Mass Relevance: Illusive but Powerful

No matter what your product or service, if you can achieve “mass relevance” you are bound to be more successful.  It is particularly important for businesses that rely on advertising revenue to survive.  You have to aggregate a mass audience in order to have something to sell.  

Let’s break it down.  Mass: a body of coherent matter and often of considerable size.   Relevant: bearing upon or connected with the matter in hand; pertinent.  Put those together in reference to content creation and you have topics that appeal to the masses.  In an age when information is plentiful and communication happens in so many new forms, it is even more critical for content creators to look for subjects that are relevant to the masses.   

Roy Williams’s principle about advertising in 2012 can be directly applied to on-air and on-line content creation:   “I hear a voice whispering in the night:  Relevance and credibility, ad writer, are the words you must engrave on your heart if you will write ads that move the needle.  The customer is asking, ‘Does this matter to me?’ They are looking for relevance. And their second question is, ‘Do I believe what they’re telling me?’ They are looking for credibility.   The public is no longer looking for a perfect icon to worship. Most of them are looking for an equally-flawed friend with whom they can connect.”

Increase your mass relevance by watching and listening for the topics that people are talking about.   Here are a few sites that can help: http://www.trendingtopics.org/, http://www.reddit.com/, http://www.buzzfeed.com/,https://twitter.com/WhatsTrending/

Look for topics that are common to all of us:    

Relationships: (couples, families, friends, workplace)
Pop Culture: (entertainment news, celebrities…)
Personal Growth: (self-improvement, fulfillment at home and job, spiritualism, etc.)
Health and Beauty (Dieting, exercising, makeovers, anti-aging, pampering, etc.)
Shopping-Consumerism: (Example: “Bargain of the Week” )
Style: (trends, fashion, cars, home, personal space, etc…)

Keep in mind that the internet is not the only source for great content.   Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.  Just think of all of the information that has not made its way to the internet.  It gives a whole new meaning to the words “think outside the box”.