The Future Buzz | Media, Marketing, PR

I like Chris Brogan. I’ve even referenced him among social media power users I recommend this community connect with. With that said, I don’t agree with everything he says and have disagreed with him in the past. I’m going to disagree with him again today.

Something popular web publishers have latched onto – that differentiates from many (but not all) traditional reporters – is the power of understanding your audience.

I’m not talking a shallow understanding of the genres your audience is interested in. I’m talking about an innate understanding of the content archetypes readers react to, the motivations behind readers as individuals interacting with media, and the steps necessary to develop an interested, activated community.

As participation by companies and individuals explodes, social media is fast losing shiny new object syndrome. Even those who ignore the social web probably realize that at this point social media is not new.

The advantage of being early is probably gone for most industries. Yet, if you’ve got the right strategy which plays into the fact that many are now participating, you don’t need to be first. More people participating means more potential conversations, more potential subscribers, and more potential paths to set your brand on fire.

At Online Marketing blog, I explained why subscribers are a vital element of your site’s growth strategy. The reasons listed in that post include:

The embrace of content marketing by businesses and marketing agencies has exploded. Already most professionals and companies that seek to be found have blogs, the ultimate content marketing tool.

Yet most get content marketing or pull marketing (in its purist form) dead wrong and are destined for perpetual obscurity.

Developing popular content once in awhile is one thing, but how do you keep your blog as a whole in demand?

There isn’t a single winning answer – there are many strategies and methods which can be effective. Regardless of the path you choose, keeping your blog content in demand is vital to keep your community growing itself organically over time.

As the pace of content being added to the web increases, the value of aggregating the best of it goes up. If you’re a content producer of any variety, researching, collecting and then putting together the best material you can find is huge, especially if you’ve got an eye for top content in your niche.

For this post, I am not talking about scripting content, I am talking about manually collecting it and being a human aggregator of the best, editorially chosen material. I know that’s not the usual definition of aggregation on the web, but I think the actual, not buzzword definition of the word works to describe this strategy.

You’ll notice that unlike most bloggers, I don’t regularly write stand-alone link posts to external blogs at The Future Buzz. Instead, for most posts I incorporate a “related links” section at the bottom, (with three links to related posts here and three links to related posts around the web) in essence making every post a link post. I’ve been doing this for quite some time, and have noticed a few of my readers even adopted the same strategy on their own sites.

Let me preface this by stating that I really do like Chris Brogan – I link to him frequently, share his posts across social media, and am a fan of what he does. But, if the blogosphere is great at one thing – it is bringing all sides to something, which I’d like to spend a minute doing.

Chris wrote a post yesterday titled: Spread Your Wings- Get More Retweet Action Today. I’m not sure why this rubbed me the wrong way, maybe it is because I think it is a better strategy to make good content that isn’t tailored to a specific platform than try and design something for one network.

After reading through his post/comments and thinking about how much has been written on Twitter-specific strategies as of late, I have a few points I’d like to remind everyone:

It’s daunting to step back and look at the sheer number of content-based sites that cover the spectrum of interests on the planet. For some, I know this can make it feel like it is too late to join – that others are so far ahead there is no way they’ll catch up. It may appear this way on the surface, but looks can be deceiving. The truth is, there is not a single niche that’s too crowded for fresh thinking.