social networks.

[Media Companies and Brands should Provide Content to Where Communities Currently Exist: Fish where the Fish are]

Attributes to Measuring Success must change
With the distributed web, measurement will need to change. For media companies (and marketers at corporations) hits, visits, and clicks are the most common way to measure success. This needs to go away, as these are not accurate attributes to measure as content flies around the web. Instead, they should focus on velocity (distance/time) as embeds fly and are spread to different sites.

All Content Should be Considered –although not all will be shared
Ever heard the phrase: “If you love it, let it go”? The same applies to corporate sites, who should repurpose presentations in Slideshare, and brochures and collateral in docstock, images in Flickr, and product demos in YouTube. The goal of marketing is to get the word out, so you best do it first, so you can at least have credit for brand attribution, as well as control to remove or edit it as things change. Remember, as a content provider, you should find the communities where they exist, and provide content to them: “Fish where the Fish are”

Get ahead of the curve and let your content be sharable, much of this is uncontrollable, you might as well lead this change, so you can at least track, edit, and manage how it’s dispersed.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 1:17 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Theory, Widget Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

For what it’s worth, It’s interesting to see how the Olympics on nbcolympics.com have figured out how to contain most of this information on their site through streaming content.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 12th, 2008 at 1:31 am

Great piece of advice, I would love to read more about measuring the distribution of such content.

Similar topics are covered in a good book by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The risk that they point to is that by decentralizing organization (or content in this case) normally the profits also decrease.

Posted by Darek on August 12th, 2008 at 2:52 am

I totally agree to fish where fish are thingy!

Posted by Qurat on August 12th, 2008 at 3:45 am

I agree with your suggestion - it serves both the blogging community and MSM. By the way I follow you on Twitter - your tweets are always interesting.

Posted by Judy C on August 12th, 2008 at 5:43 am

This is really about the misunderstanding about ‘control’ in a digital world. Brands are so worried about people taking their stuff, they try to hide it or DRM it. But anyone with half a brain can grab it, copy it, and distribute it on their own and then the brand loses control of it in an even worse way.

It will be a great day when understanding about how digital information works is mainstream and their principals are understood as implicit.

How can we make that happen sooner?

Posted by Mark Schoneveld on August 12th, 2008 at 5:47 am

Thanks Judy, I try to add value on Twitter, rather than discuss my lunch or participate in conversations only 2 people would care about.

Thanks Mark, the olympics on NBC are doing it well, they’ve got control, but let viewers get what they want –cept embeds or archived videos on YouTube.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 12th, 2008 at 5:59 am

I’m a bit disappointed with the NBC Olympics coverage online, but hey, at least its available! How about that relay race the other day? Wow.

I just realized that the New York Times has (apparently) all of their video content on YouTube now. I have been frustrated several times by the lack of embedding from their main player. Doesn’t it stand to reason that they stand to gain by sharing their own branded player?

Posted by Mark Schoneveld on August 12th, 2008 at 6:09 am

The key thing for web publishers to think about it is that embeddable content (delivered as widgets) becomes gateways back to your website. While it’s great to get content out there and for people to see the attributions, the ‘click here to see more’ link is crucial.

Widgets and embeddable content act as ad units which are essentially ‘free’ in the classic sense. Rather, you’re earning placement around the web by making great content available. Now, isn’t that something we should all strive for?

Posted by Michael Chin on August 12th, 2008 at 6:40 am

Oh Michael, did I just tee up this blog post for you? I suppose you should go reach to boston.com

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 12th, 2008 at 6:42 am

Striving for greater heights, like say, the NY Post, National Enquirer and Star.

Posted by Michael Chin on August 12th, 2008 at 6:53 am

[...] Jeremiah Owyang has a great think piece on the idea of embedded content. [here] [...]

Posted by Newest Industry » Embeds, content attribution, and success in the New Media on August 12th, 2008 at 6:59 am

What about Fox?

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 12th, 2008 at 7:54 am

Great post Jeremiah, particularly the idea that you need to focus on velocity and distance as measurement tools. An embeddable widget is a data generation machine when used properly. You can track them and still get views/hits type info, albeit from other sites, but this is tremendously valuable because it helps you build a book on your core customers habits. You can create traffic back to your site, because an embedded widget is essentially a promo piece for your site, and you can also get good data on which places you should invest in following your customers to interact with them off site. I try to educate all of my clients on the value of embeddable content, a properly managed widget is a marketers dream, imo.

Posted by Scott Hammond on August 12th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Scott

One other thing widgets could be used to measure: communities of interest and influencers.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 12th, 2008 at 8:06 am

We are exploring embeddable content and widgets with our B2B marketing clients. Very difficult to get them to move from the microsite/registration model because of their demand gen needs, but they are starting to get that a widget on the desktop beats a downloadable white paper — starting.

Posted by Jean Fleming on August 12th, 2008 at 8:08 am

Jeremiah, this practice is something PR people need to take to heart as well as marketers. Not only does it provide content to the media (PR’s usual target) instantly in a “package” but it also encourages the kind of easy sharing across web platforms you mention. Your suggestion falls into two “best principles” of media relations on the social web: “Edit for More, Not Less” and “Make Everything Sharable.” Thanks for another great post.

Posted by Linda Zimmer on August 12th, 2008 at 8:41 am

Great post. Thank you for bringing this up. DRM has been proved that doesn’t contain user sharing so it’s time to move on and get ahead of the curve as you suggest. The Q is, how long will take for big media companies to get it?

Posted by luis carbajo on August 12th, 2008 at 9:21 am

Companies should at least consider this, you are right about that. I hope that companies will do more.

Posted by Andy Dunbar on August 12th, 2008 at 9:34 am

I’d agree accept that House is on Fox. Best show EVAH!

Posted by Michael Chin on August 12th, 2008 at 10:03 am

Oops, typo. I mean except.

[...] Why Media and Corporations Should Allow Content to be Embeddable - Jeremiah Owyang A few days ago, of fantastic images from Beijing’s opening Olympic ceremony. An embed is code that I can easily paste into my blog post, and it will show media (such as a youtube video). [...]

Posted by Links do Dia: 13.08.08 « Dissonância Cognitiva on August 13th, 2008 at 12:11 am

[...] ripped off. In his example about a slideshow of the Beijing’s Olympics opening ceremony, “Essentially, someone grabbed each of the images from Boston.com and then uploaded them to DocStock.com and tagged them “public domain” with no attribution to the Boston Globe.” [...]

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