Syndication. Misrepresentation and Disinformation
Ever see Richard Branson posts on Linkedin?
Notice how his most ridiculous generic feelgood statement generates inordinate amounts of fawning and subservient clicking.
People "bigging up" Richard who needs little or no bigging up or help with spreading his message.
I've nothing against Branson. I'm looking at the whys?
If you observe human behavior you will note that many people are reluctant to learn things outside of their "ascribed" function. People are reluctant to put in the work.
People are great followers, fawners and vitriolic critics, but rarely want to set their own modest work up for scrutiny. Better to hide, snipe and snigger than be a standout.
Media owners know that Mr. X is good copy. In the case of Branson, the mythical Santa Claus beard, the homely bromides.
"Team" and entrepreneurial focused rhetoric is obviously useful on a business focused platform like Linkedin. If Richard uses this, then maybe we should too is the message to the masses... The "hustle"mantra of Vaynerchuk hits a very similar note.
I often think of the online hatred lashed upon McGregor or Mourihno and how they "play their own game," generating success after success, consistently confounding their lowball critics. The hatred against those two rarely seems to ebb, even when it seems illogical, while the "love" of Branson never seems to fade. Is telling it like it is the problem?
A note too that when they fail, as people do, their failures are reworked constantly like a "trophy," while their vast body of outstanding work is delegitimized as inconsequential (by who? no-body-s). Attention is "drawn" to their failures and used to define them, even though facts do not correspond.
Mourinho has garnered one of highest profile list of achievements in soccer. Yet he is consistently misrepresented by a disingenuous media. They're not mistaken. They deliberately lie, distort and disseminate to advance their agenda or narrative.
Any examination of the body of his work shows his players, teams and style are strategically aligned to winning games of football. His results are a consequence of his work. This fact is not valuable to a sensationalist and opinion driven media machine.
Interesting dichotomy or narrative structure. A type of barking or tail wagging response that once set in motion perpetuates itself (probably by design).
I see McGregor as one one of the best digital marketing minds in the world (until he became a crackhead). His results are impressive across all digital channels, yet he has (to my knowledge) never won a marketing award in Ireland. Although his success dwarfs that of the entire Irish marketing industry, probably combined.
Perception and reality are often distorted.
It is a key to success of many great people that they learn a little bit more, study a little bit harder and practice a small bit longer than others and make more mistakes, learning from them and moving on. They also tend to have an excellent bullshit detector.
Branson has worked for his success, entering multiple industries and invigorating the management worker-relationship. Maybe you should learn to emulate his processes, rather than fawn at his celebrity.
Virgin owns a media group of companies. Why would people denigrate their own content and push his for free?
That's the crux. The simple truth. No risk, no reward. Nobody wants to do the daring deed, be entrepreneurial, be willing to risk failure as well as potential success. Are you noting a commonality - the image of Mourinho, McGregor and Branson used for the same end in opposite ways.
To dismiss the risk taking and effort, required and expended, to distort it with myth.
To be average is to avoid risk, to hide within the crowd. Control of the crowd is the work of media.
It benefits that control to push mockery, lies and conformist fear.
Contrast your own position in the same medium (online channels). You probably don't get anywhere near the same response rates, even if your stuff is good and deals with a specific topic. You're often not a "celebrity," you're working for a living. Then you should "work." That is your value to yourself. The armchair critic is a slithery creature.
I've nothing against rich and poor, my view is that if you've got an internet connection, you're in the game. The only rich is the ability to syndicate information and that is within your direct control.
Facebook will sell you "likes" and a result a certain percentage of people will share your work and like your content as a consequence of paid outreach. You're paying for your syndication.
You don't have to do it this way. This is a key point.
If you're clever enough to use the excellent free syndication potential of IFTTT and/or Zapier and other automation tools you can easily syndicate your content across multiple channels. You can build an audience, you can cater to your niche, you can develop your own skills, message and style to suit your own ends.
Syndication and automation are services offered for free to you are useful ways to move out of the algorithm or platform selected audiences.
If you're paying attention to your own feeds, little more than ten people pop up on the top of your feed on a daily basis on Linkedin or Facebook. Even if you've got lots of "followers." Again, there is little value to followers if they never see your stuff.
Other channels offer more value, but people are reluctant to search, learn or build process points or jump between channels.
I'd like to offer a fairly simple idea...
How about using free publishing options available. Use Wordpress, Medium, Blogger and others. As you get a little bit familiar add a self hosted wordpress site for yourself.
You might add some syndication tools on top like Paper.li, Buffer and one I like, Dlvr.it. There are multiple ways of doing things. Where there is no "digital"reward is in publishing just once on one channel.
Two things to note: you are not prohibited from publishing the same information on multiple channels.
You are not prohibited from publishing the same information multiple times. Advertisers do both of these things, why not you?
Oh, you're "not advertising." Right.
Branson sure as shinola is...and he's got 600 million in the bank.
Remember the power of a message is often not in it's originality or novelty, but in it's repetition. Branson gets a lot of free reps. Maybe you should look at balancing that budget using those free syndication tools.
