The Mario Blog

05.17.2016—3am    Post #2430
Why keeping brand visible on links is important.

We are not surprised at this data: 43 percent of social media users don’t know where the stories they read originally appeared. More reason for designers to work hard at putting the brand on all those links.

We know that social media is the central square where the audience congregates to get its news.  A sort of giant press kiosk in cyberspace, right?

The difference is that when we approach the corner kiosk to get a newspaper or magazine—-for those who still do that, anyway—we come prepared to ask for a brand that we are accustomed to purchasing and reading.  In the grand central square that is Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, we run into articles, not publications, and if the headline appeals to us, we click and we read.

According to Digital Content Next,  a trade association for premium publishers, most of the time (57 percent), people are aware of which title they’re clicking on when they’re reading on social media but that leaves a  fully 43 percent who aren’t aware of the publisher behind the story they’re reading.

Publishers and editors are well aware of this phenomenon and some are trying to find solutions.

I show you here mere prototypes (not yet implemented) for Norway's Aftenposten and Holland's De Telegraaf.  In each case we have worked with the teams to design these “cards” which would appear in social media, and which include the publications' brand in a visible way to help the situation.

Again, these are experiments at this point, but I thought I would share them with my blog readers so that you get a sense of where the brand presence thinking is going.

 

Where brand is there to remind us where article came from!

Switzerland: Neue Zurcher Zeitung

Germany: Franfurter Allegemeine Zeitung

The New York times

USA Today

USA: Good Morning America

Some who should remind us of their brand more directly

UAE: Gulf News, Dubai

The Washington Post

Quartz.com: surprised that Quartz does not promote its brand more directly on photo accompanying link.

TheMarioBlog post #2430

The Mario Blog