toy megaphones

Remember those toy megaphones from when you were a kid? You know, the ones with buttons to make your voice sound like a robot or a chipmunk or an alien.

It was fun to explore different voices, but they were all kind of hard to understand until you put the megaphone down and just used your normal voice again.

The internet is pretty much the same way. It can be fun (or scary) to explore video and podcasts and blogs and all the rest, but until you know how it is that you best communicate, your content will probably sound artificial and a little garbled.

what’s my “real” voice online?

How do you decide if video or blogs or podcasts or any other medium is the best way for you to get your message across online?

Consider how you communicate IRL on a daily basis. I think most people show natural leanings for certain mediums in small ways all the time.

Some people can’t bear to be on-camera but will send the most detailed and thorough emails you’ve ever seen, while other people are terrified by a blank page or blinking cursor, but will spend an hour telling you everything about their work, unprompted, sitting across a cafe table.

Whatever mode it is that naturally gets you to spill your heart for your work is probably a good place to start, but that doesn’t have to be where you end.

form informs perception

When deciding what form to use for your online communications, it’s important to consider how you want to be perceived.

Each medium naturally carries with it certain preconceptions and emotional responses on the part of the audience.

For instance, podcasts and video are great at conveying personality, which creates a sense of comradery between the speaker and the audience. Meanwhile, a blog post strips the same message down to a purely intellectual focus, giving the author a more authoritative relationship to the audience.

Of course, there is latitude within each of these mediums—video can be highly intellectual and authoritative, and you can be very relatable and friendly through your writing style—but it’s important to keep in mind that a little extra effort is required to swim upstream of the medium’s innate tendency.

context informs form

Form is only one part of an equation that adds up to effective communication. Another major factor is the context.

To get an idea of how form and context inform each other, consider watching a movie in a dark room versus reading a physical book in a dark room.

A dark room may be the best environment to experience the full impact of a film, but it will make it impossible to get any effect at all from the physical book.

It doesn’t matter if the book is War and Peace or Curious George, if we don’t connect the form to the context, the content may become totally irrelevant.

match your content to your offering

The way you create and, more importantly, publish your content should be consistent with your business’ offering.

First of all, when I say “offering,” I mean that at a very fundamental level. This is usually one of a small list of things, e.g.:

• products
• information
• services
• experience
• or transformation

The second thing to consider about your offering is: where does it fall on the scale from luxury to necessity?

Once you have paired those two qualities of your offering, you can start thinking about how to build the acoustic environment for your content.

For example, if you offer a service that people will only need once, or very infrequently—maybe in an emergency situation—the way you publish information about it should probably be more or less static and well organized. Something like a searchable, categorized library which is easy to navigate even in an agitated state.

What would not be useful is a scrolling feed designed to be subscribed to. Subscribing is not necessary if your service is only needed once, and it means that relevant information probably has to be aimlessly dug out of a sea of click-bait headlines.

On the other hand, if you provide a transformation of some sort, such as coaching or education, then ongoing, subscription-style content which gives prospects encouragement or information on a regular basis might be just the thing.

the time-cost of content

All media has a time-cost. Anything we create will take some amount of time to consume. But not all media has the same time-cost.

For example:

• an image has almost no required time-cost. It can typically be instantly observed in its entirety; any remaining time spent is at the sole discretion of the audience
• the time-cost of written text is almost completely subjective. It is dependent on the reading speed of the audience, but it can also be skimmed and stopped or started from any point the reader wishes
• recorded audio has a semi-fixed time-cost. It can be sped up or slowed down, but with varying levels of detriment to the effect of the message (i.e. speech can be sped up to any point that the hearer can comprehend, but music will lose most of its intended impact if not heard at its original tempo)
• video has the most rigid time-cost. It can also be sped up or slowed down, but it is least desirable to do this with video because of the effect it has on both the audio and the natural movement of the visuals and pacing of the edit, etc.

In order to avoid wasting our audience’s time, it is necessary to at least make a basic assessment of how much time we are asking them to spend in the first place.

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P.S. Taking advantage of the tools in our publication platforms such as video or podcast chapters or a table of contents for a blog post are also courtesies we can extend that give the audience more agency over their time-spend with our content.