bwagy

In what could possibly be the longest title of a blog post on this blog I just wanted to iterate.

If you’re speaking, running a workshop, doing a presentation – record it!

As a default, record everything, share the best of it.

These days we have incredible leverage and you never know when that content may come in handy.  A future job interview, creating a new product, teleconferencing or webinars.  If you’ve done something once you may as well capture it.  At the least you can watch, listen and analyse yourself to look for improvements.  That alone is worth the effort.

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How to? Grab a Flip Cam, great audio and video, easy for anyone to user (even those that you volunteer).

That’s what shows up when I Google ‘bwagy’.

Amazing huh?

That’s 19,100 opportunities for me to capture people and then engage them.

I do remember when it was 7 results.  Most were typos at that point in time.

Keep in mind, as long as they don’t get deleted, this content will be there for ever.

Produced once, consumed over and over.

I’m not gloating, just saying, one by one it all adds up.  Each piece of content started with a thought, then a sentence, then a post.  The sum is greater than the individual parts… and I see that day by day more and more people stumbling across what I do.

Definitely food for thought.

I did a radio interview this morning and one of the questions was how does an idea become a chapter in the book.

Well it has actually gone through a few filters, as you may know from my Great but not great enough post that is the first big filter.

For every blog post that makes it about 3 don’t.  So for the 300 or odd so posts that are live, about 900 haven’t.

Then for those that made it live, the filter was based on popularity, my personal favourites and relevance.

By the time it has made it to the book, it has gone through three filters, at each step ideas have been refined, questioned, and put back together.

All I am doing is providing a series of filters, where at each step the most remarkable stuff makes it through and the rest drops off.

This is all that YouTube does, or that email newsletter, or the people you follow on twitter.  They provide a filtered view of the mass content.  By following and engaging you get access to the end result.

So what do you filter for your customers? Can you deliver filtered (and relevant) content do your audience as a way of engaging? For if you can, you’re customers will love you for it.

Why do people keep coming back for more on Twitter? Blogs? Podcasts?

It is like a drug, getting great content is like the mouse in the cocaine experiment, he can press a lever for a pellet of cocaine or sugar.  Inevitably he keeps pressing cocaine, as he likes the feeling.

I have absolutely no scientific proof but I suspect that is why once your in, your in.

You keep coming back to twitter for the great content & people you meet, the same with your favourite blogs they write in a fashion you understand, is relevant and what you demand.  Podcasts the same.

You keep chasing that experience….

Think about Newspapers, and actually read the content in them, it’s typically very low key and more press releases and quotes than actual editorial.  

They weren’t always this way.  Once their distribution was locked down, the game shifted from how can we maximise readership (through great content) to how can we maximise profits.

You see the same things with bands, how often do you hear so and so has sold out now the’re big.

Blogs are the new content medium, surely they’re not the same? Or are they?

Think of some of the more popular bloggers, once they hit a certain readership or tipping point they too appear to slack off.

Others don’t, some to take it as a good sign and work harder.

They’re in it for the long term.  

You see with blogging, once the distribution is set (through feedreaders / email subscriptions / syndication) the foundation is weaker.  It is easy for one single reader to drop off.  

You need to keep on your toes, keep active and use engagement or return visitors or attention time as a measure of success.

(and someone to give you a dead arm when you slack off)

That’s why you see such great content out there, for free, competition is fierce.