As the Inter­net evolves it is becom­ing more about peo­ple con­nect­ing to peo­ple, and less about peo­ple con­nect­ing to web pages. How peo­ple share and engage with con­tent is an indi­ca­tion of con­text. Con­text gets estab­lished in many ways; rel­e­van­cy and author­i­ty over time are a big part of that equa­tion. Estab­lish­ing rel­e­van­cy and author­i­ty for a brand and its con­tent needs to hap­pen for online suc­cess, regard­less of the chan­nels in which you exe­cute a brand/communications strat­e­gy.

Google+, ulti­mate­ly a social net­work, has been a dif­fi­cult plat­form for brands to under­stand and man­age. This is large­ly because the impor­tance of Google+ has been unclear, and the future of Google+ is equal­ly unclear.

Part of Google’s invest­ment in Google+ had to do with Agen­tRank, a patent they filed for on August 8, 2005. “We know that great con­tent comes from great authors, and we’re look­ing close­ly at ways this markup could help us high­light authors and rank search results,” said Oth­ar Hans­son, past engi­neer­ing lead for the Google Author­ship Project.

Google’s efforts to map the social web with Google+ have proven less suc­cess­ful than they would have liked. Despite launch­ing with much fan­fare, Google+ has seen rel­a­tive­ly low con­sumer adop­tion, a lack of mar­ket­ing, and frankly a lack of a val­ue propo­si­tion dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing it from oth­er social plat­forms. Eric Enge, founder of Stone Tem­ple Con­sult­ing and co-author of “The Art of SEO”, recent­ly shared some insights into 10 key fac­tors that will deter­mine the future of Google+.

Whether Google+ lives or dies is ulti­mate­ly irrel­e­vant. This does­n’t mean I think Google+ is irrel­e­vant to brands. It’s a great plat­form to engage your audi­ence. But brand sto­ry­telling always comes first, channel/platform sec­ond.

What’s impor­tant to focus on is what Google+ has taught us about the impor­tance of hav­ing a brand strat­e­gy that lever­ages the pow­er of authors who have sub­ject-mat­ter exper­tise.

What Are Subject-Matter Experts?

Sub­ject mat­ter exper­tise, and the author­i­ty that it bestows on a writer, are the keys to the con­tent, search, and social cas­tle. Sub­ject-mat­ter experts are impor­tant to search engines because rel­e­vance and author­i­ty is fair­ly dif­fi­cult to game. Just like in real life you have to work hard to earn author­i­ty, and that author­i­ty isn’t trans­fer­able.

Sub­ject-mat­ter experts are impor­tant to con­sumers because they bring cred­i­bil­i­ty, inspi­ra­tion, insight, and a trust­ed view to top­ics con­sumers care about.

Brands, authors, and the audi­ences they engage are the holy trin­i­ty of brand engage­ment. Invest­ing in rela­tion­ship between a brand and their writ­ers is one of the most under-devel­oped of the rela­tion­ships in this mar­ket­ing tri­an­gle.

The User Journey: Searching For Dog Food

Imag­ine a con­sumer who is try­ing to choose a dog food. She goes to Google and search­es for “choos­ing organ­ic dog food”.

The first organ­ic search list­ing is “Choos­ing the Right Dog Food” at Cesarsway.com, Cesar Mil­lan’s web­site. Mil­lan fields a ques­tion from a vet­eri­nar­i­an on choos­ing the right dog food, which she finds help­ful and uses as guid­ance in mak­ing her deci­sion.

As a respect­ed train­er on “The Dog Whis­per­er” tele­vi­sion show, Mil­lan has estab­lished first and fore­most his love of ani­mals and his inten­tion of help­ing dog own­ers. This gate­way con­tent pro­vides the trust­ed guid­ance and answers she needs as a con­sumer.

Now, armed with the infor­ma­tion she needs to choose a dog food, she digs into oth­er dog-relat­ed top­ics – train­ing, exer­cise, and dis­ci­pline. She even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ers a com­mu­ni­ty for dog lovers just like her on Google+, which she joins.

Our exam­ple con­sumer is now part of a CesarsWay.com audi­ence. Mil­lan is a sub­ject mat­ter expert with whom she wants to engage.

The con­tent he shares on Google+ isn’t com­plete­ly new sto­ry­telling. He’s lever­ag­ing Google+ beau­ti­ful­ly as a plat­form to share his brand sto­ry.

If Google+ went away, Mil­lan’s brand, sto­ry­telling and audi­ence would­n’t go away. To be fair, it does­n’t look like Google+ is going any­where soon, but if it does, that should­n’t change the brand sto­ry.

Brands need sto­ry­tellers and authors to help them tell great sto­ries. Good con­tent writ­ers are like good archi­tects, you can’t build a sol­id foun­da­tion with­out them.

What Is High-Quality Content?

Though you may no longer need to invest time in the Google+ author hub and con­fig­u­ra­tion details of imple­ment­ing Google Author­ship Markup on your web­site or blog, it’s still incred­i­bly impor­tant to invest in writers/brand sto­ry­tellers. Google’s desire to iden­ti­fy high-qual­i­ty sources of orig­i­nal, expert con­tent has­n’t changed. Those indi­ca­tors still include:

• How often is the con­tent shared?
• How quick­ly is your con­tent shared?
• Who shared your con­tent?
• Did those who shared your con­tent have exper­tise in that top­ic?
• Do the same peo­ple always share your con­tent?
• How many com­ments did your con­tent gen­er­ate?
• Who com­ment­ed on your con­tent?
• Did those who com­ment­ed on your con­tent have exper­tise in that top­ic?
• Were the com­ments on your con­tent of high qual­i­ty?
• Were the com­ments on your con­tent of a pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment?
• How often is your con­tent endorsed? (i.e. – retweet­ed, Liked, +1’d)

Why Brands Should Nurture Brand Storytellers

When social plat­forms became impor­tant to the mar­ket­ing mix, many brands rebelled and choose not to par­tic­i­pate in social because they couldn’t con­trol the con­ver­sa­tion. Years lat­er, the major­i­ty of brands have a strong, planned social pres­ence because they under­stand the val­ue of cus­tomer engage­ment and social plat­forms.

Brands that invest in sub­ject-mat­ter experts will sim­i­lar­ly reap the ben­e­fits that author­i­ty has on cus­tomer-cen­tric engage­ment.

Some brands are a bit skit­tish when it comes to pro­mot­ing indi­vid­ual authors for their brand. Most of these con­cerns come from fears the author will inevitably leave the com­pa­ny and the brand will be tar­nished in some way when this hap­pens. So they decide not to par­tic­i­pate.

Brands that embrace sub­ject-mat­ter exper­tise, from employ­ees and cus­tomers alike, are gain­ing an advan­tage. They under­stand that, even if an author­i­ta­tive author leaves the com­pa­ny, the sig­nal cre­at­ed for the brand lives on, even in that authors’ absence.

Besides empow­er­ing brand ambas­sadors or brand evan­ge­lists to share brand­ed mes­sag­ing, brands can also use tools to help find authors and influ­encers in a spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry or top­ic.

Google’s ini­tial algo­rithm focus of “which sites link to your site” has evolved to include “who wrote it, who links to it, and who shared it” to define how con­tent should rank.

Under­stand­ing influ­en­tial author data will con­tin­ue to be impor­tant to organ­ic search efforts. Aban­don­ment of Google+ does­n’t mean it isn’t impor­tant to lever­age the pow­er of tech­nol­o­gy to build trust between strangers.

Rachel Bots­man, shar­ing inno­va­tor and founder of The Col­lab­o­ra­tive Labs calls this the “rep­u­ta­tion econ­o­my” and sees author­i­ty online as its own cur­ren­cy. As the algo­rithm con­tin­ues to become more sophis­ti­cat­ed, our dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties will con­tin­ue to forge and become rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our real world iden­ti­ties.

Takeaways

Brands that posi­tion sto­ry­tellers and the con­tent they cre­ate as a mis­sion crit­i­cal busi­ness asset will con­tin­ue to build trust­ing and engaged audi­ences. It’s your brand sto­ry, not any sin­gle chan­nel or plat­form, that will help you cap­ture audi­ence and mar­ket share.

Google+ as we know it may go away or evolve, but don’t aban­don expert sub­ject-mat­ter authors as a con­tent imper­a­tive. Invest in the writer, not just the writ­ing. That means the authors you hire as well as writ­ers who are your brand advo­cates.

The accu­ra­cy and authen­tic­i­ty of your sto­ry, and your authors, are both imper­a­tive to brand sto­ry­telling.