Engagement in the Age of the Interest Graph

Recently, I had more fun going to a yoga retreat than to a dinner with many of my  old friends in my hometown. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends, they know me, I can be myself with them, but they don’t always allow me to express all the dimensions of my personality. I have so many different passions that my friends can’t care about all of them: I am a yogi, veggie, geek. Guess what? I m not the only one but many in my entourage are not and don’t want to hear about it.

Two weeks ago, I was in this yoga retreat in the middle of NAPA. I was intimated and a bit scared to find the time pretty long because I did not know anybody there. The NAPA, my yoga mat and 20 complete strangers…

…and I had a blast. Why? Because the connection was instantaneous. We love yoga, and we had hours of conversation to share. We live in San Francisco and talk about our favorite aspects of life there during long dinners.

After 48 hours, I did not only have new friends. I had met people with whom I could share a dimension of myself and some of my passions. It was a new group I felt a part of, initiated solely because of our interests.

Thinking about the adventure, I started to notice something so interesting on Scoop.it. This phenomenon was exactly the same one I was observing on the articles and content I was sharing :  my readers are strongly engaged on Scoop.it, spreading my content, thanking me all the time, commenting a lot, while I was fighting to get three likes on a status (a very one good one, believe me).

I just realized how logical it is. Scoop.it is based on my passions and interests. It allows me to share content to an audience interested into it. It is a simple rule that makes a huge difference : your relevance.

Relevance is, like Brian Solis said, one of the essential steps to keep attention and achieve social media success :

“Before creating or distributing any social object, ask yourself a few important questions: – What value am I introducing into the mix?

– What makes this object worthy of attention?

– What action do I want to inspire?

– How does this contribute to our standing within each community?

– How can I make this shareable?”

Facebook is not the place where I feel the most relevant, neither really heard anymore. I am not on this social network to be relevant anyway. It’s a place where I am because my friends are here, and we have fun. I know that even if they are not all the time passionate about what I share (what a scandal!), they will still be there for me. Facebook is my comfort zone.

Twitter is not. It’s where I have some pressure to tweet “the interesting link people will be crazy about today” . Of course, It allows me to be relevant for my followers as our relationship is based a little bit on what I say and a lot on who I am. But unfortunately I am not Lady Gaga or Obama, and sometimes my tweets jut disappear in the resonance of the infinite timeline space, too much to follow, to many tweets at the same time. The relevance is there; not the context.

I love the feeling I get knowing that I found a place where I publish my own insights on topics that matters for me. But even more than this, I am thrilled to see the creation day after day of a deeply engaged community. My interest graph is not my entourage but that’s probably why the web was made: connecting me with the ones I do not know but I have a lot to share with. Not only does it create deep engagement, but it makes you learn, explore, feel … even feed by new insights. I definitely believe the interest graph could be the future of (social) media .

Content that I care about is the only way to engage me, empowered by a context that make it easy to find. We love to see the depth of engagement on the platform. If we share the same passion or interests and your product is a reflection of it, how could your brand not resonate with me?

That’s the golden effect of the interest platform where people are ready to focus and explore. That’s the magical reward of contextual content where the unfiltered noise, the reflexes, and the habits disappear to give some space to what we all live for: deep attention to share what matters for you-and for them.

Relevant Content leads to engagement and will define your success and presence on social media. But it’s not enough to just catch my eyes. Many people on this planet can do that. What you want is to catch my heart. Only at this moment, you catch my attention; and this is only at this level of engagement that you can have a real impact.

I feel people are not only on Scoop.it. They are alive there and make the platform the place where conversation starts.

And lasts.

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