Categories
Content Sharing

Thinking Beyond Semantic Search

Publishers are quickly adopting semantic markup, yet often get less value from it than they could. They don’t focus on how audiences can directly access and use their semantically-described content. Instead, publishers rely on search engines to boost their engagement with audiences. But there are limits to what content, and how much content, search engines will present to audiences.  Publishers should leverage their investment in semantic markup.  Semantically-described content can increase the precision and flexibility of content delivery.  To realize the full benefits of semantic markup, publishers need APIs and apps that can deliver more content, directly to their audiences, to help individuals explore content that’s intriguing and relevant.

The Value of Schema.org Markup

Semantic search is a buzzy topic now. With the encouragement of Google, SEO consultants promote marking up content with Schema.org so that Google can learn what the content is. A number of SEO consultants suggest that brands can use their markup to land a coveted spot in Google’s knowledge graph, and show up in Google’s answer box. There are good reasons to adopt Schema.org markup.  It may or may not boost traffic to your web pages.  It may or may not boost your brand’s visibility in search.  But it will help audiences get the information they need more quickly.  And every brand needs to be viewed as helpful, and not as creating barriers to access to information customers need.

But much of the story about semantic search is incomplete and potentially misleading. Only a few lucky organizations will manage to get their content in Google’s answer box. Google has multiple reasons to crawl content that is marked up semantically. Besides offering search results, Google is building its own knowledge database it will use for its own applications, now and in the future.  By adding semantic annotation to their content that Google robots then crawl, publishers provide Google a crowd-sourced body of structured knowledge that Google can use for purposes that may be unrelated to search results. Semantic search’s role as a fact-collection mechanism is analogous to Google’s natural-language machine learning it developed through their massive book-scanning program several years ago.

Publishers rely on Google for search visibility, and effectively grant Google permission to crawl their content unless they indicate no-robots. Publishers provide Google with raw material in a format that’s useful to Google, but they can fail to ask how that format is useful to them as publishers. As with most SEO, publishers are being told to focus on what Google wants and needs. Unless one pays close attention to what is happening with developments with Schema.org, one will get the impression that the only reason to create this metadata is to please Google.  Google is so dominant that it seems as if it is entirely Google’s show.  Phil Archer, data activity lead at the W3C, has said: “Google is the killer app of the semantic web.”  Marking up content in Schema.org clearly benefits Google, but it often doesn’t help publishers nearly as much as it could.

Schema.org provides schemas “to markup HTML pages in ways recognized by major search providers, and that can also be used for structured data interoperability (e.g. in JSON).” According to its FAQs, its purpose is “to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema supported by major search engines.”  Schema.org is first and foremost about serving the needs of search engines, though it does provide the possibility for data interoperability as well.  I want to focus on the issue of data interoperability, especially as it relates to audiences, because it is a widely neglected dimension.

Accessing Linked Data

Semantic search markup (Schema.org), linked data repositories such as GeoNames, and open content such as Wikipedia-sourced datasets of facts (DBpedia) all use a common, non-proprietary data model (RDF).  It is natural to view search engine markup as another step in the growth in the openness of the web, since more content is now described more explicitly.  Openness is a wonderful attribute: if data is not open, that implies it is being wasted, or worse, hoarded.  The goal is to publish your content as machine-intelligible data that is publicly accessible.  Because it’s on the web in a standardized format, anyone can access it, so it seems open.  But the formal guidelines that define the technological openness of open data are based more on standards-compliance by publishers than approachability by content consumers.  They are written from an engineering perspective. There is no notion of an audience in the concept of linked data. The concept presumes that the people who need the data have the technical means to access and use it.  But the reality is that much content that is considered linked data is effectively closed to the majority of people who need it, the audience for whom it was created. To access the data, they must rely on either the publisher, or a third party like Google, to give them a slice of what they seek.  So far, it’s almost entirely Google or Bing who have been making the data audience-accessible.  And they do so selectively.

Let’s look at a description of the Empire State Building in New York.  This linked data might be interesting to combine with other linked data concerning other tall buildings.  Perhaps school children will want to explore different aspects of tall buildings.  But clearly, school children won’t be able to do much with the markup themselves.

json-ld for empire state building
Schema.org description of Empire State Building in JSON-LD, via JSON-LD.org

If one searches Google for information on tall buildings, they will provide an answer that draws on semantic markup.  But while this is a nice feature, it falls short of providing the full range of information that might be of interest, and it does not allow users to explore the information the way they might wish.  One can click on items in the carousel for more details, but the interaction is based on drilling-down to more specific information, or requiring a new search query, rather than providing a contextually dynamic aggregation of information.  For example, if the student wants to find out which architect is responsible for the most tall buildings in the world, Google doesn’t offer a good way to get to that information iteratively.  If the student asks Google “which country has the most tall buildings?” she is simply given a list of search results, which includes a Wikipedia page where the information is readily available.

Relying on Google to interpret the underlying semantic markup means that the user is limited to the specific presentation that Google chooses to offer at a given time.  This dependency on Google’s choices seems far from the ideals promised by the vision of linked open data.

screenshot of google search results
Screenshot of Google search for tallest buildings

Google and Bing have invested considerable effort in making semantic search a reality: communication campaigns to encourage implementation of semantic markup, and technical resources to consume this markup to offer their customers a better search experience.  They crawl and index every word on every page, and perform an impressive range of transformations of that information to understand and use it.  But the process that the search engines use to extract meaning from content is not something that ordinary content consumers can do, and in many ways is more complicated that it needs to be.  One gets a sense of how developer-driven that semantic search markup is by looking at the fluctuating formats used by Schema.org.  There are three different markup languages (microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD) with significantly different ways of characterizing the data.  Google’s robots are sophisticated enough to be able to interpret any of the types of markup.  But people not working for a search engine firm need to rely on something like Apache Any23, a Java library, to extract semantic content marked up in different formats.

Screenshot of Apache Any23
Screenshot of Apache Any23

Linked Data is Content that needs a User Interface

How does an ordinary person link to content described with Schema.org markup? Tim Berners-Lee famously described linked data as “browseable data.” How can we browse all this great stuff that’s out there, that’s been finally annotated so that we get the exact bits we want?  Audiences should have many avenues to retrieving content so that they can use it in the context where they need it. They need a user interface to the linked data.  We need to build this missing user interface.  For this to happen, there need to be helpful APIs, and easy-to-use consumer applications.

APIs

The goal of APIs is to find other people to promote the use of your content.  Ideally, they will use your content in ways you might not even have considered, and therefore be adding value to the content by expanding its range of potential use.

APIs play a growing role in the distribution of content.  But they often aren’t truly open in the sense they offer a wide range of options to data consumers.  APIs thus far seem to play a limited role in enabling the use of content annotated with  schema.org markup.

Getting data from an API can be a chore, even for quantitatively sophisticated people who are used to thinking about variables.  AJ Hirst, an open data advocate who teaches at the Open University, says: “For me, a stereotypical data user might be someone who typically wants to be able to quickly and easily get just the data they want from the API into a data representation that is native to the environment they are working in, and that they are familiar with working with.”

API frictions are numerous: people need to figure out what data is available, what it means, and how they can use it.  Hirst advocates more user-friendly discovery resources. “If there isn’t a discovery tool they can use from the tool they’re using or environment they’re working in, then finding data from service X turns into another chore that takes them out of their analysis context.”  His view: “APIs for users – not programmers. That’s what I want from an API.”

The other challenge is that query-possibilities for semantic content go beyond the basic functions commonly used in APIs.

Jeremiah Lee, an API designer at Fitbit, has thought about how to encourage API providers and users to think more broadly about what content is available, and how it might be used.  He notes: “REST is a great starting point for basic CRUD operations, but it doesn’t adequately explain how to work with collections, relational data, operations that don’t map to basic HTTP verbs, or data extracted from basic resources (such as stats). Hypermedia proponents argue that linked resources best enable discoverability, just as one might browse several linked articles on Wikipedia to learn about a subject. While doing so may help explain resource relationships after enough clicking, it’s not the best way to communicate concepts.”

For Linked Data, a new API standard is under development called hydra that aims to address some of the technical limitations of standard APIs that Lee mentions.  But the human challenges remain, and the richer the functionality offered by an API, the more important it is that the API be self-describing.

Fitbit’s API, while not a semantic web application, does illustrate some novel properties that could be used for semantic web APIs, including a more visually rich presentation with more detailed descriptions and suggestions available via tooltips.  These aid the API user, who may have various goals and levels of knowledge relating to the content.

Screenshot of Fitbit API
Screenshot of Fitbit API

Consumer apps

The tools available to ordinary content users to add semantic descriptions have become more plentiful and easier to use.  Ordinary web writers can use Google’s data highlighter to indicate what content elements are about.  Several popular CMS platforms have plug-ins that allow content creators to fill-in forms to describe the content on the page.  These kinds of tools hide the markup from the user, and have been helpful in spurring adoption of semantic markup.

While the creation of semantic content has become popularized, there has not been equivalent progress in developing user-friendly tools that allow audiences to retrieve and explore semantic content. Paige Morgan, an historian who is developing a semantic data set of economic information, notes: “Unfortunately, structuring your data and getting it into a triplestore is only part of the challenge. To query it (which is really the point of working with RDF, and which you need to do in order to make sure that your data structure works), you need to know SPARQL — but SPARQL will return a page of URIs (uniform resource identifiers — which are often in the form of HTML addresses). To get data out of your triplestore in a more user-friendly and readable format, you need to write a script in something like Python or Ruby.  And that still isn’t any sort of graphical user interface for users who aren’t especially tech-savvy.”

We lack consumer-oriented applications that allow people to access and recombine linked data.  There is no user interface for individuals to link themselves to the linked data.  The missing UI reflects a legacy of seeing linked data as being entirely about making content machine-readable.  According to legacy thinking, if people needed to directly interact with the data, they could download it to a spreadsheet.  The term “data” appeals to developers who are comfortable thinking about content structured as databases, but it doesn’t suggest application to things that are mentioned in narrative content.  Most content described by Schema.org is textual content, not numbers, which is what most non-IT people consider as data.  And text exists to be read by people.  But the jargon we are stuck with to discuss semantic content means we emphasize the machine/data side of the equation, rather than the audience/content side of it.

Linked data in reality are linked facts, facts that people can find useful in a variety of situations.  Google Now is ready to use your linked data and tell your customers when they should leave the house.  Google has identified the contextual value to consumers of linked data.  Perhaps your brand should also use linked data in conversations with your customers.  To do this, you need to create consumer facing apps that leverage linked data to empower your customers.

Wolfram Alpha is a well-known consumer app to explore data on general topics that has been collected from various sources.  They characterize their mission, quite appealingly, as “democratizing data.” The app is user friendly, offering query suggestions to help users understand what kinds of information can be retrieved, and refine their queries.  Their solution is not open, however.  According to Wolfram’s Luc Barthelet, “Wolfram|Alpha is not searching the Semantic Web per se. It takes search queries and maps them to an exact semantic understanding of the query, which is then processed against its curated knowledge base.” While more versatile than Google search in the range and detail of information retrieved, it is still a gatekeeper, where individuals are dependent on the information collection decisions of a single company.  Wolfram lacks an open-standards, linked-data foundation, though it does suggest how a consumer-focused application might use of semantic data.

The task of developing an app is more manageable when the app is focused on a specific domain.  The New York Times and other news organizations have been working with linked data for several years to enhance the flexibility of the information they offer.  In 2010 the Times created an “alumni in the news” app that let people track mentions of people according to what university they attended, where the educational information was sourced from DBpedia.

New York Times Linked Data app for alumni in the news.  It relied in part on linked data from Freebase, a Google product that Google is retiring.
New York Times Linked Data app for alumni in the news. It relied in part on linked data from Freebase, a Google product that Google is retiring that will be superseded by Wikidata.

A recent example of a consumer app that is using linked data is a sports-oriented social network called YourSports.  The core metadata of the app is built in JSON-LD, and the app creator is even proposing extensions to Schema.org to describe sports relationships.  This kind of app hides the details of the metadata from the users, and enables them to explore data dimensions as suits their interests.  I don’t have direct experience of this app, but it appears to aggregate and integrate sports-related factual content from different sources.  In doing so, it enhances value for users and content producers.

Screenshot of Yoursports
Screenshot of Yoursports

Opening up content, realizing content value

If your organization is investing in semantic search markup, you should be asking: How else can we leverage this?  Are you using the markup to expose your content in your APIs so other publishers can utilize the content?  Are you considering how to empower potential readers of your content to explore what you have available?  Consumer brands have an opportunity to offer linked data to potential customers through an app that could result in lead generation.  For example, a travel brand could use linked data relating to destinations to encourage trip planning, and eventual booking of transportation, accommodation, and events.  Or an event producer might seed some of its own content to global partners by creating an API experience that leverages the semantic descriptions.

The pace of adoption for aspects of semantic web has been remarkable. But it is easy to overlook what is missing.  A position paper for Schema.org says “Schema.org is designed for extremely mainstream, mass­-market adoption.”  But to consider the mass-market only as publishers acting in their role as customers of search engines is too limiting.  The real mainstream, mass-market is the audience that is consuming the content. These people may not even have used a search engine to reach your content.

Audiences need ways to explore semantically-defined factual content as they please.  It is nice that one can find bits of content through Google, but it would be better if one didn’t have to rely solely only on Google to explore such content.  Yes, Google search is often effective, but search results aren’t really browseable.  Search isn’t designed for browsing: it’s designed to locate specific, known items of information.  Semantic search provides a solution to the issue of too much information: it narrows the pool of results.  Google in particular is geared to offering instant answers, rather than sustaining an engaging content experience.

Linked data is larger than semantic search.  Linked data is designed to discover connections, to see themes worth exploring. Linked data allows brands to juxtapose different kinds of information together that might share a common location or timing, for example. Individuals first need to understand what questions they might be interested in before they are ready for answers to those questions. They start with goals that are hard to define in a search query.  Linked data provides a mechanism to help people explore content that relates to these goals.

While Google knows a lot about many things relating to a person, and people in general, it doesn’t specialize in any one area.  The best brands understand how their customers think about their products and services, and have unique insights into the motivations of people with respect to a specific facet of their lives.  Brands that enable people to interact with linked data, and allow them to make connections and explore possibilities, can provide prospective customers something they can’t get from Google.

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Sharing

How to create impact with shared content

The benefits of having your content shared are obvious.  You get “earned media.”  You increase your reach, and gain credibility by having trusted people distribute your message.  “Your customers become the channel,” to use the words of Forrester. But content that is shared is not necessarily content that is heard – at least by the people who you want to hear it.  If you focus too hard on increasing the number of times your content is shared, you loose focus on whether your content is having a real impact. Many publishers unfortunately focus on measuring sharing activity rather than sharing value.

The vanity of engineering followership

Publishers want to know how to get more people to use their content to further their business goals.  It’s an understandable target, but can produce a distorted approach.  The publisher starts to worry about behavior of audiences they don’t control, instead of worrying about what they do control: the qualities of their content.  The preoccupation with how audiences are conforming to the publisher’s plans can end up being counterproductive.

The publisher centric perspective will begin looking for “influencers” who can spread their message through their content. Publishers hope that if the content can get to the right influencers, those influencers can spread the content and it will be viewed by many others, and consequently have a huge impact. Grand expectations about the power of sharing are colored by concepts such as social contagion, the mechanism behind viral marketing.  Fans of viral marketing also point to research from behavioral economists and cognitive scientists suggesting that people respond unconsciously to various priming, and as a result can be “nudged” into certain actions.

As a practical matter, the mechanics of influence are messy. One forthcoming book on propagation in social networks concludes: “the existence of influence and its effectiveness for applications such as viral marketing depend on the datasets.” Duncan Watts of Microsoft Research notes in his book Everything is Obvious that influence is difficult to orchestrate, especially when confronted with a multitude of factors, each can intervene to shape people’s choices in differing ways. This is not to say people can’t be nudged; rather, the dynamics of influence are involved, and need to be approached with care.  Don’t expect nudging will necessarily provide magical results.

Not only is nudging complex, it can be a distraction. People are often most readily influenceable about things that matter little to them personally. Trying to sway the behavior of your audience fosters worries about follower numbers and fan loyalty – rather than whether audiences are getting value from what you provide them.

Never confuse your agenda with the audience’s

While the publisher may be worried about how to get audiences to do things with their content, the audience could care less about the goals of the brand. The audience thinks: how can I use this content for my personal needs? People have their own purposes for engaging with content that may differ from the publisher’s. Publisher goals can even infringe on audience needs when the brand has become too pushy in its messaging.

Brands often have vague goals for their content, and a vague sense of whom they are reaching and what impact that achieves. They often measure the wrong things as a result. The most obvious mistake is measuring loyalty and sharing rates, without respect to audience segment. A brand that has a core group of loyal fans that regularly shares their content sounds impressive. But who those fans are, and what business value results from the content shared is what matters. Brands need to dig deeper into what’s happening with their content to see what impact they are realizing from content that is shared.

One of the largest groups to share content routinely are middle age women on Facebook.  One could optimize content so that it gets shared on Facebook by this group, and increase the volume of shares. But one should first ask if this segment, defined in such broad terms, is the right segment you want to reach.  Does your audience you want to reach spend much time on Facebook?  Do they share on Facebook the kind of content you create?  What groups would you like to reach that aren’t active on Facebook?

The figments of trivial content

Light entertainment is some of the most shared content, things like cat videos and brand-themed games.  The mundane cat video shows several facets of the sharing process.  Some people will refuse to view a cat video.  Of those who do, some will view it, but wouldn’t think about sharing it, concerned they might look silly.  Others are happy to share the video with their friends, some of whom are annoyed and ignore it, others of whom are known to like the genre.  It is possible that the loyal fans watching the video can’t remember which brand was behind the video, while the annoyed recipients of shared video are very aware who’s behind it.  Attention can be surprisingly acute when annoyed.  A brand that simply measures the volume of shares, and their click through rates is in trouble because it doesn’t understand who is using its content or why they are doing so.

Social chit chat is the most common driver for sharing content.  Social media discussion is rarely momentous, and most content shared through social media is not momentous either. This characterization is not a judgement of people’s qualities, but a reflection of how humans communicate.  Linguists have long recognized that conversation performs a social function that is more important than its information function.  Social media is akin to spoken conversation.  Much content that is shared is a pretext for social interaction unrelated to the content itself.

Content acts a social lubricant.  It gives us something to talk about, when we feel like talking.  We comment on what we like or dislike, or agree with or disagree with.  These reactions are often superficial and predictable.  They involve little investment of effort, and result in little influence.  Much of the activity relating to sharing content creates no lasting impact at all.   Social chit chat doesn’t help brands much, because it neither changes people’s perception of the brand, nor spurs them to take action.

A lot of content that is shared is about vicarious experiences, imagining what you might do if you were the famous person in the news, or dreaming about places you might buy or visit.  Many people are happy to offer quick opinions to each other on topics with which they have no direct experience, relying on impressions and beliefs they acquired somewhere in the past. People never rethink their knowledge and perceptions when they engage with content superficially. They merely re-live old attitudes.

Trivial content doesn’t create an impact for a brand. Content needs to be meaningful for audiences for them to gain value from it.

Attracting brand awareness through sharing

Businesses should encourage the sharing of content to build favorable brand awareness with audiences they want to reach. Brands are successful when they know that people care about the content itself, and are not simply using the content as a way to size up their friend’s personality.  When the essence of the content has value for the audience, it reflects back positively on the brand.

Your content might be shared by people who are existing customers, have a strong interest in becoming a customer, or only have a casual interest in the brand.  Those who find your content may share the content with others who are not customers, who may or may not be looking to buy the services you offer, or even be familiar with your brand.  Whether or not either of the parties are actively in the market, if they match the general characteristics of the audience segments the brand is trying to reach, they can be valuable to engage with, since they may eventually want something from the brand, or be in a position to influence a peer who will want something.  We cannot predict what the buying status will be, so it is important to keep the focus of the content on being helpful for the viewer and to limit any hard sell.

Some marketers might prefer to have the content encourage people to take a specific action, instead of offering a brand focus.  Including a call-to-action can be appropriate for content when customers are in a buying mode, but is less appropriate for audiences who are getting information through the unsolicited referrals from peers.  In general, people will balk at spontaneously sharing content that seems sales-oriented unless the friend has already expressed interest in the product.  It feels pushy for one friend to recommend another buy something out of the blue.

Most content that gets shared will not have a call to action, or at most, a very weak one, such as signing up for more information.  Content that appears to be direct marketing will be shared little. People are less inclined to recommend things that have strings attached, that mixes friendship with commerce and feels like multilevel marketing. People don’t like feeling they are being nudged to do something, or feeling they are being taken advantage of. The sharing party has a reputation to maintain, of caring about the friend’s needs, not just their own pet interests.  While there is some variation in these social norms, people have a strong need to feel they are in control, rather than answering some else’s agenda.

Audiences need to care about your content

Even interesting, useful content that gets shared may not have an impact if the receiving party doesn’t look at it closely.  For the content to have impact, the receiving party needs to care about the content.

People face many choices when encountering content.  These choices indicate how much they care about the content.  Sharing content involves two basic steps, each with a series of associated decisions:

  1. The choice by the sharing party to share the content
  2. The choice by the receiving party to view the shared content

Someone encountering content will decide whether to ignore it, glance at it, or read it thoroughly.  From the brand’s perspective, it is vital that the content is read throughly, since it indicates stronger engagement that can shift perceptions.  After reading the content, the reader decides if she is done with the content or not.  She can save the content to use again later, or she may choose to share the content with friends or family.  It doesn’t matter if the content is shared through social media like Facebook, or simply email, as long as the intended recipients can access it easily.  The sharing party may also choose to add a note explaining their interest in the content.

The receiving party can ignore the content, glance at it, or read it thoroughly.  He may choose to respond to the sender with comments, developing a discussion around the content.  He may even refer the content to someone else.

Content creates an impact the deeper people engage with it, when they absorb the content and not just skim it.  As Nielsen notes, most pages are viewed for only 10 or 20 seconds. People get little value from most content they encounter. Audiences can be tough to please, but brands have a huge opportunity to distinguish themselves from the prevalence of ignorable content.

Content creates an impact when the receiving party has their perceptions in some way touched by the content they receive from friends.  If they discuss it, they likely thinking about how to apply it to their lives.

Content sharing also carries more impact when it seems like a personal recommendation, rather than an FYI.  The more the sharing seems like a recommendation, the more trustworthy it appears, and the more value it carries.  Some signals that the content shared is a recommendation is that it is unusual in some way (the sharing party doesn’t routinely share this type of content) or the sharing party offers personal comments, or engages in post-sharing discussion.

Design content that’s inter-personal

Some content invites discussion. To get a discussion started, create content that is intrinsically discussable: content that’s inter-personal. Consider creating content that provides for different perspectives, or include a discussion guide with questions.

Think about what people want to discuss with their peers.  People tend to have ties with others who are like them (a phenomenon known as homophily) and therefore are likely to share content with people who have similar interests, and similar ways of looking at things.  These people may not feel they belong to a formal “community” centered on a topical interest, but they will generally have common friends within their social circle who provide a ready forum for discussion.

People most often share news stories that are emotional, especially when stories are happy (creating attraction) and interesting (creating surprise), according to research by Sonya Song.  Brands can leverage these insights by developing aspirational content that defies expectations – content with hope.  Sharing is more common for stories that present problems and their resolution, compared with strictly factual stories.

The most important goal is to inspire trust in your content.  The more trustful that people perceive your content, the more they will share it with friends.  With cynicism pervasive, trust is precious.  When people discover something they didn’t know previously and are willing to share that with people who are like themselves, they show they trust the information.

How to improve content impact

There is no simple formula to create meaningful content that is valued and recommended.  Be wary of trying reliable gimmicks to drive up click through rates.  There are many techniques to create teasing headlines promising exclusive information (“6 free benefits you can’t afford to miss.”)  Such headlines tease without informing.  These tactics can get content noticed, by sensationalizing and over promising, but they undermine the content experience, and damage the brand as well.  As audiences get saturated with such subtly manipulative headlines, credibility is even more essential.

The best way to improve the impact of your content is to look closely at the patterns of usage in your content.  The best indicator that content is valued is when readers have spent an above average time on pages for a certain type of content, a longer than average dwell time.

Examine available analytic data to determine what kinds of content are being shared routinely, and what kinds of content are not being shared often.  This data can come from your web analytics, social media analytics, and data from referring sources and link sharing services.

For types of content not being shared, look for content with large numbers of page views.  Determine that these pages are being actually read rather than merely “viewed”: that they have a dwell time appropriate for the size and complexity of the content.  For content that is being used but not being shared, try to determine everything you can about the audiences using the content, and their social media usage, to see if there are opportunities to position the content in a way to encourage easier sharing.  Also do a content audit to see if the content is lacks the qualities of meaning that people expect when they share and talk about content.  Perhaps the content is too dry and factual, is unremarkable, and does not generate discussion.

For content that you believe is valuable but is not being shared, try to uncover why people don’t share it.  Confirm that people feel the content is as valuable as you do, and probe into why they share content in general, and how they feel about sharing your content.

For the kinds of content you offer that does routinely get shared, explore any difference in audience segments as to how frequently they share content, or the specific types of content they choose to share.  Compare these patterns with your goals for the audiences you seek to reach.  Notice if you are missing any key audiences, or if a lower priority audience segment accounts for a large portion of the sharing.  Examine any significant variations in the types of content different audience segments choose to share.  If a certain type of content is not popular with a segment that shares other types of content, make sure that difference is warranted.  Social network analysis can sometimes reveal other interests of audience segments.   Sometimes you can address those interests in your content where you find they relate to your brand.

The more you understand why segments choose to share content, the more you will be able to optimize your content.  By comparing what is happening with your goals for each audience segment, you can work on improving the performance of your content.

Audience satisfaction can be inferred through analytics, but it is useful to get other kinds of feedback.  Try small experiments to test hypotheses.  Talk directly with customers about your content, their needs, and how they relate to content.  Also, try to test how well your content creates unaided recall.  Try to work to improve the memorability of your content, just as TV advertisers do.

By knowing more about why content performs as it does, you can act more strategically, focusing on high value priorities.  Over time, you will improve and get a better sense of how likely it will be that a certain kind of content will be shared by a certain audience segment.

Content sharing plays a crucial role in content strategy.  It helps brands build relationships with customers and prospective customers.  At the heart of content sharing is how content is valued, and discussed.  Improving content sharing requires a sustained effort.   Customers will notice that they find your content is valuable and want to share it, and the perception of your brand will benefit as that happens.

— Michael Andrews