On Monday Mike mentioned the importance of having a "producer" in your corporate newsroom, someone who is "obsessed with the distribution of your content." Not a bad description for what I've been doing for the last year and half with Newsvetter and Guhmshoo.
Many of you may have figured out a lot of this on your own already, but I thought it might be worth sharing some experiences with readers who are new to the content business. Using the delivery truck as a metaphor, here are four basic recommendations:
Step 1: Carry something people will want. As obvious as it may seem, this single most important point is often missed entirely. Before embarking on Newsvetter and Guhmshoo, I dedicated a great deal of time and research to identify a problem, learn what people needed, and offer a practical solution. I can't stress enough how much sacrifice is involved in the process--you can forget about remuneration--but there truly is no substitute for hard work. Otherwise, you'll be driving nothing more than a garbage truck.
Step 2: Choose the best path for delivery. There are many routes you can take, but the key is finding the most efficient way to bring your product to your customers without landing in the neighbor's driveway or on the roof. I chose Twitter partly because my target audience was most active there, as well as simplicity (140-character limit) and redistribution (re-Tweeting). This does not mean that Twitter has more value than FriendFeed, Facebook, or other applications. I tried them all (yes, even Identi.ca and Second Life), and I would recommend that you experiment with all the latest shiny toys available.
Step 3: Meet the people on your route. Before I was really active on Twitter, I lurked to get a feel for the place--how people used the medium, what they got away with, and what they didn't. I also identified the leading Twitter users in my area of interest. I tried to engage them, to get them to look at my feed in hopes that they might find something of interest. Don't be shy to do this; it's no different from walking into a room and engaging people you don't know in conversation. Sure, you'll make mistakes and some people will be jackasses (as in the physical world), but eventually you'll assemble a group of people you respect who will be happy to share your work. Again, if you have something worth delivering, you won't have a problem. If everybody hates you, repeat Step 1.
Step 4: Deliver with a personal touch. I want people to read my stuff, and that often means delivering content that is highly specific to them and their interests. For example, one of my first Guhmshoo toons featured Peter Shankman skydiving with one of the guys from ProfNet. Shankman really appreciated the toon and shared it with his huge network of fans. This gave my cartoons instant visibility and, I hope, credibility--two features necessary for your delivery channel to succeed. This approach proved effective with numerous other toons.
You may have noticed that I've left out one of the most common delivery routes used by public relations agencies, the newswires (PRNewswire, PRWeb, et al). The omission was intentional because these "blasts" or "sprays," as they are known in the industry, are the opposite of what you should strive for: indiscriminate, impersonal, and--not surprisingly--ineffective.
What you should do is create your own distribution system, tailor it to your needs, and control every inch of it so that you can make adjustments on the fly. Believe me, you'll need to.
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andrew [at] newsvetter [dot] com
Mike Yamamoto has been working at the nexus of news and digital media since 1996 as the founding managing editor of CNET Networks' News.com, which won more than 100 major national and international journalistic awards under his direction. Mike also introduced CNET's first blogs in 2003 and created Crave, its highly successful gadget blog. Outside the digital realm, Mike has been a senior editor at several daily newspapers. He was the investigations editor of the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau, city editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and a news editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Mike is also a veteran of broadcast commentary, having appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, and Fox News, and was a credited adviser to CNET's weekly TV news program. Mike has been an adjunct professor at the American University in Washington and California State University at Northridge, and he has been a visiting faculty member of the American Press Institute and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He holds degrees in journalism and psychology from San Francisco State University.