As blogging and social media sites make publishing on the web easier, the amount of information is growing fast. You can open up a page on Facebook in minutes. You can invite all your friend with e-Mail import. Now you have a page with a blog with a photo album and even all kind of fun games. You can send messages and play games with other people. Then what? How are you going to use all this power of connecting with people? What are you going to tell all your connections that is so important? As a blogger and social media creator you need to take into account the growth in information just like other aspects of your work. You can reach thousands of people at once. You have access to lots of information. Now you have responsibility to do something well and maybe even contribute to people.
Think about the scale of your writing, audience and message.
Large scale may mean lower quality, but not necessarily!
If you are able to write, photograph and video on a large scale, it may mean that the quality of your work will be sacrificed. This is not always a bad decision. Take a look at popular writers and musicians. The ones producing good work are the ones that people like. People who create something on a large scale get help. A photographer does not have to be the photo editor or the photo processor (the digital editing for color and composition.) A musician does not have to be the composer or final finisher. When you start out you can do everything, but after a while you can
Common message does not have to be generic!
In the US there is a joke about beauty contestants, they are all blond, painted to perfection and want world peace. This is what they say when asked what they will do if selected as the winning beauty queen. It is kind of a funny cliche but not really. It turns out that that answer fits even now that the US is at war and bodies are sent back on a weekly basis. Can you come up with a good way to say something to everyone?
How to grow a niche message: what is important in your corner of the world?
Instead of thinking of everyone you can reach, you can target a smaller audience. The large number of people connected on the Internet gives you a whole new way of thinking of things. A friend of mine could not get water colors to paint. With all the digital revolution, art shops in small town have been closing down. So he started a blog about painting supplies. Now he gets commissions from affiliate stores that ship virtually everywhere in the world. Not a big or important niche, but certainly big enough for a few bloggers to make a living. There are probably thousands of wonderful blogs of painters out there you can write about. Also big issues in the painting world that are important to many painters. Just the change in how people paint, what the social media on the Internet means and how to ride the changes is a whole topic that you can write about for a while.
A personal or professional point of view: change the way people see the world.
Finally, the truly innovative use of large scale blogging and social media use: bringing your personal message to a large audience. What Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell are doing is something you can do as well. Your message can be from your personal life (how to home school your children) or from your own experience in daily living (how to eat healthy while traveling on business.) In your professional life, you can give both a private personal or a specialty domain (personal professional) view: new techniques in your work or professional observations to help others. What blogs give professionals is an ability to not only publish their personal view, it’s the ability to launch a conversation and coordinate opinions and comments. This is what we do in conferences and while eating lunch in a large factory or a hospital. We use to call it “back of the envelope” discussion, where the proverbial electric bill envelope was used to draw something while we talk. Some call it “elevator discussion” after the short conversations we have while doing nothing between floors. This quick conversation feature in blogs is useful for everything in life. Now imagine doing it on a global scale. Most people do not have that friend or co-worker at lunch. Now you can have a conversation over a specialty field without being in the same room at the same time.