Facibus On Blogging

Metablogging (that is, blogging about blogging and bloggers) suffers from echo effect - someone starts something, other people pick up on it, and before you know it, there are 2,927 posts about the one thing.

Herd behaviour is a survival mechanism for animals that live in societal groups. Every member does the same thing, or at least does similar enough things, most of the time. We’re social animals, we want to be accepted, so we try to more or less fit in. It’s only natural.

While there is safety in herd behaviour, it does get to be a bit of a drag reading the same old stuff from 20 different blogs. It goes something like this:

• someone says something, or launches a new way of advertising, or a new product comes out, etc.
• someone adopts the product or supports/bashes the concept
• the third generation ripples out with more agreement or dissent
• the fourth generation agree or disagree with everyone else.
• the next big thing comes along and everyone jumps onto it.

And the world turns and the beat goes on.

Apart from boring the pants off your readers, is there anything wrong with being a member of the echo chamber?

Hell yes.

If you are echoing, you’re generally talking about something that is hot now, and won’t be next week or next year. You’re not creating timeless posts - and not adding something of value to your niche.

Sure, you can write a good echo post. You can add a unique angle to the echoed topic through something like reframing or edgecraft.

My advice is to avoid the echo chamber whenever you can resist the urge. I’m human, and I want to be a good community member, so I do echo sometimes. I understand that it is impossible to avoid the echo effect entirely. But I am working on improving my writing, and I know that if every post is an echo post, I’ll never make it to top 10 of the Australian Top 100 Blogs.

Let me ask you this: would you rather be good enough, or truly great?  Can you stay within your niche and yet write a post that redefines part of it? That adds something of value? If you can do it once (and I believe that everyone has it within them to write something that totally blows their readers away), then you can probably do it again.

This is not rah-rah entrepreneurialism (not that there is anything wrong with that). I’m not trying to sell you tickets to a seminar or get you to buy my book. Just asking you to believe in yourself and put the mental work and time into creating a post that avoids the echo chamber.  I’ll enjoy reading your blogs all the more for it