The unbearable Twitness of Diddy. (via)

Before I was a content strategist at Razorfish, I was a metadata librarian at People.com. And though I endured endless jokes about the taxonomies I created, I have to admit, I loved the uniqueness of the tags and the complexity of the celebrity relationships. It was the perfect place to create tags such as “messy breakup,” “bad hair,” or “Promises Treatment Centers.” It was the ultimate intersection of pop culture, creativity, SEO, and content strategy.

There was infinite technical and intellectual strategy work around how to deal with P. Diddy (who seems to be going by only Diddy now). As he continuously changed names, we had to create the ability for the content management system to understand aliases and synonyms (so the editors/taggers could search on the back-end for any of the names), and yet only display his current name to the user on the site. This was also helpful and relevant for celebrities with stage names, married names, etc.; it made sure that if you searched for “Diddy,” you got everything that only mentions Sean Combs – and a keyword search alone wouldn’t have been able to do that.

So now that we could pull all of the Diddy articles together regardless of his name, what if we wanted to dynamically pull in related content, such as a story about J.Lo.? (Why would Diddy be connected to J.Lo? Because they dated from 1998-2001.) Again, a keyword search wouldn’t know this; however, a semantic relationship tagging system would. So I started developing a framework for how celebrities are connected to each other: “has gone to rehab with”; “has had baby with”; “has been involved with” (this was my way around having to untag after breakups, as well as not discriminate between gender, length, or the seriousness of the relationship). These semantic connections now allowed Diddy to be connected to J.Lo, for Liv Tyler to be connected to Steven Tyler, and for Matt Damon to be connected to Ben Affleck.

And what is Diddy’s career, exactly? Musician? Producer? Fashion designer? We needed to assign each of these attributes equilaterally – particularly in an industry where almost everyone has a fashion line – without limiting each celebrity to just one parent class. (Will Smith is the probably the most complicated, in almost every category possible.) So yes, Paris, you too can be a musician as well as a fashion designer.

So though it is easy to dismiss the content surrounding celebrities as fluff, the complexity of their relationships and identities was the perfect place for me to be introduced to content strategy: there was a limitless amount of unique, overlapping content that needed to be classified, organized, and connected. Thank you, Hollywood.