Next class  Communications 112  Assignment #1  Worth: 5%  Length: Approx. 1page  Format:12 point font; double-spaced; 1" margins; justification left Draft due: Wednesday 10/08 (2 copies, typed and printed)  Remember, your draft should be what you would otherwise normally hand in as your final submission. In addition, if you do not come to this class with a complete draft as described above, you will automatically lose 5% off of your grade on the assignment. Summary 1  Final submission due: Wednesday October 15th  Summarise the following article:  "Content Snacking—and What You Can Do About It" by Angelo Fernando, 2011Content snacking—and what you can do about it How do you reach audiences when the primary interface for the content you create will be smartphones, iPads and e-book readers? what's that? Tl;dr is forum-speak for long discussion threads where members (also known as "Tilders" or "TLDRers") warn others that the content is long and takes too much time to read. A H Then I first \ / \ I encountered \ / \ / the term cony y tent snacking (before Twitter came along), I was slightly aghast. A content snack seemed to capture the very thing we communicators sometimes rail against—and use. It is the sound bite that stands in for an informationdepleted story on the evening news, the elevator pitch, one's religious or political belief reduced to a bumper sticker. I was appalled that there was now a way of describing our shift away from long-form content. Today, the more abbreviated description tl;dr explains why our appetite for snackable content may make audiences substitute it for more wholesome content. Tl;dr stands for "too long; don't read." It's the kind of tag or commentary that is posted in an online forum or a social network when someone throws out a URL to the group with a caveat that it's going to be wordy. As a communicator who needs to write about (or produce a podcast on) complex issues that employees need to be aware of, how do you address the tl;dr factor? I recently spoke to an editor of several news sites who described it using a different metaphor: he calls it the "showerhead" model of content. There's this huge fire hose of information—the Internet—that we need to feed through different plumbing fixtures that end up in a showerhead. The end user gets to adjust the stream of information to fit the need at that moment, be it a powerful jet, a softer spray or a drip. Let's say you are in marketing communication and you have a potential audience of 8 million people. To reach them in the old-media world, you would divide your communication efforts among radio, television, print and outdoor. Perhaps radio and outdoor would let you provide the short-form content that led to longer content in print, while television was a "reminder" medium. Today, with a myriad of plumbing fixtures online, you mix and match short and long forms of content. Short-form print could lead to long-form content online (as in a statement on the back of a business card directing the recipient to a white-paper download) or vice versa (as in a link on a blog posted on Digg, leading to a magazine subscription). On the other hand, if half of that atidience was ready to hop from smartphone to MP3 player in a single part of the day, you could lose your audience if they weren't paying attention to the right showerhead at the right time, so to speak. And yet .some communicators are quite excited about this! Donna Papacosta takes an interesting view of content snacking (she calls it media snacking). "Asking whether media snacking is a good thing is like asking whether the Justin Bieber phenomenon is a good thing. It doesn't matter what we think. It's here anyway!" she says. In other words, let's not fight it! 8 Communication Worid • January-February 2011 www.iabc,com/cw- • [ •• • communique What's the critical information? Papacosta, a Toronto-based podcaster who also works with internal and external communication, recognizes that those who are snacking on media "are looking for quick hits of information or entertainment." If those people comprise your core audience, she says, "you have to decide whether you want to cater to their needs by providing snacksized content, whether it's text, audio or video." So how do you as a content creator reach audiences when the primary interface for the content you create will be smartphones, iPads and e-book readers? To Mike McClary, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based marketing communication consultant whose work includes producing white papers and Web content, the discipline of creating content for smaller and smaller screens is liberating. It means "thinking more strategically about content and asking, 'What's the critical information I'm looking to share?'" he explains. "Then developing content that tells a strong enough story to stand on its own, but also linking to content that adds depth and new dimensions to the material." rhere are three great pointers here: hone in on the critical part of the message, build a story (a timeless recipe t J if there ever was one!) and connect that "snack" to other complementary snacks. Steve Rubel, the director of insights for Edelman Digital, asked in a column in Advertising Age whether marketers can support these micro-doses "Asking whether media snaci