December 17, 2010 –No one can argue that content quality is important; its relevance is evident. But how does it compare to context?

PRWeek brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Context is king.” There has been a lot of chatter in the digital marketing world on how to deliver context, e.g., cookies, taxonomy, semantics. How do you deliver a brand message that demonstrates relevance without being intrusive? If that is the question, the author’s notion of hyper-relevance might be the answer.

Endless user-generated data tells us in real time the information that might otherwise have been impossible to obtain. While personalization requires consumers to volunteer their preferences for desired content or an experience, hyper-relevance requires the intuition of brands and marketers to read and understand these cues and create an appropriate connection. Technology has advanced to sustain this theory. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.