I noticed an interesting trend, and I’m ashamed to say I’m part of it.

There are very few trend setters in social media. Very few pioneers. We’re mostly settlers.

We all try to be as cutting edge as we can, but we’re sometimes at the mercy of what everyone else is talking about. We pay close attention to luminaries like Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Jeremiah Owyang, and Gary Vaynerchuk. We wait to see what they’re talking about, and we talk about that. And we all hold up their discarded sandals, like that great scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

I do it too. I see an interesting article on Jason’s blog, and decide I’ll comment on that. Or I’ll see something Doug Karr wrote in the Marketing Technology blog, and piggyback off that. But it’s rare that I write about issues that those guys didn’t write about first.

I’ve done it a few times — crisis communication, entre-commuting, or getting spanked by the Canadian Council of PR Firms — but I’ve also jumped solidly on the bandwagon, pushing women and children out of the way so I could get a comfy seat.

Unfortunately, this is a rather centralized industry. We only have a few tools we use with any regularity — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google — and so we all talk about how we use them, and the great things we’ve learned, or the trends coming our way.

I want to stop doing that. I want to be that one guy in the crowd who says, “Hold up the sandal!”

I can’t say I won’t keep doing following the pioneers, but I’m going to make a conscious effort to do it less. That’s one reason I didn’t post anything on the blog for a couple of weeks. (Yeah, yeah, that’s the reason.)

So it may mean I post fewer times per week on the blog. It may mean shorter posts, and fewer how-to posts. But we’re going to try to make our own path as much as possible, even if it runs adjacent to someone else’s. We’re just going to quit following the well-worn path that some people have meandered down.

About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He is a newspaper humor columnist, appearing in 10 papers around Indiana. He has also written numerous business articles, radio theater plays, and stage plays. Erik helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is currently working on Branding Yourself: How to use social media to invent or reinvent yourself, which will be released in December 2010 by Que Publishing. He is writing a third book on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks about blogging and social media.

Tags: Chris Brogan, Douglas Karr, Jason Falls, Social Media, social networking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Blogging, Communication, Opinion, Social Media, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.