COMMENTARY: At the Core ... Text is King (by Peter Paul Balestrieri, ASAP Sports President)

COMMENTARY: At the Core ... Text is King (by Peter Paul Balestrieri, ASAP Sports President)

President Peter Paul Balestrieri of CoSIDA corporate partner ASAP Sports writes how accurate, instant text is critical for everyone's media communication needs.



Click here to download PF of this article: At the Core ... Text is King, by Peter Paul Balestrieri, President ASAP Sports (pdf)

In an end-of-the-decade article posted at the Huffington Post, several communication tools were identified as now obsolete. Among them were: classified ads, encyclopedias, handwritten letters, fax machines, phone books and catalogs. Accurate as the article may be, all of these ‘dinosaurs’ live on in a different form because they have one common element: they all deliver information via text.

[See this article, entitled: 12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade ]

Far from obsolete, text has reinforced its position within new technology as the lynchpin for communication. ‘Text is king’ among all important information delivery systems: websites for news and entertainment, technical information and instruction, social networking, and of course mobile texting.

One big shift from the so-called ‘obsolete’ technologies is that text is delivered practically instantaneously once an author clicks ‘send’. Knowing how to produce accurate instant text is almost required to take full advantage of the many technological innovations now available.

Why is Text so Critical?

Media relations and information is, first, a text-based effort. Text is the most efficient way to get information quickly from one place to another. Text is digitally compact, so information is sent to any number of people - your media, your fans - in seconds. Text is flexible; it can be used informally to send a quick note or formally to convey detailed results of a game or event. Tell a teenager to call you and he or she will likely send you a text. Ask your mother for her famous pot roast recipe and she’ll send you an email.

Long or short, formal or informal, technical or entertaining, text is a primary way we communicate.

As media production sees growth in video and audio, often missed is the rapidly expanding use of text to deliver information quickly and accurately. At the core of ASAP Sports is our ability and knowledge of how to produce verbatim instant text from live events. We believe so much in the power and utility of text that we shout loudly ‘Text is No. 1’ and ‘Text is King’.

Few can produce text quickly and accurately enough to meet the demands and keep up with the rapid news cycle. ASAP Sports can help clients find the best way to expand their use of text and experience why instant text is so important.

Here are some very specific concepts to briefly explain why text is still king:

• Text is accessed in multiple layers of detail. You can decide how deep you wish to go based on interest, relevance and time.

• Text can be skimmed or scanned by the reader with very high comprehension level. Without reading an entire article, you can quickly find out which players on your team are going to the All-Star Game, even though you may want to read the entire article later for more detail.

• Audio and video are far more linear in nature. It may take you several minutes to get the information you want from watching a video clip; reading a transcript of the same interview will take seconds to get the same information and allows the user to multitask, shifting attention quickly back and forth from text as needed.

Distribution and Access is Speedy and Varied

• In digital form, text gets sent very quickly. With mobile devices, you can access and be done reading text long before a video has even begun to be uploaded.

• You can always casually read text at work, in noisy bars and restaurants, without anyone being disturbed or aware if your desire is to be discreet.

• Though mobile devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry can stream a video, text can be pulled up in a microsecond. If you have interest in the score of a game, you will go right to the text first and watch the video later.

• Beyond just the speed benefit, text can be fed to a user by way of Really Simple Syndication (RSS). With RSS, a user subscribes and gets delivered new information as it becomes available. So popular are RSS feeds, there are innovations occurring daily in delivery formats designed to expand the utility of real-time updates to subscribers.

And if you are interested in the on-the-edge technology, you can read more about RSSCloud and PubSubHubbub. Though they may seem technically complex, text is at their core.


Easy Access for Social Networks and Fans

• One of the aspects of providing accurate text is the emergence of the ‘fan as reporter’. Though it causes consternation in some camps, the reality is that with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, along with numerous sports blogs, the fan is integrated in to reporting stories.

• Making accurate information quickly available helps ensure that your message gets out while keeping errors to a minimum. Though it has been said that there is no such thing as ‘bad PR’, it often takes far more energy to correct errors than getting the right information out the first time. We are all familiar with reading first reports of a dramatic sports-related story which is incomplete and inaccurate. Sometimes the drama caused by these first reports requires more work to correct the information than staying ahead of the news cycle. There is no easy way to get the genie back in the bottle once incorrect information has hit the Internet.

• If you want to communicate well, you are best served placing a premium on accuracy as well as speed.


Text Points the Way to Find Content 

• Text is also important to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Though Google Universal Search has tried to elevate video, the actual search and search results are created by text. Even the video site YouTube relies heavily on ‘metadata’ or ‘meta tags’ in the form of text commentary to draw people to the video. For more information about metadata, read here: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata.

• Meta tags is where text can complement video greatly. The text transcript of a media conference instantly produces verbatim text, which can be used to tag any associated video. If someone has heard or read a quote from the media conference and uses a search engine, the video will be more easily found if the transcript with the quote is used to tag the video.

• Transcripts provide some of the most accurate meta tag data you can produce. And with instant text like FastScripts, other information like date, time, place, attendees, et cetera, are added to the transcript as a matter of record.


Easy as 1, 2, 3

• Finally, text is easy. It is so easy to cut and paste any piece of text information that we don’t even consider how amazing a process it really is. Pieces of a story can be ‘re-purposed’ and used over and over by many people far downstream from the source. It is another good reminder that accuracy is an important complement to speed.

• Even in different languages, text provides access to translation far quicker than audio or video. Social networks like Twitter, which is nearly exclusively text, and Facebook, which has a bigger mix of pictures, all have text at their core. And if you are working with instant text, the live quotes can be ‘tweeted’ and posted in near real-time.


Conclusion

Accurate and timely text is at the core of any information delivery process. Without fast, detailed and accurate text, your message will not get out. With accurate text, the quality and speed directly contributes to the effectiveness of your message.

NOTE:
ASAP Sports’ ongoing mission is to find innovative and effective ways to deliver text to you. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at 212.385.0297 or info@asapsports.com. Please visit our website as well: http://www.asapsports.com/ .