Feed the content monster

- I evangelized the concept of being consistent and posting steadily. So the flip side of that of course is, well, how do you find content to do that consistently? How do you do what I call feed the content monster? One way is to cheat, which is to piggyback off the efforts of others. This is completely okay. For example, there's a website, I actually created the website 'cause I need it so bad called AllTop. And at AllTop we aggregate RSS feeds from tens of thousands of blogs and websites and organize them by topic. So if you want to always find a great story about travel, go to travel.alltop. If you're a foodie, go to food.alltop. If you're a hockey fan, go to hockey.alltop. Constant source of great stories. There's also a service called Sway, there's Feedly, always be willing to piggyback off others. What I do is I look at what's hot and then I post the same story because in a sense, it's already been proven that that's great content. Now you may be afraid, well, what happens if at an extreme, five million people have already seen this YouTube video, what if I post it? People have already seen it and they'll think that I'm not feeding the content monster very well. My experience has been, and listen, I have 10 1/4 million followers, I find YouTube videos that have been viewed millions of times and post them and I very seldom, if ever, get complaints that "I already saw this." So there's a lot of people on social media. If five million of them have seen a YouTube video, you can still post it. Next concept is to be bold, that is to take a stand. Social media is your private platform, it's your swimming pool if you will right? So you get to make the rules. So I feel very strongly about things like I don't know vaccination or women's rights, equality, democratization, all this kind of stuff, so don't be afraid of taking on the tough subjects, be bold, show people what you're interested in. Now, if you're running a site or a service, or a platform for a company, the rules are slightly different. But you can still be bold, I'll take an example. Apple probably shouldn't be posting about MMR vaccination, I grant you that. But Apple could post links to stories about getting visas for people who want to work in technology in America. Kind of a controversial subject, immigration reform, but for Apple, perfectly appropriate because they're trying to recruit more people. The third way to feed the content monster is to interject personal pictures and video. I think it shows that you are human, that you are not simply pushing stuff out constantly, that you've curated and curated that you want to show a piece of you, show your personal pictures and video. So those are three great ways to feed the content monster.