015 Sub-channels + pre-owned media: A different way to think about content creation
Today's noisy digital first world is a challenging one for business owners. How do you get more people to know you, trust you, and to respect your brand? How do you stay front of mind with your target audience as well as talked about in a positive way in the marketplace? The answer is public relations, but not as you know it. Get ready to unlock potential of your business through the power of PR, content, and digital communications.
VOICEOVER:Get ready to become your own PR machine.
TREVOR YOUNG:G'day. My name is Trevor Young, and thank you for joining us here on the become your own PR machine podcast. Today, we're going to be looking at all about subchannels and pre owned media, a new way to think about your journey up the content creation ladder. And as we know, creating content is a massive part of the PR remit today. If you want to become your own PR machine, then content is going to have to figure quite heavily, in fact, very heavily in owned media sense, obviously, in a social media sense, and, of course, that drip fees into earned media.
TREVOR YOUNG:But today is gonna be more around owned media or as I alluded to at the top of the, top of the show, pre owned media. So let's get into it. Now over the years, you know, if you've listened to me at any point in time on any of my podcasts or interviews or anything that I've done, you know, you'll know that I really have become a champion for for business owners building out their owned media network, and this is so they can grow their audience and in turn, lessening their reliance on having to pay for advertising or rely on the social media algorithms to treat them fairly, which we know is not going to happen. So my starting point is developing an owned media property and, for example, this is an email newsletter, a podcast, a blog, a video show, which is, you know, published to YouTube, but also housed on your own website or blog or a regular live stream or digital magazine. So, you know, the when we say owned media, it does cover quite a few different modalities.
TREVOR YOUNG:But drilling a little bit deeper, how can we turn that owned media property into a, and I'm using air quotes here, destination show. In other words, building a sub brand that over time becomes a backdoor into your world, into your brand. So think daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, appointment viewing, reading, or listening. For example, a podcast. A great example of this is win the content game.
TREVOR YOUNG:That's it's a podcast produced by CapShow. Another example is a YouTube show. Have check out the Goulet Penscast, the Goulet Penscast by Goulet Pens. Might be a livestream show. Michelle Michelle j Raymond does this on LinkedIn.
TREVOR YOUNG:She does the social media for b to b growth video livestream. A newsletter. One newsletter that I really like reading is the ask by Ellen Donnelly. And it could be an example blog or, you know, like a blog today. It's really like a flagship online publication in this instance where it's treated like a magazine.
TREVOR YOUNG:Someone who I think does it really well is a company called Bedthreads and they have their Bedthreads journal. If you get a chance to check that one out, please do. And so, I guess if you're smart about it, you can mix and match a number of different modalities as as I've just walked through those examples that I've just given. For example, how might this work? Will you record a live stream?
TREVOR YOUNG:You video live stream. You could repurpose that for a podcast and just by stripping out the audio. You could publish the finished live streamed video on YouTube. You could turn the recording into a blog post and use using an AI tool such as Cast Magic. It's a really good tool to help you transcribe the recording and pull out, the insights and informational nuggets and of course, you can also use that content to put together an email newsletter to send out to your list of subscribers and, of course, your blog can always be reimagined as a newsletter and vice versa.
TREVOR YOUNG:So lots of interchange, and repurposing and reimagining of this content if you do if you're smart about creating your long form content and creating a destination show or, your appointment reading, I e, newsletter. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I do get excited about the opportunities available to business owners to get a leg up on their competition by being smart in how they use PR content and digital communications. Creating a regular audio or video show or editorial publication, I think, is a really savvy way to start getting attention and gaining people's attention for all the right reasons as well as build an audience for your ideas, your insights, your expertise, and your knowledge. Now this is fine for motivated entrepreneurs who have been experimenting with content and social media over the years.
TREVOR YOUNG:They've been in the trenches a little bit. But sometimes, I need to pull back. I need to pull back on the reins a bit and encourage also encourage those business owners who have been sitting on the sidelines for a while. Maybe they've been waiting for some extra clarity as to why they should burst forth with enthusiasm around this whole content creation thing. So that's on me.
TREVOR YOUNG:So that's what this this episode is all about. I'm gonna now bring in a term that I mentioned at the top of the of the episode, pre owned media. So this is an idea that I think will sit perfectly with this latter group of people who have, you know, business owners, entrepreneurs, you might be a personal brand and running a personal brand based business or everyone's got a personal brand, of course, but, you know, you are the business and you're at a solopreneur or a one person show and you are the brand and the business. Maybe you've been pulling back, maybe, but you've been have been sitting on the sidelines and haven't really been going too far into the into the content trenches to create long form content. Again, doesn't matter which modality.
TREVOR YOUNG:So this idea that I'm about to unpack for you is great for that group of business owners And and you maybe you're someone who doesn't wanna tackle anything too onerous straight away. Maybe the idea of tackling something onerous or big or, you know, a destination show is what's kept you away from creating content for an audience. But you still want to start small. You still want to get out there. You but you want to make it, you know, a little bit more manageable.
TREVOR YOUNG:So what's a small content project that you can start with? Now I'm calling this whole arena, this whole concept pre owned media because it's what happens before we start creating an owned media property or a sub branded owned man owned media property as I often will call it. The whole notion of pre owned media, what we do before we create a destination show, this is a smaller scale content activity or activities, if you want to go a little bit bigger, that you can focus on before tackling a bigger project. Now, this concept was an absolute moment that genuinely slapped me in the face while I was chatting with Andreas Lopez Varela. Now that if you're a keen listener of this podcast, you will know that that was in episode 14, the one before this one, where I did interview Andreas and we really got into a deep and meaty conversation around owned media.
TREVOR YOUNG:Now, Andreas is, I believe, a genuine thought leader in the world of content and PR and digital marketing. When it comes to content creation, Andreas is a believer in not taking on too much straight up for fear of flaming out due to the responsibility of producing these weekly podcasts or newsletters or fortnightly YouTube show. He's very aware of this, and this came up in my conversation with him in the last episode. Andreas says it's better to work up to the commitment of producing your first destination show or flagship editorial publish, publication if you're gonna go into text no matter what the modality you choose to go with. And this is, you know, again, I think this is a fair call.
TREVOR YOUNG:In our chat, Andreas suggested business owners who are keen to produce an owned media property should perhaps start off smaller and test their content, hook, theme or idea, which as we know when we're gonna create a show, we need this a theme, something to hang our our content hat on. And he talks about the concept of channel within a channel. Now I will say here that Andreas credits Edwin Smith from the social sandwich with coining this idea about a channel within a channel and I love the concept. I think it's very simple and powerful. But let's get into what does that mean?
TREVOR YOUNG:What is a channel within a channel? This is how the conversation panned out. If you heard last week, this is a bit of a prompter or a reminder of what I took out of out of my conversation with Andreas. Do you think people should have just one other so so one owned media channel and one social channel?
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:I think it's it's not as simple as that because I think the nature of these channels has changed so much that you kind of have channels within channels. Instagram is a great example. You know? It's it's the nature and the purpose of Instagram has changed so much even over the past 5 since the pandemic. Right?
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:You know? Like, it used to be all on Instagram TV, and it was about long form viewing there. That died a a ignominious and probably necessary death. But from that from that rose this format that was influenced by TikTok, you know, reels. Yep.
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:Yep. And then also the addition of broadcast channels, in particular in Instagram, it's a great example of how you have these channels within channels. So there's a there's a guy I I I know and and who I think is, you know, one of the the you know, he's a super credible, very knowledgeable guy. His name is Edwin Smith, and he is one of the best, I think, you know, organic social people in in Australia. He's got a lot of very good and very accurate hot takes on on organic social media primarily.
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:He he's really sort of, like, honed in on how to make that work for your audience and your brand. And one of the things that Edwin says which really provoked a big thought in me was about, you know, thinking of those formats within channels or channels within channels. Right? And what do you do on Instagram on your feed? What do you do on Instagram in your stories?
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:What do you do for reels? What do you do for messages? What do you do for the broadcast channel? Right? And so using those different features and go, maybe my audience is just about stories.
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:So you maybe you dump a few things in the feed, but, actually, really, you're focusing on the stories. Maybe the broadcast channel is perfect for for your for your audience and the kind of content you have because it's a little bit deeper engagement, but it's still one way. So it's kind of brand safe as well. You know? People aren't sort of, you know, knocking you.
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:Maybe they're giving you a double tap with a thumbs down at the most. Right? So I I think that when it comes to choosing that, and, you know, I I will give full credit to Edwin on this point, it's it's maybe thinking about those different options within there. LinkedIn's another great example. Right?
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:You got the LinkedIn. You got the feed. You got the newsletter. Articles less and less so, you know, but and, you know Audio
TREVOR YOUNG:audio events.
ANDRÉS LÓPEZ-VARELA:Audio audio events, groups in LinkedIn, you know. So so there are those different areas. So I think it's important not just to think of social media as feeds. And so, therefore, some of those spaces, I think, and and this may certainly rattle the cage, t y, but some of those spaces, I think, become quasi owned spaces.
TREVOR YOUNG:Now the idea of a channel within a channel or a sub channel, as it were, is acknowledgment that the game has changed with social media and that many of the platforms today have, in fact, become a collection of channels rather than being wholly and solely the channel. Hope that makes sense. Just to reiterate, Instagram has reels. It has stories. It had broadcasts.
TREVOR YOUNG:It has live streams as as well as the main image based feed. If you look at LinkedIn, LinkedIn has the main feed, obviously, for posts, but it also has newsletters and audio events and live streams, and you can create groups on there as well. So this channel within a channel concept was a real eye opener, and it was pretty obvious when you think about it, but when you roll it out and and Andres was explaining it, this was a real eye opener for me. So in other words, what Andres was saying is, why not just focus on Instagram stories instead of all the other sub channels within the overall insta channel? I think when we say we're on Instagram, but we do reels and we might do some stories and we might do some images for the feed and carousels and all sorts of things.
TREVOR YOUNG:Why not, Andreas is challenging us, just focus on stories or just focus on reels? Why not 0 in on LinkedIn live streams for the bulk of your content without worrying too much about all the other many bells and whistles on the platform? And it's just a complete reframing of how you can approach social media. I think what really hit home is is Andreas said, don't think about social media as just a feed. Again, reframing what social media is all about today.
TREVOR YOUNG:It makes perfect sense. But I will caution here, okay, I think this whole pre owned media, channels within a channel, idea or direction is a good one and does make perfect sense. But I think only if you're at the beginning of your journey or you're going back to the well in terms of starting over with your content creation efforts. I'm not sure if you wanna make a huge impact That one channel is going to cut it, but it is a terrific starting point. So the 2 things you need to think about if you're starting out and you're serious about making a dent with your content.
TREVOR YOUNG:The first one is, before going full on into creating an owned media property and, as Andre suggests, potentially flaming out due to the responsibility of doing that, Maybe you consider this pre owned strategy, the things you do before committing to that podcast, that newsletter, that live stream or YouTube show. And the second part thing to think about is start thinking about channels within a channel. Which platform reaches your audience and what channels or subchannels exist within the platform that you can leverage to build an audience, test an idea, get people excited about your content. Now I will say these two concepts are intertwined. Pre owned media is the strategy and channel within a channel, which one are you going to choose, is the tactic.
TREVOR YOUNG:And also, please note I'm not talking about becoming an independent content creator who's creating a mini media company and then launching a business off the back of it, But, rather, I'm talking about the business owner, the very busy business owner, who is building out their own media network to support their enterprise and commercial goals. So let me know on Twitter. I'm at Trevor Young. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find there.
TREVOR YOUNG:If we're not connected, please connect with me and send me a DM. Let's let's talk. I'd really be interested to hear what you think about this idea of being laser focused on one social media subchannel before committing to building out a more robust primary owned media channel. And I'll just reiterate once again, this is a starting point to move into to test your ideas, to refine some of your content, to really start getting some hooks and angles and and seeing whether your ideas and your content theme is landing with an audience. Do it through this sub channel pre owned strategy using a sub channel of a of Instagram, for example, or Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever.
TREVOR YOUNG:And then, once you're really happy and that's really working a treat, that's when you can, maybe, burst forth with enthusiasm, as I like to say, and create that podcast or create that video live show or create that, you know, YouTube show or your newsletter or online editorial magazine or a digital only. I see there's mobile only magazines that you can now create as well. So great great opportunities for someone for now that, you know, if you've been sitting on the fence, you haven't got an excuse to stay sitting on the sidelines, get into the main game, get your feet wet, start and build up to your owned media property. Until next time, my name is Trevor Young, and this is the Become Your Own PR Machine podcast.