NewsWhip’s CEO talks to Chief Content Strategist at Edelman about how people are accessing content through social media, and how NewsWhip are helping publishers and brands to harness social signals.Â
Last week, NewsWhip CEO and co-founder Paul Quigley was a guest on ‘Content Convergence’, a podcast hosted by Steve Rubel, chief content strategist at PR firm Edelman.
Over the course of 40 minutes, Steve and Paul discussed how NewsWhip came about, and how our technology helps our customers, as well as wider industry trends, such as the rise of native content on platforms like Instagram, and the types of content we’ve seen do particularly well on social media.
Here’s the podcast, and you can subscribe to Steve’s weekly Content Convergence podcast on iTunes.
Some of Paul’s key quotes from the podcast:
How can you spot what stories tend to go viral?
“The stories that end up big start big. They get picked up quickly and get traction quickly. If you can have a platform that accurately gauges that early bump, then you can get people ahead of the curve of what the big stories will be in a few hours time.”
Does sharing necessarily equal caring?
“I think ‘share’ and ‘care’ have a pretty tight relationship. ‘Share’ and ‘read’ have a reasonably tight relationship. Sometimes a story is just a headline, and especially on Twitter, if plane explodes, car crashes, sometimes they can get shared without being read, because the story is the headline. But all the research that’s been released to date by the likes of Upworthy and BuzzFeed shows a strong correlation between length of time spent reading, and shares. So people are more likely to share stories they spend more time with.”
On balancing social signal intelligence with editorial voice:
“We give you the data, but you’re going to lose your audience if you don’t keep your editorial identity. The data’s going to help you engage with your audience, if you use it the right way. I think increasingly, the audience are going to trust editors and journalists to be filters, to provide them with the stuff that they should know each day, and if you know which stories are getting interaction and are getting talked about, you’re going to be able to do that better. But you can’t just copy what works for some other publication if they’ve got a completely different audience. That’s important.”
Meanwhile, Steve shared how he and the Edelman team are using Spike:
“I’ve just fallen in love with this product over the last year. We’re using it in a couple of ways at Edelman. We use it to see what’s trending in a given topic area. So let’s say for a food company, we want to see what the most shared stories are today around food, and we’re trying to think about how our clients should be part of that conversation. The way I’m using it personally is, I’m going in and I’m pulling spreadsheet of the most shared stories around a client, or the most shared stories around a topic, and I’m figuring out who wrote them. And I’m using that to go to clients and challenge their conventional wisdom as to why these digital native publishers that sometimes look like they’re small, are actually quite mighty and shareable.”
Here are links to some of the blog posts referenced in the podcast:
FIRED UP: The Seven Types of Content People Can’t Resist Sharing
What People Search For Vs What People Share
Engagement With Content On Instagram In June 2015 Was Huge
What’s Next?
1) Sign up for a free Spike trial right now – no credit card required.
2) Join our weekly newsletter, read by 8,500 media experts
