Platforming and Brand-You leveraging — Inside Knowledge and Tips. Part I
Before you became that killer A writer and everyone begged you for your copy, you likely cut a lonely figure entertaining your work and that Jack Daniels did not go to waste. Remember it took Shakespeare a 100 plus years later to become a widely respected playwright.
For some, Napoleon, Gilgamesh, and Dorothy Parker, to name a few, the recognition came sooner.
You write because you want to. You write because you’ve this need to jumble words together into a harmony to satisfy that internal rhythm, while also trying to make a point. The bit where someone’s going to show an interest, well that’s indeterminate.
Just twenty odd years ago, it was relative to today a much brutal process. There were no universal blogs or platforms to show your wares to gain free attention, and to pour out your soul in the most graphic cathartic way.
To become a writer required gathering tear sheets you could stick into a scrap book and haul along to interviews, much like a model with her, or his, portfolio.
And then platforms in the shape of blogs changed that. A place to write. Anyone could and the magical thing that happened was people took up the opportunity. I did. Why wouldn’t I? knowing all too well how the old system kept you from the gates of emotional prosperity via a customary gatekeeper. This time any inertia was on me.
Today, perhaps unknowing of the old world, some of my journalism charges can’t quite see the value in using a forum like this one. But you do, and here’s where it get’s interesting.
As I started to write for myself in the 2000s, I did so on blogger.com. One day they wrote to me stating.
Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.3 score out of (10) in the Technology category of Blogged.com. This is quite an achievement! We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!! www.blogged.com
That Jack Daniel bottle wasn’t enough. I’ve always found writing difficult, considered myself a poor writer, but over the years have developed techniques to help. Whatever it meant, recognition, alone would do for that emotional craving many of us seek.
Then, an idea. The mid 2000s began to reveal deeper knowledge in books like Howard Rheinhgold’s Smart Mobs and Dan Gilmor’s We the Media about why people spent time online, or why they might read an obscure blog on technology. In one sense, they did, because they could, said Gilmor.
A plethora of writing platforms appeared online, and interestingly in a quid pro quo blogger.com, by attracting good writers, was itself becoming a brand. Much like @Medium today, Blogger.com back then was one of the first writing platforms to ensure you could embed videos, images and a range of plugins onto its site.
But writers like me still worked the lane largely alone until that one day. Here’s the question I asked. Why do people buy Vogue? Why do they reach for Wired? Or descend on GQ? Why do people go to awards? And why do we watch people at awards?
It’s something to do with added value and scale of impact. Yes the individual writers forming a body, a clan, has its draw, but the publication or awards is doing something else with the content. What if that unknown entity could demonstrate they could enhance the writers’ value, then like an ouroboros magically everyone benefited.
To understand what I mean by this, you have to imagine Vogue before it was well known, or GQ before it launched. Its founders yearned to create a new world in print and needed to attract the best writers. Some would have asked, “What is this Vogue about?” and needed to be convinced before leasing their own brand identity
Vogue would capture a new fashion and its architects, dandyism, a fresh art form in impressionism portraying women in a dynamic realism. Women changing society.
For those who perhaps declined the first few issue, I can imagine the riposte to be, “You’ll see” writ large. This was an aspirational world of creation and the sum of what it offered changed its overall reception.
With that in mind blogs alone in the early 2000s weren’t enough because something else the history of content creation has showed us is that there’s a gravitational pull to richer sensory experiences. Think how print was threatened by radio, then cinema poked radio. Then it became more personalised with TV.
Which leads me to 2004. This photo I took below is of Arsenal and England team footballer Anita Asante — a rising star who was getting recognition from one Thierry Henry. Today, she’s retired and a pundit, amongst many things. In fact she’s just got married this weekend. Here’s wishing her well.
In 2004 a colleague Charlie and I captured Anita at home, with her mother providing a mesmerising back story. We were both competent visualists and former Network TV producers, so we had a good understanding about what made a story.
I had been part of a movement of storytellers called video journalists which saw a new breed of journalists developing skills to produce news films that looked like cinema. It would lead to invitation to train the nation’s regional journalists and scores of people.
Alongside this photoshoot, remember Insta or Flikr doesn’t exist yet we offered a tantalising insight into Anita via photos, films and text.
We produced other content. Kuyah — a rock band who were the In Living Colour of the UK and Shirley Thompson, a composer and conductor who’d released an extraordinary CD New Nation Rising. She’s now a Prof, an OBE and ranked as one of Britain’s most influential Black people.
Cognitively, we were solving a problem and that was featuring extraordinary people on the verge of breaking big from diverse backgrounds — Lesson 1. But was there a gap for this type of content?
Sometimes you stumble upon something luckily, sometimes by active research. I did both, but why would content producers trust me. As a freelance journalist, there’s an important lesson that’s learned if you’re to be chosen amongst several freelancers .
What ever you end up doing make sure you deliver, with bells in the wings. That’s what makes you. Deliver more than what was expected. A network anchor Jon Snow would come to recognise that in me.
But to truly get attention, scale is required and that had me scratching my head until this idea.
I’m a creative technologist and cinema journalist/ filmmaker. I can be contacted on david() viewmagazine.tv, gyimahd@cardiff.ac.uk or Linkedin
