Has the Hype of the Social Media Mega-Viral Campaign Slayed the Business Blog?

by Tinu

There used to be four dis­tinct rea­sons that peo­ple would ask me to help them with blogging.

1– A per­son had an idea or a story and wanted to be heard. It isn’t always about money or busi­ness — see the polit­i­cal blog­ger, and the per­sonal blog.

2– A per­son wanted to make extra money blog­ging. This doesn’t hap­pen as much, at least not on a full-time income level. But to some, even $5 — 20 a day is a huge help.

3– A per­son, (espe­cially an entre­pre­neur) or a larger com­pany wanted more vis­i­bil­ity. If you want to be seen, and to have mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to be seen again, you blog, and you keep blogging.

4– Bet­ter search engine results or traf­fic. I would get a let­ter from some­one who had X amount of traf­fic that would bring them Y con­ver­sions. And all they wanted was more of each.

Search engine traf­fic is an excel­lent fall-back rea­son to keep blog­ging. I’ve always main­tained that it shouldn’t be the only rea­son one blogs, but that it also doesn’t make sense to ignore its pow­ers in that area.

Did you notice it?

The one over-arching rea­son is exposure.

And who can blame them. Who hasn’t dreamed of being the star of a story picked up by Digg, or Mash­able or the Asso­ci­ated Press? I’ve been lucky enough to chore­o­graph or wit­ness all three cir­cum­stances in my career, and as long as suc­cess isn’t expected overnight, it is attainable.

But more often than not, fol­low­ing suc­cess, I’m left in the irri­tat­ing posi­tion of hav­ing to say “I told you so.”

Don’t get me wrong, being on the front page of Digg, or at the top of Tweet­meme, get­ting thou­sands of vis­i­tors from Red­dit, your server rocked by Stum­ble­Upon, and espe­cially being writ­ten up on Mash­able is every bit of an exhil­a­rat­ing feel­ing as you think. It doesn’t mat­ter whether you’re just sub­mit­ting some­one else’s story, in the back­ground orches­trat­ing expo­sure, or part of the team being cov­ered, it’s fantastic.

For a lit­tle while.

When the ride is over, it’s back to real­ity. You can scream “again! again!” as many times as you like, but you learn that it’s the con­ver­gence of the story, the tim­ing and the barom­e­ter of Rome’s mob that deter­mines if and when you’ll be on top again.

Most blog­gers never make it. And yet, the major­ity of the blog­gers I talk to are blog­ging because they were sold that dream at some point.

“Become a blog­ger, and you’ll get on Digg and then your prob­lems are over!”

Not so fast cupcake.

One of the things that struck me when lis­ten­ing to Kevin Kelly’s talk about the next 5000 days of the web (thanks @sale­monz), is his sum­mary of the Laws of Media.

In this pre­sen­ta­tion on the next 5000 days of the Web, given in Decem­ber 2007, Kelly said:

And so one of the con­se­quences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spec­trum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basi­cally becomes one media plat­form. And while there’s many dif­fer­ences in some senses, they will share more and more in com­mon with each other.

So that the laws of media, such as: the fact that copies have no value. The value’s in the uncopi­able things. The imme­di­acy, the authen­ti­ca­tion, the per­son­al­iza­tion — the media wants to be liq­uid; the rea­son why things are free is so that you can manip­u­late them, not so that they are “free” as in “beer,” but “free” as in “freedom.”

And the net­work effects rule — mean­ing that the more you have, the more you get.

The first fax machine — the per­son who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evan­ge­list, recruit­ing oth­ers to get the fax machines because it made their pur­chase more valu­able. Those are the effects that we’re going to see. Atten­tion is the currency.

As you can see, I’ve empha­sized about the idea that the copy is not valu­able, and that the value is in the uncopyable.

This is the ulti­mate doom or boom of the ebook, the magic or mess of arti­cle mar­ket­ing, the vic­tory or vac­u­ous­ness of video and the evo­lu­tion or extinc­tion of the blog.

Because the ulti­mate raspy gasp of the blog echoes here: the eas­i­est way for you to get atten­tion is by pro­duc­ing ideas and con­cepts that other peo­ple will share.

Then you want peo­ple to unite around the ideas that come from that share — that’s how thought lead­er­ship can turn into profit, by using your bril­liance as an anchor for cre­at­ing your Tribe.

It is then, there­fore essen­tial that you cre­ate orig­i­nal enough dis­course that in both style (what you said, how you under­stand and con­vey it) and in for­mats (a link, an embed) that are eas­ily traced back to you. The most sure­fire way to do that is to inject your essence, which can’t truly be copied.

There may be noth­ing new under the sun, but per­haps no one can say it the way you do, or make it as under­stand­able, or dupli­cate your com­plex perspective.

And so we want to be both copied and share, for fame, for profit, for fun, for recognition.

If they copy but don’t share, they may throw the “you” part of it out. Great for con­tribut­ing to soci­ety, not so much for any busi­ness that is uplifted from hav­ing one’s inno­va­tion recognized.

If they share, you can’t always track the shar­ing, but if it’s shared in a com­plete for­mat, do you really care?

Espe­cially if you know that this is where you can really see a return in value, you prob­a­bly won’t. it’s more impor­tant that 500k peo­ple saw your YouTube video than being able to name each per­son, when they saw it and whether it was a Tues­day. So you “share to gain”, as Kelly says in the same pre­sen­ta­tion. Much bet­ter sit­u­a­tion for you, whether you can track it or not.

So much so that so for many, blog­ging becomes a game of want­ing to share some­thing as close to uncopy­able as pos­si­ble that is also extra­or­di­nar­ily share­able.

We want the hyper-viral effect with­out hav­ing our intel­lec­tual prop­erty ripped off.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to strike that balance?

We’re going to talk about that next, and take a closer look at the mega-viral or hyper-viral model — that’s really a pipe dream — in social media.

As to the ques­tion in the title?

Yes, I think the hype of mega-viral suc­cess has killed the very valu­able real­ity of what is a quite impres­sive set of tools between blog­ging and social media. Can we revive it?

Bear with me for a few more posts. I have an answer for that too.