In 2013, however, that same agency or department can just publish the story online. Gone are the days when it requires an outside reporter to reach readers.

In Milwaukee, the police department is doing just that.

“We’ll correct the news stories that got it wrong, and we’ll highlight the ones that got it right,” the blurb at Milwaukee’s police blog, The Source, reads. “Most importantly, we’ll create our own content, so you can see what the Milwaukee Police Department is really accomplishing in the community.”

When we talk about branded content, we often talk about companies and corporations. But content marketing and the strategies that come with it apply to the municipal and law-enforcement world as well.

Police departments across the country are changing how they communicate with, and respond to, the communities they serve and the news media that covers them.

‘The Source’: Municipal message control

In recent years, the Milwaukee Police Department perceived that it was facing a media-relations hurdle dealing with the way the city’s news outlets covered the force.

“This way we can get a good news story right out to the public and hopefully put a bit of a positive spin on a police department that’s often criticized.”

“I wouldn’t say a dysfunctional relationship, but I’d say a challenging relationship,” said Sgt. Mark Stanmeyer, public-information officer with the MPD. “I understand the need to process news in a certain sensationalistic or ‘sexy’ way. Unfortunately, when that news is processed it doesn’t always get across the message that we were trying to get across.”

And so, in April 2012, the police department became a publisher. It connected with a local advertising agency and secured some pro bono design time. It stopped its morning press conferences and replaced them with The Source.

Still in its first year, the site had received 814,469 visits from 619,235 unique visitors as of March. Stanmeyer writes the pieces with the help of two other civilian employees within the department. Readers find both hard-news style pieces such as crime statistics and “Chief Flynn Call For Reasonable Gun Laws,” but also softer stuff such as “MPD and Wendy’s Start March Book Drive.”

“Good-news stories don’t always make it onto the 10-o’clock news,” Stanmeyer said. “I understand that completely . . . This way we can get a good news story right out to the public and hopefully put a bit of a positive spin on a police department that’s often criticized.”

“They want to control the news — but they can’t. We’ll continue to follow the truth wherever it takes us.”

Stanmeyer said the lion’s share of any criticism in question comes from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which he described as taking an aggressive investigative angle with the police department. And the Journal Sentinel has taken the department to task in its pages for the nature of The Source.

“Milwaukee Police Department administrators continue to resist efforts by independent news sources to fairly and accurately report what’s going on without their filter and spin,” Martin Kaiser, the paper’s editor, said to a reporter in a Journal Sentinel stories about The Source, last year when the news broke that the morning pressers would be replaced by the website. “They want to control the news — but they can’t. We’ll continue to follow the truth wherever it takes us.”

Stanmeyer said he doesn’t fault the newspaper for paying close attention to the department. He suggests that perhaps there’s room for both publications in Milwaukee.

“They’re doing their job,” said Stanmeyer. “I’m not criticizing them for doing their job, or any other outlet in town. But this is a good way to get our message out, [one] that may have been lost somewhere on a reporter’s or on an editor’s desk.”

Changing landscape: Police blogging

What The Source is up to in Milwaukee — as a reactive online publication that’s taking its perspective directly to the public — is one part of a developing picture, nationwide.

The change in how police departments approach blogging may have started to gel in the mid-2000s, according to Elaine Driscoll, former director of communications at the Boston Police Department. Driscoll helped steer the BPD’s blog to approximately 250,000 visitors per month. She left the department about eight months ago to manage communications for a different state agency in Massachusetts.

Driscoll said that, circa 2005, public-information officers — herself included — began to meet and talk about where to take the concept of publishing law-enforcement news online.

“We put our heads together about leveraging social media for law enforcement,” she said of those early conversations, meetings that included officials from Milwaukee. “There was a switch in mentality where many of the departments started to realize that it would be very beneficial to start operating and running a media-relations office as if it was a public-safety news outlet.”

Other law-enforcement bloggers and public-information officers say that the Internet is newly empowering their points of view, but that not every step of the process is as simple as pressing publish.

For example, police-department blogging could open law-enforcement agencies to less than rosy community relations. Imagine a circumstance in which  a reader — or even a reporter who’s story “got it wrong” according to a department — sues the police for impugning their personal or professional reputation?

“Departments started to realize that it would be very beneficial to start operating and running a media-relations office as if it was a public-safety news outlet.”

“There are many angles that are considered before a department makes a choice to publicly expose themselves the way that Milwaukee has,” said Brian Cain, a sergeant with the PD in Holly Springs, Georgia (and a self-styled “new-mediapreneur” and online publisher of resources for police officers).

Cain spoke about the process of vetting and approving information before it goes online, in general, as he suggests it happens in police departments: “It is carefully scanned for legal compliance so as to not open up the department for a civil suit. It is not a choice that is made in the heat of the moment.”

Driscoll echoed that sentiment, and she also said that while addressing facts and accurate details are one thing, blogged reactions to the press on other levels is an issue that officers shouldn’t approach lightly.

“There is a delicate balance that you have to achieve,” Driscoll said. “For example, if a crime stat is inaccurate, it’s appropriate to correct that. But there’s a difference between correcting a factual inaccuracy, and responding to a piece that maybe you just don’t like. There’s a difference between the two.”

Next steps at ‘The Source’

As for Stanmeyer, he said the Milwaukee Police Department’s next challenge is to align the public face of the department more closely with its vanguard blog.

“The police department still has an old website that fits the city template,” Stanmeyer said. “A challenge as we move forward, in 2013, is to merge into one website. Maintaining two websites is difficult, and also I think it confuses the public. We need to drive it all to one consistent format that people can go to.”

These words from one of the greatest innovators in American history reflect the simple fact that people are essentially incapable of telling you what they really want.

We base our decisions on past experience, familiarity, social concerns and other factors that combine to make us horribly irrational, and unable to think creatively.

Unfortunately, most research done by ad agency planners fails to address these limitations, and the results can provide the wrong information about a campaign or creative execution. Why do we conduct market research on juice commercials while sitting around a conference table in a halogen-lit room with two-way mirrors? Commercials are viewed at home, usually while you’re in the kitchen getting a snack, impatiently waiting for your programming to return. Plus, they’re played back-to-back with five other spots.

The same questions can be asked of car research that doesn’t occur while driving down the highway, or shampoo research that takes place miles from one’s shower. The problem with most research is that we often ask people to tell us things they simply can’t—our feeble human brains are actually unable to process things like, well, our future feelings.

Our biggest challenge as content marketers is to think about the environment in which people share information.

Or, as Dan Ariely’s description of irrational decision-making in The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, explains: “We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe.”

For content marketers this is a particularly important lesson.

Content marketing allows for the organic spread of information, shedding “interruption-based” advertising and encouraging sharing in existing peer/professional groups. So our biggest challenge as content marketers is to think about the environment in which people share information, not whether they think the shade of purple you’ve used makes them feel melancholy. In other words: context.

Now, we’re not advocating stepping into the shower with your research subjects to ask them questions about their shampoo, so let’s get specific here.

Imagine you’re charged with using content marketing to encourage people to take better care of their teeth. Most people, when asked point-blank about their brushing habits, will lie about how frequently they brush. Our moms and dentists have conditioned us to think that the correct answer is two, but nobody’s perfect, and on average it’s probably more like 1.5.

The goal is … to engage in a conversation that builds context.

A research subject might reason with himself and decide that several times a week he forgets to brush, but that most of the time he brushes twice a day, and so the answer is two. If people can’t even give a straight answer about the discrete number of times they load up their brush with paste, imagine trying to ask them what would make them share information about good oral care. Oof. That’d go nowhere fast.

To get around our built-in irrationality, and the inaccuracy of our research subjects, it’d be more useful to understand the drivers that influence people to care about their teeth—vanity, peer pressure, gingivitis, preventative care. Once you know the emotional impetus, then you can get tactical. When do people brush? What makes them skip brushing? Do they look at their smart phones while brushing? What kinds of personal rewards do they set up for themselves when they follow a tooth brushing routine?

The goal is not to ask one-off questions, but to engage in a conversation that builds context, and from which you can make inferences about behavior. Once you’ve painted a complete picture of brushing behavior, motivations, strategies, and social implications, you can design content campaigns around this information.

Maybe it’s an iPhone app that uses gamification to make brushing fun, or a knowledge sharing effort that exposes facts about the preventative power of flossing. Whatever the execution is, if you’ve done research that provides context the result is much more likely to reflect how people actually think and behave, instead of how they act in a vacuum. With that in mind, research should be used to inform strategy rather than to falsely judge solutions. What this means for market research:

1. Research is best used to understand problems from a human perspective, shedding light on what stimuli they react to. It provides context, not answers.
2. Research is elemental to the upfront development process – as an input into strategy rather than a ‘judge’ of what ‘works.’
3. Research methodology should be creative. The best learning comes from ‘real’ situations in home ethnographies, friendship groups – rather than false environments of strangers meeting for the first time in front of a two-way mirror.
4. It is not the role of research to art direct or write executions. This results in communications that are acceptable to all and meaningful to none. If every respondent ‘likes’ an idea they have probably seen it before.

So the next time you’re tasked with a research problem, think about what life would be like if we were all on horseback right now.

Images courtesy of Emily Baron/flickr, David Fant/flickr

After 16 Years of Agency Life, Copywriter’s First Solo Ad Is an Instant Hit (AdWeek)
After 16 years of ad agency life, copywriter Matt Bull took a leap of faith in himself to pursue the path of self-employment.

His first gig? A billboard for a local restaurant that’s been up-voted to the front page of Reddit. Here’s a look into the creepy, counter-intuitive, and hilarious style.

Tumblr Adds Sponsored Posts, and the Grumbles Begin (GigaOM)
Two weeks have passed since Yahoo bought Tumblr. The biggest change so far? Sponsored posts.

Users aren’t happy and some feel that Yahoo has ruined the community. Will attitudes change, and will the Tumblr community warm up to the new look and feel? Only time will tell — here is how the online advertising giant is navigating a tough sell.

When It Comes to Slaying Asian-American Stereotypes, Ads Lead the Way (AdAge)
Online ads are power tools — not just for selling, but for social good as well. Writer Bill Imada claims the Asian American community has made its biggest strides in advertising.

In the past few years, more Asian Americans have been cast in commercials and mainstream roles. The consequence? Dozens of opportunities for Asian American actors. Can advertising help accelerate growth for other communities as well?

35 Guilty Pleasure Twitter Accounts (Mashable)
This one made the list because it’s Friday. You’re welcome.

It’s Not Always About Ads, as Data Researchers Use Facebook Likes to Gauge Public Health (GigaOM)
Conversations around Facebook likes and online advertising are inseparable. New studies, however, are linking the social media giant to more prevalent social causes — public health.

A new study suggests that Facebook likes and interest details can help map the presence of obesity in the United States. Could a new, data-driven business model be on the horizon?

New York Times Issues Soft Earnings (PaidContent)
The New York Times released their recent earnings support on Thursday, revealing less-than-stellar progress. In general, advertising declined by around 11% — 13% in digital and 4% in print.

The silver lining? An innovative growth strategy with lower-priced products to attract a wider customer base. At the heart of this initiative will be two core components: people and content.

The Politics of Publisher Redesigns (Digiday)
What happens when internal teams simply can’t get it together? Terrible designs, that’s what.

The heart of the problem is politics. Design and user experience fall through the cracks when publisher teams jam through priorities without fully understanding the bigger picture. And organizations that are getting it right? These are publishers who understand the value of prioritizing multi-screen displays.

2013 Media All-Stars Call for Submissions (AdWeek)
Know an amazing media planner, digital strategist, or marketer? Give them a nomination for the 2013 Media All-Stars program by AdWeek.

This year’s deadine is May 1, so there’s still plenty of time. Give credit where credit is definitely due.

At the core of the PEW report are the ramifications of the decline in news coverage. Newspaper newsrooms have 30% fewer reporters than in 2000, which corresponds with 31% of US adults that have stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting.

This presents an opportunity for brand publishers. PEW writes:

“While traditional newsrooms have shrunk, however, there are other new players producing content that could advance citizens’ knowledge about public issues.”

“They are covering subject areas that would have once been covered more regularly and deeply by beat reporters at traditional news outlets—areas such as health, science and education.”

PEW cites how some brands are seeing their publishing efforts carried by major news outlets. Kaiser Health News, produced by The Kaiser Health Foundation, sees its articles carried by news outlets like The Washington Post with direct attribution. Similarly, insidescience.org, created by the American Institute of Physics, has stories on NBC.com, with a lead-in identifying the source.

The report also notes our very own Contently for its innovative efforts to connect journalists with brand publishers to create original content:

“In circumventing the media altogether, one company, Contently, connects thousands of journalists, many of them ex-print reporters, with commercials brands to help them produce their own content, including brand-oriented magazines.”

Brand publishing has perhaps seen its quickest and most impactful growth in sponsored ads and posts, as publishers have begun to integrate brand-produced content alongside its regular content, delivering what publishers and marketers call “native advertising.”

The report states:

“Though it remains small in dollars, the category’s growth rate is second only to that of video. Sponsorship ads rose 38.9%, to $1.56 billion; that followed a jump of 56.1% in 2011.”

“Traditional publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes, as well as digital publications BuzzFeed and Gawker, have relied on native ads to quickly build digital ad revenues, and their use is expected to spread. According to tech website PandoDaily, major publishers including Hearst, Time and Condé Nast are investing in formats to run native ads, as are many newspapers.”

PEW warns that this “development, however, runs the risk of confusing readers about the difference between advertising and news content,” such as when The Atlantic ran a misguided advertorial for The Church of Scientology. Though most publishers do a good job of marking sponsored content, this confusion and the appropriateness of sponsored content needs to be something that publishers and brand marketers need to constantly consider.

Perhaps most encouraging for brand publishers is how much word-of-mouth—primarily via social media—drives news consumption:

“For nearly three-quarters of adults (72%), the most common way to get news from friends and family is by having someone talk to them—either in person or over the phone.”

“And among that group, close to two-thirds (63%) somewhat or very often seek out a news story about that event or issue. Social networking is now a part of this process as well: 15% of U.S. adults get most of their news from friends and family this way, and the vast majority of them (77%) follow links to full news stories. Among 18-to-29 year-olds, the percentage that primarily relies on social media for this kind of news already reaches nearly one-quarter.”

This is undoubtedly good news for brand publishers. If you create great, reported content that your audience wants to share, their friends and family will consume that content, and your audience will grow. Simultaneously, there’s less great reporting to compete with as traditional news outlets’ resources dwindle.

The entire report is a must-read, as there are many more implications to consider, such as how the decline of local TV news could create video news opportunities for the right brands. It paints a troubling picture for traditional news outlets, but within that landscape, brand publishers have to recognize the opportunity to rise up, scale the publishing cliff, and secure their own piece of the news kingdom.

It’s the reason why you can get an Ivy League education no matter where you’re living in the world. It’s the reason why you’re a more informed consumer and why you’ll meet your soulmate.

Just wait and see — it’s these trends that are going to have the biggest impact on the world:

Crowdfunding

Platforms like Kickstarter and Indigogo exist to help business leaders, artists, and technical visionaries raise money outside of traditional venture capital models.

The concept is simple — if you you need money to get a project up and running and can promise some degree of value, your prospective customers and supporters will give you money to build it.

These platforms have value beyond, money however. Each of these businesses are unique and bring with them a highly personalized brand story. Skeptical?

Just look at Roominate — a dollhouse that is designed to help young girls develop an interest in science, math, and tech. At the heart of a project is a personal story of three Stanford graduate students who want to see more women in their field.

Crowdfunding stories and experience make entrepreneurship accessible, real, and personable to anyone and everyone. It’s a content-driven concept that is, in the midst of a national unemployment high, empowering individuals to pursue their dreams and rock at what they do best.

Big Data

Big data is about numbers, right? And massive engineering ventures? And crazy statistical concepts like autoregressive models?

It’s not numbers that are driving big data. It’s storytelling.

Some might argue that a wall exists between content people and math people. They’re two worlds that rarely intersect — but the concept of big data is forcing them to collide.

That’s because the idea behind big data transcends pure numbers. At the heart of big data is a sociological, political, business, or technical story. It’s content that connects data pieces and models into an overarching big picture.

It’s not numbers that are driving big data. It’s storytelling — with content-driven narratives as the heart and soul.

Education

It’s an understatement to say that the United States education system has some serious problems. School districts can barely afford teachers, and high school graduates can barely afford colleges.

Top MBA and law programs can cost well into the six figures, and young adults are disgruntled because they simply can’t afford to advance. And if they do take the plunge, they’re saddled with three decades of debt.

It’s more than a micro-level problem. Expensive education hurts everyone by limiting access to knowledge — it hurts everybody.

Digital content is transforming education at all levels, from elementary school  through higher ed. For instance, Python for Kids is a downloadable book designed to teach programming concepts to kids aged 10 and older.

Platforms like Udacity and Coursera are connecting learners with free classes taught by reputable instructors and universities.

And some people doubt content can change the world?

Image courtesy of ToastyKen/flickr

Personalizing Health Online: Where Can You Go for Medical Information that Matches You? (GigaOm)

Americans rely on the Internet to self-direct their healthcare. The problem with online resources, however, is that there’s a huge disconnect with personalized experiences.

The human body is a complex thing, and your unique health history is a key influencer in the validity of what you’re researching online. That’s why HealthTap has created a robust content tagging framework. The moral of the story? Personalization is highly actionable.

Facebook Adds Weather Forecasts to Events and Public Places to Show Useful Info Where People Need It (Techcrunch)
As smart people say, it’s the simple decisions that oftentimes yield the most profound results.

To this end, Facebook has taken yet another step in positioning itself as a powerful event management tool. Its secret weapon? Integration of weather data.

8 Ways to Execute Your Brand’s Story Online (Mashable)
Amazing stories are essential to virtually all multimedia platforms. Think about it — what do your favorite books, blog posts, movies, and television shoes have in common? Compelling narratives.

To tell an amazing story, you need to rise above the status quo, provide a back-stage tour, and explore a range of interactive solutions. Most importantly, it’s integral that you tell your story from where it counts — your heart.

Meet the Most Suspect Publishers on the Web (Ad Week)
Ghost sites. We all know them. They’re the sites with unusually high traffic numbers but surprisingly low human presence.

And yet, advertisers pay a lot of money for exposure through these channels. What’s up with that?

A wildly disproportionate number — 87% — of US sign-ups to Pinterest have been from women, according to data from comScore. If you contrast that with the struggling Google Plus — a service that SocialStatistics.com says has a 70% male user base — it would be easy to come to the conclusion that Google Plus is from Mars and Pinterest is from Venus.

It’s a conclusion that most analysts endorse. “In a sentence: It is Pinterest’s lack of linearity that puts off men and attracts some women,” says Lief Schneider, social media guru and director of Schneider Bartosch Communications.

Others have suggested that Pinterest’s visual strength lies behind its appeal to women.

“Pinterest is a beautiful site that lets imagery sing,” says James Howard, community manager at The Sense Network, “It deserves to be populated with gorgeous content, and women — in general — are superior seekers and curators of the finer things in life.”

These are easy conclusions to make when you look at Google Plus, a service where the ratio of men to women is flipped. Though boasting 100 million active users, the male skew could easily be attributed to the service’s tech-heavy focus. Many of its biggest hitters are technology bloggers or Silicon Valley CEOs, using the platform for top-down communication.

The differences are stereotypically male vs. female. Text vs image, technology vs art, information vs. conversation. But maybe that picture is too simple.

Female persuasion

Statistics from the UK suggest that Pinterest isn’t quite the babe magnet it seems to be across the pond. In the United Kingdom, the Pinterest user base is more balanced between the sexes, with a slight bias towards male users. Data from Visua.ly shows that 56% of British Pinterest users are blokes.

Digging deeper, it seems that Pinterest’s stateside sex appeal isn’t completely organic either. Part of its gender success came from clever marketing.

“(Pinterest) offered a batch of invites to the audience of Etsy (itself around 70% female) and cherry picked influential females to populate their boards,” says James Howard, “As a result boards were created around female interests skewing the appeal of the site towards women.”

In the UK, there was no such campaign. News of Pinterest’s existence crept out by virtual word-of-mouth, on blogs, Twitter and tech news sites. So, the UK stats show a more traditional spread of technology’s early adopters.

The gender that spends

Why did Pinterest so aggressively target women in the US? Perhaps they saw a growing market that online services neglect at their peril.

“Women — in general — are superior seekers and curators of the finer things in life.”

It’s a cliché that women like to shop, but online statistics show that it has some foundation. Women spend on average 20% longer on retail sites than men. Facebook may drive more through-traffic to these sites, but Pinterest users spend more.

Pinterest actively wooed and won a generation of women to its take on social media with clean design and savvy marketing. They fought hard for the female dollar. When targeting women consumers with content, it’s worth bearing that in mind — and so is Pinterest.

Why the Washington Post is Smart to Try Sponsored Content (Paid Content)

Sponsored brand content is a strategy that faces plenty of scrutiny, but writer Mathew Ingram makes the argument that the tactic is actually pretty darn awesome. The Washington Post debuts its BrandConnect feature today.

Is writing necessarily evil or salesy because it comes from a brand? Not really. And in the midst of a struggling publishing industry, sponsored content opens doors for an additional revenue stream.

At the end of the day, sponsored content can fulfill the exact same goals as traditional journalism — to be useful, unbiased, and valuable to the end reader.

Tumblr Expects to Be Profitable This Year (All Things D)

You read that right — there’s money to be made in the business of social. According to writer Liz Gannes, the company expects a key revenue driver to be the addition of paid post promotion on its mobile apps.

Tumblr is the 50th most-use iPhone app in the United States. To actually become profitable, Tumblr would need a year-over-year gain of around 800 percent. Think they can do it?

Why Brands Need to Avoid the Hype Surrounding Content Marketing (The Guardian)

There’s no escaping the fact that content marketing rocks, but you need to treat it for what it is.

Content marketing is a tool for engaging consumers. What it is not is a band-aid for your company’s brand management problems. Steer clear of the bandwagon to develop a voice that’s truly authentic and unique to you.

Run by National Geographic reporter Dan Stone, Change Reaction, which was launched in November, covers how the world is changing in terms of transportation, food management, environmental sustainability, and agriculture. Change Reaction is sponsored by Volkswagen.

“A lot of it is what’s wrong with these issues,” Stone said. “It’s about what we can expect in the next few decades.”

Multiple articles per week are put up on the site. Some recent pieces include “Wind Turbines? Try a Wind Kite,” “A Motorcycle Car That Makes Commuting Easier,” and “Minimizing a Car’s Footprint.” Videos, made by producer Spencer Millsap, are posted often as well.

The name Change Reaction refers to the process by which one reaction sets off a following reaction. Stone says that the implication, for National Geographic’s site, is the need to point toward the future.

The sheer speed at which content can be posted on the web is only one of the reasons that Change Reaction was started. Stone says that the magazine also wanted to be in touch with the younger demographic that isn’t buying the monthly magazine. “We hope that with this idea we can reach people a lot more,” he said. ”If they don’t get magazines maybe they read blogs and we can reach them that way.”

One of the special projects that Stone created for the web site was a series of stories from a road trip in California. In late November, he drove around the state for two weeks, stopping at one to three places to report on every day through text and video. He wrote about a roadside ranch off California’s coastal Highway 1, a zero-waste stadium at University of California, Davis, a researcher in Davis who tries to find natural ways to keep pests from ruining fruits and vegetables, and the city of Fresno, which recycles 73 percent of its waste.

“The idea is to make innovation technology and sustainability core themes of our coverage here,” Stone said. “[We] make them specifically for a web audience so we can be agile, quick, and move in new exploratory ways we don’t have in a monthly magazine.”

VW originally teamed up with National Geographic in the summer of 2012 for its Think Blue sustainability initiative.

According to Darryll Harrison of VW, projects like Change Reaction “help to introduce Think Blue to consumers that consider environmental initiatives as a key factor when purchasing a product. For consumers that weren’t aware of Volkswagen’s extraordinary commitment to the environment, this allows us to highlight our approach to driving progress and preserving the environment through sustainable production, advanced technologies and clean, fuel-efficient vehicles.”

Harrison said that National Geographic is the prefect ideal partner for the company because, like the magazine, it is trying to have a positive impact on its consumers lives as they travel the planet.

“For our owners, Volkswagen is an expression of who they are and how they move through life,” Harrison said. “National Geographic is a leader in empowering people to navigate the world addressing some of the planet’s most complex topics. Both brands are eager to improve the quality of the lives of its customers/readers through innovation, discovery and research.”