Why Keeping Brand Visible on Links is Important.

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.