Creating media is a process of antifragilising

Starting a podcast for your personal brand or business is more often than not an act of antifragilising. Creating any kind of media really. Here’s why.

When you’re creating media, you have control over a number of factors, and others are far from your reach. First I want to deal with the things you have control over.

— The time put in to creating.

You’ll always be in charge of how much time you put in to creating things. This means you’ll be able to say things like “I’ll put in an hour of recording and two hours of editing my podcast each week.” and you can be fairly certain that’s what it’ll take.

— The content itself.

As long as you don’t give any rights away, you’ll be able to decide what’s going out in to the world through your channels. you’ll be able to dictate what is said by the company or brand, and to a certain extent that governs what people thing of you.

— How much it can cost.

Depending on what quality you’ll hold yourself to, you’ll be able to set the cost of the creation yourself. Most platforms are free to use which means you can be the master of the costs of creating media.

There are, however, some things you can’t control.

— Exactly what people will think.

Regardless of what you say or in what way you say it, there will always be people who find faults in your communication, or that perceive it in a way you didn’t intend. That’s part of the game.

— How many will listen.

I’ve produced a show of 5 minute insights every weekday for about 400 days. There were episodes that got thousands of views and episodes that didn’t receive a like. That’s also part of the game.

The antifragilising part of it all

The antifragilising part of creating media comes in a couple of forms. Most importantly, we can with quite some certainty say that media itself won’t be gone anytime soon, not even for business purposes.

The Lindy Effect states that we can expect something to stick around for as long as it’s been around. It is, of course, only an estimate, but I’ve found the evidence to be compelling. That means that we’ll probably have influence being used via media being around for at least 70 something years. Only looking at the tools we’re using today, we can estimate that B2C sales tactics with media in some shape or form will be around even longer than that.

We could also look at the asymmetries in creating media. The things that we can control are usually the resources most scarce for people, i.e time and money. Both of those can be limited by you. The upsides however, are grand today. Depending on the language you speak, you can reach millions or even billions of people if the content is good and the algorithms agree.

In creating media, we can use the barbell strategy quite nicely in that we can limit our risk taking. We can continue doing our marketing just the way we used to for 90% of our resources, and put 10% in to creating something new. That goes regardless of what it is you’re used to.

If you’ve been doing email marketing successfully for a long time, it might be a good idea to start a podcast. But that doesn’t mean you should overthrow the email strategy all together, it means you can put in 10% of the resources you’ve used for the email marketing, and put that in to podcasting. That way, you’re limiting your risks, and can still reap the potential benefits of being heard by new and other people.

What I’ve been talking about here has been mostly making the communications of the business more robust. But there are antifragile aspects to all of this.

If the strategy you’re currently using would go under overnight, you have some leverage since you’ve created something else. That is, if all email marketing would shut down overnight, you are ahead of other businesses since you’ve already dipped your toes in creating a podcast. You’ll benefit when others are damaged.

There’s also the aspect of how media works today. Even if people get frustrated with whatever it is you post, it’ll get attention. If you’re posting something that’s offensive to some people, it will become a storm. It might be a storm in your glass of water, yet a storm. Having created that piece of media, you’ve made the business less fragile to such storms since you’re the one who initiated it.

Plus, you’ll get attention. Regardless of whether it’s the kind of attention you wanted or not, you’ve got it.

That’s how creating media is an antifragilising strategy. At the least, it’ll make you more robust, but it could also benefit you when you previously would’ve been hurt.