This card game goes by many names: Warlords & Scumbags, Emperors & Scum, Rich Man Poor Man, A@#$hole, and perhaps most famously, President.

Although the names change, the game is the same – the more rounds that are played, the more the deck is stacked your way and the more difficult it gets to reverse your position. If you start out ‘rich’, you’ll get richer, and if you start out ‘poor’, you’ll get poorer and the dividing gap will continue to get larger and larger. Often, it is clear mid-game as to who inevitably will become ‘President’ and win, and who will become ‘Scum’ and lose.

In the same way, the algorithms that control the web are constantly stacking the deck towards the ‘rich’ who have high engagement and away from the ‘poor’ who have low engagement.

Facebook recently announced its ‘Relevance Score’ which Facebook uses to determine how engaging your message is to your audience. Of course, Facebook has *always* had this relevance score, but has just never exposed it to users before.

Now that this is official, as with the card game, the real way to win is to start ‘rich’.

In the short term, this means designing your messaging for engagement from day one.

In the long term this means crafting a brand worthy, in your niche of niche, of the office of President.