How Often Should You be in the Media

How many movies should you star in next year?

How many records should you release? How many songs should you write?

How many times a week should you post to your blog?

And when should my next book come out? Or your next newsletter or that next cartoon? What about Nike–they launch more than one product every day. Is that too many?

Ask yourself , how often you should be in media? What is too much?

A lot of the stuff marketers make is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk that consumers merely tolerate.

But some of it is not spam, it’s content. Stuff worth reading, worth paying for (at the very least, worth paying attention to.)

So, how often?

This discussion is usually filled with superstitions, traditions and half-truths. Daily comics come out every day because that’s when newspapers always came out. And newspapers came out once a day because it was too expensive to publish three times a day (and advertisers and readers wouldn’t support the extra expense.)

When movies were met with great fanfare and often stayed in the theaters for months, it was suicide for a big movie star to do three or four movies a year. But in a DVD/YouTube world, there’s not a lot of evidence that this pace makes as much sense. Saturday Night Live was on every week because there’s only one Saturday a week, but if it had launched today, it’s hard to see the benefit of it being a weekly…

I’d like to propose that you think about it differently. There’s frontlist and backlist.

Frontlist means the new releases, the hits, the stuff that fanboys are looking for or paying attention to.

Frontlist is also the new interviews you have out.

Frontlist gets all the attention, all the glory and all the excitement. They write about frontlist in the paper and we talk about the frontlist at dinner. Digg is the frontlist. Siskel and Ebert is the frontlist.

Backlist is Catcher in the Rye or 1984. Backlist is the long tail (the idea) and now, the Long Tail (the book). In a digital world, backlist is where the rest of the attention ends up, and where all the real money is made.

Backlist doesn’t show up in the news, but Google is 95% backlist. So is Amazon.

The backlist in media is anything that gets on the web. Podcasts are online forever. So are blog interviews.

Sitting in a meeting yesterday, I brainstormed a term, “haystack marketing.” I googled it to see if someone else was using it. You guessed it–number one match was an article I wrote eight months ago. Google doesn’t forget even if you do.

When getting more media, it is best to have something you are known for. Start with one thing. Media=TV, radio, blogs, magazines, newspapers, and podcasts.

Take some to think about your specific backlist media and post them. You might inspire others!

Next Post will be about the Strategy that Seth Godin suggests!