Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

The Needs of a Personal Platform

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Scaffolding and blue tarp - FlickrWhen you’re starting out online, it’s easy enough to dig into everything a little bit, and keep your agility by not building a routine.

However, as you do more and more work – more writing, more tweeting, more status updates – you’ll begin to look for ways to reduce the emotional overhead on working your networks. Tools, like TweetDeck, web apps like The Deadline, time management processes, and more. This makes it easy to maintain momentum and keep your consistency high – but it does remove some agility unless you’re aware of the scaffolding you’re putting up around your work.

Creating a platform can’t be haphazard – you need to put some thought into the framework you create.

Got a blog? Great! You have a home base, somewhere all the content is your own.

Got a podcast? Cool. Whether you blog or not, you’re publishing your own content.

Youtube channel? Ok… Now we’re getting into mixed media. Video is powerful, but if it’s on a platform not your own, you don’t own control of it.

Massive Twitter following? Neat – but, like the YouTube channel, or a Facebook page for that matter, if Twitter goes away, so does your content – so does your platform.

Building a platform means having control not only of the scaffolding – the framework – but also of the content that fills it out.

We’ve known this for a while. Owning your database is important. Having purpose apparent behind our work is important too. But how do we do this in effective ways? We diversify.

We produce podcasts as parts of our blogs, we use Twitter and Facebook as promotional and communication tools instead of publishing venues. We create spaces where people can not only congregate, but interact as a group – campfires of media to be gathered around, rather than street corners to be passed through (and passed by, and bypassed entirely).

Diversity is part of the difference between building an effective personal platform – and building ephemeral content gardens.

Look at any of your heroes, the people who got you into this whole content marketing, social media game. What do they do? How have they grown over the years?

  • Chris Brogan writes a number of blogs, produces video, takes part in podcasts, tweets, has a Facebook community, does Third Tribe stuff, and more. He’s diverse.
  • Mack Collier has a blog, but also is intensely active on Twitter, and has built #blogchat into one of the biggest weekly twitter chats.

But these are platforms which have existed for some time – what else are we seeing?

I look at people like Stanford Smith at Pushing Social, who’s recently started video blogging and podcasting in addition to the #tweetdiner twitter chat he and Margie Clayman started last year. That’s diversity.

These are just a few examples – there are more. Are you one of them?

If you’re just blogging – why? If you’re only building a community on Twitter, what reasoning do you have behind it?

How are you addressing the needs of your platform – how are you allowing yourself to grow?

 

Image by Peter Alfred Hess.

Pragmatic Social Media

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pacific morning on FlickrI’m noticing something lately, in the differences between social media usage in different geographies.

Marketing Sensei – Susan Hurrell – just got back from the annual LERN conference in Chicago, which she attended with Dan Belhassen. Some of the insights they gleaned from the conference have gotten me thinking about how we’re using the tools in our locales.

In the states, Foursquare is everywhere. There are deals publicized, people are being encouraged to add social media to their shopping habits. Here in Winnipeg? not so much.

Elsewhere, use of Facebook and Twitter is far different as well.

There are more tweetups, more use of Facebook pages, Deals and Places – and the list goes on.

One of the things we need to realize about Social Media as a tool, rather than as a phenomenon or a practice, is that we need to make our actions appropriate to our environment. Sure, there’s a certain amount of customization you can apply to your actions in public to suit the global public, but unless you work for the internet, your business is probably going to be localized at least a little.

Are you following everyone from your local business area on Twitter? Have you connected with your local Chambers of Commerce in their online presence (if they have one)? Have you recognized local social media-active people and businesses with Twitter lists, or a LinkedIn group? Are you regularly touching base with these people?

If not… How can you do this better, and support the growth of your community – the physical one – into a thriving, socially connected community online?

Image by paul dex.

You're Not A Big Deal

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When we barely know someone and are first exposed to them, they seem like a big deal. This is the case whether it’s a friendly introduction or our first sighting of a new celebrity on the red carpet. But as we gain more and more information about them, they shrink.

This might sound a bit counter-intuitive; your friends and family, whom you know most about, are likely a pretty big deal in your life, so why is it that as we learn more about those on our social peripheries, their capabilities seem to diminish? Simple: there’s a threshold of acceptable mystery that we pass through. If I know nothing about you, I can neither accurately praise nor criticise you; all I can do is pay attention, gather information, and decide on a firmer course of action once I’ve done my recon. Once I have this information, I can do one of three things: dismiss you, cultivate you, or destroy you.

Dismissal is really simple, more so in the age of social media; If the process by which I’ve discovered you is your twitter account or your blog, the unfollow button is simple to find. It used to be harder to dismiss people, but when friendships can be lost in meatspace entirely because someone accidentally hit the unfriend button on Facebook – well, it shows how superficial we are with our outer-valence contacts, right?

Cultivation is the long process, it’ how we gain friends worth keeping for an appreciable amount of time. If you’re aiming to do this, you can’t just grab every piece of information about someone in hopes you find something useful. You also can’t be cultivating people and hope to use them for anything; if you’re hoping for a business transaction, whether you’re on the end that’s buying or selling, you’ve got to keep people in the zone of casual disinterest where the acceptable mystery lives, otherwise there are expectations. Sort of like being stuck as friend guy when you’re really rather date a girl – once you’ve passed the mysterious proximity barrier, it’s difficult getting back out to the distance needed to do good business, unless you build that expectation into your friendships by strongly separating your professional and personal lives.

Destruction is, deceptively, even harder to achieve than cultivation. Most of the time you’re stuck burning your bridges, having little real effect on those you’re trying to hurt. Why are you doing that, by the way? If you just don’t like them, dismiss them. If they did something do hurt you, dismiss them. Why go to all the extra effort? Because maybe they’re a threat. The trouble with this is that you first have to define threat. Socially? Commercially? Technologically? Internet aside, it’s a pretty big planet, and unless someone has you cornered, it’s not hard to divide up the world into your own little chunk. The trouble with this is that mutual connections rarely give a crap about petty squabbles, which is where destruction gets so messy; unless you can convince your peripheral friends there’s a real benefit to them in helping you out, someone will always try to fuel both you and the other party.

Why is any of this a big deal? Because recognizing the process can demystify a lot of things. Exposing yourself to people, especially those you initially conceive of as bigger than yourself, can either be enlightening or distressing. Being aware of what makes the lustre on celebrity eventually disappear can help get past the depression of realizing your heroes are just louder versions of yourself.