Now What - Part 1
This is where it gets exciting.
So what do we need to do to ride this wave?
Let’s start with our use cases that are not directly monetized: the support content, which is looking to improve someone’s engagement with something; and the sales and reputation content, which is looking to familiarize someone with a particular point of view. (Think printer FAQs and corporate communications sites, or the town website with pool hours and the site for the mayoral candidate.)
We all know that Algernon is disturbingly good at turning a single search into a sustained stream of information that’s adjacent to that search: ask YouTube for videos about fixing your keyboard, and you’ll have keyboards in your suggestions for months; click an ad in Instagram, I dare you.
Algernon’s incentives are directly aligned with those of the support and sales businesses. He’ll identify the audience quickly, and do the work to keep them engaged; our job is to make sure the content is there to be served up (pushed). The work is to make sure the content isn’t only on a web page optimized for Google’s indexing bots - we want it in multiple formats, multiple languages, with multiple personalities, to achieve relevancy to the broadest possible set of Algernons - and their scrolling subscribers.
If we combine the tenets of social media strategy with those of SEO, and mix in some of the tricks of your favorite influencer, we’re starting to describe how to produce the content that Algernon is looking for.
Your Social Media specialist is already experienced at parts of this: audience research, channel selection, brand consistency, platform optimization, and focused objectives are her stock in trade. If we combine these tenets of social media strategy with those of SEO ( keyword research, link building, analytics, metadata) and mix in some of the tricks of your favorite influencer (hook, trends, timing, brevity, collaboration, “authenticity,” call-to-action), we’re starting to describe how to produce the content that Algernon is looking for:
Embrace omnichannel presence: Develop content for various platforms and formats, ensuring consistency while tailoring to each channel's unique characteristics.
Data-driven personalization: Understand audience segments and create targeted content that resonates on a personal level.
Algorithmic alignment: Optimize content to work with, not against, platform algorithms. This means understanding and leveraging the mechanics of content discovery and engagement.
Agile content creation: Implement a flexible content strategy that can quickly adapt to trends, audience feedback, and algorithmic changes.
Authenticity and value: Balance promotional content with genuine, valuable information that builds trust and keeps audiences engaged long-term.
Cross-functional collaboration: Break down silos between SEO, social media, content creation, and data analysis disciplines.
Continuous learning and adaptation: Stay informed about emerging platforms, technologies, and user behaviors to remain relevant in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Before you go hide under a blanket, remember that we’re going to have some help meeting this challenge - and what’s more, we’ll be able to do even better than just keep up. Consider:
Your base content, translated and localized for hundreds of languages, regions, proclivities, and any number of other variables, near-instantaneously by an AI
Your now-globalized content rendered across multiple channels as appropriate to that channel, including video, audio, text, ads, polls - by an AI that’s learned your brand and knows what makes all those other Algernons tick
Your content is adapted in real time to context: the news, the weather, the stock market, the latest trends, regional superstitions.
Content affiliation, on a global basis, becomes an automated exchange (similar to ads).
Put another way: I write this article, hit “publish” in my CMS, and that article is not the final product - it’s the seed from which any number of permutations are grown: a video of a young woman talking about the topic to her friends in Hausa; an audio snippet in a news feed playing in the headphones of a commuter in Kyoto; a suggested topic for a news roundup by an influencer popular among car enthusiasts. Today, next week, next month, the content evolves and adapts, but the message or the information remains consistent. Mentions of Google as a search engine are replaced with appropriate mentions of Bing for people in Redmond, and the flippant comment about livable wages for workers is removed for an audience in Beijing.
The author of the article didn’t need to, couldn’t have, planned or coordinated this. But Algernon will have it covered.