I was recently chatting with a friend about required reading for English Majors, namely Dickens. “I don’t think Dickens was that great,” he said. “Well…he’s not fun to read” I conceded (this from the girl who read A Tale of Two Cities for fun in 8th grade). “What if his stuff only became so popular because like 10% of the population was literate back then?” And I had to admit, I’d never really considered it before.

This conversation, combined with a recent post from Seth Godin discussing the recent increase in people/businesses using video in their marketing, has made me think a lot about changes made possible by resource accessibility.

We have more formats.

Once education and literacy were available to a larger population, there was a wider variety of published material. Just look at what we have today: tabloids, magazines, novellas, newspapers. Then the internet happened, which was a great equalizer in terms of marketing. People were eventually able to publish their work online once blogging platforms like WordPress came around. And as social media sites became popular, people didn’t have to necessarily write anything of length anymore to be heard. A sentence now can literally be seen by millions, or at least has that potential.

We have more equality.

The act of marketing and selling goods online has become easier for small businesses. For instance, Google offers tools like Google+, maps, and analytics to anyone with a website. These are great resources for smaller businesses who don’t have a team of people dedicated to market research and analyzing web metrics. We’ve written more about Google+ for small businesses and Google analytics for anyone who wants to delve deeper into those areas. (And if you want someone like us to ‘just do it’, we do that too.)



We need less skills.

You no longer have to be technologically savvy to put your “stuff” out there. As Seth’s article points out, you also don’t have to be a skilled photographer anymore to get Instagram accolades. You don’t need to be able to code to have a website, or get a television contract to have people watch your videos. With the help of a smartphones in particular, all of these activities are accessible to the greater public.

When copy exploded across the web, the professional copywriter felt threatened. Anyone could write, and anyone did. When photography was added to the mix, the professional photographer felt threatened. Everyone had a camera, after all. –Seth Godin

First accessibility happened to text, then it was links and photos, now it’s video.

More recently, video has become the newly accessible medium for all. According to this article written last year, people don’t expect high production value on videos shared via social media. These videos can get away with having a home-video level of production quality. Some ideas for live video (the kind that can be streamed as you record and get published as-is) include product demonstrations, “Ask Me Anything” sessions, and more.  If you do want to add a bit of production, there are some relatively cheap options out there like iMovie or WeVideo. You may have to pay a little, but it’s significantly cheaper than outsourcing to a different company entirely to do your editing.

Distributing video is also easier, since you don’t have to haggle over advertising space or air time on t.v. YouTube, Periscope, Facebook, and all of the other social media sites make it easy to upload videos (for free!). Again, people aren’t necessarily expecting anything cutting edge in terms of production in these places. People are consuming as quickly as you’re producing.

As the world of online marketing becomes more accessible, the better it is for small businesses. Although many of these things (video, analytics, general website maintenance) require some time and training to be done well, it’s worth the investment. Accessibility means we’re all learning together and that’s pretty cool.



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