This post is an excerpt from our forthcoming e-book, Be The Media.
A herd mentality is the tendency of people to be influenced by their peers to behave in similar ways. Business people, if they are not cautious, slide into a practice that behaves like the rest of the herd while using the power of the online world to market their product or service. Be well advised to avoid walking that well-trodden path. Instead, they should generate messaging and content that sets them apart. Doing so will require more creativity and industry but in the end the results will be worth it.
What do we mean when we say “herd mentality”? Here’s a common instance. Perhaps you are familiar with the phrase “the internet echo chamber.” It’s the pass-it-along phenomenon. The “echo chamber” is the end result of so many sources simply passing along the day’s information is an internet that is filled with repeats and repackagings and other variations-on-a-theme.
Social Sharing: Its Pros and Cons
The internet suffers today from a too-common practice of forwarding or sharing or “curating” or “aggregating” content that someone else wrote or compiled. Let’s be clear here. Sharing is good. Social media posts are often shared because it is a quick-and-easy way to engage and there is some element of an emotional connection to the content. The web, and social media in particular, is a social environment, and the business of creating community necessarily involves sharing and reciprocity. The problem arises when an individual or a business does little more than share others’ content. When enough businesses do enough recirculation of others’ content, the internet becomes that “echo chamber” that purveys vast amounts of sameness and precious little originality or real news, data, or reportage. It becomes a problem of shallowness, triviality, and irrelevance.
So much of what passes for content today in blogs or on social media is simply material that the poster (that is, the person who posts) found online, after 15 minutes or less of browsing, and turned to his or her own purposes, often with no significant added contribution of his or her own.
In the early years of social media, when the social media experience itself was still novel to most participants and when the participatory universe was still relatively small, a little bit of “echo effect” was not so objectionable. That was then. Today, such echo effect is characteristic of unimaginative and unprogressive voices. Moreover, it can be a detriment to those who practice it. It’s perceived by consumers as too pat, too cute, too familiar, or just too bland.
“Happy Friday” and Its Ilk
People have less tolerance today for another “Happy Friday!” post or another “inspiring” quotation (auto-posted from a queued-up database of the same) or a shared link to some other source’s presumably-interesting content.
The same is true in the blogosphere.
If we go back far enough, we arrive at a time when the act of posting content—almost any content—was enough to ratchet one’s website domain authority higher than the authority of some competing domain that was posting less content. But that’s changed. Search engines are far more unforgiving when it comes to material that lacks originality, uniqueness, or purposefulness.
It used to be that a poster could gain page-rank by consistently posting 300- or 600-word blogposts that furnished merely (let’s be honest) superficial treatments of subject matter. Such subject matter would likely contain the keywords that the poster hoped to rank for. But the content itself would fall largely into that “echo chamber” dimension, being based on little more than the writer’s quick, very recent perusal of someone else’s news or views.
We’ll say more about the solution to this, but let it suffice for the moment to recognize that work, real work, is generally the solution to this problem. Having something to say generally starts with having done some work. Reportage, for instance, is a beat-the-bushes endeavor. Delivering data means having generated data. There’s always work at the bottom of every good communications effort. But then, that’s good news, or ought to be, because the fact that doing groundwork can make one stand out in an internet where most are satisfied to merely pass along information—this is a opportunity waiting to be seized.
Neil Patel on Originality to Stand Out
The phenomenon we addressed above, about regurgitated content on the web, was addressed by Neil Patel in a blogpost on his site, neilpatel.com.
Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital, observed that the old days of content production were times when most anyone who was industrious enough in posting content saw good results.
Writes Patel: “But as time went by, Google no longer had a shortage of content. I would even go as far to say that there is too much content for them to choose from.”
Patel observes that Google now can be pickier if they want to rank your website (that is, display your site among the ranked search results for a given search query) or not. He states that the issue is not one of creating ample backlinks or doing enough optimizing to one’s on-page code. He says, instead, that it is a matter of providing what’s best for the end user.
“That means Google is going to rank fresh content that isn’t regurgitated,” Patel writes. “If you want to take the route of just writing dozens of articles… and trying to rank for everything under the sun, you can. It’s still possible, but it will take more time and it will be harder, as there is more competition.”
Don’t Be Left Behind
Patel noted that Google, even as far back as six years ago (when Google released its Panda 4.2 update) had already taken steps to get rid of spammy sites with low-quality content and to be dismissive of sites that had thousands of 300-word blog posts with duplicate content.
What should our takeaway be?
We all need to apply ourselves to content that is original and useful and of sufficient depth. We must apply ourselves to material that is not content-for-content’s-sake.
Here’s to your first steps in a new realm—in your world of content that is more “you.”