You Can’t Afford to Stop at Just Blogging

Posted May 11th, 2010 / By Jonathan Brill in Misc

Seth Godin had an interesting post the other day about the effect of media channels on the businesses using them.  Here’s a sample:

“Pepsi set out to dominate TV with their message, and billboards and vending machines. Newspapers, not so much. The media you chose to spread your message mattered. In fact, it could change what you made and how you made it. [Stop for a second and consider that... the media channel often drove the product and pricing and distribution].

Today, of course, everyone has access to a media channel. You can create a series of YouTube videos, or have a blog. You can be a big-time tweeter, or lead a significant tribe on Facebook.”

He went on to list a couple more “wag the dog” examples where the media channel itself defined the message, such as Tom Peters being defined by the format of public speaking engagements.

As a blogger, this caused me to reflect on a couple of different things.  First, I’ve noticed that my message is different depending on the blogging channel I plan to publish to.  Guest posts are written with a specific site in mind.  If I’m going to list something in an article directory, any post that relies on images and links is probably not going to work.  For corporate blogs I manage; a fair amount of work has to be done to make sure the copy is SEO’d and can be pasted into collateral at some point.  I view all of these things as positive influences on the content itself because they’re forcing me to adapt it to the audience.  That’s aside from the fact that every additional publishing channel directly increases exposure to my blog and all of my other work.

But there’s another set of channels that I’m not using as effectively as I should: new media.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m familiar with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  I’ve notified friends, fans, followers, and group members of new posts and occasionally even cross-published to those sites.  But there are other sites, most noticeably YouTube, iTunes, and SlideShare, which I’ve neglected almost completely.  Moreover, I haven’t really used Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn as they were designed to be used.  Linking to my blog in Facebook isn’t really using Facebook.  To use Facebook, I’d take the core message of my blog post and turn it into a Facebook Status update with maybe a poll attached.  For Twitter, I’d try to condense my message down to a 140 character statement and see what kind of conversation I could start.  LinkedIn allows me to publish my post through the news feature, but a better use of that medium might be to restructure the conclusion of my post as a “discussion”, which might result in a lot more participation from the group.

I’ve seen YouTube videos where people are literally reading their blog posts into a webcam.  Is that really compelling?  Wouldn’t it be better to use some visual aids a la Be Kind, Rewind to boost the hit count?  Even if it was just narration over play-doh sculptures or crayon drawings it would be more interesting than a talking mugshot.  But by far my biggest regret has been not doing more with SlideShare.  When you think about it, any of the posts with numbers, like this one on using LinkedIn more effectively, screams to be dropped into a 6 slide set with compelling graphics and submitted to SlideShare for the non-blog-reading world to enjoy.  It would probably take 2-3 hours to convert my average blog post into a fun slide deck that could eventually be compiled into an e-book or shared from my site as an alternate way to enjoy my writing.

Blogging makes text more shareable and mashable than ever before.  One of the most compelling things about consuming content on the web is that we’re not confined to reading, listening, or watching.  As consumers of content, there’s so much out there that we get to choose our channels.  As a publisher, I should be trying to reach more than just the “readers”.

When Kindle came out in November of 2007, it was lauded as a revolutionary way to consume content from a traditional medium.  Even though it was limited, for the most part, to black and white text.  When the iPad came out in March of 2010, it changed all that.  eBooks, newspapers, and blogs will be expected to take advantage of color screens that are capable of sound and video playback embedded within the content.

Being a blogger is great, but the web allows so much more and eventually my audience will demand more.  If any of you have started down this journey from blogger to New Media Guru already, I’d be very interested to hear how it’s going.

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Prolific247 has been building and managing business blogs since 2007. Building a Blog Machine is a collection of best practices and current information for corporate blogging. If you’d like to learn more, please find us at prolific247.com.