This Blog Post Might Make You Mad

Awhile back, I received an invitation to a newer social media platform, Clubhouse (ed. note from 2024: remember when this was a thing?). I try to hop on these things and claim my name for one reason and one reason only: because my real name is actually a strangely popular pseudonym, including one used by a famous French photographer. (Hence I had a less than ideal .net URL.) There's even someone who does similar work to me who uses it. Weird, I know.

I poked around some "rooms" on Clubhouse where people were having audio conversations (it's basically an old school party line but in an app—it's not as revolutionary as they claim it to be, I'm old enough to know exactly what inspired this), and listened to some good conversations about various subjects I'm interested in.

And then I started trying to find a few of the new to me folks elsewhere online.

I could find Instagram accounts with equally good stuff for the most part, some Facebook pages, a smattering of LinkedIn accounts... But me being me, what I was really interested in what was going on on their websites.

• Most people were at the level where they had websites. Awesome! ✅

• Most had very little beyond sales pages—and some not even that. 😟

• And here in lies the problem. 🚨

People had shown that they had enough authority and expertise that my interest was piqued and I wanted to know more.

But unless you happened to be sitting on a app listening to them live, all of that brilliance was going in to the ether, serving only to boost engagements for a NYC startup with sketchy ethics (poke around Twitter for chatter on what's gone very wrong on the platform—bullying is a serious issue).

The same is true for some of the wisdom I encounter on Instagram. I see so much brilliance from people who should have an audience but it's only there, in the app. Go to their websites and it's thin at best. No blog post building on that point, no insightful newsletter I can sign up for. So unless I can remember the user name and find the post/story, it's lost.

People are literally sitting on social media platforms for hours each day, sharing their wisdom and it never leaves that platform. So the refrain becomes not, "So and so said this amazing thing," it's instead "I saw this thing on Instagram."

That brilliant thing did not come from a social media platform—it came from a real person with real ideas and real knowledge to share.

So here's my challenge to you:

Next time you have a great response to something you post on a social media platform, take that feedback and turn it into something you own, on your own turf. I don't care if it's a blog or a newsletter, or a podcast episode, or a text marketing blast. I just care that you control it and you can use it as part of authority architecture.

For extra credit, next time you find yourself spending hours creating Instagram stories or giving away your brilliance in a Clubhouse room, sit down and write a blog post about it instead. And then next time you're talking about that subject on a platform over which you have no control, drop a link to that post and get people to engage with you off that platform.

I know this will frustrate some of you—especially if you have coaches and influencers telling you to spend much of your day on social, instead of on your business, building your authority. However, the algorithm will always get you in the end and you need to have something high quality that you own and control.

If this resonates with you, or validates something you've been feeling but are afraid to say out loud, know that you're not alone.