Perhaps the best way to learn something new is to dig deep into its inner workings. Some of the brave among us (even as children) have been known to take technology apart and examine how it was assembled. Part of that experience may be getting hands right into the guts of something electronic and discovering what happens when you create a short circuit with your fingers.
The same principles can be applied to social media and new media. That is, reading a blog, listening to audio and watching video alone does not get to the root of how something was conceived, developed and communicated in a way that makes the final creation appealing. You need to become a Reverse Engineer.
I found myself thinking about the concept of reverse engineering this morning and came up with the following five pointers to help guide the effort of learning from great content.
Look beyond your own interests. This is particularly true if you want to create a Blue Ocean within your community/niche. Explore multimedia content in areas completely unrelated to your interests. If you’re interesting in skiing, find out what basketweavers are doing to make compelling content. If you’re in the music industry, find out what the amateur radio folks are doing to keep that hobby and community alive and thriving in the face of changing times. If you’re in marketing and public relations, study how IT folks communicate.
Explore all media. One of the most exciting ways to create new content is to find ways to adapt approaches used in one media and apply them to another. Find a writer who crafts stories/features/reports/books in a way that could be adapted for use in the audio format. Maybe the way a movie was edited can be adapted cleverly for print. Figure out how the visual storytelling approach of a documentary film can be applied to audio. Watch how the sequences are cut. Close your eyes to determine if anything can be delivered just as effectively without visuals. Find elements of one medium and adapt them into your own style.
Study with your senses. Good writers and journalists, audio hosts and sound artists, actors and cinematographers all deliver synaesthetic experiences in their own ways. They’ve figured out how to appeal to their audiences’ senses and experiences. The best of these talents are able to put us — virtually — in the situation they’re communicating, complete with the filter of our own lives. How they do this is not limited to the words they choose and the pictures they paint. The pauses, the inflection, the intonation, the modulation, the camera angle, the proximity of the microphone and many more elements all work together to create a full experience.
Ask questions. If you have access to the people that create content you admire, ask them a few questions on how they do what the do. Having said that, I’ve found that many people are thrown off when asked. For these people, it’s intuitive and they don’t know where to begin to explain what they do. If you do it over a coffee or beer, there may be less pressure for them to figure out how to explain things in words. If you’re up to it, ask if you can shadow them for a day and ask questions as they come up.
Create. Once you think you have a handle on your sources, start experimenting. Taking things apart to learn how they work isn’t nearly as much fun as trying to apply your new found knowledge.
