In the last few weeks you almost certainly received an email from LinkedIn inviting you to publish. “Get recognized for your expertise,” their emails promise, and it sounds believable. Rock stars of the business world like Richard Branson have posted their thoughts to LinkedIn over the last several years, so certainly there’s an appeal to being published under the same masthead.
But as most of us have seen recently, our LinkedIn feeds are a hopeless mess of posts from friends, colleagues and acquaintances made at networking events in years past, all sandwiched between notifications of job changes and anniversaries. What floats to the top is still likely to be the polished bits of content from the names you already know.
In an important way this represents the state of digital media today, as each site rushes to gain their share of the internet’s traffic by pushing out tremendous amounts of content each day. The digital footprints of venerable news organizations have expanded to compete with newcomers like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed that are veritable content farms.
The deluge of content is mirrored in all of digital spaces. Facebook began as a digital enclave for college students to escape the free-for-all of Myspace, before becoming the place where everyone — your parents included — could post links to their favorite time wasting cat videos. LinkedIn began similarly, and even a newer generation of sites like Medium that purport to gracefully curate the internet’s overabundance, have gradually become untamed.
Truthfully there is no simple lesson to be taken away from this. The easy thing to claim is that in an infinite pool of content, each drop is meaningless, but that is obviously not the whole truth. It is certainly possible that a post on LinkedIn or Medium could find an audience and grant a platform to a voice that was previously overlooked. But it’s a little like winning the lottery.
As a general rule, you should avoid being impressed and satisfied with media hits at the digital juggernauts, be it the open forums of LinkedIn or the lightly edited blogs of the Huffington Post. Yes, it’s true that those sites generate tremendous amounts of traffic, and some of those posts create extremely high visibility, but for the most part these sites are generating traffic over a very long tail.
These sites have undoubtedly meant that venerable media outlets are no longer the sole gatekeepers to public exposure, but as we are seeing now, there is enduring value in having a gatekeeper, an editor or a curator to sort the wheat from the chaff. The big name outlets remain high value media targets because they bolster credibility and deliver a reliable audience. As communications pros, it is on us to work to get our stories on the platforms where they will be noticed, even if that means doing more than pressing “Publish.”
Photo Credit: David, Bergin, Emmett and Elliott Creative Commons via Flickr
