Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

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:

Of the last 100,000 visitors to The Future Buzz, 2,145 – or around 2.14% were using iPhones, iPod touches or Android devices. So in an effort to make things easier for readers on the go, today I have done two things:

1) Installed the WP Touch plugin

The guys at Brave New Code made a slick little plugin which auto-detects if users are browsing via an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android powered device and serves a beautiful mobile version. It’s simple to install and makes any Wordpress powered blog look clean on leading mobile platforms. Fire up The Future Buzz in your iPhone to have a look, you’ll get something like this (I’ll work on customizing it further in the future, lots of neat options in the plugin):

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.

Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.

Twitter is popular because it is easy. It is easy to setup, easy to copy-paste links into, and easy to write 140 character bits. But, having your own blog remains the strongest platform if you’re serious about sharing ideas and having a continued dialog with the world. Blogging is the antithesis of easy, however it is far more rewarding.