Mentions, communities and video

Assistants look for agreement between independent sources. When editors, comparison writers, community members and video creators describe your brand the same way you do, an assistant has more to go on and more reason to recommend you. You cannot buy that agreement. You earn it by being worth mentioning, making the facts easy to find and correcting errors when you see them.

Three rings of evidence

Think of the evidence about you in three rings. Owned: your site, your profiles, your documentation. Earned: editorial coverage, reviews by independent writers, comparison and “best of” pages, interviews and awards. Community: forums, question-and-answer sites, social discussions and user groups where buyers talk to each other. Lessons 6 to 8 covered the owned ring. This lesson is about the other two.

Editorial and comparison coverage

Writers covering your category need accurate, current facts and something worth saying. Give them both: a press page with plain facts, dates and images, and a reason to write, such as original findings from your own data or a genuinely new capability. For comparison pages, contact the author with corrections and trial access rather than complaints, and accept that an honest comparison will sometimes recommend someone else for some buyers.

Communities: earn, do not seed

Community discussions are read by people and increasingly by assistants. The only durable way to appear in them is to be useful there under your own name. Encourage staff who know the product to answer questions openly, state who they work for and help even when the answer is not your product.

Video that machines can read

A video's pictures and sound are hard for a text-based system to use. Its title, description, chapters and captions are not. Give each video a descriptive title, a summary in the description, chapters with plain labels and accurate captions, and publish a written version of what is said on the page that hosts it. That turns a video into text an assistant can read and quote.

Partners and integrations

If your product works with other products, the partner directories and marketplaces that list those integrations are independent pages describing what you do. Keep your listings complete and current, use the same product names as your own site, and ask partners to describe the integration accurately on their side. These pages are easy to overlook and easy to fix.

Correcting third-party errors

When your scorecard finds an inaccurate answer, look at its sources. Often the error comes from a third-party page: an old review of a product version you replaced, a directory with your former address, a comparison with last year's prices. Contact the publisher with the correct fact, a source for it and a polite request. Keep a log of the requests and their outcomes, and re-check the answer after the page changes.

Worked example: Lumen CRM

Lumen is missing from most comparison answers, and the sources those answers cite are three “best CRM for small teams” articles that do not include it. The team writes to each author with a short fact sheet and a trial account. One adds Lumen in an update; one replies that the list is closed; one does not reply. Meanwhile two support engineers start answering small-team CRM questions in a public user forum under their own names. The team logs every contact and watches the comparison prompts in the scorecard.