Prioritizing Authoritative Content During COVID-19

Accurate information is getting buried online. Public health organizations’ publishing and distribution strategies are responding by targeting their information more precisely to audiences when they need it and at the point of care.  

It is no longer sufficient to wait for information seekers to find reliable content; it is critical for public health organizations to deliver their content to audiences who need it, when they need it, in a way they can easily access it and use it.

There is urgency to get this right. The consequences of failing are severe and already upon us. For instance, the Pew Research Center recently issued a report titled, “Americans who primarily get news through social media are least likely to follow COVID-19 coverage, most likely to report seeing made-up news.”

This is about more than just social media and search

How people look for information, and where and how quickly they expect to find it, is all shifting rapidly. In the era of COVID-19, a clear over-abundance of mid-value content, created and distributed by millions of people (and in some cases machines) on a by-minute basis, has accelerated this evolution to entirely new levels of complexity while creating a significant new governmental challenge.

Our instant access culture has prioritized the concept of the search engine "snippet" — the 1-3 sentence blurb search engines scrape from the internet and deliver to users to offer quick answers to common questions.

For the ordinary user in ordinary circumstances, snippets are generally helpful. Instead of forcing users to navigate to a new webpage, voice-activated assistants can simply read an answer out loud in 10-20 seconds. These smaller abstractions of data, including "fragments", "handles", and "fraggles", are just some of the ways the major content aggregators are seeking to decompose, absorb, and repurpose information to meet our insatiable cultural appetite for on demand answers from our mobile devices, voice-driven assistants, and more.

This is not a quick fix. Agencies must invest in the human and technical resources and expertise required to stay relevant in a world that has universally prioritized fast access to information over more carefully acquired evidence-based knowledge.

Designing content that can be found

At Publicis Sapient, we start by partnering with clients to consider and address three initial constituent-centric questions:

By understanding the value your agency provides to the public at large, it becomes easier to position your digital content strategy to align with the tools and resources the public is already using to vet what is worth their time and worthy of their trust and limited attention. Big data and Machine Learning advancements are making it easier than ever before to address the public’s concerns with confidence, but this process must start with context-relevant query information that allows agencies to work backwards from the final audience reception goal in order to provide more stakeholder value.

In today’s complex media environment, digital channels are customized to the detailed preferences of the information consumer. Effective organizations are driving engagement and loyalty by allocating resources to understand where and how their audiences spend their time online. By syndicating content through the right channels at the right moments, experts are meeting their audiences when and where they are most receptive to the messages they seek to deliver.

By understanding what information is being provided to frequent queries today, agencies can develop public health communications that make complex information more immediately digestible to both humans and those machines that now run interference. By serving up new information in formats that are proven, organizations can skip to the head of the line when critical new content is ready to be made public.

In order to help our clients develop an actionable roadmap that measurably increases the reception and amplification of their evidence-based publications, we recommend a series of formal assessments that address five critical considerations.

These kinds of assessments, performed regularly, are critical to both modern digital authority management and future-ready mission preparedness for all medical and scientific agencies.