FriendFeed Hand-Wringing
J. Phil is a guest author who maintains the blog scribkin - where code and culture converge.
Around noon today, I posted a new article to my blog about Digsby. It took me a while to write because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything. Also, I once read that it’s good to editorialize your own stuff before publishing, so I decided to do that for a change.
After I hit the big button and the article went live, I turned automatically to seeing the ripples that the post was making.
- Was there a twitter mention?
- Did it get picked up by Google and FriendFeed?
- Well.. I worked on it so hard.. I’ll submit this article to Digg and Mixx. Just this once, I swear!
- Hey there it is in Google Reader. Ok, shared and starred.
- Maybe my friends on Facebook will find it cool. Linked.
- Hmm.. now there are, like 9 entries in FF for the same article! Argh! How will someone know which one to mark as liked??
It was at that point that I realized I had to stop, take a deep breath, and step back for a minute.
What the hell did I know about self-promotion, or marketing? I thought back to a Gary Vaynerchuk video called You Can’t Please everyone……..Why not? In it he takes on the old hackneyed phrase, “You can’t please everyone”. Eventually, he admits, sure, some people won’t be pleased by you, no matter what you do. But that doesn’t mean what you are doing isn’t meaningful or that you should be discouraged.
So, after my time-out (and a bit of housework) I came back with a new idea. I know next to nothing about marketing or promoting a brand. So, I shouldn’t try. My half-hearted, frenetic attempts probably only serve to annoy people more than they would be anyway. I would drink the Vaynerchuk cool-aid (well, in this case I guess it would be wine), and concentrate on doing what I do well even better. Write useful, tutorial-style articles for my blog. Guest blog occasionally. Give people a helpful link on Twitter or do what I can to be a Good Guy online.
Also, part of this would be to take down those constructs that I thought might be giving my more exposure — cross linking from my blog to Twitter, or from Twitter to Pownce. Not worrying about Digg or Mixx, use those services like they are meant to be used, discovering new and interesting content on the internet.
Maybe then, the love will come back to me. I will stop getting in my own way. People know how to use Google Reader, and if they don’t, there’s an article about it on my site.
Sounds good to me.
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