The #MadeinNY list steadily grows, and companies are hiring. Internet Week New York aims to celebrate progress, examine problems, and present new possibilities when innovative technology meets established industry in this city.

The event, May 20-27, will host speakers, such as Jonah Peritti’s keynote address on Buzzfeed’s “humble beginnings,” panels, such as Vice on “Conflict Journalism in the Social Media Age,” activities, and parties for over 45,000 attendees.

Festival Director Caroline Waxler gives us a preview of the event from HQ:

How did you decide the themes of this year’s Internet Week New York?

So some of the things we’re thinking about is what’s bubbling up in the bigger conversations, and also what’s important to New York. So some of the bigger themes that we’re tackling are education – and we know as we work closely with the mayor’s office that that is something they’re really concentrating on, crossing the digital divide, as it were.

So that is one aspect, and we’re also huge on making sure everyone gets online. So whether it’s small business owners who run a dry cleaner in Queens, or somebody who’s thinking of starting their own business, just how to become more fluent in technology.

What aspect of this year’s Internet Week are you most excited about?

IWNY director Caroline Waxler

I’m most excited about getting different types of content into the headquarters. Prior, it’s been advertising, media, and marketing, which is awesome and I come from that world.

But New York is a bigger place than that, and I feel like there are so many conferences serving that segment. And different niches have different conferences, but how about a place in New York where everyone can come together?

We’re going to have talks focusing on healthcare, some on sports, some on food, some on fashion, all industries very important to New York. But people can learn together. A lot of the same lessons adapt.

And everyone coming together with the purpose of being online, and focused on technology.

Exactly, and everything that’s getting disrupted. So the person who’s coming as a doctor to learn about what’s going on in healthcare may also go to the food panel and find out some things on health that they didn’t know before.

Why do you think New York is such a center for technological growth right now?

I think we’re in a phase where brands are focusing a lot on content, and marketing and distribution, and that’s what New York does so well.

As startups are focusing and interfacing with these different industries, then that’s why New York is really charging ahead.

What startup are you most excited about this year?

I love Makerbot, and Bre Pettis is speaking at Internet Week, so that’s great. He’s actually speaking about an education initiative; he’s involved with Mouse, and he’s being honored this year. He’s going to talk a little bit about Makerbot, but also about how he gives back, and that’s really important to me.

Do you have any advice for making the most of all the options Internet Week has to offer?

If you can work on getting time off from being in the office and [instead] coming there and holding your meetings during Internet Week, it’s a great place to meet people.

I would just go there and kind of camp out. Bring your laptop and do your work from there, and then pick and choose the different panels that are of interest. There’s going to be a few things per day that are of interest to everybody.

Even if you’re not a fashion and beauty person, you’re going to want to hear Neil [Blumenthal] from Warby Parker speak at the end of the day. It’s a great place, it’s in Chelsea, it’s central, and there’s going to be something for everyone every single day.

I think our opening party is going to be really fun. Lots of DJs, lots of things happening. That’s a great way to kick off the week.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

And now, for the next five weeks, Red Bull is launching a takeover of New York’s music scene.

Through the Red Bull Music Academy, the company is putting its brand in the same breath as the likes of Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Afrika Bambaataa, James Murphy, Kim Gordon, and Erykah Badu. All known and revered for their producer and artist credits on classic recordings, they are only a sampling of the mass of talent that Red Bull has put together to keep the city up and dancing all night.

This targets a specific core of the music loving community — those who are proud to know as much as possible about how the hits are actually made.

Eno, who played the synthesizer in Roxy Music, and has worked in the studio with the likes of David Bowie, The Talking Heads, U2, and Devo, is giving an illustrated talk at Cooper Union, but for those who can’t attend, his self-generating audio/visual installation “77 Million Paintings” will be on display from May to June 2. Dance rock aficionados will file into at NYU’s Skirball Center to drink in the knowledge from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, who will also be performing on the turntables at the RBMA hosted 12th Anniversary Party for his DFA record label.

“A long-term music initiative, committed to fostering creative exchange amongst those who have made and continue to make a difference in the world of sound.”

Legendary producer Giorgio Moroder, whose resume includes Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” and has just been announced as a featured collaborator on Daft Punk’s upcoming album, will be performing his first DJ gig on US soil. These are just a few of the names that Red Bull will be declaring it’s association with — every event the Academy is putting on speaks to a different facet of an amazingly diverse community.

By hitting the highest marks of quality and possibility, Red Bull is working to place itself in the ranks of the elite brands of the country. The drink may not have the association with Americana that a Coca-Cola has, or the athleticism of a Gatorade, but it can build a different platform, one more focused specifically on the cutting edges of culture, targeting both the valued youth and high income demographics.

“Part of being a great brand is conveying what you stand for in an authentic manner so consumers find it believable,” says Nirmalya Kumar, a professor of marketing at the London Business School who has studied the company, in a New York Times interview. “The music academy and the air show have given Red Bull a lot of that.”

The RBMA bills itself as ”not a sponsored event, but a long-term music initiative, committed to fostering creative exchange amongst those who have made and continue to make a difference in the world of sound,” placing its goal on a more long-term, macro, scale (not surprising for a company planning a whole month of events).

“The Red Bull Music Academy is probably the most progressive entity of music education.”

The other half of the Academy consists of collaborative lessons, taking place behind doors between established artists and those who have applied to get into this session. The results of those sessions belong entirely to the artists, with no footprint from the company (unlike when Smirnoff or Mountain Dew sponsor musicians, and their logo winds up all over the album art).

Treating the artist in such a way produces tight bonds within the community. Questlove of The Roots, the soon-to-be bandleader for Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show run, says, ”The Red Bull Music Academy is probably the most progressive entity of music education.”

The focus is constantly on the content, letting the brand — which is bringing the audience once-in-a-lifetime events — give the audience space to enjoy the music, and be seen as respectful of the community.

The Red Bull Music Academy events run from April 30 through June 2.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

As I write this story, I have a field at the top of my page for the headline I have written, below that is my byline and then this box that I am typing the body of the text into. Invisible to me is the metadata that describes these content entities and their relationship to each other.

But if it is my job to set up this system in the first place, the database aspect of what I am doing is first and foremost. In the world of content strategy, the defining of the basic elements of an editorial system is called content modeling. And for those with a background in information architecture, this is just a variant on the more established practice of data modeling.

Mike Atherton, head of user experience at Huddle in London and a former information architect for the BBC, uses the term “domain modeling” to describe how expert knowledge about a certain subject matter is translated into the basic components of a content site.

In his talk, ”Domain Modeling at the BBC,” Atherton shows how the idea of the scientific taxonomy dating back to the 18th century has become the basic armature on which we hang what we know about a subject, for instance the way teams are organized into divisions in a sports league.

This is to say that there is both an art and a science to creating content models. Create one that is too complex and full of distinctions without meaningful differences and you wind up with unwieldy content management systems (CMSs) and unhappy content creators. But if you don’t break the hard rocks of the given subject matter you wind up with an unstructured blob of content that is hard to reshape and reuse.

In the API-driven future of publishing, creating structures that are independent of format allows you to easily develop new products and facilitate use by third parties.

A slide from Mike Atherton’s “Domain modelling at the BBC”

As content strategist Rachel Lovinger at Razorfish in New York describes the process in an article on A List Apart, a content model is composed of an assembly model (how individual content items are put together to make webpages), content types (collections of components “that are distinct enough to be unique types in the system”) and content attributes (the actual elements of content and metadata that constitute each type, and their interrelations.)

On NPR’s site, for instance, each broadcast story has an inventory of components (long and short headlines and link text, full text transcriptions along with summaries of different lengths and multi-media elements like audio files, photographs and videos.) Different parts of the site use different “recipes” to mix and match these elements to assemble pages — and so do many other organizations via NPR’s robust APIs.

By focusing first on how the content will come together in a particular scenario, content modeling is more user-centric than traditional information architecture that tends to work from the elements up. Your model needs to capture the mental model that your users map the subject matter with. And remember, your users are both the consumers of the content and also the creators.

“How tolerant are your content creators of laborious processes?” Lovinger asks. Try to avoid asking editors to break unstructured content into lots of separate data fields unless it serves a functional purpose. The key is metadata. If you will need to reuse an element in a different context, it should be its own field, otherwise probably not.

Lovinger identifies three distinct types of metadata used in content management systems: structural, administrative and descriptive. Of these it is the structural metadata with which a content model is primarily concerned. Making these distinctions will make the most difference to your users. Administrative details, like the status of a given post, is housekeeping that we expect our CMSs to handle. And descriptive metadata is more the province of the domain model. Tags and keywords will be tended by the content creators themselves and can often be at least partially automated through intelligent machine learning that can extract semantic information from text.

The content model itself emerges from our engagement with the subject matter and publishing process of the given organization as a higher-level abstraction that will inform the structure of the underlying database. It is, in fact, a drawing, a diagram — a design that facilitates visual as well as informational decision-making. Most likely, the c-suite will never ask to see the actual model, but they will miss it if it’s not there.

Top image courtesy of adactio/flickr

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Mashable reports that when consumers line up their QR code readers on their smartphones with the ad, Sports Illustrated models from the swimsuit edition start moving in the video. The ad campaign is called “Blend Out” and is “the latest attempt to sex up the annual issue with digital bells and whistles,” says Todd Wasserman.

QR codes in ads that pop up as videos are nothing new. In 2010, Calvin Klein used them on billboards in New York and Los Angeles to promote its jeans, according to Mobile Marketer. They gave consumers a look at a video with models Lara Stone, A.J. Sid Ellisdon, Grayson Vaughan and Eric Anderson. In a print ad, Simply Zest reports that Volkswagen used a QR code that allowed consumers to experience what it was like to be in one of its cars. The list goes on.

As Kissmetrics points out, there are negatives to this technology. For example, it’s susceptible to spam and hacking, which can make consumers hesitant to pursue it. Not to mention, it requires an extra step, and a consumer must have the technology already in his or her phone.

At the beginning of 2012, AdAge reported that only five percent of consumers were using the codes. Kunur Patel writes that some consumers “who have tried the technology were dissuaded by codes that offer little useful information or simply redirect the user to the company’s website.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

NASCAR Focuses on Fans in Site Redesign

NASCAR unveiled its new website last week ”to provide a better experience for the more than seven million unique monthly visitors who use the site each month,” according to ClickZ.

Now on the site, which looks more like a social media platform, visitors can pin, tweet, and share content to social sites. Content includes a section for the drivers, along with videos of race track tours.

New York Observer’s New Editor

On Friday, Ken Kurson, an author and editor, was named editor in chief of The Observer and editorial director of the Observe Media Group reports the New York Times.

Owned by New York real estate developer Jared Kushner, the paper has gone through different editors, monetary losses, and faced stiff competition from New York Magazine and city-centric websites.

Of his publication, Kushner said, ““If you take a conventional approach in the media business, you are going to get slaughtered. It’s true that I’ve broken some eggs along the way, but in the process I’ve preserved an important editorial voice, not just in New York but in the rest of the country.”

This Year’s Key Phrase: Socially Optimized Microcontent

In 2013, marketers need to produce socially optimized microcontent, according to AdPulp.

This year, it’s been predicted by digital agency Deep Focus that social platforms are going to be the primary digital device on which to reach consumers. In addition, newsfeeds will be breeding grounds for branded content, native advertising will excel while display ads will be banished, and engagement will be seen as a critical marketing metric.
Hulu CEO Leaving Company

The Wall Street Journal reports that Hulu LLC Chief Executive Jason Kilar is going to be leaving the website in the first quarter.

The departure, which was rumored to happen for some time, comes after Kilar requested $200 million from investors into the company. That has not yet been fulfilled. The new leader will either come from one of the Hulu holders at Disney, Comcast, or News Corp, or from an outside place.
Australia’s Branded Content Special

Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), created an hour-long branded content special about meat, starring lamb’s brand ambassador, Sam Kekovich.

The special, called “The Australia Showdown — You Can Never Be Too Australian,” won the 2013 Australia Day  campaign, which, according to AdNews, is “the most coveted cross-platform deal of the year.”

Making the Most Out of Content on Social Channels

Steven Van Belleghem of Content Marketing Institute writes about capitalizing on content on social media websites.

He says that social content approaches need to be integrated so that consumers can go from channel A to B: “So here, companies should focus on creating a ‘content-conversion’ plan, where you outline every touch point where a (potential) customer can come into contact with your content.”

Companies can build audiences by holding contests, creating a rhythm for the release of content, and advertising campaigns and content on social sites. An editorial calendar, posting creative content, and engaging with consumers are all going to increase the chances of persuasion and conversion.

Freelancing that Lasts

CopyBlogger’s Marcia Hoeck writes about how freelance writers can keep clients interested in their work. 

They can be superheroes for clients in a variety of ways: Writers can come in at the last minute before deadline and swoop in on a story, help out on a story without being asked, or give advice to clients for projects when they lack knowledge. They can also advise clients if they don’t know what to do and end up proving how valuable they are to them.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

On Twitter, she has over 6,600 followers, and on Facebook, 3,200 fans. Her website, Jetset Farryn, receives 10,000 unique visitors per week.

After leaving Jetsetter.com, a private community travel site, Weiner became director of social media in the fashion industry.

The Content Strategist recently caught up with the entrepreneur and talked about her latest work, her thoughts about the future of content and social media, and how she made a name for herself.

TCS: How do you incorporate your travel background into your work?

Weiner: I think my travel experience has given me a much wider sense of the world and a much more open minded way of thinking about content, technology, and the way I communicate with people.

I understand the different cultures. I wanted not just a global perspective [for my clients], but a local perspective. How I speak to audiences in New York is very different compared to how I speak to our audience in Tokyo.

I want to give equal [attention] to everyone who is interested. I have perspective and understanding of the way people live their lives and how they want to shop.

TCS: How long have you been working in social media?

Weiner: About four years now. I was at NYU and got an assignment from a teacher to go on Facebook my freshman year.

Once I got over the ability to stalk guys I was crushing on or look at what my ex-boyfriend was posting, I thought it was so interesting how people were expressing themselves on the site.

In social, you can’t be afraid of yourself or the truth of who you are.

I make the choice to be out there, to express myself through all these platforms and I stand by that.

When you have that confidence or that honesty in what you do, you’re bound to be successful.

TCS: Any advice for people trying to build their own brand? 

Weiner: First and foremost be yourself. Audiences in general are extremely smart. Think about the message that you want to send and become an expert in it. A lot of what I do is educate myself and my team.

I really don’t believe in the word “social media expert.” I think we’re all learning how to create interesting conversations with people around the world. If you’re humble in that sense, you have so much to gain.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

New York Tech Meetup (NYTM) is the epicenter of New York’s tech scene. The 850 tickets to New York Tech Meetup sell out in minutes each month, and overflow crowds gather at General Assembly and New Work City.

NYTM hit the 25,000-member milestone faster than anyone expected, adding 10,000 members in the previous 15 months alone. That growth mirrors New York Tech’s incredible run of success: Since 2007, VC deals in the New York region have increased by 32 percent, while they’ve decreased by 11 percent nationwide during the same time period, including a 10 percent drop in Silicon Valley.

Back in 2005—when New York’s tech industry ran a far-distant third to Silicon Valley and Boston—no one suspected that it would come to outpace the big boys.

All this growth has come without the help of a major, cohesive project. No one here is building the plumbing for an Internet 2.0. It also comes without the emergence of a signature tech powerhouse. Tumblr and FourSquare have had great success, but they’re no Microsoft, Amazon or Google.

Despite this dearth of tech empires, New York has rapidly emerged as the 2nd-largest tech hub in the world, and a recent study by NYC Future predicts that this exponential success will continue for some time.

The reason? The very nature of New York Tech. In New York, tech companies boost existing dominant industries: media, fashion, finance, art, education and advertising.

Most are providing that boost to existing industries through content.

The vast majority New York tech companies and the startups that demo at New York Tech Meetup are focused on content in some way. They’re helping brands create content, distribute content, share content, optimize content, analyze content, target ads towards content, connect sales to content. Others – like The Huffington Post, Gilt, and Refinery29 –  have created innovative content businesses unlike anything the world has seen.

“We are having a renaissance in New York,” Andrew Rasiej, chair of New York Tech Meetup told NYC Future, “because technology and content are marrying each other.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Thursday’s panel “How to Build a Business Your Customers Rely On” discussed how content curation can serve as a business model with speakers from Fab, SheFinds, and Songza. Douglas Warsaw of Fortune Magazine and First-Person Communication was the moderator.

The panel began by focusing on how people react to content curation on e-commerce sites, which can be seen as the virtual equivalent of them walking into a boutique shop or gallery and looking at the array of products.

Fab’s Director of Product Acquisition Chad Philips said content providers can use a boutique tactic called “rigging,” which is when something outlandish and unexpected is placed in the front display window to attract attention. Consumers will hopefully be pulled in and most likely won’t buy the crazy window piece, but will get a shirt or something else instead.

This tactic has worked for Fab’s blog by grabbing the viewer’s initial attention and then hooking the potential buyer. Curating content can thus be leveraged to attract initial attention, and then allow the user to discover other things for themselves so they feel they have made an informed decision.

Phillips says Fab.com’s goal is to curate the best designed products and make them more accessible to online audiences. Crowdsourcing, whether through social media or customer service, helps Fab.com, SheFinds, and Songza decide what content to curate on their sites.

Social media and tracking analytics within a site can help a business understand which content is trending and what they should include.

Warsaw asked the panelists about which analytics best measure success of curation for all three businesses. For sites like Fab and SheFinds, the number of sales and conversion of readership to purchase is proof enough, while Songza focuses more on algorithms and tracking who is clicking what and when.

Songza co-founder Elias Roman explained that since the company provides a curated and crowdsourced array of playlists customized for listeners based on the time of day, the activity users are engaging in, and which genre the listener prefers, tracking engagement is a necessary part of their model. Listeners “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” songs, which adds a crowdsourced curation element.

Founder Michele Madok said SheFinds attracts shoppers who have a certain taste level and are looking to buy, not just to browse, so showing conversion is very important to their business. Part of that process is curating the right content on the site’s SheKnows blog.

Madhok said she thought social media curation would seem more like a stunt than a useful service for the audience. People look to their peers and influencers with similar tastes to get recommendations. Roman said that Songza users understand that songs are curated by experts, which brings authenticity and quality to the platform, crucial  for any business and consumer relationship.

A brand such as Hertz could offer playlists for their audience with Songza as facilitator, but overall what’s key for a brand to understand is knowing what the audience wants. Songza has worked with a cleaning brand that wanted to created “housecleaning playlists.” The brand was able to gain customers and more Facebook followers by providing relevant content to their audience.

The consensus was that having a human, rather than a robot relying on a pure algorithm, to do the actual curation was the most effective way for a brand to offer content.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Users who are able to capture truly stunning photos with the app can also develop a following of complete strangers. The same opportunity is available for brands, and one business owner, Sam Maher, says brands that aren’t on Instagram now are making a huge mistake.

Maher runs Fluent City, a language school in New York, and has found that the most popular content isn’t always a direct representation of his brand — a picture of a cupcake does as well or better than something about language education.

On his own, Maher follows the colorful streetwear community and a couple in Memphis (her and him), which he calls his Instagram reality show, since they’ve developed a following simply by being charming people.

Some other hits are NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which uses Instagram to share the most fascinating images from science, and educate followers at the same time.

The official account from HBO’s Girls is almost an ongoing scrapbook of the show, with memorable quotes superimposed on screenshots from each episode

Maher himself is a success story for brands like WestNYC, which he discovered by searching hashtags on Instagram and was in the store days later due of the brand’s great content.

Streetwear is a natural fit for Instagram’s visual interface, since personal accounts from industry personalities such as Dennis Todisco can double as the “what’s new” section of the clothing brand’s website — he’s simply out doing cool stuff and wearing the label’s latest attire.

Some brands take a step further and use Instagram to involve followers in the product, effectively enabling these devoted followers with influence.

NPR posted a note to its followers after the acquisition of Instagram, asking them to email a voice memo with their reactions — and used the voice memos on the air, said Andy Carvin, who manages the account along with a few others.

Burberry runs a series called “Art of the Trench,” which asked users to post street photos of trench coats with the hashtag #artofthetrench, essentially a celebration of the style for which Burberry is so well known.

Instagram may be one of the few places left on the internet where value is in being interesting, not loud, or posting at the ideal hour. Most of these popular acccounts only post a few times each week.

Even after its purchase by Facebook, Instagram continues to be the untainted network — no ads, and a single stream that does not allow for noise or clutter. That means that when a brand garners a spot on a user’s stream, it also earns full attention, and it is up to the brand to make that worthwhile.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

At  the Creative Week conference earlier this month in New York, Jordan Crane of Wolff Olins, Rob Trostle of Mother New York, Joe Stewart of Huge and Natasha Jen of Pentagram shared strategies for finding inspiration in a panel moderated by Cliff Kuang, editor of Fast Company’s Co.Design.

The panel discussed how writers and content strategists can find material to develop story ideas and inject new formats into their work. Here are some of the findings:

1. Steal from human behavior

Digital media has only been around for so long. We must look outside of digital for inspiration or else we’ll continue rehashing the same ideas. Observe nature and human interaction, and consider how it can speak into to what you are writing.

2. Meet with a group

When people get together they can often find solutions organically. Nobody is in full control of where the conversation will end up. Take advantage of each other’s imagination.

3. Look at collections

The trend on the web is curation, as can be seen on site like Pinterest. But a merchant like FAB is also highly curated by someone with great taste. Collections offer something you won’t find on Google – an answer when you don’t know the question.

4. Do some user research

If you are designing for a company that manufactures granola bars, go to the store and watch the people who buy the product. You’ll develop a greater sense of who your audience is, and what they might like.

5. Talk to people — Any people

You’ll find yourself bouncing ideas and concepts off others and being able to see an immediate reaction – that joke you weren’t sure was funny might make it into your next article if it’s a hit with friends.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently