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Are there too many choices out there?
Posted by: Kevin in Technology, Internet, Blogging, Podcasting, RSS, New Media, Youtube, Facebook, Marketing and promotion, Social networking, Web 2.0, Commentary, kyte.tv, Embedded Content, Audience Interaction, MySpace, DigitalI recently participated in the Big Ideas, Small Budget discussion group put together by Donna Papacosta of Trafalgar Communications. For 45 minutes, we discussed several things regarding communications and new media. One point that I brought up over the course of the discussion was that there was too much choice out there. I’ll explain.
I’m getting ready to build a new site for a client and I was thinking about some of the new media technologies that I may want to integrate, and I’ve hit a wall. It seems that there is too many ways to reach an audience these days. Much so that it’s starting to be confusing.
For instance, we want to hit a social network. Do you do MySpace? What about Facebook? How about LinkedIn?
Do we blog using Wordpress? Why not Blogger? I’m building the site using Joomla, so why not use that for blogging as well?
Do you add micro-blogging? How about Twitter? But Utterz is practically the same thing and you can add voice, so why not use that? Or do you use Jaiku instead? Do we create a YouTube channel? Or what about kyte.tv? But we can use BlogTV.ca for video as well (and live to boot!) How about that? Do we want to podcast as well? What about a video podcast?
And the feeds! My God, everything has RSS these days! Do you do separate feeds for all of them? Do you consolidate some together?
And, if you pick one service over the other are you going to alienate a potential audience? Lots of people are on Facebook and MySpace, but others are on and not the other. If I do everything through kyte.tv, will the people who usually hang out on YouTube find my kyte.tv channel somehow?
There is also a time consideration there. If you go head-first into all of these services, do you have the time to maintain and update them? While posting a quick Twitter post might not seem like much, you get the most out of MySpace by networking with your “friends” (i.e. doing more than just hitting the “add” button.) There is also importance in the consistency of information across all of your online presences; if you post a blog on your site, you should post it on your MySpace blog as well (thankfully Facebook got this right and auto-updates the blog on your profile—aka “notes”—through RSS. Genius!)
These kinds of things present the opportunity to think strategically about what you want to do. While it might be tempting to dive head-first in all of this and spread the love as far as you can, you might want to consider testing the waters with one or two things to see if they catch on. If so, keep going with it. If not, you might want to consider trying something else.
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February 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Wow! You took the words right out of my mouth! Or rather… my mind.
Fear not, I know how you feel… for I have thought the same thing as well, from time to time. So many options can be overwhelming! I have recently narrowed down my dilemma by having only a facebook account versus having both facebook and myspace. The decision was long overdue because of that exact situation you pointed out: Some people have this, some people have that, and some have both or none at all! Which is initially why I had both!
However, it ultimately comes down to one important thing… preference. Which do you prefer? Do you prefer user-friendly features or the user count?
I, myself, am an online blogger as well — so choosing a site to dish out my 2 cents was quite the dilemma. And with video-blogging being on the uprise, I have chosen Kyte.tv as my bread and butter! I enjoy the concept of having a channel of my own, and producing shows on that channel. Having a channel for my video-blogging and another for my picture slide-shows helps me to keep all my shows organized
And the embedding ability is an easy way to share my shows with friends and family on facebook! [kyte.tv has a facebook application, did you know?] Honestly, Kyte is how I got into video-blogging on a heightened scale — after seeing other users with video blogs on their own kyte channels; so rad!
Well, I hope you get to the bottom of your dilemma here!
March 10th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I agree with the point you made about the abundance of choices; it’s a rich web world, and a lot of it is free - if you can ignore the ads;->
Thanks for mentioning that Facebook can link to blogs, and that the route is through Notes. Found it, linked mine!
And I’m badly behind in my Bloglines. More choices!