The Heck With Originality, Build on What’s Come Before You
A few days ago, I read a great blog post written by author Seth Godin. Titled Originality, the post takes a look at two distinct groups of people with equal disdain: those who pass off the ideas of others as their own, and those who spend their time accusing others of stealing ideas.
Godin is a master of improving ideas — mostly ones that did not originate inside his own head — and turning them into the most readable, understandable and useful capsules of information imaginable. Taking his inspiration from wherever he can find it, Godin adds value and gives credit to those who came before him.
Seems like a pretty good goal for anyone trying to establish a presence in the world of blogging. The essence of Godin’s message, “Every artist builds on what came before,” resonated for me, and caused me to stop and think about the myriad sources of ideas I’ve picked up on the various social media platforms over the past two years.
I love the idea of working hard to improve on the ideas presented by others — knowing that those ideas may have already been improved upon several times. Ideas like the concept of ambient awareness, which I first heard about from keynote speaker Chris Dessi at the First Westchester TweetUp in October 2009.
Ambient awareness is the concept that “Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” (Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, NYT).
I’ve started to notice that ambient awareness also comes into play as I learn new social media techniques, develop strategies and adopt philosophies. Small pieces of information are taken in, processed, altered, added to others, and the process goes on and on.
The knowledge that impressionistic masterpieces are being created in my brain every time I log into Facebook has caused me to be a little more careful about the pallette I work with. I now fill my most often-visited newsfeed groups with pages and profiles I think will be most likely to yield a good painting, and I visit the less interesting and less relevant pages and profiles less frequently.
Earlier today, while going through the feed of my Facebook social media group, I found a blog post that helped me immensely as I struggled to come up with a topic for this column. The post, entitled Holy Blog Fail! Suggestions From a Lapsed Blogger, was chock full of great blogging tips and useful links. The post was written by Rhonda Hurwitz, owner of Rhonda Hurwitz Marketing and Social Media.
In a single week, I typically collect a couple dozen blog posts or articles I consider “keepers”. It’s gotten to the point where I now keep a stack of Post-It notes with me when I sit down at a computer. My collection of ideas, information and links on hundreds of little scraps of paper soon looks like a pointillistic artwork in its own right.
Chris S. Cornell is the Director of Social Media at Thompson & Bender — a Westchester-based PR, advertising and marketing firm. He manages several online communities, and consults, speaks and writes about social media. He is also the owner of Cornell Gallery, a custom framing business in Pleasantville. You can follow Chris on Twitter.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.