Enough With The Good Feels. GooFMeLT Is Making Us Post Crap.
About an hour ago, I finished writing an article for thinkfuture pulse and pressed schedule to schedule it for tomorrow at 6 am my time, the normal time I publish. As I was writing the post, I thought to myself – is this my best work? I kept writing and writing and writing, reworking and reworking it, asking myself over and over again – is this my best work – does it bring my readers any value? Even as I was thinking that and writing that,
As I was writing the post, I thought to myself – is this my best work? I kept writing and writing and writing, reworking and reworking it, asking myself over and over again – is this my best work – does it bring my readers any value? Even as I was thinking that and writing that, I realized that the post I was going to publish really didn’t have any value. Nevertheless, I kept on writing and writing, trying to add value, all the while checking my SEO checker to make sure that I was using all of the right keywords so the article would show up in search (the article was on “building unicorns”). I kept watching the little word counter ticker going up and up until it reached and surpassed the magic 1000 plus word mark, you know, the point where search engines supposedly start paying attention to you, and you may have a slim chance of getting your post in the range of someone’s eyeballs.
As I was doing all of this, all of my writing seemed to be getting more and more insipid, as I was trying really hard to make my article conform to SEO rules – so that the almighty search engine gods may smile on it and it might actually go viral and have it be read by more than two people. I finished the article, hit the 1058 word mark, read it over a few times and realized that well, I guess it was good enough. Then signed off, knowing that it would go up tomorrow at 6 am Pacific.
But something bothered me. I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that something wasn’t right. That what I had produced was just crap, crap for the sake of attempting to bring eyeballs to my blog, and hopefully my business. That it really wasn’t my best work, but just more fodder for the content beast, fast food nuggets of pithy optimistic non-filling, non-satisfying text, which didn’t do a damn thing that it was supposed to. I went back and forth in my mind – “it wasn’t all bad, there might be some value to someone”, was interspersed with, “it’s total crap, please take it down before it goes anywhere and makes me look even worse”. I went back and read it over and over, trying really hard to bend my mind around it. Was it worth the read? Was I saying anything new – was I saying anything that might remotely educate anyone?
About an hour after I scheduled it, I took it down and started writing this instead.
We’ve been now cornered into a situation by Google, Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter (lets call them GooFMeLT) where the best stuff, the really good content, the cream of the crop, never really gets to be seen by those who might be interested in it, or if it is, it happens during some super rare serendipitous moment when all of the stars align. Those who write really good content must now circumnavigate this uncircumnavigateable mess when attempting to deliver something that may possibly show up in front of people’s faces. As with all other mediums before it, the internet has now become a place where the really great tail content created by real, authentic humans struggles to be seen among all of the sales messages, click-bait, “fake news” and corporate “head” content.
If you aren’t a big name writer, you are lost in the abyss. If you haven’t got thousands of followers, you’re no one, and no one sees anything that you do. Even our own messages to our friends and family are drowned in a stream of nonsense, click-bait, and crap. The situation is bad, and it is only going to get worse.
So here is my thinking – do you want a real challenge? Do you want to truly build not just a billion dollar business, but a trillion dollar business? Then figure out a way that we can actually get the right content to the right people at the right time if its content that they want. Figure out a way to remove or delete the need for all of us to have to write content which may catch the eye of The Great GooFMeLT, and just get the right sales message to the right person at the right time, exactly when they need it. Instead of drowning in a sea of crappy content, swimming among the sharks to find the good stuff, the real good stuff comes right to us when we need it, whether its content, a service or a product. Do away with the horrible mismatch between supply and demand, and finally, once and for all, give the internet back to the people, not the corporations.
That’s your next herd of unicorns, right there.