If you’ve taken the time to dig into interactive marketing and social media, you’ve already been introduced to the phrase “content is king”. When it comes to engaging with your target audience, there are very few more effective approaches than to provide high quality, relevant, content to them at a reliable frequency. The thing is, great content only becomes great when its seen by an audience that values it – too often the siren song is publish, publish, publish – but if content isn’t great unless someone sees it and values it, what’s missing?
Here’s an example. Being a surgical broadcaster, I keep track of surgical video appearing on the web. I recently found a tweet that told me to check out a video of “Robotic Removal of Prostate Cancer”. The tweet came from the UCLA Health System, so I thought I was in for a treat. What I found was completely out of context.
I found a well produced video with limited viewership, on a communication medium so cluttered that more than 15 hours of video content is loaded each minute, surrounded by singing australian, french speaking prostate related video, and some prostate gag films (really?). A little exploration, I found they had a nice UCLA Health System channel, but by that time I would have been off chasing the dog related content suggested at the end of the video.
Exploring their YouTube channel, I found that they simply weren’t getting good viewership numbers. Twenty here, fifty there, but it was good content – really informational. Was it just bad luck – not yet “viral”?
It’s not luck, it’s context. It’s knowing where you expect to find your audience, and understanding what it is they’re expecting when they arrive. It’s understanding the nature of where you’re placing your content, and adapting your presentation to fit the culture of the site. It’s also knowing how your content will be presented in the site – what other content, or advertisements, will appear beside it. Can your content be found? If it is found, will it be seen in the context you need it to be seen?
The whole UCLA channel is well produced case study/PSA video – it would have been better placed on Vimeo, where the viewers are looking for well produced video, and they would have had a much nicer player to embed on their site. They could have tagged it Da Vinci Surgery, so all the videos surrounding it at least had a robotic surgery theme. Or rather than attempting to shape the context, they could have placed it in a branded channel like ORLive, where it would have been surrounded by surgical videos being watched by medical professionals and informed care seekers – which I believe was their ultimate target audience.
Context matters.
Context is king.
Bob,
I love the ‘Context is King’ line! That’s brilliant. I can certainly see how UCLA could have elevated their content by finding the right context in which to share it.
Are their any instances in which you think destinations like YouTube or BlipTV deliver the right kind of context for a medical professional?
Thanks Andrew,
For the medical professional, that’s a tough one. To engage your audience you need to go where they are. Part of context is making sure that you understand how your audience uses the communication channel you’re using. If I’m looking to get the attention of medical professionals, I don’t see them using YouTube or BlipTV as a regular part of their on-line professional activities. You might pick up a medical student here and there, but I don’t see those channels, even with a brand like UCLA, to be trusted enough to spend a significant amount of time searching for content.
That being said – I think UCLA was trying to reach informed care seekers, and communication channels like YouTube and BlipTV can be effective tools to get the content out in front of this audience. UCLA would likely see better results if they used shorter pieces on YouTube, or certainly shorter descriptions, that took the viewer back to their core site/communication channel. They probably could get good legs on their content at BlipTV as well, positioning and re-titling it as a series, then dropping a new “episode” every week. It’s a commitment, but one that pays off!
I’ll have more to say on context in the coming weeks.
Appreciate the feedback and the question!