A couple of weeks ago I attended Emerging Communications 2010 in San Francisco as a blogger. Most of us were first micro blogging by issuing tweets to share what was going on in real time. Adding #eCommConf and #eComm to my tweet would also display my updates on the conferences’ two Twitter channels right away. Additionally, the reach of some of my tweets would be further expanded by others who ended up “retweeting” the most interesting ones.
Cross-platform syndication enables you to write just once and to populate a variety of online media services. As an example, the same tweets I was discussing above were also captured by my facebook, linkedin and wordpress pages, which I had already set up to that end. Plaxo was in turn displaying the same updates by getting them from facebook.
I posted full length articles on my blog once a day, which get also further announced and propagated across tweeter, facebook, plaxo and linkedin. A “share this” or “add this” button enables others to continue to disseminate my content from my blog, also in a cross-platform syndication fashion.
Needless to say that this micro blogging and blogging activity kept me not only more focused on making the most of this conference, but also enabled me to engage in online conversations with others who shared the same interest in the event’s topic, some of which became face to face and, interestingly enough, email discussions that are still going.
Thanks for this post, Jose. Would you mind sharing how you address the different cultures of the various platforms with this strategy?
Thanks for pointing that out. In my case, I leverage micro-blogging as a near real time communication channel, which would at times resemble public instant messaging, as well as a vehicle to deliver updates to the online networking sites I am registered with.
While it is true that the various platforms are often identified with different cultures and, therefore, different behaviors and response times, the audience I address is mostly professionals in the information and communication technologies sector who share the same interests. This means there is a common ground.
I leverage blogging to get myself to step back, regroup my thoughts, and to deliver the next level of information and analysis. Then I get to use micro-blogging again as an awareness tool to share that I have made available a new post.