Intranet Management Software Blog

As one of the greatest socialites the world has ever seen Oscar Wilde once said that “there is only one thing worse than being talked about – and that is not being talked about”.

A tidy few years later Seth Godin said you should turn a sales funnel upside down, and create instead a megaphone for people to talk about you – eventually creating sales people from customers.

Since then a lot of sites and online techniques have sprung up or evolved to help us do just that.

The modern world is now full of communication channels and collaboration software that promise a plethora of networked interactions. The basic idea is that this should allow some kind of sense and wisdom to eventually float to the top, much to the satisfaction of the mere mortal looking for useful stuff.

New techniques have become verbs, verbs have become absorbed into the daily vernacular of the nimble fingered - and within just a few years new activities have become so fundamental to peoples lives that not understanding that you can “create an ecosystem out of tweeting about your blogs” now marks you down as some kind of a luddite – even though Twitter was only established in 2006.

However Seth Godin also said that “functionality is the new marketing”  [ source : ‘small is the new big’ ] which I personally took to mean that you do actually need a great something or other to create genuine waves to get  you talked about. And that’s what I personally find a little  frustrating about some of the current ways to network and promote your stuff. They basically are often empty of innovation, and seem to be trying their best to enable people who have nothing to say to be talked about.

It seems as soon as the world finds a way to enable great functionality to float to the top for you and I to find easily – someone else will hire a bunch of cheats to get their stuff there instead of yours. “Rank it by incoming links?” – pay people to create incoming links. “Build great networks?” – form sites where all sense of effort and value based networking is lost and instead allow people to spam everyone all over again.

It takes a huge amount of effort and skill to actually create something that really is functional enough that it should be shouted about. People who do that will be hard working, creative, often burnt out and generally fascinating – and they probably wont have time to nurture any kind of an ecosystem out of anything , even though they are actually creating something that other people will indeed shout about – because it is actually great and that’s what counts.

Oscar Wilde also said that “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast” and on this one I am with him completely.  If you are working that hard to actually create something that might become great you need to find the time each day to just stand up, clear your head, learn from your bruising mistakes and start again – perhaps we should have a quiet reflective coffee and leave tweeting about our blogs to others – chances are that they will enjoy it and do a very much better job than I ever would.

Home collaboration, Social Networking