Several years ago, before this blogging thing became commonplace, I became sadly aware of the fact that Google was becoming the scourge of perceived originality. I'll explain why I am using the word perceived in a moment, but let me first explain what I mean about originality. I am not talking about just big ideas. I mean any idea. Next time you come up with something that sounds truly original, just type it into the Google search box and see what you get. There was that dark day, I believe in 2003, when I tested my originality for thinking up a string of bad names for ethnic restaurants (Dim Sum and Then Sum; Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down; Makes Me Wanna Challah). Only one of the search terms got zero results when I checked on Google (guess which one?). The experience led me to believe that we were entering an age of disbelief that anyone can come up with anything that's truly original.That might have been my best idea of the year, and had I known what was coming, I might have searched the idea on Google. For what was coming was the age of social media where the impossibility of being original is a given. In fact, as many an eager blogger has learned, you can get further ahead in the blogosphere not by contributing anything original, but by practicing a few blog-tested rules for getting people to link to you. Which brings me to this week's subject for Office Talk, the word meme, in the sense that the word is used and understood in the blogosphere.If you have not yet been subjected to the word meme,it's a clever neologism invented by new-world atheist Richard Dawkins in an 80's book titled The Selfish Gene. Dawkins was looking for a metaphor to describe social viruses (a phenomenon that would later inspire Malcolm Gladwell to write The Tipping Point) and he came up with an apparently original idea based on an analogy: gene is to biology and evolution as meme is to communication. As the article in Wikipedia notes, a meme, like a gene, is a "self-replicating unit of transmission." It's no wonder that the idea became so popular. Self-replicating messages -- it's a marketer's dream come true.But it took some time for the word meme to take hold, and Wikipedia does a great job in chronicling that history. It was not until the Internet evolved into a sociallly efficient platform for this kind of transmission that meme could take off. I'm talking itself about the blogosphere, of course, which has embraced the idea so deeply that one of the most popular sites for tracking content has incorporated it into its own name. In these early years of blogging, the social rules of transmission appear to dominate. To see that this is true, just study how certain posts climb their way up the ranks on sites like Techmeme, Digg, and other sites that monitor transmission. For the sake of simplicity, I'll list a few of them here -- in order of effectiveness -- but there are others:Tailgaiting: I first became aware of this practice while helping a client deal with a competitor who had the fascinating marketing strategy of posting a comment on every single blog post (positive or negative) that my client inspired. My client was enormously popular, and I had to remind him that this thing -- let's call it tailgaiting, illustrating the competing company's longing to appear at the tail-end of a conversation -- had no negative effect on his business. In fact, the buttmunching might have hightened the perception that my client's business was on the rise, and that his competitor's business was in trouble. Which turned out to be true. Tailgaiting, I concluded, doesn't work. I still hold that opinion.Baiting: In case you missed it, Stowe Boyd recently pissed off the PR blogging world so much that he earned the top spot on Techmeme on a Sunday morning. How did he do it? By questioning the intelligence of the PR blogging world, which, in case you didn't know, has a lot of members (see below -- "aggregating"). Result: lots and lots of people chimed in, including people who hate, people who hate PR people, and PR people who hate that they are hated. Whether Stowe meant it or not, the phenomenon here is called baiting, and it kind of works, if you know what will get people to bite. But, for the record, baiting PR people is easy. It was not the first time they've been called stupid.Aggregating: I had a college roommate who managed to cope with a bad case of freshman-year social anxiety by studying the freshman facebook and building an impressively wide but shallow network of connections. (He executed his vision with the kind of discipline that would have made even Dale Carnegie proud). And yes, this was way before the days of Facebook, the company. Had I gone to college in the post-Facebook era, I would have told my roommate that his habit was not aggravating but aggregating. As Chris Anderson wrote in The Long Tail, everyone wants to be an aggregator, because it works. A recent case in point: Todd And's list of popular marketing blogs. Before Todd wrote the list, he appeared close to the bottom. Now he's approaching the top third. And it's only been a few weeks.Yes, aggregating appears to work. But ask anyone who does it (I've done a little of this myself) and if they are honest they will admit that it is deeply unsatisfying. Google may have convinced the world that there's no such thing as orginality. And, yes, the blogosphere may have convinced the world that it's better to get link love than real love. But we are failing ourselves if we give up on being original, because that's the only way to win real friends and influence people. And remember, even if Google tells you that someone has already come up with your idea, it doesn't mean that your idea is not original (though it may be seen or perceived that way) or that it doesn't deserve to be heard. It certainly beats repeating what you have heard, or plying the tricks of the trade that have resulted in the cheapening and meming of life. And in the end, the meming of life may not work at all; as a people, we are quickly developing antibodies to even the most clever ruses invented by communicators.Incidentally, even that term -- the meming of life -- has already been used, in a very fine article by Dominic Pettman. But before writing this post, I refused to do the Google search, because I had vowed to focus on what I mean before I meme. I'm asking everyone I know -- in my private little facebook -- to do the same.NEXT ON OFFICE TALK: "COMMUNITY"
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