How To Split An Atom

I am a brand! (read this for context)

I wish I had a bumper sticker that said that so I could stick it on my Hybrid.

Go ahead, laugh.

As silly as the “personal brand” thing sounds (say it out loud a few times), it makes enough sense for discussion. To you, my fair readers, I am only as relevant as the character that I have crafted for your viewing pleasure.

That character, for the most part, is a good representation of who I actually am, but just like Pappa Bear Bill O’Rielly is probably a wee bit different than his show might portray, this blog and the rest of my little Internet fiefdom is only one angle on a (hopefully) more complex life.

Take this stuff, for example,

• I am an Electrical Engineer.
• I live in Florida.
• I am a Fencing coach.
• I don’t drive a Hybrid (though I would)
• I like music and movies and hiking and traveling and all sorts of other stuff you could probably find in my Facebook profile.

All of that isn’t as important to you as what I can tell you about making your business better or about building better stuff. That’s why I don’t blog about any of that here.

That’s Media kids.

Media is the space between your story and my pocketbook. Media is the commercial that prodded me to buy my car, the newspaper ad that got me into the leasing office of my apartment, the 24 hour news rant that shifted the way I looked at candidate X or movie Y or product Z. Media is as much the lucid analysis of topics as it is sensationalist rambling around them.

We love media and most importantly we consume it ravenously.

New Media, “Social” Media is all this but with no budget.

If you want to understand New Media, watch Newsies. Besides being one of Christian Bale’s first films, it’s the most accurate New Media documentary that exists to date.

It has everything.

You have an industry (newspapers) growing in relevance and seeking to gain a foothold in the hearts and wallets of a society that still doesn’t understand it. You have a few huge players (Pulitzer and Hearst) who have lost sight of what they originally wanted to accomplish with their platforms, and you have an entire field of minor characters (the newspaper strikers) trying to make ends meet preying off of the pennies that the industry titans rain down on them.

It’s great stuff and it couldn’t have fit better if they had cast the entire Technorati Top 100 to play themselves.

New Media is not some idealistic reinvention of media, no matter what anyone tells you. It’s the campfire stories we tell, how we tell them and who we think tells the best ones.

It’s the characters we create, the story arcs that we develop and all that stuff going on backstage that makes our medium worth following.

It’s important, it’s vibrant and it’s necessary because unlike old media the cost of entry is a double Espresso and a domain name.

It’s useful financially because unlike journalism where graft, bias and corruption are at least looked down upon, we are still writing the rules. It’s the Wild West of content production. No one knows where the line in the sand should be, and even if they did there is nothing in the world that forces any of us abide.

For those seeking some direction, worry not, we have the covered too — marketers, advertisers and PR people the world over are more than happy to lead us in the “right” direction.

What else can you learn about the media social?

It’s a fantastic place to become an expert on a topic (unless it’s web applications, I think we have that covered).

If you’re smart, you’ll use it to help build some other business. Being a New Media producer in and of itself is a one way ticket to the soup line for 98% of people.

It’s a great way to meet great people. Compared to the rest of the web, Social Media folks are surprisingly friendly. It has something to do with the fact that most of us are Marketers.

There is no such thing as The Conversation, there are conversations and they are important, but there is no special link between your company writing a blog post a week and raising your marketshare.

Using New Media is hard. It involves liking people and talking to them like they were human beings instead of notches on your existential bedpost. For many Marketers this will prove an insurmountable task.

A few things to ruminate on until next time.

Pst, before you go.

I wanted to leave you with my lesson for this episode –The Secret to Social Media, the two tips that will build your “brand” and make the world love your product no matter how ridiculous it is. These tips are guaranteed to wow all of your friends and change the way you do business ™.

Alright, ready? Let’s begin.

The first is that as a blogger you should use Social Media to build expertise, not traffic. Once people care about what you have to say, traffic will come and trust me — there are a lot better places to get it than Twitter.

As a brand you should use it like a 24 hour help-line to track, monitor and talk to your customers where they feel comfortable — whether that is through publishers, from a Twitter account or in some elaborate video production. Again, get your eyeballs off of your analytics and realize that the people on the other side of your monitor have their B.S. blasters set to kill and the second they feel like you’re doing more shilling than talking, they’ll vet you from their lives permanently. The level of this behavior is directly proportional to their importance to you as a customer, so be weary.

Good examples for your consideration, Comcast Cares over on Twitter and Intel’s Insiders that my good friend Michael Brito (who you should be reading) turned me onto.

Onto Episode Five: Building Absolutely Incredible Businesses

(Image) (Season One)