Context Collapse: 💭Own Your Own Voice
You are not your platform: CC #238
In this issue: Creating stuff is easy but, damn it, don’t depend on a single platform to reach people.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
Human beings, as a whole, have crap memories. They also acclimate to their surroundings very, very easily.
As I write this in 2023, it’s ridiculously easy to make your own content whether you’re a person or (and I’m so sorry if this is the case) a representative of a brand or a company.
You can make a TikTok. You can post on Instagram. You can write an email newsletter. You can make a YouTube video. The window is wide open.
This is a new state of affairs, relatively speaking.
YouTube is only fifteen or so years old. Blogs only became a big thing during the Bush II years. TikTok’s a baby by comparison.
Which means that once upon a time, making creative stuff (sigh, let’s call it content) for other people to see was a lot more difficult.
You needed equipment like a camcorder or a 4-track. You had to learn the basics of graphic design and the logistics of mailing stuff to people. There were barriers to entry for creative stuff and marketing/advertising that were:
COST BARRIERS (Making a 7” for your indie band and touring to spread your band’s name is expensive!)
KNOWLEDGE BARRIERS (Want to make a public access television show? Good luck learning how to put everything together!)
ACCESS BARRIERS (Live in a rural town and really, really want to start writing and get published? I sure hope your local public library has funding for directories of agents!)
Technological developments like smartphones and free-for-user cloud storage—call it the internet if you have too—blew that old paradigm up to bits.
Except that something happened on the way to removing the barriers to creative production… middlepeople called platforms appeared.
Platforms are the Facebooks and TikToks and YouTubes and LinkedIns of the world. They exist across categories—Amazon and Salesforce are platforms also.
Platforms make being creative easy. You might not even notice you are making creative stuff! You post a status update on Facebook. You make a 10 second video of your niece on TikTok. You send out your company’s monthly newsletter with Mailchimp.
The learning curve is massively quick. Anyone can make a video with TikTok’s app. A witty tweet can be typed in and reach an audience of millions.
More after the jump…
But there’s one big complication: Platforms mean that you don’t fully have control over your creative work or marketing.
A company buying an ad in a print magazine can get assurances that their ad won’t accompany an article about controversial topics. But a tweet from a corporation can end up above someone’s Holocaust denier retweet! That’s not good.
Or maybe you’re a creator who goes all in on building an audience on Instagram. One day an algorithm change unintentionally decimates your audience and instead of reaching 100,000 people per post you’re only reaching 25,000 or so. You just suffered major damage without even knowing it.
Or you’re a podcaster who reaches most of your listeners on Spotify and Apple podcasts and skip out on building an email list in favor of just churning out new episodes and having fans discover your work through word of mouth. Then you find out that both Spotify and Apple are changing their search functions and suddenly your listenership plummets.
It doesn’t even have to be a hypothetical! Imagine that you run a pizzeria that uses a marketing platform to send out email promotions and text messages. One day you wake up to find out that costs are increasing 20% next year but that you can’t export your data and migrating to another platform would cost more than the software price increase.
Depend on one or two platforms and you set yourself up for failure.
Neal’s advice: Live that multiplatform life.
No platform is your friend. No platform will look for your best interest.
If you’re doing creative stuff on your own, get your own domain and set up your own blog/portfolio/hosting/etc. and build up an email list. Make sure that you’re building audiences on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube… everywhere. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
If you’re doing marketing or PR, make sure that your client isn’t over-invested in one platform and that they are driving audiences to their website or IRL events or anywhere that an app isn’t the mediator.
Even this newsletter… I love Substack, which is the platform Context Collapse publishes on. It’s great! It fits our needs. It is easy to use. But we know that we could switch to another email service quickly if we needed to and are clearheaded about that. It’s part of doing creative stuff! That’s how we work!
Intermediaries make creating stuff easier. But become dependent on them at your peril.