Monday, March 9, 2009

One Man's Noise

With the internet and social media making it so easy for anyone to become a publisher, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the content that is produced and can be difficult to find the good content among the noise. As I was discussing this today on Twitter with @mehwolfy, he tweeted that "@ljjones one man's noise is another man's music." A very true statement. What's interesting and relevant to you may not be the same for me and vice versa.

So what is noise?
Noise is content that is not relevant or of value to you or a given audience.

Listening
If you are listening, then you are part of the audience and you need to filter the noise. Don't try to listen to everything. There is just too much. Listen to what interests you and to people who interest you.

Publishing
If you are publishing then you are writing for an audience. In order to write good content rather than generating more noise, you need to know your audience and understand what content they will find valuable. Write for them.

Everyday more content is created and if we don't filter it, it all becomes noise. But always remember just because its noise to you, doesn't mean that it won't be music to someone else's ears.

1 comment:

Wolfy said...

I don't think most people are "writing for an audience" on twitter and facebook. We are real people writing about real life things that are eclectic, weird, random, stupid, funny, thoughtful or bitchy.

We Social Media marketers espouse the notion that authenticity, realness, personality and such things that describe ordinary people in the course of commenting about their ordinary life are good and beneficial to a brand.

Yet all that unfocused commentary still gets described as noise. I couldn't disagree more. Sure it would be helpful for marketing if we could cut down on the noise, but it's the noise and the difficulty of succeeding in marketing that makes Social Media useful to both marketers and (far more importantly) to ordinary people.

Social Media is Social first and a marketing platform second.

-M