Will Google News Badges Make Junk Content Writers Irrelevant?

Have you ever questioned the credibility of a Blogger, Tweeter or an independent analyst on a subject matter and wanted to verify whether or not a news source could be trusted?  In previous generations, most news and content was generated by publications, publishers, newspapers and media companies that selected and assigned qualified reporters and researchers to write and report on selected subject matters.  Publications and media sources in these types of organizations were and continue to be incentivized to maintain highly qualified reporting staffs since one of their main assets is their loyal readership and/or viewer group.  Consequently, most content produced by these organizations is credible.

However, in today’s marketplace, independent reporting mediums like Blogging, Tweeting and independent publishing are growing rapidly in popularity and becoming alternative news and content sources that many people rely on for day-to-day news coverage and thought leadership.  These independent news and content mediums do not have rigid writer or reporter selection and publishing processes like traditional media and publishing houses.  In fact, writers and thought leaders in these mediums often self-select into becoming content writers or independent news reporters on a given subject matter and control their own publishing processes.  Thus, there is rarely an institutional credential filtering process to regulate who reports or writes about a given subject matter.

This burden now lies in the hands of the readers who chose to consume content from these mediums.  Readers generally will rely on Google Page Ranks or Social Media Recommendations (Tweets, LinkedIn Shares, Facebook Likes, or Google +1s) from trusted sources to gauge the credibility of content.  However, this filtering process does not identify bad content, it only flags popular content, which means bad content often slips through the cracks and reaches readers.  This can lead to all kinds of false rumors than can be personally or financially damaging.  Google has attempted to resolve this problem with the new News Badge feature that it introduced to Google last month and is slowly integrating this feature into its Google+ social media platform.

The Google Badge allows Google News readers to collect private, shareable news badges that show how well they follow a given subject matter in the news.  These badges can be shared with all of their followers on Google+ and presumably marketed in the other social media market places and blogs to establish credibility on a subject matter.  Although Google’s news aggregator only provides a fraction of the total news that is read, it does have a large enough market share to indicate what a reader knows most about.  Google is likely just trying to test the receptiveness of the public with this idea and if it gains mass popularity, Google may roll-out a badge system that covers all types of Google Searches.  If Google did so, this would be a much more robust measurement of credibility and could become a major game changer in the influence marketing space.  It is possible that Google could even roll this information into its search algorithm and weight Google +1s by the credibility of the recommender.

As with any new technology feature, only time will tell how important Google News Badges will become in influencer marketing and search rankings.  However, one thing we do know is that early adopters of the Google News Badge system will be rewarded with a first-mover advantage in acquiring these badges.  Thus, it is worthwhile to position yourself to take advantage of these potential changes in the market place before they happen.

If you are interested in learning more about the new Google News Badges, I highly recommend reading Google’s help article on how Google’s News Badge system works.  Similarly, if you are interested in learning more about the Google +1 button and its increasing importance in Google Search Rankings, I also recommend reading my blog post on how Google +1 is a marketing strategy game changer.