So you want to go direct

‘Going direct,’ or reaching your audiences directly without having to contend with the filter of the professional media, is very stylish right now in Silicon Valley.

On the one hand, if you have the resources to create compelling, useful content, that’s wonderful. Build it! They will come! However...

Building great content is harder than you think. Nobody wants to subscribe to a podcast in which you keep saying “My company and products are great” over and over again. Your audience wants to be smarter, to be entertained, to be empowered. Content that informs, delights, and enlightens is hard to deliver - that’s why professional reporters work hard and get paid for what they do.

Leaving aside whether a free and fair press deserves our attention, respect, and support (which I emphatically believe it does), let’s just look at what it takes to create great content if you DO want to reach your customers and prospects directly.

Let’s say you create software that helps make self-driving cars safe. Do not record podcast episodes about your software’s great features, how you built them, and how they work. Create a series of episodes about the larger, newsy, and culturally important issues around what you do.

An episode about the history of software’s capacity to recognize moving and stationary objects, including interviews with two or three pioneering researchers in this field, would be pretty compelling listening. An episode with a psychologist and an anthropologist about humans and their relationships to controlling or ceding control to technology might be cool. Or, you could do an episode about how car design will change as drivers do fewer tasks, an episode on which Sci-Fi movies get self-driving cars right and which are comically wrong, etc., etc.

Coming up with the ideas is hard. Finding and booking the guests is hard. Hosting a compelling, lively interview is hard. All of this is a serious time and resource commitment. AND, in your fascinating, diverse, entertaining and informative podcast about self-driving cars, you may not even mention your software or its features.

But by demonstrating how thoughtful and visionary you are, how connected you are to all of these leading thinkers, how you see the world in a unique way, you’re building your brand. You are capturing your audience’s interest and respect. In other words, you say more about who you are by not talking about yourselves.