Thesis project

Been messing with this thought today: What channels/tools are available on the internet for us to spread our ideas?

With lovely icons from Komodo Media

My perspective here originates with the idea taking shape in the form of a blog post. We will immediately have a number of impressions due to the direct and search traffic that a blog usually enjoys (not in the graphics).

Distributed content

The content is then distributed in different forms, pictured here are RSS and e-mail newsletters. This kind of channel is the hardest to build, but it is also the most rewarding. These channels don’t tend to give the same spread as the other channels but on the other hand they offer those users that have made the largest commitment to you.

Opt-in Promotion

To further promote the idea we work with Opt-in Promotion and Other Promotion. Opt-in promotion is promotion via channels where the receivers have given us permission to put information in front of them. I have divided these in microblogs, social networking sites, e-mail newsletters (that instead of distributing the idea promotes it) and your own other blogs (this is a tricky one, somewhere between opt-in and other promotion i believe).

Other Promotion

Other promotion is all forms of activities where no one has given you explicit permission to promote, but where you believe that they might benefit from knowing of your idea. Please note that this is not about spam.

Our options here are to e-mail or instant message a contact with the objective of promoting our blog post. Another form of this is to promote the blog post in an open forum such as the comment field of a blog (here visualised with the Google Talk logo due to the mysterious lack of a standardised “comment” icon).

Conclusions

This is just a rough draft of the channel options and work needs to be done to categorise and exemplify them nicely. However, I believe there to be great need for a model like this to get a more structured perspective on the channels of idea distribution.

Please feel free to help me out in completing this!

And something else, note how one particular channel keeps coming up!