Cross-media Challenges

This post could also be called Cross-media schizophrenia: managing multiple channels online. Why, you may well ask?

Since the advent of Web2.0, I have been an avid collector of channels, it started with designing a blog, creating a delicious library, creating profiles on twitter, scribd, flickr, identica, slideshare, instagram, pinterest, facebook and the list goes on… Now I have multiple blogs, a number of Facebook pages and not enough time to manage all these channels!!

Sometimes I do not look at these profiles for months and when I do, it is a complete surprise. For example, I went to SlideShare recently and saw that I have had over 8,000 document views, of which over 2,600 people had viewed my 2010 presentation New Media Art, The Law and Activism. On Scribd, my PhD thesis has had over 2,500 views and another 2010 paper titled Web 2.0 Tools Options, designed for social media managers in the Australian Public Service (APS) has had near 900 views. My thesis is also published on Academia.edu and has had over 1,200 views. I would love to get that number of readers to my blogs!

What has become a real challenge for me is to try and bring my disparate audiences to one place – here at traceybenson.com! I know that content is king and that somehow I need to bring together these threads in some sort of coherent way. If you apply Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia to this heterogenous mix, I would say it is a #fail

Last weekend I spend some time reblogging from my geokult, mediakult and remotexmedia blogs in the hope of attracting some readers to traceybenson.com and centralising my audience. This is otherwise known as ‘herding the cats’ – I have included a cute YouTube clip to demonstrate.

I noticed something strange and  interesting when I did these reblogs – that instead of new readers coming to the traceybenson.com site, that I was getting new followers on the other blog sites. I even wrote a specific blog titled New place for stories, media and projects asking that people come to this site instead of remotexmedia. Guess what happened? I now have over 10 new followers on my remotexmedia blog.

To be honest, I can not stand the thought of closing down any of these channels as I love that my work is out there and people are reading it. So, what do I do? Maybe, write another blog 🙂