Jasonified.

I’ve talked about this concept in sales pitches with prospects, with clients and privately and thought It was time to “put it out there”.

This idea was inspired when Heath Ledger died and I’d visited an HMV to see copies of his film, Knights Tale next to the tills. 

So here’s how it works (in the example above):-

1. You run a site that sells DVDs, Music etc.

2. You ensure your web content, e-commerce products are well described with keywords, actors names, locations etc, all properly indexed/tagged.

3. You choose a selection of news/feed “sources” that will be used to trigger content and having a weighting system in place to rank the data received. (ideally you’d want news sites, twitter, but could have as many as you like).

4. You build a “bot” which has the job of taking these feeds in, filtering by relevant content keywords and then matching these against your own index finding relevant content and promoting/displaying it.

So for example, an actor is reported dead by the BBC, Twitter, Reuters etc. Your bot picks these feeds up and is filtering for specific phrases/keywords/names. It matches this against similar words in your site/database and the result?

The actors DVDs are “featured” on your front page of your site and automatically.

The best bit you don’t have to be specific - you don’t have to say they’ve died, you don’t even care if they have - you’re just reacting automatically to the fact that *this* person is being discussed by multiple feeds/sites and multiple times.

You’re reacting to the trend and promoting your products/articles/content accordingly.

Another example - you run a site that sells home safety products e.g. smoke alarms, fire extinguishers etc. One day news reports come in of a house fire where a smoker detector wasn’t installed or working or testing. The bot kicks in, collates the stories, filters the common words and matches/cross-checks to your product database and FAQ/Knowledge-base.

Next minute, articles and videos you produced about checking smoke detectors are promoted to the front page with smoke detectors as featured products. You Twitter feed is showing links to smoke detector test articles and tutorials and this can happen in almost real-time and automatically.

I called it “Responsive content” - no doubt someone else has called it or will call it someone else and Apple will call it iContent. Oh well.

If it exists, I didn’t know, didn’t check and blew it.

If it doesn’t exist, you implement it and you get rich, throw me a bone or at least a bit of credit.