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.
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 Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Okay, he didn’t say it was me per se, but rather anyone who was reading his blog post.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Content is not king. You are. (or Queen.) Content is currency. You’re the king.
Content is a means to deliver interest. It’s a gathering place for you and the people you hope to entertain/attract/educate/equip. That doesn’t make it the king.
And while I like Chris Brogan’s channeling of Mr. Rogers — everyone is special, a sentiment I firmly believe — I think new online relationships are started by our content.
Whether it’s our ideas, the words we choose, or how well we string them together, people find us because of search. They stay with us because of quality. They form relationships with us because of, well, us.
But I submit that it’s still the original content that started it all. You can’t win search without good content. You can’t win fans without good content. And people won’t stick around without good content.
Content may be currency in Chris Brogan’s world, but in a culture that worships the Almighty Dollar, I think the currency of ideas is our king.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
