Choosing Medium
III
Why blog? I guess I really am a bit late to the bandwagon, but I never saw the appeal of showcasing the intimate details of my life to the public. As a long-time connoisseur of the hard copy diary (how quaint and naïve the notion seems now), I’ve never seen the need to plaster my life all over the internet for the wider public to ogle.
One of the first steps of my personal digital immersion was to start a Twitter. However, what Twitter doesn’t provide is a means of developing a more long-form writing style. 160 characters are all well and good for the purpose of refining specificity, but wanting to take my writing development in as many directions as I could, a natural progression was to begin blogging too.
Even though the concepts of micro-blogging and blogging revolve around the core premise of writing, each has a different emphasis, and cultivate slightly different sets of skills.
For me, I’m going to be using the vehicle of blogging to document my digital journey (both for myself, and for my readers). For the purposes of increasing competitive advantage, it’s another platform through which I will be able to showcase my writing style. How I differentiate and justify the different objectives of the two different channels: the focus of my blogging is to showcase my ability to exploit the power of words put together, whereas I am using Twitter to highlight my ability to create content.
Maybe, in time, I’ll invest in vlogging (or at the very least, a YouTube channel and a video CV). I might actually need to jump on the video CV bandwagon before it, too, becomes passé. How long ago was that How I Met Your Mother episode where Barney creates a video CV for Robin? (for the record, it originally aired in 2009 — Season 4, Episode 14 ‘The Possimpible’).
Moving on to my next challenge: choosing my blogging platform of choice. I really was beginning from the very beginning; I had no idea which platforms were the most popular/easy to use, nor the broad extent of my choices. My initial thought was to have my blog ‘in-house’ on my website marketingdyad.com to have everything centralised, but because my website builder lacked in-built blogging layout which optimised appearance (I’ve had experience with building an in-house blog from scratch, and the results ain’t pretty), I opted for an external platform (which would link from my website).
Wordpress was an obvious choice. But with so much customisation power and it existing as a stand-alone website, it wasn’t my first choice (I wanted a distinct hierarchy where my main website would provide links to subsidiary channels). Tumblr—also a popular option, but investigating further, I discovered that it was primarily used in the sharing of visual, user-generated content, rather than textual. Blogspot/Blogger, too, was an option I briefly entertained. But from what I have seen of its blogs, my impressions were of an unwieldy, clunky, mainstream platform, rather than anything particularly cutting-edge or fleet-of-foot.
I really just wanted a clean, minimalist, aesthetically-pleasing layout, without the clutter of a million customisable options at my disposal (that’s what my website is for, after all). Asked a friend for a personal recommendation (she’s a proliferate user of Tumblr and the like), and based on my criteria, she recommended Svbtle. Sidenote: with such a wealth of information available on the internet, it really is interesting that when we’re in the unique position of being relatively unfamiliar with an offering, and our external search capacity has been overwhelmed, we fall back on personal, non-marketing sources of information, and attribute them with credibility.
In any case, a two-second Google search heralded the disappointing news that as of September 2014, Svbtle had become a paid-subscription service. I’m not averse to paying for things if the ROI is there, but taking into account the personal (rather than business) nature of this endeavour (not going to be generating direct revenue streams from this venture anytime soon!), I decided that I’d exhaust the abundance of free options first.
Medium was an option that came up in my Google searches of Svbtle; comparisons of Medium and Svbtle, 1v1, described the two as very similar in layout, but with slightly different emphases (Medium emphasising a more collaborative, social network mindset than Svbtle). In terms of brand attribution alignment, it was all there; as a relatively new platform not yet in the mainstream, with a powerfully minimalist layout, it worked with my personal brand from the get-go.
Test trials proved successful for my purposes, and so off I went.
