Achieving Online Authorship and Its Immediate Impact On Message Penetration

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis: To achieve message penetration online, public health organizations need to ensure content is attractive to search engines and appealing for people to share on their social media accounts. But there is a dilemma with content written by organizations. Today, because of social media, people and search engines prefer influencer-written content over organizational or brand content. This session examines the potentially game-changing impact of ‘online authorship’.

Methods and Results (informing the conceptual analysis): There is a demonstrated need to market content written by people, not organizations. Only four percent of the public will share content written by an organization or brand according to a February 2013 Technorati study. While 56 percent will share Facebook content shared by friends and 26 percent will share blogs written by online authors. Simply put, in the age of social media people trust people much more than faceless organizations and prefer to ‘retweet’ or ‘like’ content than link to an organization’s website. Search engines also favor social media content because it is fresh. Therefore, it is imperative for organizational representatives to become valid ‘authors’ and to achieve what is referred to ‘online authorship’. One underutilized method of achieving online authorship is ‘Google Authorship’. It is process that Google has developed to connect pieces of content to credible individuals. It has several immediate benefits. Google will deem your content more credible if you are a verified author, thus placing your content higher in search engine results pages. It is another way for Google to filter out SPAM. When content appears in search and social media it will feature an author profile picture, related articles and author name as well other metadata such as ‘more by this author’ and number of followers on Google+. It has been proven that having such metadata connected with content increases click through rates (by 150 percent according to some studies) and encourages sharing of content on social media sites. Beyond these immediate benefits, Authorship has a potentially game-changing impact. On March 11, 2013 during the SXSW conference, the head of Google’s anti-SPAM division, Matt Cutts, said that Google will significantly update its algorithms later in 2013. Authorship could have a more prominent role in what content Google returns in its search engine results pages. By implementing Authorship, Google will, over time, consider authored content as quality and highly credible content, thus giving your content precedent over content that may not have Authorship.

Conclusions: Online authorship is a critical component to content marketing and should be considered a primary strategy today. Organizations that factor authorship into online content marketing efforts will see a higher return on content marketing efforts and greater reach of health messages. 

Implications for research and/or practice: Authorship is easy to implement and adds little time to content management. Organizations need to consider:

• Choosing and verifying authors for online content efforts
• The risks of putting employees as public-facing representatives
• Developing strategies to engage employees to be authors
• Achieving influence through Authorship