The Washington Post recently announced Trove, a service to allow readers to build customized news sites based on personal interest. The New York Times has News.me, an app culled from Twitter followers’ reads.
Ongo is a paid service that organizes news by sources selected by subscribers. Paper.li has been out awhile on a smaller, individual reader scale doing much the same – customizing posts and content from RTs and hash tags on Twitter.
What does this mean?
- It’s a goldmine for social media, media relations and public relations professionals. Those who have typically pitched vertically into trades may just have more opportunity for stories with customized or specialty content.
- What does this mean for writers? More of a chance to niche and offer specialized content to one vertical.
- How about marketers? When the first analytics start coming in they’ll scramble to feed product campaigns to push sales.
- Advertisers? This may just be what the advertising industry needs to push it into higher profitability.
We are on the fringe of a huge content mash up; do you see your opportunity on the horizon?
It’s interesting to see these .. I guess we’d call them curation tools .. popup, ways to customize and personalize our reading, viewing, sharing. What it means to me: one more thing to learn about, then ignore. I took the same approach with Google Buzz and Wave. For myself and my SMB clients I do of course need to monitor trends, look for opportunities where ever they exist but always with an eye on the upside, the ROI. There are opps on the horizon for much of this, but I still lean to balancing curating news with creating custom content. Too many tools can turn the mash up into a hot mess. FWIW.
With all the money these publishers are sinking in to customized content for you, me and our clients, I wonder if this requires more than a nod and a nod off? I wonder; these brands have big reach; then again, how will they sustain the content; will advertisers support?
We’re still climbing to the tip of the iceberg, IMHO; survival of the fittest and all that. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Davina.