Media Distribution

     Production, obviously, is only half of the story. What good is great content unless you can get it to people? Take blogs for instance. People have a limited amount of time to check websites regularly – few people are going to be bothered to check more than a couple of blogs every day.

     Now they don’t need to. The innovation that has increased the reach of blogs and podcasts and has given terrific impetus to social media’s evolution is a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which allows people to subscribe to a blog or website.

     RSS notifies a ‘newsreader’ or your personal homepage (on, say, Google or Windows Live) that there is new content available and sends it the text and images. You can then read these in your newsreader without having to visit the website itself.

     The importance of RSS, therefore, is that it makes it much easier for blogs and other social media to build or become part of communities. They may often be small communities, but to their users they may be highly relevant and valuable.

     The other method of distribution that is sometimes neglected in any discussion of social media is search engines. Because blogs are highly connected, in the eyes of Google the more established ones can become an authority on a niche topic.

     If, say, you have been blogging about cats for a good few months, and your posts have attracted links from other blogs, then a story about new government legislation on pet ownership on your blog may earn similar ranking for searches on that subject as the local newspaper or even national media.

     Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book