philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Conference Report: Signal LA – The Content Marketing Conversation

John Battelle brought his first Signal event, Signal LA – The Content Marketing Conversation, to the SLS Beverly Hills Hotel on February 8^th.

Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Strong opened the event with a discussion of the just-announced acquisition of The Huffington Post by AOL.  Tim noted that “content” has been AOL’s strategy since he arrived 20 months ago.  Arianna and her partners agreed to the deal because of the corporate culture match.  Huffington Post contains 26 topic areas, and only 15% of their traffic is from political discussions.  So it interfingers well with AOL’s topic areas.  Mr. Strong said that AOL was attracted to the strong brand of Huffington Post, its extensive social network and reach, and Arrianna’s reputation.

Demand Media’s Chief Revenue Officer, Joanne Bradford, noted that LiveStrong, a site that helps people monitor their diet and caloric intake, gets more traffic than FourSquare.

Twitter founder Buzz Stone said that businesses are now using the service as a hybrid between customer service and marketing.  During the recent snow blizzards in the northeast US, Virgin Airlines responded to twitter comments as a key part of their effort to contact and rebook stranded passengers.

When asked what has surprised him most, Buzz’s answer was how quickly companies have flipped from calling twitter “stupid” to calling it “valuable.”  It is breaking the veil of secrecy that shrouds the content production process, he said.  Twitter is the way for the one quarter of the planet who have access to mobile phones to experience the social aspects of digital communication, since Twitter was originally designed for SMS messaging.

Scott Moore, Execuive Producer at MSN, listed MSN’s five primary focus areas; news, sports, finance, entertainment, and lifestyle.  The Huffington Post is the largest distributor of MSN video outside of MSN itself.  MSN’s top priority is driving traffic to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.  Bing has risen from handling 7% to 12% of all search traffic in 18 months.  MSN curates Bing’s returns for some of the top query topics.

On the start-up front, serial entrepreneur Keith Richman of Break Media commented that in Silicon Valley people will give you start-up money “just because,” whereas in Los Angeles people want to see a business plan and a defensible path to revenue.