LIVE BLOGGING - enhanced customisation is key to a killer content strategy

An impactful content strategy is at the core of the success of any organisation, and not only from the angle of fan engagement.

Indeed, it’s expected that content marketing will generate up to $300 billion revenue by the end of 2019. Telling stories, especially in sports, has rapidly become a critical part of building a brand. A cohesive and engaging content strategy moves across a number of touchpoints and needs to be accessible to consumers via different digital outputs. In essence, you need to give your fans what they want and be where they are. Today’s expectations for a rich and thorough fan experience are ever-growing. And a fast-paced evolution — both from a technological point of view and the “content making” layer — is clearly needed.

Deltatre’s range of solutions includes Liveblogging, a powerful tool that facilitates fan engagement in an easy way. The platform is “editor-first”, meaning that content creators have the power to control every single stage of their content workflows, from idea inception to publication, all from the same place. Not only are they able to create engaging pieces when on the move from an intuitive tool, but also they will now have the opportunity to enrich that experience including elements from external sources too.

The third update for Liveblogging in 2019 includes several new features and improvements. Here’s a summary.

#1. Customise the fan experience

Have you ever thought of a content platform that lets you promote pieces created from an external source, straight into a liveblog stream? The new release of Liveblogging enables this simple workflow with a single click on the back office. Publishing or embedding text, images, even video or sports data on the post is now just a couple of clicks away.

Content can now be organized into tabs, and searched for using new, easy-to-use filtering options, to help editors easily find what they're looking for.

Enabling advanced features, such as search and filters, is now simplified and every single aspect of the user workflow is automatically managed by the product. This means that integrators can choose the feature set they want to support, and focus on writing the code that’s needed to retrieve the data to be shown. Data sources can be easily configured to automatically refresh the content. This way, users will always access data that is up-to-date.

Finally, the third update of Liveblogging for 2019 introduces the possibility to create a customer user experience within the back office for users around unique data sources. What does this mean practically? Projects are now enabled to deliver a custom-fit integration with data, which — in simple words — means flexibility.

#2. Promote content from Forge and publish from social media in one click

A brand new built-in data source now fully integrates Liveblogging with Forge. Editors are now able to publish content previously created within Forge directly to Liveblogging. We are talking about stories, albums, even single items such as photos or other kinds of assets everything can be promoted on the stream within Liveblogging in a couple of clicks only.

What about social content? We got you covered there too! Similarly to what already happens with Forge (read here about its latest update), posts taken from social channels can now be embedded into the stream in an easy and direct way. Tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, as well as YouTube videos, are only a few examples of the content that can easily be shared on the stream, by simply copying and pasting their URL on the back office. Sports organizations have been boosting their digital presence via social media in the last few years. And importantly, the explosion of video content on social media has considerably moved the needle, as fluid fans want to access all the information in the same space. This is what we call a “one-stop-shop”.

#3. Enhanced content editing and media management

Speed, quantity, quality - the three attributes of any successful sports company’s storytelling strategy. Never before has it been more important to produce a lot of high-quality content in as close to real-time as possible. But with this pressure to keep fans in the know comes a housekeeping issue - how do you keep a growing library of premium content organised?

Thankfully, editors will now feel more comfortable when working with large amounts of posts or content banks to manage. Liveblogging’s third update for 2019 will allow them to enrich their content with links and headings that can be managed via a rich-text dedicated editor. Also, a smarter system of pagination on the back office enables content creators to work smoothly on the blog, still maintaining the reactive UI and reducing the load times on the browser, even with a large number of posts lined up for publication.

On a final note, this version of the platform introduces a built-in media source, which allows editors to upload photos seamlessly from the back office, selecting media form their local folders and uploading them on Cloudinary with a few clicks only.

To wrap it up, the fourth release for Liveblogging - the final update for 2019 - is due by the end of the year. Another chance to focus on the power of storytelling, enhanced by Deltatre’s solutions.