This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, May 13.
We know how difficult it is to retain those elusive, quick moving readers who come to our content via social media.
A project at Bloomberg Media’s innovation lab BHIVE devised an ideal social article template designed to break the reading-and-leaving behavior of so many readers.
In the process, the folks from Bloomberg learned valuable lessons, all of which make a lot of sense.
- They found out through analytics that articles with images perform better. “We’ve seen both anecdotally and in our data that the ‘social news stand’ moment is more compelling to people when it includes visuals, such as photos, gifs, or videos. Just make sure your articles are properly formatted with Open Graph tags for optimal display on social cards and posts.”
- Social media users tend to skim-read their feeds, rarely clicking on the media articles and even more rarely reading them in their entirety.
- A lot of social media reading takes place via mobile. And there is more skimming than depth reading here.
“Our new design allows users to get to the story sooner — we’ve literally moved the first paragraph up from the bottom to the top of the mobile page view in some instances.”
Mario’s speaking engagements
Mario doing a keynote presentation at Newscamp 2018 in Augsburg, Germany
Here are places where I will be taking the message of mobile storytelling in the weeks ahead:
May 15 INMA, New York City International News Media Association’s Mobile Storytelling Workshop
May 25, Milan, Italy, EidosMedia Annual Customer Meeting, Keynote: Mobile First Strategies for Publishers
June 12, NEC Media City, Bergen, Norway, Storytelling workshop for Editors
June 13, Fortellingens kraft 2019, Bergen, Norway, Long form Mobile Storytelling for Writers
July 11, Florida Media Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, Keynote for editors: The mobile first newspaper strategy.
Mario’s weekend rituals…..
Monocle interviews me about what I do on a typical weekend (is there such a thing? Not for someone like me who is seldom in the same location twice. But I gave it my best shot, for what may come as a normal weekend, when I am home in New York! Enjoy.
https://monocle.com/minute/2019/04/27/
Pre-order The Story
The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Find out how, pre-orderThe Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.
Order here:
https://thaneandprose.com/shop-the-bookstore?olsPage=products%2Fthe-story
An interview of interest
http://www.itertranslations.com/blog/2019/3/11/fd60ybflpvlqrgrpdp5ida5rq0c3sp
TheMarioBlog post #33049