Epiblogger

I am so f—ing tired of the prejudice against personal bloggers. Leading the charge today, I quote the great Guy Kawasaki:

I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool—specifically as a marketing tool—for my website Alltop and my book, Reality Check. If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

Humanities biggest problem is entitlement. Entitlement is a bit of a double-edged sword, if you ask me. I hope it’s appropriate that I believe I am entitled to life, rights and (if I am fortunate) happiness. It gets a little dicey when I start to believe I am entitled to own a hummer (I don’t own a hummer), destroy communities and so on.

Rhett has road rage and blog rage

One of the easiest areas to see our sense of entitlement is when we drive and I am a perfect example. If you want to hear the most foul, evil and vindictive things, just spend an afternoon driving with me. Most of the time it just spews out of me. I can own that. Usually, I shock myself and tell myself I need to cool out. I am entitled to be where I want to be, when I want to be and you better get out of my damn way. This is the bad side of entitlement.

I also have, little known, pedestrian rage. When I worked downtown I walked everywhere and I have almost been hit by a car more times than I would have liked. But there’s a difference between being on time and being hit by a 3/4 ton truck. I am entitled to my life. I am going out on a limb to believe this.

So where’s the line?

I feel entitled to the right to be a personal blogger without chastising comments from the would-be peanut gallery. It makes me angry when people think that I blog about my cat all day. Or that I let everyone know I am about to brush my teeth. Because I don’t do that. And let’s just be clear—Guy’s not the only one saying this stuff. He’s just the one who crossed my path today.

Finding value

I really don’t think Guy is so much further ahead. He’s just in a different line. So he uses Twitter as a “tool” to create “value”. In truth, that’s just some marketing spin. He’s just selling—undercoat not included. This assumption of value might be the most annoying part about all this. It’s like he almost runs you over and then gives you the finger on top.

The numbers are skewed

For work, I was reading up on CTR (clickthrough rates). One person mentioned that depending on clickthrough rates to find value can lead to error because heavy clickers are not necessarily heavy buyers. And generally, they aren’t. It can be relatively easy to get a large following on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that they buy whatever it is your selling and in fact, I have found that they don’t. Everyone’s just sending links all the time. On Epi’s twitter I do have a lot of friends, but there are also a lot of people I don’t know. When I check that feed it’s usually someone hocking some link to a bullshit list that I’m not interested in.

If you compare that to my personal Twitter feed, it’s a different story. In Calgary, we have developed quite a community and I have developed quite a few new real life friendships because of it. Because we are friends on and offline, we respect one another, and we view Twitter as a conversation between us, when we share something—we are really sharing it.

The value is in the relationship

If you want to sell something or share anything, you need the relationships. I don’t have stats, but in this day and age of complete information saturation, I really believe that the relationships you build are what is going to get you ahead. If you think that Twitter is a blunt tool to hit users over the head with, I can’t imagine you finding success. It works for Guy because he is already a name and because—whether he admits it or not—he already has the relationships.

My hypothesis

I think you probably see where I am going with all of this. But it would be my hypothesis that those marketer-types or whoever they are that like to create this sense of dissonance and divide between them, in their tower, with their selling and money-making, value-creating lifestyle versus we lowly and humble personal bloggers is because we have the community that they want. We have a power that they don’t know how to achieve. We connect in a way that they never can, because they are always looking for an angle to work and we are just looking to have a conversation.

There is value in sharing minutae of my life and I hope you will share yours with me. My name is Rhett Soveran and I am a personal blogger.

Photo by Tony the Misfit