New Media Prescription 004 – Interview others

For other entries in this series, See New Media Prescription

If you want to enhance the impact of your new media efforts, and expose yourself to an entirely new set of listeners and viewers, you can’t do better than recording a series of interviews.

Why are interviews so powerful? It is a simple fact of ego. When you interview someone for your show what is the first thing they do? That’s right, they tell all their friends, family and business contacts to listen.

“Hey, you’ve got to listen to this interview I did for the XYZ show!”

This is exactly what you want them to do and you want to facilitate it as much as possible. In this relatively simple way you gain exposure to each person’s network of contacts so provide them with audio or video from the interview, send them links they can share and embed in thier own blogs and web sites and post the interview to public audio and video sharing sites.

While you might hesitate to ask someone for their entire mailing list so you could send out a  press release, interviewing someone, and asking that they share it with their friends and contacts is very natural. An interview provides valuable content and yet still achieves the goal of raising your profile and that of your interview subject.

Who do you interview? Start with the people you would most like to speak with.  Who are your influences? Who are your heroes? Whose opinions do you respect most? There is no need to shoot low, either. My fellow Friends in Tech members, Chuck Tomasi and Kreg Steppe of Technorama always make a point of reaching out to bigger names for their interviews. Their guests have included Mythbusters Adam Savage and Grant Imahara, author Stephen Covey,  explorer and discoverer of the Titanic, Dr. Robert Ballard and many others.

You should also seek to be interviewed by others. You gain content that can be shared on our own blog or podcast and your ideas get exposed to a new group of people. It also allows you to get your ideas out if you are having difficulty writing them down. This was the genesis of my New Media Answers series for New Media Interchange. Members would often be peppering me with questions during our meetings and I quickly realized that my answers would be beneficial to many more people if I captured them for the web site and podcast.

So I asked NMI member, Tracy Pattin, who does her own show, Sizzle in the Middle, to act as the interviewer and duplicate in the studio what happened so frequently at our meetings. She comes in with questions on a particular topic and I answer them to the best of my ability. This results in an engaging discussion and allows me to talk about new media issues and work through ideas that I can later present as more fully-formed articles here and on the New Media Interchange blog. This allows me to answer questions that a large majority of the members might have even when I am unable to talk with each of them individually.

Start interviewing today to spread your name and your message to an entirely new group of people.

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