Media Empire Building For Women, What We Can Use Our Platform For & Why We Need To

Regarding an on-going kerfuffle in an area I follow pretty closely (media & journalism plus gender disparities in those fields), this post by magazine editor and journalist Ann Friedman on media empire building has a lot of lessons in it for those of us building platforms and what we can use them for, and why we need to.

We need them for leverage, if we're thinking bigger or one day will. We need them as evidence. If we're women, many of whom are relegated to supporting roles in our fields, we need our own platforms to grow strong as marquee figures.

"I’m doing pretty well at building a following for my work that’s mine alone, not reliant on the individual outlets I write for. But I’ve never approached a publisher or editor-in-chief to ask for my own vertical, or the funding to create my own mini-empire."

When she decides to pitch a funder to finance her own media empire, Friedman writes, "There will be footnotes about my own Twitter following and the number of newsletter subscribers I have and my proven ability to cultivate a strong editorial voice."

Doing Capitalism In The Innovation Economy With Bill Janeway & Tim O'Reilly

Happy to attend O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly's book launch event for venture capitalist Bill Janeway's Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy at the  SOMA offices of Code for America, described by GOOD magazine as "the Peace Corps for geeks." Legendary web browser engineer, entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen has described the book as "essential to anyone who wants to understand technology and how its creation will be financed for decades to come."

Code for America founder Jen Pahlka interviewed Janeway for the lunchtime networking event where I ran into Twitter acquaintance and director of Deloitte's Center for the Edge John Hagel, the author of the prescient The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.

The white leather couches are pretty bad, too.

Masterminding A Grant-Writing Consulting Biz

Along with Tara Agacayak, I run a private mastermind group on LinkedIn (it’s a subgroup of my Creative Entrepreneurs & Social Media group).

Here are my thoughts from one of those sessions, on the topic of a grant-writing consulting biz:

If you were to create a blog to sell this skill I imagine you sharing resources, techniques, news about the grant writing process and opportunities. Examples and lessons drawn from your own experiences consulting others. Taking questions from your readers and addressing the answers in a post, all the while very clearly offering your consulting services -- more of the same high value understanding of the field, and personalized attention for the client -- at the end of each post, in the side bar. Offering a teleclass on the basics of grant writing. selling small ebooks with up-to-date resources and your guidance on various elements of grantwriting, and considerations for different sectors.

I bet you could knock out 20 topics you'd want to cover in a blog series, and that would get you very well started. try making a list of catchy headlines to peg the subject matter... "Grants, in this economy?!" "The secret of getting a grant" etc.

I'm not familiar with the territory but you might like to distinguish yourself from the other grant writing consultants out there -- so a bit of research to see what they're doing and how you might like to approach it differently. what you know/care about that they don't. personally, i'd love to see you bring a little of your personality to this business -- if it's at all possible. Who needs dry info when they can get a little zing with solid advice? It could be simply in the language you use to talk to your readers about what might be a dry subject.

I would love to learn more about grants *I* could get! Bet we all would. You could be the cool educator of your audience. How about targeting the audience you already have -- and help them find grants to do the work they love -- rather than splitting off to service a different group of people?