Martin Koss – thinking out loud…

More channels = Repeats… More social channels = more cross-posting and more ‘duplicate content’. Where’s the future in that? Seriously. If you were looking in the TV guide and at 10am there was 17 channels all showing the same repeat of the same program, how cool would you think that is?

If at 7pm you tuned in and skipped through all 400 channels to find different presenters all saying almost exactly the same thing about the hot topic of the day, how cool would that be. Nothing new. Nothing different. All the same?

The web is full of repeats – Who wins?

The winners are: 1. The person who breaks the news and writes the first, truly inspiring and interesting version of the story or event or trend. 2nd winner is the one who tells the story from a clearly ‘human’ stand point. The one who adds some history and some interesting viewpoints.

In the ‘duplicate / cross-posting’ war, the outright winner is the one who adds value by incorporating inspiring, thought provoking, ‘conversational’ responses and questions – turning the ‘text’ from a monologue to a ‘conversation’.

There are some blog authors who do this extremely well.

The one who takes the ‘story’ and builds on it – rather than regurgitating for the sake of ‘name-dropping’. The one who brings something fresh and interesting to the ‘conversation’ rather than practicing being a blog parrot.

Anyone can ‘repeat’ content – add value by adding ‘thoughts’.

The losers are all those who reuse, repeat, regurgitate without adding their own ‘spin’ on the story and without incorporating their own ‘how it applied to me’ or ‘how I saw this work for someone’ or ‘what this means to you’ etc.,

We’ve all see them haven’t we? One of the top bloggers (no I’m not going to list them all in hope they all find this post while monitoring their names) writes about a really cool ‘thing’ and within 24 hours we can find 17,000 retweets, facebook mentions and ‘reblogged’ versions of the original work.

Was it inspiring?

Perhaps. But what really happened was that all these writers, bloggers, content ‘pushers’ did was jump on the elusive ‘name dropping’ band-wagon in order to get into Google’s top 10 for the title, the phrase that started it all, and to gain a bit of credibility by association’ on the twittersophere and in Facebook, LinkedIn etc.,

What the parrots also do is hope that the original author (a well known name, usually) will find the post while doing their own ‘reputation management’ and will come along and read it, possibly comment on it and, the parrot hopes, will retweet it.

They won’t! Oh, they may read it. They may even comment. But unless you’ve added value or started a thought provoking ‘conversation’ around the original post, you ain’t gonna get retweeted. The original author will see right through the intentions:

Look who I follow…

Does it say we’re cool because we show off who we follow? Does it say we are smart because we follow CB. SG, MJ, etc., and do people see the blatant name-dropping and regurgitating for what it is? I do, and I suspect so do the top bloggers.

The ‘losers’ in duplicate content / cross-posting includes anyone looking for great content:

Don’t you hate it when you go to Google looking for some answers or some ‘hot-to’ advice and find the bulk of the top 10 are repreats or reworks of someones hard work.

I want opinions.

I want a new twist – a slice of lemon in my tea if you will. Something with someone else’s ingredients added to create a new and interesting flavour…

Don’t give me the same same old same old chocolate chip cookies – gimme some nuts in there…

Throw a squirt of cream in my morning coffee…

Make it different – then you’ll get my applause for actually doing some work rather than regurgitating someone else’s thoughts to get 5 seconds of fame.

Before you hit the ‘publish’ button, please pause for a moment and ask yourself “Am I adding value?”

 

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