New media: we’re all drowning in content

My passion is flying. On weekends I get a thrill hopping into a little Cessna and wandering around the countryside at 4,000 feet. I wanted to share my passion with aspiring pilots, so in the summer I started a blog.

From working with our clients I’ve always known that it isn’t easy to create and keep up social media. I’ve now learned that it is vastly more difficult to do so recreationally. The reason isn’t a lack of content. I’m too busy–and recreation too often takes a back seat to ‘things that can’t wait’ or ‘must be done’.

This experience has taught me a valuable lesson: marketers can become like doctors who only see the illness, and overlook the person. We’re driven by ‘engagement’ objectives and readership goals. We need to be more sensitive to our readers because like me, they’re drowning in content. In our lives, if it’s ‘recreational’ it’s going to be pushed back.

Three things I’ve learnt about new/social media.

1) Take the initial default assumption that people don’t have time for your idea. The challenge is to make social media easy-to-consume and interesting. You don’t want to add to the clutter.

2) When starting out, take your time and resource assumptions, and double them.

3) I need to make leisure a ‘must’ on my to-do list.