First, there was the 24-hour news cycle, courtesy of CNN and cable news. That replaced the day-to-day cycle, where you'd respond to today's paper and tonight's 6 o'clock newscast.
Now, social media adds a new twist, with constant demand for new content.
Yet this can be a two-fold trap.
- Instead of sending out too little content, you can wind up sending out far too much.
- It's much easier for your message to turn into a self-serving monologue, rather than a dialogue with the press and public. People may see your message as spam rather than valuable content.
So what's the answer?
How can you produce enough content -- but not too much?
And how can you send out your message while engaging people in a discussion?
This One is Too Much, This One is Too Little, and This One is Just Right
The question of how much content to send out, and when to send it, is tricky.
Different outlets demand different strategies. What works for emailing the press doesn't work for social media and blogs.
Sending material to the press every day is a sure-fire way of getting editors and reporters to create email filters shipping your material to the trash can.
Yet sending only one tweet per day on Twitter would be far too little. Twitter moves fast. You need to be on there often to truly make connections and talk to people.
Facebook and your blog is probably in between the two. Once a week is too sparse. Once a day is smarter.
A Dialogue, Not a Monologue
Even if you crafted the perfect schedule for your blog posts, press releases, Twitter feed and Facebook page, it would all go to waste unless you're engaging the press and public in a dialogue rather than a monologue.
What's the difference?
Your message is a monologue if all you talk about is you. Your company, your client, your product, your organization, your campaign.
A message is a dialogue when it responds to the press and public and brings up real questions and answers.
Instead of sending out press releases whenever you're ready to ship them (monologue), send them when there's a news hook, right after a newspaper prints a related story, or a television station runs a piece.
For example, press releases are usually a monologue. Letters to the editor are a dialogue, because they're responding to news, an oped or other letters.
Twitter and Facebook can be seen the same way. Don't look at Twitter, Facebook and your blog as a megaphone. Think of it as a crowded coffee shop or bar, with people have all sorts of conversations.
Try to respond to other peoples' posts far more often than you produce content focusing on yourself or your organization. Responding to people engages them.
Instead of sending out messages, ask questions.
Questions are inherently more interesting than statements, and posing a question is far more likely to generate a dialogue than simply stating something or providing a link to your blog post or press release.
Here are a few quick examples. Say you're working for Apple and dealing with constant press questions about what features the new generation of iPhone will have. You can't divulge it yet, but neither can you maintain complete silence. Instead of letting the press and public know tiny bits of information (monologue), engage in a dialogue. Ask reporters and customers, "What features would you like to see in the new iPhone?"
You can apply the dialogue idea anywhere: politics, business, professional sports, authors, rock stars. Instead of sending a press release announcing the tour dates for U2, ask fans which cities should be on the tour.
Rather than having the press shop of the Seattle Mariners tell reporters and season ticket holders about special promotions and events for the season, start a dialogue earlier by asking them for their ideas of what they'd like to do or see, what worked or didn't work.
Hillary Clinton did a good job of opening up a dialogue when she ran for the U.S. Senate in New York.
It's easy for political candidates to fall into the monologue trap, to talk about themselves, their qualifications, their resumes, their policy positions. It's hard to make it about the citizens. She did it by traveling around the state -- especially upstate New York -- on a listening tour.
She had a dialogue. She listened first and talked second. The press and public paid a lot more attention to that listening tour than they would have if she'd done the usual schedule of stump speeches, showing up in town after town to say the same thing over and over again.
Would a typical stump-speech tour have kept Clinton on message? Sure. But it'd be the modern equivalent of repeating the same tweet on Twitter hour after hour until people tuned you out.