Where's the Beef?

In my opinion this is one of Wendy's best advertising campaign's ever. The message is pretty straight forward. 

In today's networked world, where digital is the seemingly 'uncontrollable beast' stomping on and devouring everything in its path, I'm asking the exact same thing. There's a ton of content out there, but the content has no real meaning (countless diggs, retweets, facebook updates, etc).  Saaay maan. . .where's the beef?! 

You can find it when you dive into the intersection of business, technology and culture. This allows you to swim in the maket ideas of Kogi, Threadless, Apple, and NIN music, products that people want, where lots of value is being offered and customers are actually willing to pay for it.

When you just focus on technology (i.e current social media "darlings" like twitter and facebook) you address only one dimension of a mult-dimensional world. It seems that, when it comes to the pundits, the conversation is about social media, as the big picture, instead of the big picture and how social media fits into it. It's mostly about how Twitter rocks instead of a rockin' idea and how to use twitter to spread the word. 

So when I came across the below Ad Age article by Alex Reiss, I clenched my fists and said "yeesss!"

Rock on Alex. . .

Why I stopped Tweeting By Alex Kniess

I've never been great at sharing a constant stream of fresh content online. I have a personal blog that's been updated a handful of times in the last year (maybe longer, I don't even remember). I don't have a Del.icio.us page nor do I Digg things. I probably have dozens of online accounts that haven't been updated in years. And if you look at my Twitter page you'll see tweets from the beginning of December.

Ask any "social-media expert" and they would probably tell you I'm doing it all wrong. And maybe I am. But I can't help but check my Twitter feed every few days and see the majority of those I'm following doing nothing but retweeting each other or posting links to other people's opinion. Sharing is caring and I love to learn new things, but I've come to a breaking point. It seems like the majority of the content I subscribe to is repurposed and watered down. There is so much noise out there that it's hard for me to find the source. Where are the original ideas coming from?

This is why I've had a slowly decaying online presence. I started to catch myself becoming one of the many who were sharing the ideas of the few. In my opinion, quality should trump quantity and a stale online presence may be exactly what some of us need to cultivate.

I've since resolved to the old-fashioned means of sharing ideas in person, via e-mail, or among friends on Facebook. The common thread is that I'm now stumbling upon new information, learning new things and sharing my ideas with people with whom I have relationships, rather than the faceless masses.

When looking for a job, it's absolutely valuable to have a presence online and to naturally share the fresh stream of content I'm so terrible at keeping up. However, you should be careful of over-sharing and retweeting just to expand your online footprint. Doing this may just water down those nuggets of wisdom that come only once in a while, and when employers can't tell the difference between your opinions and the ideas of others that you're merely sharing, then it all becomes pointless.

When writing this post, I deleted and re-wrote my thoughts several times. Because I couldn't think of the perfect way to get my words out, I now have to temper my thinking. Here's the catch: I still believe in the mass broadcasting of ideas and sharing of information (after all, you're reading this blog post). In fact, I still learn a lot of new information in the very manner I'm advocating against. So, like I said at the beginning, maybe I'm doing it all wrong.

But I stand by my words when I say that we've had enough "Top 5" lists. Our sharing of ideas and information should be purposeful and well thought out. Our opinionated blog posts should show how we really feel.