I’ve been on Facebook since 2003. I’ve been blogging since 2006. I got on Twitter in 2007. Generally speaking, I didn’t believe there was room in my life (or my attention span) for another platform. Enter Posterous.
(Graphic via Fast Company)
In their own words, “Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email.” You email content (a link, text, photo, video, even MP3) to your email address at Posterous and it automatically posts it to your Posterous site – as well as over a dozen other social media platforms that you specify.
From a technical standpoint, Posterous is a huge asset to any heavy social media user. Forget one off apps that cross post your Tweets on Facebook. Posterous does that and way, way more – removing the human syndication lift that we all did day in/day out.
From an editorial standpoint, Posterous fills a gap we didn’t even realize existed. Twitter thrived because it helped facilitate personal, microinteractions – reinforcing, rather than competing with, long form blogging. Posterous fits nicely in the middle, as Guy Kawasaki said on his Posterous “Holy Kaw!” it’s, "For everything that's slightly less than a blog post but slightly more than a tweet."
From a “that’s so simple I can’t believe no one’s done it like that yet” standpoint the email link up is genius. Email is still the fundamental way we communicate and underpinning of most of our devices. You may not always be able to access your blogging app, or hop online to craft a post, but 99.99% of the time you have something with you that lets you send a simple email.
While some (in the social media space at least) people’s Posterous blogs look suspiciously like their normal blogs, many I found were much more personal glimpses into the author’s life. Videocasts with children, photos snapped on vacation, coupled with the occasional too short for blog/too long for Twitter industry thoughts or findings. With blogs the go to for long-form thought leadership, Twitter increasingly becoming a brand/personality building platform, and Facebook remaining a walled garden Posterous fills an informal void. It's a life cast tool we didn't even know we wanted.
Personally, I’ve taken the informality to the max and decided to use Posterous as a digital scrapbook of my vacations and travels. This use will allow me to literally capture a moment complete with a photo and my thoughts and feelings at that exact time. I probably won’t use Posterous to its fullest extent with respect to syndication (do all my Twitter followers need to see a picture of me eating a lobster on Martha’s Vineyard?), but it will allow me to cater to an underserved audience (my non-geeked out friends and family) while easily creating a real time archive of my adventures that I can cross-post as needed.
Posterous is simple enough that anyone publishing or participating on more than one platform should climb aboard.
This post was originally written for Ogilvy PR's Fresh Influence blog.
