“I think I’ve had it.”
I said this to myself six months ago, as I was trimming my RSS subscriptions. Why do many blogs echo each other’s content? What is the difference between “5 Ways to Use Twitter for Business” and “How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business”? More importantly, why do these two articles seem to procreate and spawn 100 incestuous offspring entitled “7 Ways to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business” or some such incarnation?
Why would the world need yet another blog post on how to use Twitter for business? Chris Brogan already wrote his 50 ideas on how to do that. If you’re just going to repeat 5 of the 50 points he’s made, forget it. Just because a regurgitated “Twitter for business” post can exist, it doesn’t mean it should.
This might sound hypocritical coming from someone who has written her fair share of those articles, but I’ve had it with all those posts (and even entire blogs) that are just predictable, inbred mutations of other people’s work. I’ve had enough - not just of the inbred articles I read, but also the ones I create. If I don’t stop now, I might as well ask Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel to ghostwrite for me.
For the past several months, I’ve been making an effort to create something unique with each piece I write. Not unique in the sense that it has to be a sweeping masterpiece, but I should at least be able to answer “yes” to the question “Is there any point to this?”.
But nothing is completely unique, right?
You can be sure that almost anything you come up with has already been done. What you need to do, is spin it in a direction no one’s seen before.
-Nate Piekos [via Blambot]
Let’s look back at the US Presidential Race late last year. Setting your political inclinations aside, remember how everyone was talking about how inarticulate Sarah Palin was. The words coming out of her mouth seemed to be random phrases and keywords strung together. Every other blog and its owner’s Twitter account has some record of her grammatical gaffes.
Despite the monumental accounts of Palin’s nonsense, there was one article that left a deep impression on me. That article was “Diagramming Sarah” by Kitty Burns Florey.
That article is impressive to me for the following reasons:
- The writer took an over-discussed idea (Sarah Palin’s verbal nonsense) and put an original spin on it (from the perspective of sentence diagramming).
- Among the tens of articles and Tweets I’ve read about Sarah Palin’s gaffes, it is the only one I still remember.
While most people were blogging “Sarah Palin’s stupid, haha”, Kitty Burns Florey used her enthusiasm for sentence diagramming as a new way to approach the topic. If she intended to do this for the sake of uniqueness, I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet she just happens to look at most things from a grammar enthusiast’s perspective. Why? Because that’s who she is. On the surface, Sarah Palin has nothing to do with sentence diagramming, but through Kitty Burns Florey, a new connection was made.
Making New Connections
Here’s the funny paradox: blogging allows us a space for our unique voice, but we end up echoing each other’s ideas, style, and perspectives. We read lists of the 22 perfect blog title templates and guides on how to make web content more scannable. We read formulas of how we can make our own posts pop, shizzle, and wow.
In other words, we’re following someone else’s footsteps because we think we’ll lose our way if we walk on our own. But the “on your own” stuff is where the magic happens. You’ll have the freedom to walk into different worlds and spot the hidden connections that your peers don’t know about - they’re too busy talking loudly amongst themselves.
Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work.
- Stephen King, “On Writing”
While there’s nothing wrong with knowing the established standards, taking all that advice too seriously will hamper your own innovations. If you write about internet marketing, don’t limit your reading material to what other internet marketers write. That’s where the inbreeding starts - in one’s inability to look beyond a specific subject. Read about plumbing, watch an interpretative dance, or build a model Death Star. You’ll be surprised at the connections you can make among seemingly unrelated activities or genres.
If you really want to write that “Twitter and business” thing, go ahead. Just make sure you’ll be a conduit for a new connection no one’s noticed before. A tall order, perhaps, but not impossible.
Maybe you can make sentence diagrams of business-related Tweets.
Image by Jan Flaska from sxc.hu
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on Apr 12th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Fantastic post. And congratulations on exercising your right to unsubscribe
I too have posted my fair share of inbred nonsense. And while I’m still enjoying the process of finding my voice (maybe it will always be a work in progress), one thing I have definitely decided is that I’d rather post nothing at all than regurgitate another variation of something that’s been done to death already. But then I’ve always been a quality-over-quantity kind of girl
Regardless of the medium, there have always been people who are happiest, and most reassured, when they are parroting the ideas of someone else. The benefits are obvious - it’s so much easier to criticise, for example, when you’ve not taken any risks yourself. But that’s fine, it takes all sorts, and it will all come out in the wash once we get over the hysteria of this new thing called the blogosphere and become a bit more discriminating about what we are prepared to stay subscribed to.
So blogging may be a great tool to express a unique voice, but it doesn’t automatically confer one. There’s a lot more to that than many of us realise!
on Apr 12th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for dropping by, Sarah
Personally, I’ve experienced the benefits of parroting other people’s ideas - you finish your blog post faster, research is easier, and you can meet your writing quotas if you do that sort of work. It could just be part of the discovering the medium and finding one’s voice.
But right now, I’m at that point where I want to produce something more - whatever that means. I guess I’ll find out.
on Apr 12th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
… I’ve just realised it’s a bit rich, my implying criticism at parroting in any shape or form - I am a translator, after all
on Apr 12th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Celine, this is excellent… going to tweet it… or is it retweet… sigh… and point to it tomorrow on my blog and read it again and again… it’s so easy to get stuck.
on Apr 13th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
@ Sarah: You’re being modest about your work - translating is hardly just parroting
I’ve been watching the TTC course on linguistics, and studying Spanish. It’s not just word substitution, that’s for sure.
@Anne: Thanks so much for dropping by
Your blog is one of the few I subscribe to.
on May 29th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Even the “gurus” regurgitate a lot of stuff on the web, and if you’re subscribed to many of them it’s really obvious how they just mostly echo one another — usually because they’re affiliates of one another or simply because it’s really quite hard to keep churning out truly original (read: creatively thought-out and re-processed) articles and posts on a regular basis.
Only a few voices are really distinguishable in this echo chamber…and those are the real gurus — people who stick to what they’re good at, say it like they see it, shut up when they don’t have anything worthwhile to say about a matter, not minding the fickle crowds. They’re memorable because they could say things with authority — we know they’re speaking from experience, not something they just overheard.
Sometimes it’s best to just tune out…and think and write as yourself, not let your writing process get “contaminated” by what’s in vogue. People are afraid to imbue their work with their personality/own perspective of things, but that’s the only thing that makes the work unique — themselves.
I like your post so much I tweeted it. The Sarah Palin example is something I’d remember, too.
on May 29th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Ok, I remembered something. This is my opinion as to why parroted, uninspired, robotic, even crappy and plagiarized content abounds:
Young writers who are just starting out…most have no choice but to “parrot” or deliver cookie-cutter content. They see it as a job that pays the bills, or something to do while they find their real “calling.” Only a few find writing to be their calling, such that they’re motivated to keep improving their craft. And it takes dedication and years to hone it.
Some writers are just plain lazy and take a lot of shortcuts. Some, too exhausted or too jaded to even bother. Some aren’t even supposed to be writing, have no business writing at all. Plenty of the stuff we read online are written by amateur writers, bad writers, and non-writers. (Why is quality or talent that prized anyway? Isn’t it because there’s such a short supply of it?)
And take into account that many businesses are quantity-oriented. Many in the industry aren’t after “quality” or “originality,” which is harder to translate to neat numbers, they’re after search engine rankings and high visibility in the social media. Traffic, in short. They’re after potential revenue.
Have you heard of PLR or Private label rights to existing content that you can repackage as your own? There are also lots of content mills that offer really cheap articles, videos, what-not.
From a business perspective, taking advantage of these makes a lot of practical sense. It IS hard after all to maintain fresh content daily, especially for high-traffic sites. If I’m the business owner, for instance, I’d just pay someone to produce my content so I could free up my time for other things. And what if I don’t read much because I’m too busy, how can I tell that the people my folks are hiring are even good? Won’t I think of profits as an indicator of how good they are?
The situation is, shall we say, market-driven. If the search engines, for example, hadn’t changed how they rank websites to favor original content or took precautions to discourage copy-paste content, we’ll all be buried to the neck in worthless, mindless crap.
I agree with your thoughts wholeheartedly, but from what I’ve observed, it’s going to be a monumental effort to produce more unique content from original-thinking writers. Especially not in the age of push-button social sharing.
That is the state of things. I don’t have the answers. Will just continue improving my craft. Cheers!
on May 29th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Thanks for the substantial discussion Dyoonet
I agree with everything you said. I, too, regurgitate content, even without intending it. I certainly can’t stop people from writing that way if I can’t prevent it myself either (at least not 100%). People have different goals when it comes to their blogs or their writing careers, so I understand it if some writers aren’t looking for this kind of challenge.
Basically, I wrote this post because I’m just at that point in my career where I’m getting conscious about repeating other people’s ideas for the sake of money. I wasn’t at this point 5 years ago, and I don’t know how long this will last, but so far I’m enjoying the challenge. I know that this means I’m publishing fewer articles, but I hope the quality is improving.
As you said, it is a monumental effort. Still, I’d encourage other writers to try it for themselves if they’re getting bored with the usual keyword-intensive writing gigs.
on May 30th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Haha so sorry to take up so much of the space. I realized belatedly that my comments took as much space as a full article. Your post was very stimulating I had to write down my thoughts as they came, because I easily forget!. My apologies.
on May 31st, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Don’t worry about it, you raised a lot of interesting points
You should restructure your comments into a blog post, and maybe we can have an inter-blog discussion going hehe