Social Media Roundup: The Three H’s of YouTube

What do the words “hero,” “hub,” and “hygiene” mean to you? If they evoke images of movie protagonists, bicycle parts, and toothbrushes, you should read the following for a refresher course on one of the hottest trends in marketing, courtesy of today’s Social Media Roundup.

Lifting a Successful Strategy

https://twitter.com/GdnMediaNetwork/status/552434470347735040

YouTube’s “hero, hub, hygiene” strategy  (opens in a new tab) is conceptually simple. Draw people in with a “hero” piece that triggers an emotional reaction and leads readers to “hub” content. In the hub are serialized pieces of content, weekly videos, regular features, and so forth. Specialized content created for particular audiences that answers specific questions—usually discovered via search—are the “hygiene” portion.

The three H’s are usually cited as a strategy for YouTube promotion, but as freelance content consultant Jon Wilks  (opens in a new tab) explains in a story in The Guardian  (opens in a new tab), their usefulness stretches beyond online video.

The strategy “recognized that audiences tend not to live their lives according to a campaign schedule, and that they’re likely to keep coming back and re-engaging if you provide regular content that ticks the right boxes,” Wilks writes.

“It puts the content calendar at the center of everything, and it gives everyone involved a clear sight of where they’re heading,” he adds. “In many ways, it’s the silo killer we’ve all been waiting for.” (ht @GdnMediaNetwork  (opens in a new tab))

Quality Over Quantity

.@Ev  (opens in a new tab) on metrics: “We want to make people think. To connect emotionally. It’s hard to measure any of that.” https://t.co/aJQNeTKSKp  (opens in a new tab)

— Corby Kummer (@CKummer) January 7, 2015  (opens in a new tab)

“Most internet companies would build better things and create more value if they paid more attention to depth than breadth,” Medium CEO Evan Williams declares in a post advising organizations  (opens in a new tab) to look beyond web traffic when judging their success.

And associations are no different. Traffic and readership are wonderful assets, but the roles and purposes of associations stretch beyond meeting numeric monthly and quarterly quotas.

“If what you care about—or are trying to report on—is impact on the world, it all gets very slippery. You’re not measuring a rectangle, you’re measuring a multi-dimensional space,” Williams writes.

His post  (opens in a new tab) is a great springboard for conversations about where to place your association’s online priorities in the new year. (ht @CKummer  (opens in a new tab))