Coming to terms with the nature of the social web can be difficult. Many that get in with some level of passion soon fizzle out. What I notice is that many others fall back into the familiar networks of their friends and relations. That being said, the most interesting social media plays I’ve been involved in had nothing to do with pre-existing relationships. They were spontaneous and unpredictable.
My take away: social media is about engagement with the immediate. We can’t expect any investment with those of this moment to endure into future moments. It might, but that’s not a condition determining the creative value of what transpires. And our investment is not depleted by what may be a random chance encounter. Each act shapes our practice, our posture so to speak.
So the question remains, how to we continue to position ourselves in the swift moving waters?
In auto racing, it’s the inside position which gets claimed by the racer who put of the fastest qualifying time: the pole position.
What’s the analogy to positioning content in this arena? More and more as I observe both my own behavior with content consumption on-line and the behavior of the digital community I belong to, what stands out is that every transaction hinges on the title.
The pack is full of the title gimics. There’s the “27 best ways…” and the superlative overloads “absolute best/worst/insane etc,…”
In my practice day in and day out I grant the post position to content with titles that are creative, accurate and authentic. That being said, I realize how poor a job I do titling my own posts. So a simple pre-Thanksgiving New Year’s resolution (might as well kick the season off sometime): stop dismissing the title.
OK, I admit this title was somewhat over the line…but it is a great shot…
What I’m most interested in, that’s the road that leads to the most meaningful interactions with others in this space.
I’m hitting upon this theme again because all the posturing in this space about “making it about the audience” is in my mind only a useful for those whose main interest is empowering audience. It just isn’t enough if it isn’t enough (pardon the redundancy). And it leads to so much banter in the social media space about “making it about you” that it feels like breathing air that is thin on oxygen…or worse, polluted with gasoline fumes.
See, if you are making it about me, by telling me to make it about them, then we have no terra firma. Nothing to break bread over. Nothing to base our shared journey on. It’s like a dream of bouncing around like a ping pong ball in the clouds.
Now, it’s been my experience of late that drilling deep into my interests has served up the community I was blindly seeking.
Passion generated by interest is contagious.
I prefer to walk in this way, firmly grounded, breathing in deep breaths of fresh air, sharing the meaningful stones that line my route (even if it means walking all the way to Cleveland…
Really folks, what’s the rush?
Once a practice is established, taking a break (or to put it into the vocabulary of the tech space, hitting pause) has an interesting effect. It’s like damming a river. One’s energy gets collected in the manner that water is gathered in a reservoir.
Hitting play after such a pause (like the one I’ve enjoyed this week) gives one the opportunity to regulate the release of contents moving forward with a new sense of control.
Quietude
The Splendor of the Twitter Stream
Lifestream Digest for October 10th