Get Social But Stop Copying!
This weekend, my high school class of 1986 will be gathering for our 25 Year Reunion, at a tavern barely two blocks away from the stairwell separating the Home Economics Department from the Chemistry Lab where I stole my first kiss (I can still recall the alluring aroma of arsenic and old lace). Besides the receding hair lines and massive weight gain, the only real difference I’m expecting from the last time I saw many of my old classmates is that THIS time our ID’s won’t be fake.
Back To The Future
I don’t know about today, but back in the “Roaring ‘80’s” academia was obsessed with putting students into “groups” to work on in-class assignments in an effort to better develop our collaboration skills (and therefore better prepare us to defeat the Soviets). Hogwash. While the educational intent was noble and altruistic, in reality this emancipated pedagogy simply resulted in entire classes of students developing and refining the very powerful and practical skill-set of “copying.”
In an age when advanced data duplication devices like mimeograph machines were only assessable to faculty and staff, this blatant copying was all done manually (by hand, using writing instruments) and typically followed a predictable, hierarchical, and trickle-down data flow as described in the following vignette. Once the assignment was given (for example, a chemistry lab experiment), the groups would spend 30 minutes periodically mixing elements on the table and trying to avoid explosions of sufficient size and scale to compromise the integrity of the surrounding load-bearing walls. However, once the class recognized there were only 30 minutes remaining, and they were nowhere CLOSE to being done, widespread panic kicked in and the lobbying and posturing went into high gear. The smart and nerdy kids (who had usually helped the teacher set up the experiments in the first place) would beg, cajole, and ultimately receive the correct answers from the instructor, and these eggheads would then be strategically ambushed by an intellectually inferior group to copy their answers, and they would in turn have their answers copied by the next group, until finally everyone had copied the answers from somebody else, just in time to turn in the assignment before the bell rang.
Are You Skating On Thin Isotopes?
What I find interesting is that this phenomenon is not limited to a couple of mullet-wearing, Styx-loving, Trans Am driving groupies during the Reagan Administration, but rather this practice is alive and well 25 years later, and is in fact RAMPANT within social media today. In fact, the situation has become so dire that I am considering the possibility that Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki are the ONLY two remaining people actually introducing original ideas and content anymore, and that the rest of the online universe is simply copying them (except that we don’t call it “copying” anymore, because that would make us feel uncreative and lazy and uncomfortable with the fact that after 5 years of daily blogging we have run out of interesting or new things to say). So, instead of thinking of it in terms of “copying,” we have invented a lexicon of these wonderfully benign, politically correct, euphemisms featuring words like “repurposing,” which ultimately lead us down that slippery slope to simply Linking or Retweeting what someone else wrote or said, with the selfish hope of getting some kind of halo effect from our community by being associated with a poignant and compelling thought-leadership manifesto.
Leaders LEAD!
In order to establish the essential trust and credibility necessary to establish your brand as a leader in the marketplace, individuals and firms need to commit to generating a steady supply of ORIGINAL content, copy, and messaging that resonates with the specific interests of your audience. These pieces must have a consistent brand voice and maintain an equilibrium – a sense of “give and take” – in much the same way that effective in-person conversations balance speaking and listening to make it beneficial to both parties. An active and strategically managed editorial calendar can ensure that a steady diet of content is balanced in just the right proportions between industry information, product education, and specific calls to action. The truth is, active management of brand content will always accommodate occasional references to outside resources or articles, but these should be spontaneous and contextual, rather than a creative crutch to support a cultural and systemic nonproliferation of original thought.
Reading or Leading?
One of the questions Human Resource managers frequently ask of job seekers is, “So, what are you reading?” A valid question, but here’s the reality. My six-year-old daughter could read. Reading is easy. (In fact, the reason so many Kindles and iPads have been purchased is because they reflect the condition of our society, as they are GREAT for the masses who want easy content CONSUMPTION and DISTRIBUTION, but suboptimal for the CREATION of original, essay-length content exceeding 140 characters). Instead, when I interview candidates, I always ask, “So, what have you written?” That is the true test of intellect, and the reason it is weighted so heavily in college admission considerations as well as in nationally standardized tests.
So please, I beg of you, don’t Link, Like, or Retweet this piece. Instead, consider it a challenge and a charge to stop copying, sit down, and commit to writing your own content!
Douglas O’Bryon’s sanguine Soundbite Laureate moniker paints a poetic self-portrait of this adult prodigy, who enjoys nothing more than pitting man versus metaphor in a continuing fight for justice from his vantage point high above Strongsville’s suburban Serengeti.
Author and artist, bodybuilder and businessman, cereal entrepreneur and everyman, soccer Dad and MBA grad, he is a realist, idealist, and surrealist, who considers his job done when he has blended high tech with high touch into an easy to swallow Digital Casserole, which is, ironically, also the name of his blog. He is currently working his new novel, a sequel to The Titanic.
2 Responses to “Soundbite Laureate: Get Social But Stop Copying!”
Julie Cajigas
Douglas…
First and foremost, I’m not entirely sure how you can consider Guy Kawasaki outside the “copying others” realm. If you follow him on twitter, it’s entirely material taken from other sites and put into his “Holy Kaw” blog format, from which you need to click to the outside website to see the original content in its entirety.
More importantly, I think you are missing the massive educational benefit of linking, liking and retweeting. For example, my college professor, who inspired my thesis on Facebook Stalking, frequently links to fascinating articles from a bevy of online and traditional (think NY Times) sources, which I then click and read. If it wasn’t for his posts, I would have missed many fascinating details about the world I live in. I don’t find his lack of content generation to be lazy copying. Instead, I find him to be an arbiter of useful information – much like I find Kawasaki to be a conduit to funny and interesting stories. He reads things, evaluates them with a critical, highly educated eye, and then passes them along for anyone in his feed to read.
Now, obviously my professor does a fair amount of copy generation by way of published academic articles and studies, but his linking and “repurposing” is useful and leads to his followers (me) having access to carefully filtered, fascinating pieces of information. I appreciate when others link to content that I might not have had the chance to peruse because of my limited time to search for and consume content. This, to me, is an important part of the value of social networking. Certainly, social media and social networking has given us the opportunity to broadcast our own content and has given individuals and companies a platform that they can control and utilize easily. But, I think, more importantly, it has created an easy way for us to share content and information that previously we wouldn’t have.
As far as the question “What are you reading?” Reading is crucial, if for no other reason than the fact that reading is the building block of becoming an excellent writer. Without the digestion of word patterns from other accomplished writers, it is much harder to learn writing skills. Beyond that, do you really think people are reading voraciously out there? While I know a few people who voraciously read Perez Hilton or watch viral videos – who exactly do you think is reading the articles my professor posts on evolutionary psychology? Reading, and reading high quality works of fiction and non-fiction are indicators of intelligence. We cannot stand on the shoulders of giants without reading what they wrote and did ahead of us in order to learn quickly great bodies of information.
I can see how in business, writing is equally as important as reading. I can also see why you might want businesses and businesspeople alike to blog or otherwise generate content rather than just reposting. But, I would think the combinations of writing and reading, and generation and reposting are really what is necessary. One must read to stay abreast of trends, to gain access to knowledge about the world and current events, to piggyback off the research of others and simply to have something to say. Sometimes these will come from our own searches and seeking, but now, we can benefit from the collective wisdom of our social network through their postings and sharing of information. If we follow quality people, we will be connected to a vast array of knowledge we would not have found on our own. Thus, if I was interviewing, I would ask both questions. I would want to know what my interviewee is reading, and what they have read. I would also want to see their writing samples. Both are needed for success.
A few parting points:
1. Just because everyone CAN publish on the internet does not mean everyone SHOULD. Sharing is caring, especially for people who do not have a lot to say or who are not comfortable sharing. The reality is, we are not all New York Times columnists, and for good reason.
2. Better to repost intelligent content than to generate less-than-intelligent or less-than-interesting content.
3. How can you argue that reading is a sub-standard skill set? If I buy a Kindle to read the works of the great Masters and essayists, how is that in any way lazy or unimportant to education as a whole?
4. College entrance examinations and admissions processes may ask for original content in the form of essays, but if you haven’t passed reading comprehension, how can you possibly generate any interesting content? How could you get a qualifying score on your SAT verbal section without extensive practice at reading? Also, how do you figure that standardized tests emphasize writing? Generally, the written section is not part of the totaled scores and does not have a direct effect on admission (please feel free to correct me if this has changed).
5. Plain and simple – and possibly the most salient point. If no one reposts, links or re-tweets, and if no one reads because they are too busy creating their own content, who exactly do you expect to read this article? I would link to it, but I feel compelled to respect your wishes that I refrain from doing so.
Julie
Anita
You don’t do much reading, do you? Most of the original content I find on Facebook is all about where Joe had breakfast, who’s having a baby shower, and “Go tribe” nonsense. Alternatively, the creative writers I know on Facebook are writing bits of poetry and lovely or funny thoughts which they’ve cribbed from the internet, without any attribution. You’d think a person who writes for a living would understand the twin concepts of intellectual property and intellectual honesty, but in most cases, you’d be wrong.