Information Will Find Me

As the way that we find information becomes increasingly driven by social influence, it’s interesting to look at where this trend goes in the longer term. The logical extension of this trend is that the consumers of information – our prospective buyers – will expect that the information they should be interested in will find them, rather than them finding information. Much as in the consumer world, songs, books, and movies are recommended to us based on collaborative filtering techniques, information in the business world may soon find us.

A combination of our own unique social graph, and that social graph’s interests and reading history, may soon make the dominant trend of information discovery one of passive recommendation, rather than active discovery (such as via search). As each individual’s interest areas, business role, and social influence graph becomes more and more known by search engines and content portals, the information being presented will cater itself more deeply to what is likely to be of interest.

Analytics across extremely broad populations and vast amounts of data on what was actually clicked or viewed will allow this process to become startlingly precise and highly accurate, further increasing its effectiveness, adoption, and relevance to marketers.

The question for marketers, of course, is how to have relevant content discovered by appropriately interested buyers in this way. The two key points are relevance and interest. As marketers, we need to focus on creating interesting content that is of relevance to each type of buyer we are likely to encounter. This content, whether it is eBooks, webinars, live events, or interesting data, can then be introduced to the discussion through well targeted nurture marketing approaches.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target.

When your information is found, and deemed interesting by an influencer population, it will find its way to a much broader population. Vice versa, if it is not found, or not deemed interesting, it will not find its way to a broader population.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target. The more relevant, interesting, and targeted the content is, the more likely each potential influencer is to read, recommend, or share it, which then guides whether audiences beyond your own will have that content recommended to them based on their unique interests and social graph.