Do you have a website? And a blog, social channels, email newsletter, maybe even a podcast? If so, you might have thought to yourself: “How do I make all these channels work together?” The word for this is “integration.”
Sadly, much of what you read about integration is at the level of “here’s how to make blog posts based on your podcast.” This is a sort of integration, but it prioritizes the secondary goal (to post on channels) above the primary goal, which is to say something interesting. I hope to give you a guide on how to integrate your channels without losing sight of the reason why you’re posting in the first place: to share your ideas.
Integration is like cuisine: bringing together foods, paired together and with drinks, in a succession of courses, makes them more than the sum of their parts. But, listening to my peers talk about it, I fear they wish to integrate not to maximize their ideas but because of two recent and largely unchallenged assumptions:
- You should post regularly across a variety of channels regardless of what you have to say.
- What can be integrated, should be integrated.
This is a recipe for “slop”—shallow (often AI-created) content-for-the-stake-of-content, that risks little, moves no one, and says nothing.
For integration to create something actually good, you need to dial in the following three things:
- You need to have something to say. You need to know what actually matters about what you are doing, what makes it interesting or surprising. Without actually knowing this, what are you actually integrating?
- You should remember that media bring a “change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action” (McLuhan). They are therefore not trivially interchangeable, and you should choose the right medium for the right story.
- You must think like a chef or composer. These people combine different things, carefully bringing about something fresh through juxtaposition, contrast, harmony.
So, how do you figure out what to say, make a plan to express it through the right media and form an opinion on what combinations of ideas and media are interesting? What do I even mean by integration?
What Integration Means
When people, especially marketing strategists, talk about integrating their podcast with their other marketing channels they say to do some of the following:
- Post clips of your podcast on social media
- Transcribe your podcast to make blog posts
- Rewrite your blog posts into scripts for podcasts
As an integration strategy, the above is, at best, superficial. To explain, let me use a culinary metaphor:
- Beef stew is good.
- Beef stew with mashed potatoes is better.
- Hors d’Oeuvres, followed by beef stew and mash, followed by creme caramel, with the appropriate wine pairing can be a meal you remember for the rest of your life.
This requires skill and time, and it all falls apart when companies try to reverse-engineer the process to save money and end up with something like this:
- Beef, carrots, onions, potatoes, milk, cream, caramel, pâte, radishes, red wine, and sugar have been shown to be the elements of a successful meal.
- These ingredients can be sourced inexpensively and brought to their optimal final temperatures quickly by mixing them all together in a bucket and then microwaving it.
- We can then take the resulting integrated food product and slice it into dozens of individual servings, each with the same nutritional content as a fancy meal but at a fraction of the price.
And so slop is created. If you don’t want slop for dinner, you need to be thoughtful, not just efficient. Let’s look at how.
The above meal involves three levels of integration:
- Blending (say of butter into the mash), which adds the flavor of the butter while the mash is still mash, much like how a transcribed podcast is still a blog post.
- Chunking (of the beef into the stew), which keeps the character of the beef, like how podcast clips are still on-demand audio (and are for the most part still made of podcast).
- Pairing (of the stew with the mash, of wine with each course, and of individual courses with one another), which combines several things, preserving the character of each, giving the diner a much more interesting experience than if they ate each of the foods separately.
What is the equivalent of pairing when it comes to integrating one’s podcast and other media? For it to actually mean something when you integrate your podcast and other channels, you should think like a chef. You should assess the character and style of each of our media—which is partly inherent, partly down to how you do it—and think carefully about how you combine them to do something interesting. This is the most interesting, difficult and rarest form of integration.
What’s Your Big Idea?
Integration means nothing if you don’t know what you’re saying or have nothing to say.
If your organization says anything, it necessarily expresses an overall idea. This is the combined effect of everything it says, as from the particular combinations of foods in a meal or the arrangement of instruments in an orchestral piece.
If you haven’t thought about what your big idea is, then the best case is that it will come across naturally from your overall way of thinking. The most common case is that your overall idea will be bland. The worst case is that it will be contradictory or nonsensical.
Indeed, the modern obsession with scale and automation means that marketers do a lot of their work without actually thinking about the overall idea behind it. We can blame this habit for the innumerable blogs whose titles read like a list of target keywords, and the social accounts with all edge but no blade.
A company’s “big idea” should align with its mission statement. Here are some mission statements to illustrate:
You should know what your big idea is if you intend to say something online. If you have a feel for what it might be, but can’t put your finger on it, by all means publish to help yourself figure it out. But above all, don’t publish only for the sake of hitting trends or target keywords: this will give you nothing of lasting value.
Once you have a feel for the big idea you want to share, you can consider the proper set of media to get it out there and how to integrate them.
Why Do We Integrate?
The idea that we should integrate things is universal, often to the point of going unquestioned. So: why?
The first reason is that we integrate to get more attention for the things we create (like blog posts, podcasts and social) and as a source of newish things (like a social post including a podcast clip). This is perfectly valid: indeed, if you think your LinkedIn followers would enjoy a clip of your podcast, then post it.
The second reason is that we integrate so as to create a new effect, feeling or emotion, or to express a complex or challenging idea that would not otherwise be possible with just one thing or with several things mixed up.
To put this into practice, step one is to understand how people use different marketing media, for which I need the attention matrix:
This diagram plots people’s intention (either to get an answer to a particular question, or to encounter something interesting without knowing what precisely) against their level of focus. Allowing of course for variation within different media, we can fill in the matrix with the common marketing channels like so:
The modern (and usually unspoken) idea of interchangeability—that talent and personality don’t matter (Everything can be fixed with “process”, right?) and that anything you create can be decomposed and reconstructed into something as easily as you can copy and paste text—suggests that not transcribing your podcast to make a blog post would be wasting “content.”
I disagree: different ideas (or different expressions of the same ideas) deserve different media. Simply mixing everything up might give you “more content,” but it will cost you the character of your ideas.
Considering these media (and others) and how people use them, we can decide how to:
- Use the innate strengths of each medium
- To express most pungently
- The idea or aspect of an idea that is most natural to said medium.
We can then bring these ideas and the media conveying them together, pairing, juxtaposing, contrasting, to tell a story people remember.
What This Shouldn’t Sound Like In Practice
Carrying on with our culinary metaphor, there are at least two ways marketing can start to go wrong:
- The individual pieces are bad: they lack a theme or big idea, are bad quality, etc.
- The individual pieces are good, but the chef throws them in a blender.
I hate to say this, and honestly it feels like something we used to know intuitively without having to say it: almost 100% of the time, when you’ve ruined something, there’s very little you can do to make it good. To quote Huey Lewis, “Sometimes, bad is bad.”
There’s nothing you can do, having blended the ingredients of the aforementioned meal, to make it palatable again. Nor is there any way to blend known bad food into something good. Our founder David showed me a video of a supposed marketing expert, who recommended having AI read and summarise the top blog ranking SEO blog posts from your competitors, then publish these summaries. Nothing comes from nothing, slop comes from slop.
Bad Is Bad
Many blogs say nothing because, above all, they aim at keyword targets and nothing else. Let me give you an example: the blog of a large, respected, open source technology platform. I won’t name the brand or screenshot because that would be slinging mud, but here are the latest article titles:
- How to Balance a Career in Finance with a Holistic Lifestyle
- How Digital Payment Trends are Reshaping the Political Landscape in 2024
- How to Secure Your Ecommerce Store From Cyber Attacks
- Building a Successful Ecommerce Loyalty Program
- What Makes Digital Marketplaces Integral for Services Businesses
This bears every stamp of being for Google, not for people: from bizarre juxtapositions (“career in finance” versus “holistic lifestyle,” who talks like that?) and phrasings (“digital marketplaces integral,” to what?), to the fact that the author of each of these posts is the name of the SEO agency.
For the record, I’m not against SEO in itself. The Web has no built-in index, and to be seen you need to be found by Google. Fine. But Google is supposed to help people to find information. If the strategy of creating thin/fake/recycled information so that people accidentally find your brand actually works, something has gone very wrong.
Blended Is (Often) Bad
Not naming names again, one of our competitors talks about how their client runs a blog in parallel with its podcast. They publish summaries of each of the podcast episodes on the blog, with clips. This might sound like a good idea initially: surely not doing this is throwing away what could otherwise be “content?” Surely all these articles will attract keyword rankings? People like the podcast, surely it would be nice for them to be able to read it, too?
I’m sure they will: but at what cost? As mentioned above, each medium is suited to express different ideas or perspectives on the same idea; when you crib from your podcast to make your blog, you undermine this specialisation. This is like, starting from the assumptions that, a. creme caramel, and b. beef stew is good, that blended together they should be even better.
Indeed, some podcasts should be adapted into blog posts. Just as some things that we commonly think of as savory go amazingly well with those we think of as sweet: see salted caramel, raisins and cashews in curry, chocolate pretzels etc.
The problem isn’t the idea of connecting and mixing up our media, it is the assumption that this is what we should do to everything all the time. Rather, we should ask ourselves the question: what is the right thing to do?
Then there’s opportunity cost: why are these writers rewriting podcasts when they could be writing something new, about a topic more suited to the written word? If the writers are bad or too inexperienced, help them learn: this will help both of you grow. If it’s AI rewriting the blog post, you should feel a pit at the bottom of your stomach: where is this nearly free rewrite coming from? In the same way that that same pit should trouble you when you see a dress for $10 on TEMU, you know that someone else is losing big in this transaction.
“Taste” is a word I don’t hear very often. It implies a partly innate, partly refined understanding of what is good when it comes to art, music, cuisine etc. Children have funny tastes, remarkable for obsessions like separating foods (e.g. the peas must not touch the chicken) or obsessively blending (and apparently enjoying) all the parts of their dinner.
Then we grow up and establish a personal (or even professional) taste: this refinement helps us delight each other by combining things natural, complementary or surprising. This is the difference between unthinkingly following a process (e.g. “we make every podcast we publish into a blog post”) and trying to make good creative decisions.
I’m not being a snob here. I honor what each individual person is good at: and when we’re not good at something creative or don’t know our way around, we need a guide whose taste we trust. Agencies: brand, advertising, marketing, etc. had something of this role and still do, partly. With newer, easier channels to get your thoughts out there, agencies are often farther away: this has, thankfully, pushed back on the cartel/priesthood of agencies and the attendant self-indulgence and tedium.
But, absent agencies, who is around to tell people that having an AI write pretend blog posts based on it reading your competitors’ websites is an idea so dystopian that it makes Big Brother feel like the Big Lebowsky? Now: this moment, with these conditions, is when agencies and others with good taste should step in and lead.
What This Should Sounds Like In Practice
To examine what this sounds like in practice, let’s look at our strategy at CitizenRacecar. We use three channels: our podcast, our blog, and our social media profiles (let’s focus on LinkedIn to keep things simple). These media have their own innate feel, which we of course embrace and/or push back on for our own purposes:
- (A Podcast about) Making Great Podcasts, is highly structured and produced, something it shares with the best examples of the medium (in our opinion).
Each episode addresses a particular aspect of the art of creating great podcasts, and together they will offer a thoughtful and in-depth treatment of the subject. This works well with podcasts sitting in the “learning” quadrant: people come to a podcast to expand their horizons.
- Our blog, Notes on Good Podcasting, is, while carefully edited, a little more personal and immediate.
If something interests one of us, we might write about it, but we’re not claiming to address a given topic completely or even even-handedly. We’re also not worried about coming back to the same topic and exploring it further. As with our podcast, this fits with what a blog is in people’s minds: somewhat informal, chronological, personal.
It’s also a lot more focused on answering people’s questions: like whether podcasts have video, how one should choose a hosting platform, etc. But there are indeed more learning-focused pieces too, and this diversity keeps things interesting.
- Our LinkedIn profile is built on the understanding that much social media activity is based around scrolling.
The priorities are therefore stopping power (give people a great visual) and succinctness. Right now, this looks like showing people what great podcasting looks like in practice, demonstrated by the work we do for our clients.
As mentioned earlier, when an integrated marketing plan works well, all the things you say interact with each other to build your big idea. Here’s how we build up the aforementioned pieces, then combine them:
(A Podcast About) Making Better Podcasts
For example, episode #2 of our podcast walks the listener through the art of podcast narrative:
The individual parts of the episode come together to express the overall idea that great podcasts have great narratives, built with the tools of storytelling we’ve known for millennia.
Together, the episodes build a bigger idea: podcasting is an art form:
Our Blog: Notes on Great Podcasting
The same is true for our blog. For example, in our founder David’s article “Is There Any Such Thing As A Video Podcast?” he says that despite a marked industry trend toward video, ‘lacking’ video can actually make a podcast better:
Together, the posts on our blog combine to express the overall idea that, in order to make great podcasts, you have to embrace what makes the medium special:
CitizenRacecar LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, we share weekly updates on our latest work. The idea is, simply: this is what great podcasting looks like.
Together, our combined podcast, blog and social media express the big idea that the power of audio is nearly limitless:
To return to the culinary metaphor, we pair our different channels and the ideas they express to create a new, bolder idea:
Slop Versus Cuisine
Talking about this with our founder, David, he told me something, originally told to him by a friend: “To be a collection, the person building it has to have said no to things.”
This is to say that if you say yes to everything that comes along, you don’t have a collection, you have an accretion, or some stuff. Not being able to say no to things (like “this keyword is relevant to what we sell, we should write about it” or “we should read our blog archive into a mic and post as a podcast”) is a bad sign.
It means that you have no guiding principle. Absent a guiding principle, the only guides will be data and the market. There’s only one item on the menu where those two eat: slop.
The alternative? Care about what you create and treat your ideas with respect.