essay on don't blow your own trumpet?
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i had just finished reading Caroline Middlebrook's fantastic tutorial on using StumbleUpon to network online and I headed across to that site to give it a go. After browsing around the users for a little while, I came to a realisation which sort of bothered me. A lot of people were actually stumbling upon...themselves.
At first I thought "you can't really stumble upon yourself, can you?" but it made me think. In fact, is there anything wrong with StumblingUpon, Digging or submitting your own content to any other of the multitude of social bookmarking sites out there?
Daniel Miessler answered this question in an incredibly logical way. Effectively, if you don't blow your own trumpet and just wait quietly in a corner for someone else to do it, you aren't going to get very far. He used the example of an author or an actor who continually submits their writing or their show reels, unsolicited, to agents, publishers and film producers in the hope that they will get noticed. In those industries, they know that if they don't get out there and bring attention to themselves, then their chances of actually making it are next to nothing.
The fact that Web 2.0 is heavily driven by peer review means that the quality of your content will be judged fairly anyway. If it is good, you will get more votes/diggs/sphinns/stumbles or whatever. If it is bad, it will get ignored, buried or voted down. But the chances of it receiving either of these reactions if you don't actually get it out there in front of people to assess are pretty slim.
I think it is a result of past training, especially for those of us who are British or Australian (me - I am a bit of a hybrid!). We are taught that if you make too much of a scene about how good you think you are, or volunteer to have your essay read out in class then you are more than likely going to be ridiculed, teased or bullied by your peers. It has bred a sense of false modesty into us - many of us are crying out to get our work noticed, but we are still a bit afraid that if we do, we'll be sorry when we get out to the school playground at lunchtime. For those of you who didn't experience this kind of treatment as a child, you are so very fortunate. You are probably finding it a lot easier than I am to 'face the lions' and submit my own work.
I would also point out that to not self submit is in fact doing you and everyone else a disservice. If you have some amazing content which could really help people but you don't make it easy for them to find, then surely it is your audience who is missing out?
So get out there and do it. The blogosphere is not the school playground. Fabulous content will rise to the top, but you have to keep putting it out there to even give it a chance. You don't think JK Rowling had her strange but fantastic book idea about a boy wizard accepted by the first publisher do you? And it certainly wasn't because she sat in her kitchen and one day and agent miraculously came and knocked on her door...