As GM at Wattpad, Candice Faktor knows a thing or two about the value of a well-told story.
We caught up with Faktor at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival to get her take on the emerging trends at the intersection of content, community, and communication.
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The rise of social networks and digital media has contributed to a flood of information and content from an ever-growing number of sources. How do you filter the content you consume?
Candice Faktor: It’s amazing that everybody now has the chance to share something or express themselves. But you’re right — it can be overwhelming in terms of, “How do I find what I should read?”
For me personally, I rely on a few different things. One, I have tastemakers or influencers whose opinions I really care about. Now, I don’t need to just read what they’re writing. I actually like to see what they are curating.
Writers have become curators in many ways. It’s very much like they’re influencers through my social network. I do like to see what rises to the top, and I can see that on Wattpad, which is a storytelling community of very passionate readers and writers, one of the largest communities in the world.
“Writers have become curators in many ways”
On Wattpad, we have something called the Hot List, which ranks the stories that are getting the most reads and are essentially trending on our platform. We show those lists to people so that they can get exposed to the stories that are rising to the top.
At Wattpad, we have algorithms that — if you’re reading a particular story —will suggest stories that are similar to that story.
The more you read on our platform, the more we start to understand what you like to read, and then we’ll suggest more stories, as well.
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The theme of the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival is to imagine 2024. How has the strategic role of marketing changed in your world, and where do you see it going by 2024?
Candice Faktor: If you fast-forward a bunch of years, marketing needs to be far more authentic. It has to be real stories. It has to be positioned by influencers. Then, it has to be really targeted.
“If you fast-forward a bunch of years, marketing needs to be far more authentic”
I don’t think this idea of mass marketing really works in this day and age because it’s so hard to reach masses and people’s attention spans are much smaller.
But it’s so much easier today to find the target you’re looking for and send a message to that target. The ways you’re doing that are through influencers, social, and targeting capabilities.
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How do you see the role of content creation changing over the next decade?
Candice Faktor: First off, Wattpad is primarily a writing community and a reading community. We’re very text-based, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have tons of multimedia, as well.
People will write stories with text but they will also add soundtracks and YouTube trailers and multimedia into their stories.
“The whole process of authorship is becoming a lot more fluid, transparent, and targeted”
Authorship is becoming more multimedia but it’s also becoming a lot more democratized. Over the next few years, your fans and your audience are actually going to play a role in the story creation itself.
By giving you feedback, by commenting on things, by you being able to actually see data on what’s working or not, the whole process of authorship is becoming a lot more fluid, transparent, and targeted.
Candice Factor spoke at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival alongside Kristian Hammond, Yoni Bloch, Jonathan Harris, and Charles Melcher in a session titled, “Everyone Has a Story: Mind-Blowing Technologies that Bring Narratives to Life.”
Watch clips from their panel discussion below:
If you liked this post, you might like Barry Feldman On The Opportunity Cost of Poorly-Created Content or An Insider’s Guide To Marketing On LinkedIn: Q&A With Jason Miller.
Interview has been edited for clarity.