Valeria is always inspiring. This post struck a chord with me. One thing I’ve long noticed, is a comparison between sound blogging advice – write for your audience – and everyone begging for attention – with the same news story.
A recent example, this past week, some dullard in Texas was yapping on his cell phone while driving a $1.6M Bugatti Veyron (fastest production vehicle in the world, mind you), dropped the phone, then lost control of the car and drove off the road into a saltwater lake. First came video of the car being pulled out of the water, then came camera phone footage of the car launching off the road into the water.
All afternoon, just about every automotive blogger I follow (many of whom seldom, if ever, engage in the conversations) are posting links to “Exclusive, Breaking,” or otherwise “Hot” coverage of what everyone already knows. We’ve already seen the videos and we’re already talking about the story. Why would we come back to read another version of it?
This was a hot topic. One which a got a lot of gearheads riled up and talking. This was a great opportunity to jump into the conversation, but many just regurgitated the same story in the hopes of some quick visitors on their analytics. As I see it, by engaging in the conversation – without drafting your own blog post on the subject – you could be making connections with people who would come to your site to see what YOU have to say. It’s a wasted opportunity to seed the community with your own perspective. In a way, my making a point of mentioning it is in the same vein, I suppose, but I’m trying to make a point, here.
I follow a lot of automotive people on Twitter, but I have my preferred sources for different types of content, so I often see no value (read: I ignore) all those links to the same story by sites which have not previously shown more than paraphrasing the same story for traffic. If I’m following you, it means I saw some value in your tweets at some point in the past. (I think auto-following anyone is the most pointless, superficial and shallow thing you can do on Twitter, so I always check profiles before I follow back.) Why then, are you sending out eight tweets in a row just linking to the same stories of the day on MSNBC for chrissakes?
For that reason, when I’m making posts on my own site, I seldom take stories from the day’s hotlist. If the hot story of the day is one about which I am very interested of excited, I will, but not for the sake of traffic. I could draft short, witty posts about the hottest happenings of the day, the blogger’s equivalent to shouting, from the back row, “ME TOO!” But I want to tow my own line and be as real as possible.
I’ve often felt that I’m a bit too wordy and that I don’t have a clear enough focus to my own site to ever really make something big out of it, but I don’t really care about that. I’ve got my angle and I like to think there’s no other site out there like mine. Which is saying a lot in the current blogosphere. I write about things which move me to write. I’m not some published, author looking for speaking gigs or to be on some paid panel. I’m just a regular Joe what likes helping people out. I like to talk about the higher level stuff. If you don’t know where you want to go, no social media expert in the world is going to be able to draw you a map to get there.
And if you’re not focused 110% on driving (the relationship side of PR), don’t be surprised when you end up tossing millions into a lake.
[Videos sourced from Jalopnik.com, where I went for all details on the retard with more money than skill this week.]