Controlling your content: The next social media revolution?
Jason Hiner | August 22, 2010 I just finished reading one of the best blog posts of 2010. It was a little diddy from Leo Laporte called Buzz Kill.
Leo has been using Google Buzz as his primary social media tool since it was launched last year. He switched over to Buzz for publishing announcements, updates, and instant analysis -- the kind of stuff that dominates Twitter and Facebook. Leo also had his Buzz stream replicated to his Twitter account (he famously quit Facebook in May).
Then, a funny thing happened on August 6. Leo's posts stopped publishing -- on both Buzz and Twitter. A total of 15 posts never made it to the Web, including show notes to Leo's popular TWiT podcast. The worst part: It took 16 days for Leo to notice. No one alerted him. No one threw up a red flag. No one even noticed.
Leo concluded:
"It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing... I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more."
This a timely reminder for me. I recently decided to dedicate more brain cycles to writing in this blog rather than just throwing all of my random thoughts at Twitter. Leo's post helped coalesce some of those thoughts, but the bottom line is this: I want to control my content.
Currenlty, Twitter doesn't show the entire history of a person's posts. In order to see that you have to use an external service like Backupify, which gives you a PDF of your entire Twitter archive (posts, direct messages, etc.). I'd expect Twitter to offer a paid account in the future that provides a full achive, more analytics, and other services, possibly even an exported offline archive.
But, even if Twitter makes that move, it's worth considering whether anyone -- but especially content creators -- should put too much of their best content (even the short stuff) in a public service such as Twitter, Facebook, or Google Buzz. Those services can change their formats, policies, and pricing without any input from their users. And you can be sure that they will make their decisions based on their own best interests far more than the best interests of their most active users.
By contrast, if you publish your most important observations and updates in your own blog -- where you have much greater control over the format and functionality -- and then use social services to promote that content, then you've put yourself in a much stronger position to control your presonal brand.
I think we're in the midst of a pendulum-swinging moment. In the last several years, we've seen the pendulum swing away from blogging toward more "microblogging" on Twitter and Facebook. Now we're seeing the pendulum swing back toward blogging, as the limits of microblogging present themselves. Leo's experience and revelation is just another sign of that.
Reader Comments (4)
Great post. Especially the second to last paragraph.
To me, microblogging is perfect for those random thoughts that you want to blurt out when you think about them, but then your ego takes over and keeps it in. The same social media is a perfect vehicle for promoting your regular blog. I guess the trick is to make the broadcast method (to your Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, etc., etc.) as simple and painfree as possible. Either through add-ins, organic blog-tool settings or a syndication service to hit all social media (obscure or not obscure), that seems to be the right balance and utilization of still meaningful social sites.
It's very interesting. And strange like ezoterica.
It's very interesting. like
it is my site =)