jeremyvaught

I started a group on Facebook last year called, “New Media.”  It has almost 11,000 members now and some very interesting things are discussed.  Recently a question was asked that I responded to, and I thought it interesting enough to post it here.  It applies to you if you ask yourself, “what should I do with my website to help me professionally” or more simply, “I have a website, now what?”  This is by no means an exhaustive answer, just some quick thoughts on how to get up and going quickly with a plan.  Please dispute anything.  I would love to hear your thoughts, either here or at the group on Facebook.

Terry Reith asked the question,

“I’m a television journalist in Canada and recently taught myself how to build a site. It’s clear to me that the future is online and these are the tools we’ll need to succeed. But aside from strictly being a vanity exercise how might people use their personal sites when they have nothing to sell? I do television and photography and quite happily give it away. My site is www.terryreith.tv. I’d be interested in seeing some examples of what other media people are doing as well.”

And my response:

“To easily update the content, I suggest setting up a blog. They are designed to update quickly, and are search engine friendly. There are many ways to go. My favorite is installing wordpress.org on my own site. But there are also hosted solutions like wordpress.com, blogger.com and typepad.com.

“Back to putting your content on your website. The advantages are displaying your work is to get credibility for it, become known outside of your initial influence, and then basically whatever you want it to do. :) There are many ways to raise the awareness of your blog. An effective one is to comment on blogs where your potential audience is reading. Don’t spam the comments with an advertisement for your site, but a valuable and useful response, with a simple link will bring visitors wanting to know more about you. Additionally, to bring trust to who you are and your message, it takes time. So don’t expect to drop in, make a comment or two, and magic will happen. Trust takes time. (this goes for your site as well, update as often as you can. No less than twice a month, but more than once every day or two can drive readers away)

“These are what I have for you just off the top of my head, hope this helps!
Jeremy Vaught
[A] King of New Media”

I’m forgetting SXSW faster than I want to, so I’m capturing my memories here before they are gone forever. And admittedly, this could be a lengthy process because things happen that remind me of a moment at SXSW… and that’s when you will see it here. (hopefully)

So first. Might as well talk about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. You have likely heard of the exciting interview of Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy. I was there, but left about half way, the interview was exceedingly boring up until that point I left. In hindsight, my exit must have sparked the revolt. :) I was sitting along the wall, near the door where Mark walked in. Here is a pic I took.

So later that day I was running around with my friend Brent Spore from iboughtamac.com and Justine from TastyBlogSnack.com. We were talking around deciding what to do, and Justine informs us we need to go see AJ and leads the way. When we get where we are going, we walk in the back of this crazy bar that looks like a former rock quarry, and sure enough, there is AJ. (who I later learned is @garyvee’s brother, who I also learned that @garyvee is kind of a big deal, even though I had never heard of him). So sorry to say this AJ, but more importantly, there was Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg chatting. We were there all of 30 seconds or so and Kevin wanted out of there, (I later learned, nothing to do with us, they had plans) and was waiting for Mark to follow. But, we held him up. :) First, I took this pic…
And then we watched as Justine tried to ask Mark what his favorite snack is. Mark first refused to be filmed on video, which was pretty odd, since earlier in the day Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com had no problem with it. And I may be naieve, but at this point, Bezos is a tower of internet power, and Zuckerberg has to still bend his head way back to see Jeff way up there. Regardless, Zuckerberg refused the video, highly doubting that people actually answer Justine’s question about what their favorite snack is, I took this pic, and we were off.

I just discovered Mashable Invites. A cute idea. But brings to light a bigger problem. Too many social media startups.

It is great there is so much happening, but how much real innovation is really going on? Not much I’m afraid. But this begs the question, how long will this continue? Will it increase? Will the big sites like Facebook and Myspace start to grab some of the tiny ones and integrate them?

Off the cuff, I can only imagine it will get worse. There will be more and more. And even as I wrote the sentence asking if the big social media platforms will grab up some of the smaller ones, I knew the anwer is no. And the reason it is no is stated above, very little innovation is happening.

Back to the drawing board. Invites anyone?