Use the Right Channel for Your Content

Your path to success doesn’t end with creating great content; you must match it with the right channel in order to reach the right audience. While it sounds simple, getting the right fit takes some careful thought. Some people get it right, but a vast majority just don’t get it at all.

Our presidential example

Last week, The Massachusetts Historical Society scored a huge win by choosing Twitter to publish President John Quincy Adams’s personal journal. Because his journal is a collection of one-line entries, one for each day, and because every entry happens to be under 140 characters, Twitter is the perfect vehicle. As a result, over 5,000 people started following his tweets on the very first day. That’s a grand slam.

A novel approach?

In The Tipping Point podcast last week I also introduced you to Matt Stewart, who is releasing his novel on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. It may work as a gimmick to gather attention. But it is attention to the gimmick and not the content. This is somewhat successful for Matt because of the novelty of it. But this limited success is not repeatable.

The content itself is very inappropriate to the medium. Even if you follow just a handful of people on Twitter, Matt’s book tweets — which are frequent, at 15-minute intervals — are still so spread out that the 140-character excerpts are hard to read and put together. His tweets are separated by dozens of others, and the plot-line for his book gets lost in the shuffle. Even Matt admits this:

To be honest, I don’t think anybody’ll weed through all my tweets.

You could set up a filter to collect just the book tweets using something like TweetDeck. But most Twitter users don’t know how to do this and why would they want to? Forced pauses and fractured sentences piled up bottom to top merely interrupt the story.

Lucky promotion vs. successful content

Matt’s book is better served on Scribd, the iPhone, and Kindle, where he has it available for $1.99. The French Revolution may become a successful self-published eBook thanks to the novelty of his approach. If so, Twitter will have been a successful tool for promotion just this once — as the self-proclaimed “first novel released on Twitter,” this book garnered a bit of major media attention at its release, but there’s been no traction to speak of. That’s because for the content itself, Twitter is just horrible. Wrong channel.

The right channel for you

The point? Well, of course the point is to find the right channel for your content. Is your video a quick demo of a new product feature? Well then try 12seconds.tv instead of Vimeo. Is your user group geared to professional sales people? Then try LinkedIn over Facebook. Are you hoping to build a 24-hour web channel for your fishing videos? Then create a UStream channel instead of a YouTube channel.

You can’t expect to be able to strike novelty gold. You must set the stage for long-term success with engaging and appropriate content for the platforms where you are reaching out to your audience.

The takeaway

Distribute your great content in the right contextual channels. Make sure both the format and the audience expectations are a good fit for your content.

My questions to you

Have you seen any other good examples of content fitting context? How about some horrible examples?

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.