Long Live Shortcuts! But When Will The Shortcut Mentality Die?

by Tinu

Well, there are short­cuts, and there are short­cuts.

I usu­ally just say “Short­cuts are just the long way to fail­ure.” That’s not entirely true, it’s just a sound-bite. (More on the sound-bite tac­tic later.)

REAL Short­cuts actu­ally work, by definition.

It’s the Short­cut Men­tal­ity that doesn’t work.

Let me explain.

A short­cut is defined as a route to a des­ti­na­tion that is shorter than the long one.

There are all types of rea­sons why the short­cut route isn’t always the default road.

While it may have fewer steps, it may occa­sion­ally take longer in time spent. Think of high­ways ver­sus city streets.

A short­cut may encour­age us to go off on side missions.

The short­cut might be new, and not have existed at the time the long road was first built. You may have had a sta­tic web­site. Now blog soft­ware like Word­Press can build you a web site with­out even using the blog func­tion­al­ity until you’re ready.

So yes, short­cuts work. So what is the short­cut men­tal­ity, and why doesn’t it work?

The Short­cut Men­tal­ity is the premise that tak­ing the work out of a process will still bring you the desired result.

Some peo­ple think they can use PLR con­tent, or other sub-par con­tent to cre­ate or update a blog and it will still “work”.

Every time I’ve seen this process fol­lowed, I’ve seen it fail. Blog­ging is work.

It’s not work that nec­es­sar­ily has to be done by YOU, but some­one does have to do it.

Prefer­ably some­one with per­son­al­ity who is knowl­edge­able about your topic mat­ter enough to be able to com­pe­tently fuse the per­sonal touch with the spread of information.

That means when your local com­pany starts to blog, whether the prime objec­tive is more vis­i­bil­ity or bet­ter cus­tomer ser­vice, it has to connect.

Blogs are con­nec­tive tech­nol­ogy. Imple­ment­ing them to divorce your­self from the pub­lic partly defeats the purpose.

This is a fairly con­tro­ver­sial topic and some peo­ple will Strongly dis­agree with me.

They’ll say the point of blog­ging is the soft­ware and what it can help you do in the search engines.

They’ll claim the aim of blog­ging for busi­ness is dif­fer­ent from that of per­sonal blogging.

I would counter that no mat­ter why you are blog­ging or what the ulti­mate gain is, if you intend to blog with­out mak­ing con­nec­tions, it’s as effec­tive as hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion using only a monot­one voice.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion will result. But if you’re going to use resources to achieve that aim, and what amounts to ten per­cent more effort will make that mis­sion ten times more effec­tive.… why not?

If you have the tools, use them. Espe­cially if it can give you a leg up on peo­ple who don’t get it.

There are blog short­cuts that work. And there are those that dis­mally, sadly, can only be said to work if you down­grade your def­i­n­i­tion of some­thing “working”.

So why say that short­cuts don’t work, when in a lit­eral sense, they do?

Not just because the world rarely plays out literally.

Also because peo­ple who intu­itively know I’m talk­ing about the men­tal­ity, instantly get it, even though I’m speak­ing in sound-bites. And peo­ple who don’t, and want to know, I can nor­mally engage and explain.

I find that when I talk or write in sound-bites, peo­ple lis­ten, and I’m able to then engage the ones I really need to talk to fur­ther, in order to relay the true message.

We’re turn­ing into a Head­line Cul­ture. It’s a nec­es­sary tac­tic, and per­haps not even an evil one.

If you can’t sum up what you have to say in a head­line, is it worth your time to get the details?

Tell me what you think.

And share your favorite recipe for chicken too.

Because if I was a head­line right now I’d read “I’m Sofa King Hung Ray”.

This week:

• Social Media — Isn’t it already shortcut?
• Why doesn’t the short­cut men­tal­ity in social media work?
• Why and how does the short­cut men­tal­ity in blog­ging specif­i­cally, fail repeatedly?
• Which short­cuts can you safely take to blog­ging and the rest of social media?
• How do you avoid the short­cut men­tal­ity in social media?
• What are some of the worst exam­ples of the short­cut men­tal­ity in social media?