Ian M Rountree

Freelance Copywriting and Digital Marketing

4 Signs You’re Strip Mining Your Niche

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Vulture Mine | Flickr
Sometimes, the best way to get at a resource is by digging a pit and pulling it out.

People have been doing this for some time – but is it appropriate for bloggers to be approaching their niches the way some mining companies approach environmental conservation; with scorn, disregard for wasted effort, and their eye on nothing but fast profitability?

Like open pit miners, some content producers go right for the veins of gold in their niche by going broad and shallow with their content. By not only writing for your very specified subject matter, but addressing subjects in a strategic manner, you’re going to get more out of the wells you dig in your niche.

Here are some signs you might be missing the opportunity for sustainable work:

1. Removing overburden

When you’re starting niche work, one of the really tempting strategies is to write all the obvious blog entries first – 10 Ways to Get Better Sales, or How to Own A Hacksaw are great titles – but when you spend your first month in a blog with nothing but these super obvious subjects, one of two things happens; either you gain no ground because you’re showing no depth, or you lose enthusiasm because the learning curve goes from bunny hill to K2 after you’ve exhausted the easy topics.

2. Chopping off the mountaintops (overt criticism)

There’s always kerfuffle about negative action – but relentlessly hamstringing the competition isn’t just a bad idea online, it can be downright fatal to your career as a blogger. Because nothing ever really goes away (see also; Eternal Cache mediatrope), even if your opinions about something change, your Voice of Record never will. Endlessly pursuing conflict for whatever reasons you name is counter-productive.

3. Failing to survey properly

If you don’t do the research, no one can blame you for getting it wrong, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Missing vital details, neglecting to give proper credit, or opining without disclaiming an article as opinion, can be damaging to your long term opportunities as an authority on the web. And that’s just with individual articles.

If you dive into a niche that’s dried up, or being effectively addressed by a range of other knowledge workers who both got there before you and know more than you do, you’re only going to be able to get a certain amount of return on your work.

4. Paying no heed to the tailings

Run-off from a blog may be harder to quantify than from a mine, but the fact remains that unaddressable byproducts exist. Unanswered comments, unthanked retweets, ghost town Facebook pages – all of these are the tailings of a sloppy blogging operation. Missing the opportunity to clean up after yourself, by responding to comments, and thanking those who share (when you find them), is a great way to waste future advocacy.

There are better ways to produce serialized content along a constrained topic set.

Because, let’s face it, that’s the technical definition of Blogging, isn’t it? We’re not just weblogging any more, we’re not journaling – certainly not if the idea of a niche has entered the discussion. Creating serialized content in a shallow manner will net swift results if done well – but it won’t last forever.

Image by Kevin Dooley.

Facebook’s Automated Censorship Kerfuffle

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If you’ve been anywhere near where I’ve been over the weekend, you’ll have seen this article on Dangerous Minds about Facebook removing a photo of two men kissing.

From the article:

[…] it seems that the sight of two fully-clothed men kissing was too much for Facebook, or too much for some redacted […] who complained about it.

This is an issue a lot of networks need to face and be willing to take their place on; if a user flags an image as inappropriate on Facebook, it’s up to Facebook’s policymakers to either remove the image for the same of propriety, or leave it up and face action from the person flagging the image.

Facebook likely removed the image for reasons it will never explain – the trouble will come, however, not when it’s a picture of two men kissing, but when it’s a photograph of a couple’s wedding kiss that’s removed for inappropriate suggestive content. Or a parent giving their child a smooch.

This doesn’t just apply to Facebook – all information-storing networks suffer the same trouble. Offending a loud minority with anything means normative action by the network. It’s the only way to go.

Without this, there are two options;

  • an incredibly strict EULA forcing people to acknowledge that they can’t do anything about things that offend them other than leave the network, or
  • zero memory on the site itself, to go along with the lack of moderation; this way lies 4chan.

Not every network can handle either kind of strain on it’s social contract, because online networks need to remain an extension of real networks. The unfortunate problem is that, while free speech exists as law in the United States, almost all social networks are now (or have the potential to be) global, and need to allow for the strictest common denominator.

We’re going to see more of this kind of thing in the future, and we’d best be ready for it. More than any other governing force in our lives, our social networks are the best equipped to dole out equality as a commodity; even equality of objection to things we consider of no consequence.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

Make sure you read the full article on Dangerous Minds.

What Does That Mean, Exactly?

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SaltaMonte on FlickrI have a problem with buzzwords.

Can you name the last five buzzwords you heard? What about the last ten? Don’t worry about the order, just try to come up with something recent, some term you’ve run across, that really didn’t seem to stand for anything, but was intended as a broad generalization of a concept, and applied to a very simple, elemental ideal.

I’ll help. Here are some: Rights. Reform. Liberty. Justice. Freedom.

We’re used to seeing ideas like blogging, the social web, networking, entrepreneurship come up in the discussion of overarching, nebulously defined ideals, but the trouble is that so much of our society is predicated on these vague shorthand terms. I wonder sometimes if buzzwords in general are part of the problem, or not. How are we supposed to communicate in general if we can’t communicate these ideals in the specific?

The whole point of language, especially codification and good lexicography, is to make sure that communication is reliable, understandable and universal. Dialects and slang aside, raw core ideals should be easy to transmit in short bursts, to make conversation breathable. But throwing in buzz, or any kind of highly emotional lingo, ruins a part of this because, like it or not, no two people speak the same language. As much as we convince ourselves we all speak (for example) proper English, it’s a crock.

I’ve got a better vocabulary than a lot of people I know. This can come in handy, as I spend a decent amount of my time being a translator. Working in the core has drawbacks – immigration rates and cheap housing mean that the down town area, at least of Winnipeg, is saturated by people who speak English – this supposedly common language – to varying levels of success. Having strong command of the language lets me do my job effectively whether the people I’m speaking to own the technical command or not. But every so often, I run into trouble translating, and it’s usually because of the wide adoption of buzzwords.

We don’t all use the same ones.

Perfect example: patch cords. What does that mean, exactly? You wouldn’t believe the number of times in a month someone asks me for a patch cord, then gets incensed when I ask what kind they mean. You know, a patch cord! For hooking up a TV! This isn’t a buzzword for me. I work with a lot of kinds of cords: coaxial cable, analog RCA, S-Video, component video, DVI, HDMI – and that’s just the video cables that fall under this category. If you want audio, there’s also RCA, but then we get into things like quarter inch mono and stereo, eighth inch for the same, digital coaxial, optical cable. See where this is going? In one eight foot section of my shop, we’ve got easily twenty different kinds of cords that all fall under the broad description of “patch cord.” Don’t yell at me because you can’t bring yourself to specify.

Don’t yell at the system because it can’t either.

If we get so confused over one term relating to two dozen kinds of AV cabling, imagine what someone from outside our sphere thinks when they start hearing terms like health care reform, universal justice or rights and freedoms. Often, these words either mean nothing at all, or can mean so many different things that even with context the lack of specificity is damaging to communication. It gets worse when we bring up the broad ideals, but don’t concieve for ourselves what possible specifics we might mean.

Our culture – the entire western hemisphere, everywhere from western Europe to Canada, the USA – produces buzzwords at an alarming rate!

I’m still waiting for someone to explain the job qualifications of a Director of Community. Or a Social Networks Manager. On the surface, it seems like such a simple ideal – but like any good category, it has to leave room for details that haven’t been conceived of when the buzzword is created. Which is part of the problem, I suppose. Specificity is great, but exact language requires a lot more time than most people have these days. It’s worrisome that our language has begun to so accurately accommodate the velocity of our society.

As someone wise is reported to have said, there is more to life than increasing its pace.

I’d encourage you to be more careful of why you use buzz along with your words. The shotgun approach to conversation doesn’t serve everyone as well as it does stereotypical politicians. Some of us have to back up our statements with fact.

Photo by HVargas.