Prediction: Perceived Personalization

It was sometime between my first battle with an Uruk captain and overthrowing my first war chief that I realized something was special about Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. While the gameplay itself was fantastic, it was something in particular about the game's enemies that struck me. Each Uruk had a unique name, appearance, and set of weaknesses, strengths and fears. Each Uruk had its own personality that was only present in my game. If I fell in battle to one, he made sure to let me know the next time I saw him -- in alarmingly specific detail.

This is all thanks to Monolith's Nemesis System. What the Nemesis System has managed to accomplish is something extraordinary -- and noticeably lacking in many other of its AAA game brethren: perceived personalization. It wasn't a matter of going after these Uruks because the game said I had to -- I went after them because I wanted to. For sweet, sweet vengeance. It was no longer purely a game mechanic. It was personal. It was as if I KNEW the Uruk and he existed purely to antagonize me and make my life more difficult. All of this made it that much more satisfying by the time I was able to exact my revenge by parting his head with his shoulders.

So what does this all have to do with digital marketing? Everything.

You see, Monolith has stumbled onto something utterly brilliant. Mechanics that go a long way in making you, the consumer, feel like you're having a completely unique experience. At its core, the Nemesis system is essentially a bank of possible names, attributes, personalities and sound bytes that combine to form randomly created characters. But it's how it all comes together to form a cohesive experience that's where it really shines.

You could apply this same logic to attributes in product design, custom web experiences, or experiential events. If you feel like you're the first and/or only person to experience something, how much better of an experience is that compared to a one-size-fits-all approach? By creating something truly unique, you're creating social currency and empowering your consumers to speak on your behalf.

But why perceived personalization? Isn't it just personalization? Yes and no. Yes, the experience is unique and personalized to me, the end user. But where I see the differentiation is the fact that it's unique without any additional input from either the development side OR the user side. It's a highly sophisticated automated system that makes me FEEL like it's built specifically for me. That's the magic. And something I believe we are going to start seeing even more in 2015.

Disclosure: I worked on a marketing program with WB Games and GameStop to promote this game, however, all opinions and commentary are mine and mine alone.

How To Make Trends and Influence People

One of the proverbial Holy Grails of social marketing has been to get your brand to trend on Twitter. It signifies scale and social value, it's easy to explain, and not everyone can do it. Or can they?

First, let's begin with some definitions.

What does it mean to trend on Twitter?
It means appearing in the top trends box on Twitter's home page and mobile app. The trends are tracked and viewable at a global, national and city level.

What are trending topics?
Trending topics represent what people are talking about the most at a given time. But it's not just a traditional word cloud, tracking individual words -- rather, Twitter uses an algorithm to identify the larger conversations related to topics and distill them down to hashtags and keywords. By clicking a trending topic, you can see all related tweets, profiles, and headlines.

How does something become a trending topic?
The most certain way to trend on Twitter is to pay for it using Twitter's Promoted Trends product. These opportunities are offered once per day at a fixed rate -- typically $100,000 - $200,000 for 24 hours. While this is a surefire way to get your brand in front of the massive Twitter audience, what we're discussing today is how to do it the old fashioned way: organically.

There are a few things to note about organically trending topics. 
First, there's no telling how long or short their time to trend is going to be. I've seen trends last less than 20 minutes and up to a majority of the day. It really comes down to the size and nature of the audience that's engaging -- that is, fans of One Direction and Justin Bieber are incredibly passionate and show up in the millions to create organically trending topics quite frequently.

Second, a big part of the algorithm that causes content to trend is based on two things: frequency and volume over time. That is, the more people are tweeting about a given topic in a shorter amount of time, the more likely that content is to trend. This is why you see topics related to live television like sports and The Voice trending -- the viewership is so massive and active on social media that, at any given time, thousands upon thousands of conversations are occurring about these cultural events.

So, what does this mean for me and my brand?
When it comes to trending topics, there's a lot to do with chance -- right content, right time -- but there's an equally important part that can be affected with the right strategy to put your best foot forward. Here are a couple thought starters that should get you on your way to your first trending topic.

1) Live Events
What better way to replicate the momentum achieved by a live television or sports event than to create one of your own? I'm not saying you need to produce a television show or host the next Dodger game. Quite the opposite, in fact. You can create an online event targeting a smaller but passionate audience. The most common example of such an event is a Twitter Party -- an event hosted by a popular Twitter personality, centered around a hashtag, and designed to get their audience talking about a topic. Another type of live event that I have personally have seen success with is a live trivia event. Working with a gaming client, we devised a program that offered up high value prizes to the first Twitter follower to answer each of a series of increasingly difficult trivia questions using a designated hashtag. We hosted a similar event for four weeks and organically trended three of the four times.

2) Mass Appeal
Don't have the means to make an event of your own? You can try appealing to the masses with something that hold a universal truth or can be entertaining to everyone. A program I created for the same gaming client was designed to tap into the passion around nostalgia for a particular franchise and the result was the topic trended within the first 10 minutes of publishing the original tweet. It comes down to understanding your audience and their motivations. What are they passionate about at scale?

Google's Updated Search Algorithm Puts Greater Onus on Social Content Marketing

What's changed?

Source: fitmarketing.com

Google recently announced significant changes to their legacy algorithms -- Hummingbird, Panda, and Penguin, which impact 90% of the world's searches -- that took the war against spam links and black hat SEO to new heights. At its core, the change is putting a much greater emphasis on content relevance and quality by stripping out bad searches (keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and hyperlink manipulation) and clearing the lane for the good stuff.

So what does this mean for digital marketers and brands?
The bottom line is this: great, relevant content will prevail over all else. No longer will marketers and SEOs be able to stack the deck to artificially inflate the presence of bad and/or irrelevant content. If the ever-increasing demand for original, quality content wasn't already apparent -- this is your wake up call.

The good news in all of this is, if you're already creating engaging, high quality content for your marketing campaigns, this is some of the best news you'll hear all year. With the clutter out of the way, your content stands that much greater of a chance of being discovered by your intended audience.

As a brand or agency, there has never been a more important time to focus on the creation of original content in real time. By reacting to global events and trends quickly in an authentic manner, you'll not only ensure your content is original and fresh, but you'll be poising your content (and brand) for discovery. And the changes to Google's algorithm have cleared the lane of clutter to make a clearer path to the top of the search engine results pages.