How To Be Relevant

It's important for a brand to understand their new role as a Publisher. It's important for a brand to understand that nothing happens unless they are interesting. It's also important for a brand to understand that none of that matters unless they are relevant.

A lot of people confuse "being relevant" with simply following a "trend" or "fad." You can quibble over the semantics of that last sentence, but think about American Idol and what Simon Cowell constantly attempts to reinforce to the young, aspiring singers in the early days of the competition (and no, I too can't believe that I'm using an American Idol reference here). Cowell constantly lets these artists know when they are (and when they're not) being relevant in terms of their age, their song selection and the general zeitgeist of the world. It's a great question for a brand to constantly question and prod...

Are we, truly, relevant to our consumers and the industry we serve?

When you think about some of the best Creative Directors in advertising, you can see one common thread amongst their varying looks, style and approaches. For the most part, the creative folks who are at the top of their game are either culturally relevant or are directly tied in to the many various components of our society that inspire them to be relevant. Relevancy is such a complex concept for most brands because they do tend to confuse what it means to be relevant versus getting caught up in trends and fads.

Being relevant is (and can be) many different things to many different people and industries.

We are at a unique moment in time when Social Media enables and empowers everyone to publish their thoughts to the world. What makes it even more unique is that a lot of the focus (for many people and brands) is in using these channels to help them reach a bigger and broader audience. Prior to all of this, we had traditional media and a very fixed/finite amount of companies publishing content for the masses. Now, we have this conundrum where we have to become better human editors to sift through the masses of content (for more on this, please read: Mass Media Or Mass Content - What's Worse?). Who comes out on top? Which type of content wins?

It's not those that are publishers, and it's not those that are interesting. The ones that come out on top are the ones that are relevant.

How does one become relevant? Ahhh... that is the secret sauce (the mystery... the little black box). It's some parts imagination, some parts curiosity, some parts hubris, some parts creativity, some parts execution, and some parts insights. Those that are able to find some magical (and personal) concoction of those parts are, typically, those who do become relevant. Awesome timing doesn't hurt either.

Think about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, etc... Who do you follow? Who can't you live without? It's always those who are relevant

Build Your Brand a Social Content Ladder in 5 Steps

April 6th, 2010
Written By: Jay Baer

Sure, social media takes a lot of time, but probably not as much time as you think.

Too many companies and organizations are reinventing the content wheel for every social outpost they maintain. A better approach is to create a content ecosystem that allows you to repurpose and cascade your best information.

Instead of a series of self-contained initiatives, build yourself a content ladder.

Here are 5 steps to get there:

1. Understand Taxonomy

If you want a new pair of glasses, the Yellow Pages is a frustrating neighborhood. Look under “G” for “glasses.” Not found. Look under “E” for “eye glasses.” Nope. Only when you look under “O” for “optometrists” do you find what you need. It’s an example of an industry with poor understanding of taxonomy – the words and phrases used to describe products and services.

Taxonomy is incredibly important in social media because it’s the most direct link between the worlds of social and search marketing. Remember, your most important customer is Google, and your content ladder needs to maximize your chances for search success.

When creating and promoting social content, include specific, relevant keywords and search phrases wherever possible. (This is especially important now that Google and Bing are incorporating social content into real-time search results).

Find keywords and search phrases to include in these four places:

Google Analytics (or whatever Web site analytics program you’re using)

Look at your keywords report to find phrases that are driving traffic to your site. I recommend using a mixture of your Top 25 phrases and some that are highly relevant to your business, but perhaps aren’t sending as much traffic as you’d like at present.

Social Mention (or a paid social media listening package like Radian6, if you have one)

Go to www.socialmention.com and search for your company or product name (in quotes), and set the pull-down to “all.” You’ll then see a search results page that shows a comprehensive list of places you’ve been mentioned on the social Web.

On the left hand side, you’ll see a keywords chart that lists common terms associated with your name in social media. Consider adding some of these to your list if they differ from your analytics results.

Twitter Lists

How your company or product are referred to in consumer-created Twitter lists can yield important taxonomy insights.

Go to your Twitter account, and click on “listed” next to your followers count, and see how the lists that include your Twitter account are named. Consider including some of these phrases to your master keyword list.

Incorporate your phrases into your social content wherever possible, but only when relevant. Nobody appreciates keyword spam on the social Web.

2. Seek Content Inspiration

Creating successful social media content isn’t just status updates. Take your top keywords (including your company name, product name, etc.) and search for them on Google, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and SocialMention.

What shows up in these search results? How much photo and video content appears? Content from your competitors? From fans? You’ll be amazed at how many content-creation ideas this simple exercise can generate.

3. Understand Your Frequency Schema

The key to a content ladder is organizing your rungs. Your scenario may of course vary, but for illustration purposes let’s assume you have a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, blog, and email newsletter.

To create an efficient ladder, you must understand the comparative publishing schedules that you typically employ for each of these outposts. Ordered from most frequent publication to least, let’s assume that your program looks like this:

• Twitter (5x/day)
• Facebook (2x/day)
• Blog (3x/week)
• Email (1x/week)

Create your own integrated frequency schedule to better understand how your outposts interrelate.

4. Test & Track
Create a piece of content (remember to include your key phrases), and post it to the first rung in the ladder (Twitter, in this case) Use a tracking system (I prefer bit.ly) to determine how popular that specific piece of content was with your audience.

Remember however, that many factors influence popularity at the individual content piece level. Don’t make assumptions – test them. Vary time of day, day of week, phrasing, link placement, and other options, and thoroughly document your results.

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella has some excellent research on social content best practices.

5. Tweak and Repurpose
The content pieces that are most successful on the first rung of your ladder should be appropriately tweaked and redeployed on the second rung of your ladder (Facebook).

Test and track content success on Facebook using bit.ly (or number of likes and comments), and add the most effective content pieces to the next rung on the ladder (blog). Note that as you move down the ladder, your repurposing will be more complex – a blog post requires substantially more content than a Facebook update in most cases.

If a piece of content is successful on your blog (measured by visits as determined by Google Analytics, perhaps), add it to the next rung – your email newsletter.

By understanding how your various social outposts can work together at the content level, you can develop meaningful efficiencies. Also, because a sprinkling of the content included in the lower rungs of your ladder has already proven successful on higher rungs, the relevancy and popularity of your content should increase for most fans/readers/subscribers.

Of course, this content ladder approach assumes that you do not have the exact same audience for each of your social outlets, and I believe that to be an entirely realistic assumption. You may have some overlap (especially with Facebook and Twitter), but consumption of status updates and consumption of blog posts and email newsletters are meaningfully different activities, and attract different groups of fans.

What do you think? Worth a try?