Own Your Platform
I wrote in our original article what I meant by owning your own Platform:
“Lastly, own your platform. Platforms belong to your brand. They don’t belong to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok. Those are platforms. By building your own platform, you’ve created something the algorithms on those platforms can never take away from you. Those platforms can help your platform, but they can’t take it away. This one might be my favorite one of all three.”
When we talk about platforms, we must identify ‘owned’ vs ‘rented’ land (metaphorically, of course). Take a look at our ‘Hub’ Model above.
The center, the ‘hub’, is your website - it’s almost always the hub because after your have your audience’s attention, your goal is to bring them to your website where they can not only learn more about what you do, but also how you do it, who you are, and ideally they will continue to explore the website to learn even more than they came to learn. Your website is a carefully curated experience - it’s your platform and it cannot be taken away from you by Social Media algorithms.
If we examine the spokes, we will find that most of them are ‘rented’ land. In this case, ‘rented’ merely means that if you aren’t paying for the platform, you’re on someone else’s ‘owned’ land. Let’s look at some examples and figure out which is which…
Facebook? Rented.
Instagram? Rented.
Downstream Ads? Rented to the highest bidder.
TV/Radio? Big time rented.
Email? Owned.
Podcasts? Owned.
Blog/News? Owned.
On that list, Email and Podcasts might stand out - how are those not rented?
Email: you built the list, you choose the content, you pay for the service, and the only thing that’s keeping you out of their inbox is your ability to continue to deliver your audience content they find valuable.
Podcasts: you chose a content strategy, the voice of the show, the guests on the show, you pay to host the show somewhere, your audience comes to you, and again, the only thing that’s pushing your audience away is you (not an algorithm).
If you aren’t hosting the platform, You are likely supporting someone else’s platform
Does this mean you should abandon Social Media platforms because you don’t own them? Absolutely not. It means you should be acutely aware of how much time and money you are investing in content creation/distribution and asking yourself: am I primarily strengthening my own platform, or just supporting and relying on being a part of someone else’s platform?
Your Platform supports your News and Jobs Strategy
If we go back to the very beginning on this thought exercise, we said we were going to make the case that strengthening your platform meant it would support your News and Jobs goals. To recap, we had to ask ourselves the following questions:
Does our news strategy demonstrate…
Thought leadership?
Your position in the marketplace?
Material that would be shared with future prospects?
With our Jobs Strategy, can we…
Bypass traditional recruitment funnels to stand apart from our competitors?
Tell our story about why we are worth your time?
Create a frictionless application experience?
The stronger your Platform, the easier it is to answer ‘yes’ to all of those questions. While your competitors are busy dumping time and energy exclusively focused on strengthening someone else’s platform, go the other direction and build on ‘owned’ land - you won’t be sorry.
