News on Social Marketing, according to Ad Age : In its expensive and ambitious effort to create an iPad newspaper, News Corp. said on Monday, that it is shutting down The Daily on Dec. 15.
Roughly, 100 people are currently employed by The Daily after a third of their staff was laid-off this summer. A News Corp. spokesman announced that The Daily’s sister companies, like the New York Post, will give affected Daily employees’ job opportunities.
The company has reached this decision after achieving significant results on developing the iPad as a publishing platform and gathering 100,000 paying subscribers for a brand-new product.
However, editorial execution or the relative lack of tablet penetration among consumers may be a factor that contributes to the slow progress of the iPad’s for News Corp. According to eMarketer, iPad is used by more than 54 million people in the U.S. at least once a month, but they remain just 16.8% of the population and 22.2% of people on the internet.
Chairman-CEO Rupert Murdoch’s dividing the company into an entertainment operation and a publishing concern could be caused by the hacking scandal at News Corp.’s U.K. newspaper unit. The company will need the entertainment profits as the newspaper development will have a harder time sustaining money-losing properties.
“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties,” Mr. Murdoch said in a statement.
News Corp. announced that the entertainment company will become Rupert Murdoch’s while the publishing spin-off will keep the name News Corp.
Read more at News Corp. Shuts Down The Daily
News on Content Marketing, according to eMarketer : One major factor on how users engage with content online is age. Research from nRelate, a content optimization firm, suggests that demographics can have a considerable effect on how web users behave once they have found interesting content. To keep audiences interested and clicking on more assets, content creators should consider audience composition.
An October 2012 survey shows that after reading online content, younger US web users, especially younger males, had a high propensity to click on related articles and videos. A story that features a photo draws attention from women, especially the older ones while older male users tended to click on links to related content on a weekly basis. Articles that are linked to content they found interesting are more likely to be clicked by all groups, rather than videos.
For both genders, especially for older men, the most likely to generate interest in further content are stories about local news, followed closely by national news. Entertainments are most often clicked by young women while men were significantly more interested in related sports content. Web users’ ages 18 to 34 were least interested in related home improvement content.
The research also shows that clicking on links in search results are preferred by most users across every demographic group. Forty three percent of respondents used these links for research while links at the bottom of articles that web users were already reading were popular to 25% of respondents. Seven percent said they were most likely to click on links they found on Facebook, though among 18- to 34-year-olds the proportion rose to 13% of men and 10% of women.
Read more at Online Content Exploration Varies by Demographic
News on Content Marketing, according to Mashable : Content Marketing Institute (CMI), an organization that provides research and education on content marketing, said that 93% of marketing professionals create, or plan to create content marketing as part of their overall programs in the next year.
The research shows that over the last three years, 44% of marketers has cut their budget for print ads while 70% have put in large part of their budget towards social media and custom publishing.
Companies like Mint, Hubspot, American Express and many other companies have had great success with content marketing.
Launched in 2006, Mint immediately faced a stiff competition with startups like Wesabe and established company like Quicken. Three years later, the company is a market leader in online personal finance and sold to Intuit for $170 million.
Mint’s user adoption and brand success was mainly because of its aggressive and intelligent content strategy. They also invested significant resources to its blog like a full time editorial staff and a slew of freelance contributors. Because of the consistent and quality Mint content, readers began trusting Mint and eventually became Mint customers.
Hubspot’s primary customer acquisition method is through inbound leads from content marketing. The marketing software platform does a lot of content marketing as they produce case studies, videos, podcasts, webinars, and ebooks for their audience, educating them about their industry.
American Express, a credit card company, has done an excellent job of turning its business and money expertise into actionable content for entrepreneurs— an influential subset of Amex’s total user market — with OpenForum.com.
Open Forum is dedicated to hosting insightful and engaging content about the many facets of running a business aside from offering tools for small businesses. Publishers like Inc. Magazine (as well as Mashable), produces useful content and hosted on OpenForum.com, while other articles are created by in-house Open Forum writers. It’s a mix advertising/guest blogging/in-house editorial operation, and it’s fostering a community around the topic of running a business.
Read more at How 3 Companies Took Content Marketing to the Next Level
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