My title for this blog is to serve one purpose. To show that most of the people who share this blog have never read it. It's not your fault. Most blogs are boring, they provide very little in the way knowledge, or thought leadership. However, our community of Social Media professionals share these blogs based on title, and not merit. Again, I blame the blogger ... not the viewer.
People love blogs that list the 20 things you should or shouldn't be doing on Social Media. They are easy to write, the titles are very sharable, and they push few boundaries. When boundaries are not pushed, everyone is happy and the fear of "backlash" is never realized.
Every "list blog" I ever read does a great job of looking useful on the surface. Yet, one need only put these tips and suggestions to use in a real-life scenario to know that the information given is unbelievably obvious, and marginally effective. In fact, many of these "tips" come with "fine print" to their success. Hardly a tip, if you ask me.
Social Media is about pushing boundaries, not regurgitating content. If we (as Social Media professionals) did things the same way traditional marketers did it 40 years ago, we would be sending each other inter-departmental mail, and keeping ROI statistics on ledgers.
Our industry is about doing things differently. Why say the same thing many people did before you? For this reason, beyond the title, many blogs aren't being read. Social Media blogs have been diluted by information shared a million different times, in a million different ways. They offer nothing more than a title. Some of you may point to the number of "reads" your own blog gets. I'd reply with, "lets look at each blog's bounce rate."
What I do not understand is that while these blogs clearly suck, many of you leave comments like, "great job!" and "useful information." Seriously? Newsflash ... it's ok to disagree with other Social Media professionals. This is not Sesame Street; we don't all have to be friends. When a blog sucks, you should indeed call it out (make sure you have some points to back your statement). This is our industry, and our message. We have to own it, and govern it - otherwise we are just spinning our wheels.
I have openly disagreed and debated with many "big names" in Social Media because I thought they were wrong. Half of them took what I said to heart and made changes, half of them cried and called me a bully. That means I am batting 500 ... not too bad. Not to sound self-serving (another trait of a bad blogger), but if more of us were outspoken and cared about the content, our blogs would once again be shareable because of the content and not the title. Let's make content king, again.