Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Free/advertising supported web services and applications are nothing new.  They are also extremely useful and we all get value from them daily.  But there is an inescapable truth about using them:  you are ceding control to someone else.

Last week several services were brought to a halt, once again highlighting the importance of a self-hosted site, blog or network.   Everyone with a main network presence tied a free service that stops working goes into panic-mode.  Everyone who has their own self-hosted web presence is unfazed.

With free or advertising-supported services:

They get something: control of your content, attention, links, creativity and work for the network owners to monetize/use as they see fit.  “As they see fit” can include everything from advertising, to building enough influence to sell their product to a larger company, to re-using your content, etc.

You get something: use of the shiny new tool/application/network and connectivity to the other members using it.

With your own self-hosted platform, you get everything.

Ultimately when you are paying for a service, someone else is accountable for providing a response/support should something happen.  When it’s a free service, this is simply not possible.  If you value your digital tether to the world, build your network on a platform you’re paying for.  The benefits far outweigh the cost.

Consider:

If free services go down there is no recourse, you’re at their whim

You can complain, but their staff ultimately is not concerned with individuals, especially if you’re just a regular user and not one of the mavens of the network.  Imagine you were planning to launch a big campaign and your influence was tied up in a network you don’t control (but you invested a great deal of time in).  What if that network was down on launch day?  You are pretty much out of luck at that point.

Conversations and traffic naturally route around outages

If you build your influence in an area you do control and simply used external networks as outposts, it wouldn’t be a big deal if an external network went down.  Social media power users and influencers all use multiple platforms, and the conversation will naturally route around outages.  It’s analogous to traffic re-routing around a blocked area.  But if your influence is locked up in that blocked area, you are left powerless.  If your influence is in the destination, and what’s at the destination is worth reaching, people will always find a way to re-route.

No guarantees with content you put into the networks of others

If you’re spending more than a fleeting amount of time producing digital content, isn’t it worth it to pay the (ridiculously small) fee for your own hosting?  You can make backups of your content this way, it’s easily exportable, and if others share it your domain will get the links and credit.  Why give this away to someone else?

Engine juice/authority

Speaking of links – if you’re just producing content in other people’s platforms, those platforms are getting the benefit of all the links and attention you attract.  Links and attention are the currencies of the web.  Nice for the network – but ultimately you should get the credit for your work in both name and engine juice.

Free services can ban you

We’ve all heard stories of popular Digg users being banned.  These are people who have literally spent years of their lives becoming a powerful member of that community and all of a sudden had the rug pulled out from under them.  Imagine how they felt at that point.  You’re never 100% free in anyone else’s network, there is no escaping that.  The network owners don’t like what you’re doing, you’re out.

Is your content really yours?

If you read the TOS pages of many popular social media services carefully before signing up, note that in many cases you are ceding control of the content you produce to that network.  Facebook using people’s photos in ads is just one recent example.  Yes, it was a third party advertiser doing this – but it shows you that large social networks are providing data and access to third parties who are going to do what they want with that information.  The network may be benevolent, but not everyone interacting with them may be.

Networks fall out of favor

Remember when AOL was king?  How about Friendster?  MySpace?  See the trend?  Spending your time building up a valuable, influential platform-specific network today is a mistake.  Don’t think any network is forever.  Go platform agnostic instead and build your presence in an area still niche specific, but all your own.

The bottom line…

This isn’t new to many of you, but it’s worth restating:  it’s potentially disastrous to give your professional, personal or creative works over to any web service that you don’t host personally as first version.  The better move is to create content on your own site and use external networks to help increase the reach of what you’re doing and build additional connections.

Yes, it’s worth paying a web host.  Web hosting is dirt cheap, and if you’re paying you’re going to get customer service if their servers go down.  Trusting your digital life to ad-supported or alternative revenue based services is unacceptable if you rely on what you’re doing and it just has to work.  That’s the beauty of something like a self-hosted blog – they just work, and if they break you can always troubleshoot yourself and put a fix into place.  If there is a technical issue above your head you can hire external help, but there is always something you can do to fix it.  If a larger network breaks you’re generally left in the dark, unconnected.

From the community/networking/socializing/utilitarian perspective, free web apps are hugely useful and I’m as big a fan as anyone.  You should definitely take advantage of them, but at the end of the day the most valuable digital asset is the one where you control the vertical and horizontal.

We’re so used to free but I actually have no issue paying for the ones I use if the quality of their service go up, reliability is increased and I’m provided support should something go wrong.

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image credit: Derya Celik via Shutterstock