How to Leverage the Rebel Distribution Graph

At RebelMouse we obsess with how content reaches audiences. I started thinking about this when I was a teenager and have been working on it ever since. While the tactics and mechanics have changed dramatically the really cool thing to me is that the basic dynamics are still the same: be generous and link out on topic. But it’s never been a more fascinating time to be deep inside the algos that surface great content to the right people.

Make Big Data Little Again

The key you’ll see to taking advantage of the distribution graphs is always to be able to take big data and turn it little again — in a way that actually delivers insights to writers and content creators themselves. Insights that float up to the execs just help judge an organization’s performance. Insights that get to writers and creators change the performance itself.

First a Small Trip Through Distribution History

In the 90's all we had was an imageless internet through Lynx. As that evolved into the full blown pre-Google web I was lucky enough to have some significant viral hits while building Palo Alto Software’s internet business. At grad school at ITP in NYU I stumbled upon niche viral hits and then a big press driven one with The Dog Island and again with the Contagious Media Research Lab when we launched the NRA Black List. At Avaaz.org we built the science and art of building movements through email campaigns that led to pages with refined calls to action. At Huffington Post we began in the pre-Facebook internet (it existed but it was just not really important and was only barely beginning to open up beyond college students and had no impact yet on the open web) where Digg was everything to Obama’s first election. Google of course was absolutely vital to the pre-social years of Huffington Post.

Discovery in Google is a Linear Approach

Google’s search still sort of, sometimes matters. When a huge earthquake, tsunami, the VMAs or a Superbowl happened — we would all rush to Google to get the story. This barely happens anymore because we expect it to surface immediately on Facebook, Twitter and all our social platforms. But, you can still win in Google by turning big data little.

If you want to succeed in Google, your content creators themselves (not just the analysts) need to write search phrases behind each story before publish. And then after publish, they need to know which search phrases they actually won on a story by story level. Google rewards you for being on topic, so letting editors quickly choose links that are above them in the rankings on that particular search phrase is key. An hour or two later we were often beating out those listings and had made our linear way up to the top.

Especially in the early days of Huffington Post growing, every news company was panicked to link out. They felt they were building an island they had to keep people on. This was never a good idea, and it still isn’t. Google was right to build their algo’s that way and I’m glad they still do work this way — linking out is unselfish, not jealous, generous and the right thing for the user.

We’ve built a next generation of that at RebelMouse that lets you learn how Google works now that they have much less power to decide who is popular and are now just detecting who is popular.

Discovery in Facebook Works like Concentric Circles

The principles of being unselfish and on topic works with Facebook too. Understanding how to navigate and see the relationships is much more complex however. The data is much larger, way beyond 10 listings in numerical order, so technology turning a massive amount of data into little data is even more vital.

If you write a heart warming story about pit bulls, you need to know the concentric circles of interest. There are 3 big Facebook pages that are very popular that focus on pit bulls alone, and then beyond that like 10 pages that are popular that focus on dogs, and beyond that a cluster of pages that love animals and a huge cluster beyond that of stories that love heartwarming stories. Beyond being able to send a polite ping which lets these pages know you have this wonderful heart warming story is vital. And then after publishing knowing which ones have published back, even more important. Sharing back to those pages, absolutely vital.

So, bringing this all together without turning a page into a horrible heaviness of dozens of widgets is why we have 70 engineers working across the globe in 32 countries.

And it’s why you should come and build on top of the RebelMouse platform. Bring your best content, and get it across the distribution graph.

For more information contact us here.