Many of us will be in the habit of releasing things. Emails, journal articles, essays, blogs, games, apps, videos, songs. We are empowered to create content. So create we do. I feel however we often give little thought to how we publish our material short of the format.
Academic articles aren’t difficult to work with because of the citation format, or the decision to use PDF over Microsoft Word. They’re difficult to work with because the majority of portals to find and view them are just so badly designed and formatted, that you often can’t be bothered reading anything you find even if you are successful.
We don’t do ourselves justice when our efforts to reach out to our audience are flawed or half-baked. That tweet with the link to your purchase page, blared out to strangers with no prior knowledge or intent, is lost amongst the noise of the networks we use to communicate with each other.
By focussing on fine tuning our signals - by optimising them so that they are both discovered by the right people, and making our end-goal as relevant, frictionless, and considered as possible - only then do you stand a chance at being heard amongst the noise of the crowd.
I believe thinking about this at every point of outreach is important. Sure, it might mean that tweet you were going to send out takes a couple of minutes to compose rather than a few seconds (you’ve got to get a shortlink, a good image, select some relevant hashtags and format your call-to-action) but if you’re asking for minutes of other peoples time, isn’t it worth at least breaking even with them than expecting astronomical returns that come from barely any effort?
So this year, try to spend more time being considered in your outreach. It may feel like a waste of time at first, but as more people begin to actually hear your, more people will subsequently listen.
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