“Every day, somebody's born who's never seen The Flintstones” – or, why telling it once isn't enough
If you are a content creator you probably want people to know about your stuff. Especially in Developer Relations, where most of our content is supposed to be useful and educational, we do want to make sure that people at least know there is some content that might be interesting or useful as they're getting more familiar with the platform.
It's surprisingly easy to get into the habit of publishing some content along with some initial tweet(s) and a post in various communities and move on to the next thing. But chances are, the content you just pushed into the world is long-lived and interesting for way more people than saw your initial push.
At least twice a week I think of the paraphrase that Merlin Mann frequently does on his podcasts, “Every day, somebody's born who's never seen The Flintstones.” I don't remember the full backstory (I believe it was a program manager at a local radio station) and the cultural relevance of The Flintstones is probably not prevalent.
Even so, I find it a useful reminder that there are always people:
- who don't know the things you may take for granted as “common knowledge.” This is especially true for programming and product topics.
- who haven't seen your content yet
So what are the practical implications?
There is practically no lack of ideas or things to create content on. Even the things that might seem obvious. Of course, there might still be more or less intriguing ideas, but thinking that “everyone knows this,” should never stop you.
Whenever you plan to release some content or do a launch, also plan for how you want to revisit this content down the road. Schedule tweets for later, add them to the rotation of tips and tricks to be posted in your community. – your future self will thank you.
P.S. And yes, even the points made in this post have been done many times before. Full meta.