Break your content into smaller chunks and disperse it on as many websites as you can. The act of chunking your content increases the chance others will take hold of it and pass it on (distribute it).
Today, most marketers work on having some component of their campaign viral. When done right, giving away small chunks of content greatly improves the chance of your campaigns’ viral spread, and spread in general.
Let’s take a look at a few sites/products that naturally provide a way for you to break your content into chunks.
Flickr allows people to upload pictures for the purpose of sharing photos. This fundamentally is the idea of chunking, where each picture is an easy to share chunk. Not everyone will want all of your pictures, but there are certainly some who would like a few. When a user shares a picture, they often build a link into the picture, and this creates the means by which the small chunk of content on flickr begins its viral travels.
Flickr also built a mashup of their chunked content (pictures) into another form - slideshows. The slideshow is an enticement for users to distribute their content more. For example, without a slideshow, I may only share a picture or two from my trip to New York. The slideshow ties all the chunks together in an attractive, but still shareable format. It makes the content seem like something new, something you want to share again. You can see my slideshow from New York, here.
YouTube is another example of chunking content. YouTube allows their content to be chunked and distributed by letting any YouTube user share a video they enjoy on any site. In addition to being able to put a YouTube video on any site, YouTube spurs more exchange and interaction of their chunked content by suggesting other videos the user might like. You can take advantage of these suggestions by creating multiple videos with very similar tags, creating a chunked content stream.
When it comes to chunking content, Facebook did something really neat. They built the Mini-Feed.
Facebook’s Mini-Feed takes actions users already do on the site, like write on their friend’s “Wall”, and wraps those actions into small chunks of content they call updates. Facebook then sends these updates to the mini-feed of all the people who are friends of the user.
For example, if it’s my room mates birthday and I write “Happy Birthday!” on his wall, ~100 of my other friends will receive an update (chunked content) saying I wrote “Happy Birthday” on my friends wall. If they’re friends with him, they will then do the same, which will then send updates to all of their friends, and on it goes.
When you’re creating your next piece of content, think about how to make them smaller and more easy to distribute. Consider the services that they might fit into to help them spread. But make sure not to skimp on the quality of the content itself. It’s easy to figure out a way to break them down into smaller, distributable pieces. It’s much harder to create content worth sharing. Focus on content that people want to share first, then build it into a system that let’s that happen.
2 Comments
I think there is a limit on how effectively you can “chuck” writing. It seems like it is going to be difficult to distribute something that is really small and still valuable–perhaps jokes, but that is all I can think of.
Mark, there is a limit on how small something can be and still have it valuable, you are correct there. I think we are a much better natural judge of something that is too small versus too long, and therefore less susceptible to ruining content by making it too small.