Hello all! I love the rock star reference of my last name but always still use my maiden name (Roxas) because that has been my byline for the 15 years or so that I’ve worked as a magazine, book and public relations writer.
The enterprise of engaging an audience has certainly become a lot more complicated since I first started out writing. Everyone has his own bully pulpit now, with the blogosphere and the social media. I just recently joined the fray with a blog about garden matters and I’m finding out that building a community around your content is a major project unto itself.
But I’m encouraged by the emergence of social media platforms like Pinterest, StumbleUpon and Scoop.it offering content-sharing tools that enable creative narrowcasting — being able to reach an extensive audience that share the same specialized interests and engaging with them using relevant media technologies. Contrary to the common notion of social media contributing to an ever shorter attention span, it can also lead us into a deeper exploration of things that matter to us the most. Pinterest, for all its reputation as being lightweight, has been quite educational for me.
I hope that this course will help provide some clarifying perspective into the protean media landscape we are in. As I am personally interested in issues of arts and culture diversity, I hope it can help me discover best practices in using multi-media technologies to give a voice and honor the beauty and humanity of alternative aesthetic traditions.
Hi Grace,
Isn’t it fascinating to watch the evolution of media communications? I like the term you used, narrowcasting, because it so describes where people’s focus points are now, how communications can be developed and then deployed. I don’t think that anyone is ever too far behind on what’s going on because everything changes, err, evolves, so quickly. I have felt many times over that I should walk away from, or at surrender to,the notion that in order for me to succeed at my job (people actually reading my stuff), I have to be aware of, or even be the created of, the next big trend.
I think you will do a fine job on your quest in finding your own way on giving voice to art.
Question: About how much time a week do you spend researching the sundry of tools/methods/best practices on content-sharing tools? I am curious because from my experience, it’s too easy for me to go down all the rabbit holes on the subject-matter. What advice would you give?
Worrying about being the creator of the next trend or the next interesting piece of media is constantly hanging over me/my filmmaker friends. When a movie takes a few years to make how do you know whether or not the topic will be relevant or interesting to an audience and a world that is constantly finding new things to be interested in?
That’s an interesting insight into filmmaking I’ve never thought of before. What I find so interesting is that particular topics seem to come out in droves. There are so many environmental issues we are facing right now but food documentaries for instance, seemed to pop up overnight and held staying power over several years.
It seems to me that documentaries have so much power when several come out simultaneously and continuously as if to get the audience to think, hey this stuff must be really important if everyone is making a film about it versus a stand alone film on a particular issue.
I am curious if there is ever is a conscious decision on the part of a larger community of filmmakers to choose an issue to focus on (as to have larger change impact) or if it really is more of a lead and follow with hopes that an issue maintains relevancy?
Your concerns on drawing readers and interest are not alone. I follow many bloggers, some pros and some newcomers, and all of them talk constantly about the frustrations of feeling like they’re pouring themselves out to a void, or on the flip side, an arena so saturated you can’t be heard over the chaos. Most of them focus on marketing across platforms just like you mentions – Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit etc. Where have you found the most success and do you use any tools like Hootsuite to help?