This might seem a little strange for a guy who has spent the last two years evangelizing new media to say, but there are times when a podcast or a videoblog aren’t the right tool for the job. Sometimes, plain old text does just fine. And other times, text is so horribly wrong, and we threaten to drown someone in the depths of information traipsed across a page in strings of words. Here are some thoughts on the matter for your consideration.
Text is Good for fast consumption of information. It’s great for reading news, lots of news. Want to try a test? Take your list of podcasts in audio or video form and tell me how much information you can parse through in 30 minutes. Now, try the same with your RSS reader. If you’re using a decent reader, I bet you’ll get MULTIPLES more of the text scanned, read, parsed, and processed. It’s great for lists. That’s why we don’t draw pictures of eggs.
Audio is Good for information you want to absorb deeply. It’s wonderful for building a bond between the listener and the speaker. It comes off as far more personal, sometimes even intimate, to listen to the spoken word. Audio allows for a variation or a coloring of the meaning of words. Think of how many ways you can say the simple sentence, “Thanks a lot.”
Video is Good for visual information and/or for showing someone something you wish they could experience the way you’re experiencing it. It’s also good for making a personal connection, thus the beauty of videoblogs and how they form a connection between the blogger and their audience. There’s a reason TV changed the world in the 1950s, and a reason why even today, more people walk around talking about TV shows than they do any specific movie, radio program, or book.
There are variations and exceptions for when you might use an audio podcast versus a blog versus a video blog versus a photo post. For instance, instructional information is great in a video format.
Video is for Showing
Bre Pettis’s Make: Video Podcast is a great show. It’s very visual, gives you a great sense of Bre as a human, and by extension, makes you think good things about Make. It shows you cool new things. But what if you want to take Bre’s project outdoors with you and try to recreate it? Unless you’re using your video iPod, it might be tricky. Aha! That’s when the Make Magazine issue you bought at the bookstore ends up being better. So, one might say you should watch Bre for entertainment, and then either memorize what he did, or you should consider the magazine should you want to recreate the experiences.
Audio is for Absorbing
I prefer audio interviews to video. Video interviews usually are cut too short because it gets boring watching heads pingpong back and forth, and/or because video requires us to move along a little faster. Audio is also a great way to hear about things while you’re doing other things. I love listening to Managing the Gray and New Comm Road and a dozen other audio podcasts while I’m commuting to work, because I can listen to them and experience the information while driving. I can rewind parts I want to hear again. I can go back when there’s a salient point. I can skip ahead. (Ah, but then navigating a podcast can be clunky).
Text is for Information
I text blog more than anything else I do in the space of media, and that’s primarily for ease of use, as well as ease-of-sharing. If I write one thing on this page that’s worth sharing, you can clip it out with Clipmarks and go back and look at it later. You can riff on something on your own blog. Text is just super easy to produce, share, remix. Easier than any of the other media we work with.
It’s Not Just One Format Any More
In a world where WE are in control, and where products exist that allow us to create whatever we want, however we want, and produce/consume/remix/share in multitudes of styles, why stick to just one format? It gets tricky for meta-aggregators like the startup I’m involved with, Network2, should a producer put more than just video in their RSS feed, but otherwise, you and me, we’ll consume what we’re given. I know because I do it in Google Reader all the time. You throw text, I read text. You add a video. I’ll watch it (if I have time).
So pick the format you need to tell the information you need. You want to report on a birthday party you attended? Cool. Show us the video. You respect my time? Show me a few snapshots, or a fun music video clipped from the best parts of the birthday party. You want to tell me about your new startup? Please don’t make me watch a video first. Give me some text and a couple pictures. Then you can throw video at me, or a quick audio message from the founders.
What’s Your Experience?
Knowing full well that I have lots of audio and video podcasters, bloggers, and new media superheros as readers of [chrisbrogan.com], I’m looking for your thoughts on this. Be honest. Look at what you’re producing and tell me that everything you’re making fits well into the single medium you’ve chosen for delivery. And if not, how would you consider integrating a multi-modal approach of delivering information? Would it just be a blog that you post text, audio and video into? Or is there a consumption experience that would make it all feel just as exciting?
How would businesses use this advice? What’s your follow-on?
And how long would this have taken to consume had I read it all into a microphone and produced an MP3 file?