Aliveness vs Contrivance: Authenticity and Noise in the Rush for Blogging Popularity
At the Beer and Blog yesterday, Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about how to make your corporate blog more popular. One strategy he suggested was to follow Techmeme and write posts relevant to popular items and thus join the conversation. The theory is that by responding to popular waves of interest in the online conversation in your chosen industry, you get to be part of the conversation while it’s hot.
So here is my experiment and the results, not in terms of traction (I got none so far), but in terms of my internal experience of joyfulness as a result of trying this method of marketing. See, as a joy ninja, I don’t want to just be popular, I want to be happy. I want to do activities that come from authentic aliveness and intrinsic motivation. Including the ways I promote my ideas.
The conversation I responded to was the hubbub around Jason Calacanis’s post about how to save money as a startup by firing people who weren’t workaholics. I read and commented on a few blogs with posts about the conversation, and wrote a post myself.
Then I asked myself the question I often do “Am I happier now than I was before I did this activity?”
The answer came back as “NO”. I feel kind of cheap, like I just contrived interest in something, so I could get the result I wanted.
Then I asked myself “Would I be happier if I had gotten some traction, if my post was up on Techmeme like this guy’s?“
When I checked in with myself, the answer still came back “NO”.
I probably would have felt excited, for a bit, patted myself on the back, maybe squealed a little and twittered “Look at me!”. But happiness? Aliveness? I don’t really think so.
I have blogged before about intrinsic motivation. It’s when you do something because you want to, not because of the result you get. I wrote that post out of extrinsic motivation. The only intrinsic part was the experimental nature of it: ooh, can I really manipulate myself into being on the top of the conversation? The actual piece of writing was more contrived than not. Which is why I think it didn’t bring happiness to write it.
Now I’m not the kind of person who generalizes these discoveries into “Marketing is evil”. I think marketing is fascinating and useful, but what I also think is that when people get attached to the potential extrinsic rewards of marketing they lose touch with the intrinsic rewards of having a conversation they enjoy. They become less happy, their writing becomes more contrived and less alive, and everybody loses. Blogs get filled with “me too” posts and comments, people spend their time and energy trying to get famous instead of trying to understand what is interesting about themselves and the world, and the whole point of life is missed.
So I think it’s important that the world has Marshall Kirkpatrick because I imagine he enjoys this kind of marketing work intrinsically. And it’s important for those of us who might not be motivated thusly to connect to our own motivation and act from that. The result, I posit, will be a net increase of joy on the planet, not to mention a higher signal-to-noise ratio on the web.
We can all be vibrantly alive and happy. Here I discuss the ideas and tools that will get us there.
Ah, so you only commented on my writing because you were whoring your blog? You didn’t genuinely want to join the conversation? No wonder you feel dirty!
Your discussion in this post is precisely the point about authenticity in communication — something my colleague Zern Liew is always banging on about.
It felt wrong for you because what you did was the online equivalent of trying to be popular by pretending to be part of the “in crowd” — however that was perceived at the time. You saw that it was “popular” to be talking about Jason Calicanis’ article, so you walked into a room of people talking about it and said something — anything — to be part of the group. But your heart wasn’t in it.
My story blipped up on Techmeme not because I wanted it there or tried to get it there — I didn’t, and perhaps I’d even have preferred it was widely read by some other mechanism. It was because I had a genuine communication with another widely-read author (Duncan Riley, who I met at a conference), I wrote a passionate rejoinder — and because I had a real and personal connection I could tell him about it, and he posted it in front of a wide readership.
There was a spike in traffic, but only a few readers will hang around. But that slowly builds an audience. It’s not an instant thing.
As an aside, I’ve written a follow-up piece, Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up, which is also passionate. It’ll be interesting to see what happens…
Hi Stilgherrian,
Thanks for visiting and I apologize if my use of your blog in my experiment didn’t meet your needs for authenticity. =)
Your guesses about what I am feeling and why are not jiving with my internal experience and so I want to clarify where I’m coming from.
It’s not so much that it felt “wrong” - I don’t like to think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. I always end up on the “wrong” side of things eventually. =)
What I meant to convey is that it didn’t feel fun. That’s my personal metric of “do I want to do this” - do I enjoy it? I didn’t enjoy writing the first post because the topic wasn’t alive for me. At least not enough to write a whole post on it. What was alive was the experiment, which is why I did it.
I don’t want to create or live from a moral standard that people “should” be authentic or “shouldn’t” respond to popular posts just for the sake of increasing their readership. Heck, if I’d enjoyed it I would have written a post about how I enjoyed it. I would have shared my fascination with how marketing works and how it’s changing and what it means to be popular nowadays and how it’s about contributing value to the conversation, and how that skews things toward creative thinkers in ways that excite me. In that case, it would have been very alive for me!
So for me it’s not about the specific actions themselves, it’s about whether or not they were in the service of real living needs I feel inside myself in the moment, or in service of an idea of meeting a need through a strategy like being popular. I’m all about following the former and letting go of the latter, because when I do that, I get to exist in the juiciness of who I am in the present moment. =)
Emma
Brilliant post Emma!
So much about conventional business practice is focused on the external. And yet it is by working on the intrinsic, the internals of ourselves that can generate true happiness.
So why is doing what pleases us so hard?!!! When it gives us such joy.
Love your blog! Super relevant.
Hi Zern,
Yay, celebrating our common interest in true happiness!
I think it is hard because are taught very early to do things for external rewards, and punished by social censure if we do things for our own joy or interest. For instance as a kid I was constantly called a geek, freak, weird, etc.
Social conditioning runs deep because we are social creatures. Our aptitude for learning and adapting means we end up adapting to basically unhealthy ideas that are extant in our culture. And it’s nobody’s fault - it’s just where we find ourselves, and that’s what I want to change about our culture, so it is aware of and supports people living from their intrinsic motivation. So I see two things as necessary for that: education about the issue of intrinsic vs extrinsic, and each of us doing our own work to uncover our true selves and run with them.
I am feeling so tickled that although I started out with an “inauthentic” strategy to “join the conversation”, I ended up becoming involved in a conversation I care about as a result of doing that. Supports my thinking lately that you just gotta jump in, make mistakes, experiment if you want to learn and grow and connect. I had an impulse to connect, so I jumped in. Underneath “wanting to be popular” is wanting to connect, to participate, to be part of something. Those are the real living needs and this thread is meeting them for me. Yay!
Emma
[…] Emma’s experiment on doing so (when it is not in your intrinsic nature to do so) is telling. […]