A few days ago I cooked a half-pepperoni/half-cheese pizza. I didn’t want to eat any pepperoni so I cut the pizza in half and ate half of a cheese pizza. It was exactly what I wanted and it was a delicious, satisfying experience brought to me by “content fragmentation”.
Photo by Flickr user Pink Sherbert Photography, licensed under Creative Commons: http://bit.ly/xfnbkV
“Fragmentation” is one of the latest buzzwords to overtake marketing. You will hear the word spoken in hushed, cautious tones or used dramatically to spell the inevitable doom of mass media buying and ad agencies. But truth is, for a digital marketer like me, mass fragmentation is the beginning of a new age of marketing and, ultimately, a better digital world for consumers.
Content Fragmentation
The Yahoo homepage gets my award for most upsetting page on the web. Why? The complete lack of content fragmentation is unsettling. Yahoo attempts and largely fails to achieve the impossible balance of providing content for everyone.
Yahoo’s end result is more content than you can ever consume and a heavy concentration of broad “bait content” i.e. the type of articles that provide no long-lasting value, you will forget in 10 seconds but you just can’t resist clicking (see: the latest update from Tiger Woods’ ex above.). The resulting experience is unmitigated content chaos.
Every human being has different passion and interest levels for different subjects. That’s not news. There’s no information in the world everyone cares about, barring massive natural disasters andleaked nude photos of celebrities.
That’s why the most successful broad platforms are the ones that allow people to fragment content within them.
- Facebook: You choose which friends you are interested in and then you might hide them if you made a mistake. In fact, the biggest challenge with Facebook and the gravitation of some users to Google+ is the combination of two elements: 1) You’ve likely added too many people to Facebook that you don’t really care for 2) You don’t have to worry about that happening with Google+ since you can fragment your connection with Circles.
- Twitter: You choose who you follow, likely someone that shares or contributes to an interest of yours. Twitter’s challenge is you are often times registering your interest in an individual but with absolutely no exceptions no one on in the world is that interesting overall (including the World’s Most Interesting Man.) I am hugely interested in what Josh Topolsky of This Is My Next has to say about the latest tech device, but I couldn’t care less about the coffee shop where he likes to hang out.
- Google+: see both Facebook and Twitter above
The entire success of Google Search is its ability to expertly fragment content in under 15 seconds. The web is full of chaff and the best platforms let you find the wheat.
As a marketer, content fragmentation is a positive boon. Sure, it makes it more challenging to do our jobs broadly, but it lets us do it more effectively. My team often works to strategically integrate brands with parent influencers (the artists formerly known as mom and dad bloggers). Would I personally ever read a parent influencer’s site? Absolutely not. For the same reasons you don’t watch a Woody Allen movie when you’re six years old. I don’t have the life experience to find the humor and poignancy that these influencers bring to parenting. Can I appreciate their contributions and understand why they’re important for brands? Absolutely.
Embracing content fragmentation
The reason the average person hates marketing is due to a lack of content fragmentation. The times when I most want to throw my mouse through my laptop is when I’m on YouTube and I have to sit through a commercial for a product that helps women get through menopause. Unless something scientifically impossible happens to me I’m confident I’m not going to ever need to know about that medication. I understand why it exists but it’s a waste of my time and a wasted opportunity for an advertiser. It was fine in the 1960s when there wasn’t a way to tell who was watching the TV but it’s no longer acceptable.
Similar to YouTube, Hulu should be an ideal platform to embrace content fragmentation and truly target consumers. I’ve used Hulu Plus since it came out in late 2010. By now, Hulu should know everything I care about and provide videos, supplementary content and advertising that’s relevant to me.
Unfortunately, the current reality does not agree. The last time I watched an episode of Modern Family on Hulu I ended up watching the exact same commercial for the same exact product more than 15 times. My favorite film is Once Upon a Time in the West. I watch it at least once a year. But if you sat me down and made me watch the film 15 times in a row it’s going to free-fall to my never watch again list. Also worth noting, I already own the product being promoted in the Hulu commercials. Where’s the “I already own this” button? Content fragmentation #fail.
Fragmentation is a tremendous gift the digital and social age handed to marketers. It’s time to stop fretting about it and focus onmaximizing the opportunity for brands to connect with customers more effectively than they ever have.
Alan
• Jan. 11, 2012 at 12:02 am
Ah, young Jedi. Let go of your anger.
You raise some very interesting points, but I have questions and observations:
How does a brand, rather than a media company, make content fragmentation deliver ROI? Especially when apps like Zite do such a better job of fragmentation and personalization.
I’m not sure Google, or any search engine, truly let’s you find the ‘best’ stuff on the web yet. Most popular or visited, yes. By your definition, HuffPo is delivering the best content on almost any subject.
If you absolutely do not read any parent blogs, how do you think you can effectively counsel or develop content that will resonate with said parent influencers? (And I’m hurt. You know I write one.)
Charlie Witkowski
• Jan. 11, 2012 at 12:22 pm
I trust you will not confuse anger with passion, Obi-wan Kercinik!
A brand gets ROI from choosing the right platforms to engage with both via advertising and content delivery. I’m not familiar with Zite because it’s an Apple product and, as you know, I try not to use Apple products unless absolutely necessary. But at the end of the day, even apps like Zite can benefit a brand. The question for most apps and platforms is are THEY ready for your brand to get ROI. I’d argue in the cases of Hulu, as I outlined in the article, that the platform isn’t where it should be to really let your brand benefit from content fragmentation.
I think google is delivering the “best” stuff because it always gets me to what I want. Or at least Google does the “best job” getting me to the “best” stuff. Obviously the term “best” is highly subjective. From the changes this week, Google will soon be able to pull results that are truly skew more toward your “best” content based on your social streams. HuffPo has some great content once you find it, although I’d disagree with the “any subject” since their comedic and tech offerings are rather lacking. But Huffington Post doesn’t do a good job helping you find it on an ongoing basis like Google. Sure you can subscribe to content streams but that doesn’t make it any easier than Twitter or any other portal. Basically I don’t think those portals do a good of job helping you fragment your content as Google or even Zite do.
I will admit to reading many parent blogs in order to do my job more effectively but, generally speaking, they don’t do anything for me personally. There’s only ONE parenting blog I read for pleasure because it’s extremely well written and has lots of great references. I’ll let you guess which one that is.