“Music videos are not like a painting. People have an emotional connection to music videos, they feel something,” said the director and animator of a-ha’s classic music video “Take On Me.”

Patterson spoke recently about the Museum of the Moving Image’s latest exhibition, Spectacle: The Music Video, which claims to be the first of its kind to seriously examine music video as an art form. More than 300 videos, artifacts, and installations to show how the music video has evolved and continues to push the boundaries of creativity. The New York exhibit opened last week and continues until June 16.

The most iconic music videos share commonalities that can be applied to best practices of content marketing. The following lessons are paired with music videos from the exhibit.

1. Create a tangible story

The notion of putting song to a moving image has existed since the 1920s, as early as technology allowed it. Adding video to song made the music and the image both feel more tangible and digestible.

A few examples of great storytelling are the first plot-driven video The Kinks’ “Dead End Street” and David Bowie’s videos for Space Oddity, ”John I’m Only Dancing,”"The Jean Genie,” and ”Life on Mars,” which were treated as short films upon his first break into the U.S. And there is the 13 minute epic video “Thriller” by Michael Jackson.

2. Be experimental

Spectacle exhibit curator Jonathan Wells said that there has been so much experimentation with music videos “they’ve started to have their own genres,” including choreography, cinematography, controversy, inspiration, or art and animation.

Constant experimentation was what made some artists get their break, such as Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.,” Devo’s “Mongoloid,” OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again,” and Stereogram’s “Walkie Talkie Man.”

3. Make a connection

Patterson says what made “Take On Me” so successful was the simple love story and the connection viewers feel between the girl and her animated love interest. Despite the fact they had a wall between them (different dimensions of reality), they still connected.

“Even with the break from reality to fantasy, it’s all about the gaze,” said Patterson. Connect with your audiences, and forget that wall.

4. Allow group participation

In recent years, crowdsourcing has become a popular trend among artists, including The Beastie Boys, Japanese band Sour, and the Johnny Cash Project, just to name a few.

Fan remixing “couldn’t have happened without the Internet” and the ease of video production allowed fans to engage and share their remixes of their favorite music videos, Wells said, adding, “Culture exists to be remixed.”

The wildly popular hit “Single Ladies” from Beyonce was featured in Spectacle due to the many fan remixes and parodies it generated all over the world. Allowing fans to engage in celebration creates a deeper connection and more meaning.

Wells explains that “music videos are exciting” because they allow artists to be experimental and break boundaries. Music videos have evolved — as has how brands communicate with their audiences — by finding new ways to create stories, make a connection, experiment, and allow fans to participate in content creation.

The March 8 symposium in New York was organized after Hyperallergic writer Ben Valentine penned “Tumblr As Art” last June and caught the attention of Tumblr arts evangelist Annie Werner. Werner said that she hoped the symposium would shed light on the artistic community that exists on Tumblr and help it to grow.

The event featured disruptions of various types — vocal audience members, chaos when a very NSFW Tumblr was projected and live streamed, and members of the panels who were unapologetic about taking Instagram photos of one another. As Tumblr artist Brad Troemel said, during a Q&A session, “Artists should be defining visual culture, not advertisers.”

Sociologist Tricia Wang, in her presentation, “Tumblring Our Elastic Selves,” said the reason Tumblr users gravitate toward the platform was because it was an “unbound” experience that allows for expression and allows oneself to be “elastic.” Wang’s description of elasticity as a means of identity means being able to create as many accounts – and identities – as possible.

Before her presentation, Wang shared her mantra that “you have to go to the edges to get what is really happening.” If content marketers want to know what is “next” for content, perhaps they should look to the artists who have made Tumblr fit their calling.

The common sentiment from panelists and audience members was that the more corporations try to “monoplozie and monetize” content and art, the more creators will rebel and try to disrupt the system, whether its the marketing system or architecture of Tumblr itself.

“Artists should be defining visual culture, not advertisers.”

San Francisco-based net artist Ian Aleksander Adams said during an open panel session that his project Friendster Friday was inspired out of the experience of having his friends becoming angry at him for trying to “tumblr” on Facebook, crowding their newsfeeds, and breaking the natural order.

Christiane Paul, professor of visual arts at The New School, was asked to define Tumblr Art during the first panel, ”Past, Present, Future: Why Should I Reblog This?” She said it was a “corporate art form, not an art medium.” Tumblr is a platform that many artists share their work through, but the collection of collages, video art, engagements and reblogs are not a united art form, she said.

A few possible content strategy lessons from the Tumblr Art Symposium: The platform from which you post your content does not make your content, more people will engage and react to content more “unbound” it feels , and you will get more attention the more you want to “break” something.

Reuters is also continuously experimental in online distribution beyond mainstream social media.

While its social audience of more than 300,000 is tuned in, Reuters still looks for new ways for its content to be discovered online, whether by testing with new formats, mediums, or the business of news itself.

Video: A Happy Medium

Reuters has made an investment in video content, making stories shareable and digestible for online audiences. Reuters TV is used as a primary video publisher while Reuters YouTube imports Reuter TV’s playlist to their larger YouTube audience (Reuters YouTube has over 57,965 subscribers while Reuters TV has 15,293).

Reuters TV posts videos daily and distributes to it’s own Twitter and Pinterest pages. With Twitter’s new embedded video feature and the video pinning option on Pinterest, both make great video distribution channels.

Content for Everyone, However They Like It

Reuters makes content customizable and available through many mediums for fragmented audiences.

With a dozen available email newsletters ranging from investing, health, or the presidential election, Reuters can have a placeholder in a reader’s inbox. Reuters News Pro Applications for mobile are available for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android devices. The availability of the apps on multiple devices makes Reuters accessible for any professional while they are on the go. Offering RSS feeds for readers also allows readers to make the choice of how to receive their news.

Experiment With Social Distribution

Reuters has communities on established social platforms, but it also looks for new ways to reach potential audiences.

One new venture to reach business professionals is through LinkedIn Today, an aggregate of the top content shared on LinkedIn. Users are also able to customize their stream by following sources.

To encourage people to follow, Reuters directs readers to its LinkedIn Today page through the site, right where they list their Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube presences.

As of now, it has more than 17,500 followers.

Reuters also has presences on Pinterest and Google+ with Reuters TV. Though both platforms’ audiences are far smaller than other channels, the attempts at testing new social platforms for distribution shows a news agency that is adaptable to emerging technology.

No Fear of Curation

While content curation has dominating content marketing blogs, the question comes up on whether news sites should get in on the action. Reuters is testing that notion with Reuters Counterparties, a tool created by Reuters and Percolate that curates content from other news sources.

Reuters considers Counterparties an “experiment” that challenges the question “what would a news website look like if it didn’t need to promote its own content,” according to the Counterparties site. The best way to keep an audience is “to send them away: click on a headline, go straight to another site, and see for [themself].”

Reuters is a model for how the digital distribution component of a content strategy can extend well beyond social.

“What if instead of optimizing branded content to hit every marketing bullet point on a brief, we optimized it to maximize the amount it got shared?” wondered Schafer.

According to Noah Brier of Percolate, brands need a mix of “stock” and “flow” content in order to remain “sticky.” The type of content created out of a brand newsroom that Schafer speaks of would be “flow” content, which are shorter, more timely pieces of content.

Before ditching the briefs, storyboards, and boardrooms in favor of a brand “newsroom,” content marketers and strategists need to remember where “flow” content needs to build up to. The ”stock” content are the bigger features that bring audiences and fans back and can strengthen the overarching brand strategy.

One of the earliest forms of original branded “stock” content is the eight part BMW film series The Hire starring Clive Owen from 2002. All eight films featured popular filmmakers from across the globe, starred Clive Owen as the driver and highlighted the performance aspects of various BMW automobiles. Viewed 11 million times in four months on BMW’s site, according to BMW Blog, what’s most amazing about this campaign was that this was pre-YouTube.

As Horatiu Boeriu points out, if the series were released for the first time today, with social sharing and consumer content consumption at an all-time high, “one can only imagine the impact and viral marketing that these videos would have generated across the internet.” If BMW had a brand newsroom back then, they could have created supplementary flow content for the series and finding opportunities for the BMW brand to find cultural relevance in daily conversations.

Schafer is right in that a brand needs to be set up “as much like a modern newsroom as it does a creative department.” The need for brands to be part of cultural conversations fueled by social is essential — and it’s possible through flow content. However, with the abundance of daily content and information being shared, creating “stock” content once in a while will help brands be the focus of the conversation, not just joining it. That’s why it’s important to have both the newsroom for the daily “flow” content and keep the strategy briefs and creative brainstorms for the bigger “stock” content.

The “creative” part of the term “creative newsroom” is making original content, the “newsroom” part allows content strategists and managers to try to predict what will be discussed three months from now as well as what’s trending on Twitter this morning. The most important third element is strategy so the brand doesn’t get lost in the online ether of online content.

The process of hiring and maintaining a content studio is expensive since talent, originality, creativity, and strategy to guide the way is essential. As much as Schafer cautions that “briefs, brainstorms, boardrooms and 70 rounds of revisions” slows down the process, all of these steps are key for keeping the brand identity in the conversation.

Image courtesy of maiak.info/flickr

Late last month, Adweek reported that the latest BuzzFeed Social Intelligence Report named Reddit as the biggest driver in referral traffic for the site. In comparison, Pinterest, it said, ”is nothing more than a fad.”

Content marketers have to consider traditional search (through sites like Google) as well as referral traffic from social media. However, as all content is not created equal, the context in which people discover content is not equal as well.

Many publishers, Adweek included, are saying that Pinterest is simply a fad and doesn’t offer much for publishers. This may be due to the fact that Pinterest is more suited for e-commerce than for sharing news, which have fueled predictions that Pinterest will become most significant driver of social traffic to e-commerce sites.

Digiday reported that for BuzzFeed in July, Pinterest drove a mere 110,000 referrals, far less than the other social networks, including Reddit, which referred a little more than 5 million.

What’s even more surprising is that, according to Digiday, “for many news publishers social isn’t really a big deal to them.”

Editorially driven sites like The New York Times and The Atlantic report little referral traffic from Pinterest. However, publishers that have established their own unique brand such as Time Inc.’s Real Simple and Conde Nast’s Brides.com are seeing some positive traction. According to what a Real Simple spokesperson told Digiday, Pinterest is the number one source of traffic from social media.

A publisher like Brides  has other higher-level objectives. Lisa Gooder, digital director at Brides.com, told Digiday, “We have recently undergone a re-branding of the magazine and website, and Pinterest has been the perfect way to get our new look out there.”

While Digiday says that publishers are wondering whether social benefits their traffic, social sites are beating leading search engines. Shareaholic reported last month that among 200,000 publishers who reach more than 270 million people each month,  Pinterest referral traffic is less than 0.10% away from overtaking Yahoo! organic traffic.

Google introduced social context into search results earlier this year as a possible attempt to capture what has made Twitter a leader in referral traffic.

Social adds a context for people looking for information or browsing content. What friends share and who people choose to follow provides more value than search results alone. While the The New York Times and The Atlantic are large enough to not get lost among search results, brands with editorial content and smaller media sites should leverage social to get more results.

It’s about finding the right context for content.

In her post, Leandra wrote being disconnected reconnected her to the offline world: “I read Hunter S. Thompson, enjoyed a view for the sake of looking at it, not filtering it, took note of my walk home from the nearest subway … recognizing three buildings I never had before.”

While digital disconnection can be a welcome relief, Leandra was even more surprised when she noticed a 16% increase in her blog’s page-views from two days before.

Bloggers, or more appropriately “influencers,” have to divide their attention between their blog and their social networks, which could include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. While the individual influencer’s efforts might be stretched across multiple platforms, their audience might feel stretched out attempting to keep up with every update.

The reason why there was an increase in views might correlate with Leandra not uploading to Instagram and her audience missing their dose of man repelling, therefore going to the main blog.

As Pinterest and Instagram increase in popularity, serving content in visual, digestible bits has become a trend for bloggers, from site redesign to spending more time creating shorter bits of content.

Even Man Repeller had a site redesign, featuring one photo and headline from each post, without the traditional editorial blurbs under each headline.

Leandra further writes, “Does an impressive following on an app cancel out the consideration and work that goes into scribing a blog though? …due to the rise of Kindles and iPads, will bloggers [find] themselves on the brink of change because of snappy, quick-and-easy-to-consume inspiration?”

While journalists and content marketers struggle to deliver short and long form content, bloggers are also divided on whether they too should follow the trend. As it becomes easier to become a content creator, will those with the skills to create long form content be valued and not feel forced to adapt to the mainstream?

No matter whether you think they are annoying or alluring, animated GIFs – essentially embedded mini-slideshows of photos that play automatically to make the images appear to move on the webpage — might be a growing force in content.

Not just suited for replaying live moments, GIFs allow publications to further express their voice, such as how The New York Times uses GIFs for its Still Life series with writers sharing images and personal essays.

The GIF is making a comeback by being both functional and allowing any person, brand, or publication to add another form of artistic expression to their editorial content.

“What GIFs do,” BuzzFeed Deputy sports editor Kevin Lincoln said to Neiman Lab, “is sort of bridge the gap between an image and a video, which becomes incredibly useful in sports — you don’t have to wade through and listen to an entire highlight/video, but at the same time, you get the motion and action that makes sports sports.”

While GIFs appear to be the new fad, they’ve been around for 25 years. Now that technology, the usability of the Internet, and hyperactive social sharing have finally met, GIFs are being introduced as a new medium to be taken seriously, which content creators and brands are both starting to leverage.

The GIF, or a graphics interchange format, was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and gained popularity by being shareable and easy to create. GIFs can be created with Photoshop by creating a MOV file, and additional mobile and web based apps make them easy to create, such as GifSoup, Cinemagram, Snapz, Gickr and Picasion.

 A GIF requires no flash and works in any browser. For years GIFs were popular on MySpace, Fark and Reddit, but “Tumblr’s highly visual structure and reblogging functionality that has enabled GIFs to go viral and find a wider audience,” writes Ann Friedman from Poynter, who believes journalists should start leveraging GIFs in their editorial.

Co-creator of Cinemagraph Kevin Burg sees more factors leading to the rise of the GIF and how it introduces a new way to communicate:

“When MySpace faded away and Facebook took over with an anti-animated GIF policy it cleansed the internet of the sparkly 90′s style GIFs that were so prevalent,” he says. “In the wake of that was Tumblr, which had an artistic and creative community plus loads of bandwidth, a 512kb file limit on GIFs and a super simple way to share them. The spirit of Tumblr then was about creating rich content and lots of people were experimenting with how to use that 512kb most effectively or creatively.”

Cinemagraphs is a shop created by Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck who invented a new art form leveraging the same practice as a GIF, taking a series of photos and isolating a single area that is animated.

“I think of it as a little movie projector, reel and screen all in one, so it becomes a catalyst for art forms,” Burg said. Cinemagraphs are an evolution of the GIF, reducing file size and having the ability to be taken out of the GIF format to HTML5 video and art installations.

Cinemagraph had its start at New York Fashion Week 2011 and has evolved into a thriving business. “So far this year we’ve worked on projects with companies like Google, Tiffany & Co, Microsoft, DKNY, Banana Republic, Puma, and Bloomingdale’s that have been Cinemagraph based and usually have a GIF element,” Burg said.

Burg was among the first to use cinemagraphs in mainstream media with Dogfish Head Craft Brewery last year. The campaign was regarded as innovative by the likes of Fast Company, making the brewing process of the company’s strawberry beer into an artistic narrative. Burg is especially proud of one project with Gilt Taste, in which a lemon is squeezed over a plate of oysters.

While the Olympics may have brought GIFs into mainstream media, the possibilities of the format have just begun to be uncovered. Burg and his partner Jamie Beck are hoping to begin using Cinemagraphs as display technologies in galleries and to further push the envelope in digital communication – as should content marketers.

BuzzFeed Radio, a live, weekly, call-in show on SiriusXM has BuzzFeed editors Jack Moore (@BuzzFeedJack) and Whitney Jefferson (@twitney) “dissect, discuss and offer a behind-the-scenes look at the inspiration, reaction and creative process behind the week’s biggest viral sensations” according to a press release on BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed Radio airs live on Tuesdays at 6:00 pm EST and played again Wednesday mornings and evenings on SiriusXM Stars Too (channel 104).

HuffPost Live is Huffington Post’s new “never-ending news talk show on the Internet,” streaming 12 hours of programming daily.

BuzzMedia’s launch of BuzzFeed Radio, acquisition of Spin Magazine (soon to be no longer), and political bureau in D.C., and Huffington Post’s new HuffPost Live, and weekly magazine Huffington, the evolution of Internet companies becoming media networks is an ironic twist on the state of media overall.

While traditional networks are competing to capture audience’s attention with digital, both Internet-based blogs are looking into new mediums to reach audiences beyond online editorial.

BuzzFeed’s penchant for creating viral content combined with their active online community allows for an easy transition to online radio. Sirius has had a history of unique programming and looking to social platforms was a “natural progression” says Scott Greenstein, chief content officer at the satellite-radio company to Advertising Age.

BuzzFeed Radio allows the platform to reach current audiences offline and Sirius’ 22 million subscribers.

BuzzFeed Managing Editor Scott Lamb explains, ”We’re on your computer screens at work and now we’re taking over your cars on the way home. The way you react to and share a BuzzFeed story with your friends is the same emotional reaction someone has when they call into the radio. Our commenters are like radio’s callers so working with SiriusXM just feels really organic.”

Ad Age’s Jason Del Ray calls HuffPost Live “bold” and “a TV news experience for the digital age.”

The show debuted with a few technical difficulties and mixed reactions.  Last week most of the programming featured interviews with community commentary in real time. Hosts play a multi-functional role on HuffPost Live as part community moderators and managers, trained to display tweets at any second.

President Roy Sekoff tells Advertising Age his approach is “iterative on purpose,” experimenting with multiple formats. The inconsistency and focus on community commentary had Brian Stelter from New York Times say HuffPost Live was more chatter than reporting.

While “the network will feature The Huffington Post’s writers and editors…it will not have is traditional reporters in the field, preferring mostly to talk about the news rather than gather it independently,” he wrote. “Talking tends to be cheaper than reporting.”

While one might argue that an online television network is appropriate for the digital age, BuzzFeed Radio has the best and most strategic choice. Producing video programming is far more ambitious and expensive to produce and radio is a medium that follows audiences to their offline activities.

BuzzFeed Radio will be about BuzzFeed’s process on developing original content, while HuffPost Live is a regurgitation of what everyone else is saying.

According to a study about Pinterest benchmarking by Pinsights, an analytics platform for Pinterest, pins by a brand that come from another site are 50% more  ”viral” than posts from its website.

At the same time, a sustained stream of content is the only way to gain a following on Pinterest.

This can leave companies in a bind since pinning a majority of content from other places is a risk some brands won’t take.

Last spring’s dispute over Pinterest’s copyright issues  have left some brands fearful of repinning content they don’t have rights to.

Managing a content stream for Facebook with a post a day is a challenge, but with the amount of content one has to pin to be relevant, finding content that is “up for grabs” can seem impossible.

However, Pinterest can be used for something other than creating an engaged community.

Enter Pinterest 2.0

Pinterest can be used as it was originally intended, as a functional way to organize content. It was only after Pinterest began generating more referral traffic than Twitter and news of their majority female audience that marketers really started to notice.

However, what made people rave about Pinterest initially was its functional use and grid design. Weekly digital design magazine Dolody even dedicated an entire issue about the design of Pinterest. Leveraging that attribute over the need to tap into an audience could be the key to bringing something unique to the platform.

Uniqlo’s “Dry Mesh Project” on Pinterest shows how a brand doesn’t need a presence in order to make an impression.

With the new announcement that Pinterest will now attribute and support content from SlideShare and SoundCloud, there are even more opportunities to use Pinterest not as just a social platform to engage with, but as a new way to publish.

Pinterest boards have been used as resumes (such as Rachael King’s), implemented by colleges such as Drake University and Oberlin College for recruiting, used by teachers to share lesson plans like this one on space, and even for Obama and Romeny’s political campaigns.

Marketers can start thinking about Pinterest 2.0 by answering the follow questions:

• What visual story couldn’t be told through a stream like Facebook or Twitter, but would make sense in a place like a Pinterest board? An aspiring journalist or designer could use it as a free but sexy portfolio.
• Are there multiple pieces of content that need to be shared as a bundle? If a band’s manager wanted to share a press kit for their band, they could create a board with backstage photos, tracks, videos, and online overage.
• What part of an existing content strategy could be enhanced by Pinterest? The Today Show’s Pinterest is a great example of enhancing a story that is already happening.
• What else exists as a grid? Inspiration can be drawn from comic strips, storyboards, calendars.

Pinterest has been a game changer because it brought back the ability to categorize content to become an entirely new destination.

With Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, users have become used to constant streams of content with no filtering. Pinterest predicted users’ need to curate and organize, not because of a need to be relevant but the desire to filter the content one shares.

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Jory John, author of All My Friends are Dead, recently wrote a list titled “Suggested Buzzfeed Articles” on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. The titles included “15 Ways to Obliterate a Tree” and “3 Opera Singers Covered in Day-Old Newspapers.”

Intern Feldman discovered the post and sent it to Scott Lamb, BuzzFeed’s managing editor.

“As a general policy, we try not to engage the trolls,” Lamb said, “But on the second read, this wasn’t trolling. The McSweeney’s post was funny and sharp and a parody — with a pretty clear critique of BuzzFeed — but it also struck me as coming from someone who knows and likes BuzzFeed as well. Not a hater.”

Lamb said Feldman suggested a post about it. While Lamb was hesitant at first, he asked the staff for input and reconsidered Feldman’s idea. Lamb decided that BuzzFeed would actually try to create all of the posts, calling them “Suggested BuzzFeed Articles,” with McSweeney’s as Community Contributor.

Lamb said one longtime user already wrote The World’s 13 Laziest Salmon. The posts combined have reached about 350,000 views.

BuzzFeed felt flattered that they’ve “risen to the level where people would bother satirizing,” Lamb said.

What “sets us apart is a willingness to be experimental and engage with others on the Internet,” he said. “The site has grown very organically from something small into something much larger, but our perspective is still very much that we’re from the Internet, not outside of it. One of the web’s great and defining charactertistics is playfulness, which is also a main trait at BuzzFeed.”

Content strategists and online marketers in general should take note. Playfulness and the willing to take risks can lead to greater rewards with online readers.

Brands should strive to be a place where readers can be entertained and engaged, meaning audiences are also “in a place” to respond and be playful as well. Lamb called the content spat, “good fun for the Internet,” a goal that marketers of all kinds should strive for.