I’ve been dreading this post for a while now, but a recent exchange with a friend over Skype last night reminded me how I can’t avoid the subject any longer, hence this post.

Here was the departure point for our chat: you can only be good at one delivery mechanism in social media. That combining your social media efforts across multiple channels – text, audio, and video — needlessly dilutes your cumulative efforts in the space and withers away at your brand identity. It boils down to the following: if you’re a prolific blogger, like my friends Damjan DeNoble and James Flanagan of China Health Care Blog

Courtesy: Damjan DeNoble, Asia Health Care Blog

remain a blogger. If you’re a sensational podcaster who gives great Q&A mouth like my friend Ian Kath of Your Story Podcast, remain a podcaster. And if you’re an entertaining vidcaster who always puts out entertaining educational material, like Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, well then, keep doing what you were doing. Stick to your knitting, as the old saying says,. seem to be what the professionals are saying. If you find your voice in one medium, don’t jump around. And always ensure that it’s exceptional.

Since the start of Twenty-Ten, I’ve recorded just the single podcast episode, and that was only because my computer suffered a meltdown on the morning I’d decided to blog. That audio bit – which turned out to be better than the post I’d originally planned – was a sort of high-brow regurgitation of what I’d spent the better part of that morning compiling (thanks to Live Writer and the sage advice of Brett “Brother From Another Mother” Bumeter, that no longer happens). The podcast was better only because I’d devoted more than two hours wrangling down my thoughts on the book review, but I still would have preferred to see the review in print.

This post is odd because I’d spent the better part of 2008 recording gigabytes of the stuff, but I’ve gone almost exclusively text-based since the middle of last year while I maintain a certain brand reputation. If your viewers drop into your site never knowing what to expect, you ruin the potential goodwill you might establish from an otherwise consistent delivery. Some readers might appreciate your novelty and the constant shuffling, but others will likely tune out as they tire of your constant bob and weave. Supplying a good defense that constantly changing offense will knock out even the most well-intentioned follower.

Demonstrating the “Bob ‘n Weave”

Still, I’m not sure I’d want to give up podcasting, even though I know this contradicts with everything I’d just written about above. So I carry around my gear wherever I go, just in case and since I have a natural facility with the spoken word, it would be a shame to lose that arrow in my “media quiver,” so to speak. Should I be making more of an effort to record audio? Well, so far the big drawback is for people tuning in from places where high bandwidth connections aren’t freely available or where they’re heavily censored.

When I was in China last (November 2009), The Double E and I planned to test out how our various media stuff loaded from within the Great Firewall (GFW), and the results weren’t good. Streaming audio and video that didn’t load up from government-approved sites was a terribly unreliable affair, and access to YouTube and Vimeo even with the Virtual Private Network (VPN) assist didn’t improve matters much, either. So if it’s your business to target Chinese consumers with media products, this obstacle must absolutely be taken into consideration given how it can sideline even the most ambitious rollout plans.

On vide: It’s tremendously effective and continues to grow in importance (especially for mobile devices) but takes time to splice together digitally even under the most capable of editor’s hands. Post-production remains, for most, the pinch point in an effective video delivery chain and as much as I’d like to record one per day, two things inhibiting that lofty goal are, a) editing time and b) the ability of people to actually make the commitment to sit there and watch the thing. Cellphone and iPhone delivery is an area I’d like to explore more this year, but I’m still unsure about how much of an impact a full-screened video experience loses when compressed down to the contours of a squint-inducing mini-screen.

Regardless, whether it’s text, audio, or video, get something out there daily. After five weeks into this New Year, I’ve been on a steady blogging tear, though I might slip into an audio binge next month because it’s been too long since I had that sort of fun.

Keep tuning in, though, and thank you for your support, always.

Related posts:

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