10 Ways to Spread Stuff: New Distribution Strategies for 2009

How digital touch points have evolved over the last couple of years has brought about new meaning to what Web 2.0 really means. Specifically, the explosive growth of social content, and broadcasting both branded and user-generated stuff has pushed us all to coming up with new ways of distributing that very same content.

As a result, I've been pondering and thinking about new forms of distribution and areas for engagement across the web, as a part of extending the digital experience by looking at the entire web as an engagement platform, not just the pretty social media, videos, and updates on Twitter.

The following are 10 ways to spread "stuff" - content, ideas, and anything else you can link to:
  1. Content sharing and creation, which also includes the co-creation of content (all hail the mashup and remix culture).
  2. Community engagement through blogging, joining groups, and collaboration
  3. Social expression through badging
  4. Knowledge sharing, How-tubing, and other tutorial, expertise, and wiki-type things
  5. Sharing your opinion as a stranger about anything - Rating, voting, writing reviews, customer feedback, and posting responses through comments
  6. Deliberate propagation of an idea, through word-of-mouth, promotion, blogging, link sharing, starting conversations, and other forms of digital kudos
  7. The ever-popular status update. Everyone feels like broadcasting what they are doing and where they are doing because we can, so we just do.
  8. If you haven't noticed, social = mobile (slide 22, and slide 23) and vice versa. Mobile is becoming a social enabler specifically providing ways to map and share our mobility. Think location-based services wrapped in a social burrito (i couldn't think of anything else to say outside of "enigma").
  9. The word viral has been so misused and abused, it pretty much doesn't mean much nowadays because we're trying to call everything viral. Rather, the new content journey is all about social discovery (slide 13), and knowing about something because someone you know shared something they thought was cool. When is the last time you visited a micro-site to get something you kept hearing about?
  10. Finally, making content and ideas slippy rather than sticky has proved that good ideas can survive and travel across the sea of blogs, social networking sites, communities, inboxes, and even mainstream news sites. If it's not stealable, er, embeddable/shareable/portable, it will never get anywhere for obvious reasons.
And thats it. It's really what I have been saying all along, as well as all the amazing digital minds out there. Feel free to tweet about it with me.

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