It did, however, get me thinking about how the Internet changed as it got mainstreamed, to the point where it’s not as friendly to introverts as it used to be.

The Early Conceit/Delusion of Content Meritocracy

In its beginnings as a consumer medium, when the Internet was starting to really get hot — I’m thinking early- to -mid-90s, when the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, came out (1993), as did Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995) — there was this notion the Net would be a pure, disintermediated meritocracy, where good content would rise to the top, and the creators of good content would be recognized and gain currency (prestige, influence) on that basis.

For someone who tends towards introversion, the written word, and extreme laziness, this was a golden opportunity — just push out good content, and your genius would be recognized, with no need to hustle, market, or pitch. (This was my personal interpretation of things at the time, and it looks incredibly naïve now, just like those infomercials for making millions on the Internet by putting up a Web site. But I don’t think my naïveté was so incredibly far from the norm, especially when there still weren’t that many people online.)

We know how accurate that vision turned out to be. (It still applies a little bit, as long as your content involves cats.)

The Marketers Arrive

I finally buried and staked that particular delusion in 2004, with the arrival of Digg, where we saw that good links didn’t stand a chance against okay links that were supported by extrovert-friendly promotional strategies, like building networks of Digg friends for link logrolling (i.e. “digg my link and I’ll digg yours”), tailoring your content to be Digg-friendly (e.g. short articles, small words, lots of lists), going out and actually promoting your content, and other ways of gaming the system.

Basically, what we consider to be part of the online marketer’s standard toolkit these days.

It’s Not Really the Marketers’ Fault

Despite my trolltastic headline blaming “marketers” (see: Tailoring your content), the need to do marketing and promotion for your content wasn’t caused by marketers, it was simply a need that they came to fill. With the competition for attention that came about with the democratization of the Net, it was inevitable.

And we keep seeing mini-cycles with each new product and platform that comes out: people discover it, use it, it gets popular, and then people have to dig into the bag of tricks in order to stand out. Look at the blogosphere and Twitter, where first movers of quality were able to get noticed and rewards (including book deals), whereas now net.fame is increasingly the province of previously-established celebrity and brands.

Of course, this isn’t to say that the Internet isn’t dead for introverts, just that they can’t expect the world to beat a path to their door just because they put up a good piece of content. (Which was a conceit in the first place, however much I might pine for it.) So if you have something you truly want to be seen (which makes you something less than a true introvert, anyways), you have champions who are extroverts, be an extrovert yourself, or at least be able to fake it in certain contexts.

It is the way of the world, just like there aren’t any ugly pop stars anymore (save for a few with, shall we say, non-traditional good looks). Although it is interesting to watch the outliers, those systems that are still almost totally meritocratic — say, something like the MacArthur Fellows Program (the Genius Grant folks), which features a totally opaque nomination and selection process. Can you imagine the cluster-chaos that would ensue if it featured open nominations? The mind reels.

Was the Internet ever a content meritocracy? Do introverts have to stop acting like introverts to get noticed online? Leave a comment.

You’ll see bursts of user submission activity around breaking news and memes as they hit the news, other popular Web sites or viral tipping points. Then, after a headlining link bubbles up to a site’s main page or first view (either from being chosen by an editor, or voted up by the community), all of the activity is directed towards that specific item.

Subsequent submissions, unless they bring a distinctly new aspect to the table, are either ignored or dismissed with a terse “Already been posted,” or the even more-succinct “Repeat.”

Eventually, as the event and the discussion plays out, so will activity around the topic peter out. (This may or may not coincide with the item expiring out of the high-traffic first view. The behavior is slightly different on Web message boards, many of which will keep active content popping back up to the first view.)

After this initial phase of activity, the topic passes into the no man’s land of “old news,” inhabited only by the newbs and the clueless who are a little bit behind the curve, and the cognoscenti who take pride in reminding them of this.

Then, a funny thing happens. Because there’s a constant flow of new stuff coming in, the old news is pretty quickly forgotten. (Of course, there are searchable archives, but they’re largely out of mind.) Then, when someone later re-submits the item, there’s a whole new audience of people who missed it the first time around. And when you tell them it’s “already been posted,” they say, “So what?”

It explains why you see items about stuff like exploding whales recur periodically. It’s like that NBC summer rerun slogan from the late ’90s: “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.”

Call it a statue of limitations on user-submissions.

This whole phenomena is not new, of course. There’s a limited amount of space in the public consciousness (at least as what was defined by the particular piece of mass media you’re consuming), always new stuff happening, and always new people to see it. The thing that’s interesting about the online piece is twofold:

1. The cycle is just so much faster. Something can become “old news” in a matter of days (or day), pass out of consciousness in weeks, and become new again (or the focus of “instant nostalgia”) within months.

The focus on “what’s new / what’s hot” that we find so often find online has meant there’s a premium on new-seeking, as opposed to something like retaining institutional memory.

It also means that if you’re a hack like me, you can get a lot of mileage out of rehashing and repackaging your old stuff, even if it’s available in your searchable archives.

2. The phenomena is a lot more transparent – it’s easy to watch the rapid cycling of memes on any social linksharing site where you can see the queue of submitted items. (However, the back half of the cycle, the re-emergence of memes and stories, depends on your memory and search proficiency.)

Anyway, if there’s a takeaway from all this, it’s that you don’t have to be first. Which, now that I think of it, is the re-emergence of one of my earlier-posted themes, You Can’t Be First, But You Can Be Better (remember, if you haven’t seen that one, it’s new to you).

Is any of this applicable to submissions to social linksharing sites (or anything else)? Please leave a comment.

The New York Times article about its creation and promotion, “Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog,” offers some insight in how the story propagated across the Web, so I wanted to see what kind of lessons we can take away for promoting your own small business endeavors.

The Chronology

The proprietors of BBQ Addicts wanted to drive traffic to their Web site to increase advertising revenue. Coincidentally, in December, a Twitter user challenged them to do something barbecue with bacon. They came up with their particular spin on a smoked bacon and sausage log, and posted it on their site 2 days before Christmas. They then saw a traffic spike on Christmas Day, and at some point it went viral.

The Tools

* One of the guys, Aaron Chronister, is an Internet marketer/search engine optimization guy. He also has 1,200 followers on his Twitter account.

* They (and others) posted links to the Bacon Explosion on social networking and social linksharing sites. (StumbleUpon is specifically mentioned.) Likewise, as seen on many sites, they have links so their visitors can also easily submit the page to linksharing sites (Digg, Twitter, and Delicious).

The Lessons

How can we make this relevant to your small business?

* People really like bacon. Seriously. Whether it’s bacon bras or bacon on cats, there’s something about bacon that people really, really like. Not only do Internet people like bacon, they like talking about bacon, and they’ll send bacon links to their friends. Bacon has a built-in audience, and one that’s ready-made to go viral.

Not many things have this kind of appeal. If your business doesn’t involve bacon, it still helps if you have a sense of what people have an affinity for. One thing you don’t want to do is indiscriminate spam everything you do to every social linksharing site out there. If you expect any sort of effective response, think about what people who aren’t you might find interesting or useful

* Use the tools at your disposal. Take advantage of social media tools like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc. Most of them are even free. And make it easy for your visitors to use these tools to share what you’re doing.

* Be an Internet marketer. And have lots of friends who are Internet marketers. All this means is that the Internet is a valuable tool for getting the word out, and there are people who know this. Connect with these people, understand what they’re talking about, talk to them, and be a contributing part of the community. People are not tools, but when you form real relationships with connected people, they will help you get your own word out (when you have something interesting or useful to say).

* You can try, but you never can tell. There is no secret formula for guaranteed viral success. And you don’t have to hit as big as the Bacon Explosion to be a success — getting known in your local or regional market can work just fine.

For some additional food for thought, check out 5 steps on going viral on Twitter and Go Beyond Blogging – Multi-Channel Marketing via Online Media.

Remember, the lesson here is not “Incorporate bacon into your business,” but instead, recognize when you’re doing something interesting or useful, then use the social media tools available to you to help get the word out among your expanding circle of connected friends.

If you’ve got thoughts specific to the success of the Bacon Explosion (is it a one-off, an outlier that we shouldn’t draw conclusions from?), or promoting your small business using social media tools in general, please leave a comment.

This is unavoidable, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing; even if you can’t achieve true originality, you can be a part of some broader digital consensus. Which is a polite way of admitting that you don’t have a chance at doing anything original, so you might as well go with the flow. (See also the phenomenon of hundreds of people taking essentially identical and poorly composed and executed photos of the same thing, simply because they want to have “their own” digital memory of the event.)

Anyway, if something inspires you to blog, you should always attribute it. Linking to a source is easy (usually), it’s polite, it shows you’re aware of what’s going on in the blogosphere and you know how to be a good participant. And all it takes is a simple acknowledgement, with a link back to the source. Easy, right? “Link via XYZ blog.”

Well, sometimes, doing the right thing isn’t as easy as that.

For starters, the nature of the blog commentariat and link economy being what it is, figuring out what the original source is (and best thing to link to) can be a pain. There have been times when I’ve seen an item on the social linksharing site Digg, that’s pointing to a gaming blog (say, Kotaku), which in turn got it from another gaming site (say, Joystiq), that picked it up from social linksharing site reddit, that finally got the original link of some random guy’s blog. (This is only a slight exaggeration, by the way.)

If you’re going to be honest in that example, you’ll want to say that you got the link via Digg, but if you want to be the most useful, the best resource is skipping directly to “Random Guy’s Blog.” (Even though the other two gaming blogs may have useful commentary, and Random Guy’s Blog is probably down, overloaded from all the traffic, anyway.)

Doing the whole “via” chain in this case (”link in Random Guy’s Blog via reddit via Joystiq via Kotaku via Digg”) is pretty silly; what I’ll typically do is say something like:

“Check out the original article in Random Guy’s Blog, [link via Digg]“

Since Digg was the way I became aware of it, I’ll give them the first credit, though the full chain of “via”s is available if the person wants to click his or her way through it.

Anyway, the point of all this is to be aware of the best link to highlight, which is not always the link by which you became aware of the issue.

Of course, you can avoid all this by writing about completely original stuff. As this may consist of knowledge exclusive only to you (e.g. what’s in your pocket, what you had for breakfast), you may need to branch out to items of broader interest, and thus, this whole racket.

Do you do your due diligence when you attribute a link? Or do you pick the first link in the chain and be done with it? Leave a comment and share how you handle attributing links.

The premise is simple: Things that you bookmark because they are useful to you may be useful to others. As an expert in your field, your recommendations are worth something, so by recognizing things as useful, sharing them publicly, and adding a little bit of your expertise through categorization and annotation, helps make these useful things more accessible to others.

What kind of items are we talking about? It’s a little subjective. Whether you’re a consultant, tradesperson, retailer, or cook, it’s whatever you find useful as you conduct your business: References, new techniques, calculators, trends, tools, news stories that affect your industry, etc. Sure, some of it may be inside baseball, but then you never know what other people may find useful.

Why share your links? For starters, you’re doing it already — you’re just doing it for an audience of one. Instead of hoarding useful links in your browser’s personal bookmarks (where they benefit no one but you), share them with the world, add to the sum total of human knowledge, make the world a better place and so on and so forth. Oh, and help build your reputation as someone who knows what they’re talking about and is willing to help others.

Like I said, social bookmarking is a really easy way to see what all this social sharing stuff is about. Depending on the tool, it’s a matter of clicking a link, adding some descriptive tags, and writing up a quick description. It doesn’t need to be elaborate — just enough information so that you’ll be able to find it in a search later on, and recall just what made it interesting in the first place.

In terms of specific tools, you can use any tool that lets you save, annotate and organize your bookmarks in a place other people can see. I’m thinking primarily of delicious (I don’t use any of their community features, just use them purely for bookmarking) and similar services (like ShareThis).

You also have social linksharing sites like Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon, though people tend to focus on the social voting, traffic-driving aspects instead of the basic bookmarking features. And of course, you have microblogging sites; Twitter, of course, is good for distributing links, but less so for organizing and archiving them; others are Tumblr, and Posterous — anything that allows you to post a quick entry with a link and a description.

Of course, it doesn’t help you if you’re being helpful and no one knows about it. You can add a static link to your public, socially-shared bookmarks, though an even better solution is to display a feed of your recently bookmarked items (services typically provide widgets that you can embed in your Web sites) and make the feed available.

Sharing your expertise through bookmarks is easy; it’s useful; and you’re doing it already. Why not do it for a wider audience?

Yahoo’s Buzz is very similar to Digg’s service but in a much bigger way. The audience is incredibly large. Yahoo is putting the trends of what people are searching for on their home page which sends huge amounts of traffic to the articles that people have buzzed up & chosen as popular.

Users can’t submit your own articles but you can put the Buzz button on your posts & encourage your readers to buzz them. Because the posts have the potential of sending 10 times the traffic that Digg posts do it seems lucrative. (And that’s assuming that the post has made it to the Digg front page).

You can also host a Yahoo Buzz widget on your blog or site. This would continually refresh the news stories that people have voted for.

For further reading ProBlogger has an article on it.

Here are some highlights from the interview which is embedded at the end of this post:

Loving Digg but seeing an opportunity in the marketplace

Laurie and many of her friends used Digg and thought it was a great concept. However, if any of you have been to the site, it is primarily a tech focused site with the audience being predominately male. Digg revolutionized the concept of “Social News” and there have been many clones of the site that didn’t add a whole lot of value to the social media landscape. Laurie and her co-founders looked around and while there were good blogs out there for women there was no, as she likes to call it, “Digg for Chicks”. So Kirtsy.com was born.

Power of Social Media

Laurie talks about how in the past this kind of content would have been shared with friends via e-mail as those “cool links” e-mails that fill our inboxes. When they built Kirtsy.com they did a soft launch, which is essentially putting the site out there without a lot of fanfare. Ironically, the site has grown due to the power of social media with a mention on Digg that brought so much traffic it crashed their site. Talk about irony.

The power of Social Media has transformed the site into a global presence with traffic coming from the US, Europe and Australia. As word of mouth grows, more countries are utilizing this “Digg for Chicks” and loving its relevancy and global reach.

What is also different about this site from a social news site like Digg is that it has editors where the competition relies just on the public to submit and let the law of popularity take effect. This has been a problem with groups of people “gaming” Digg to their advantage. Kirtsy.com avoids that by making sure there is some management of the channel and contribution of relevant content to make sure the site keeps its appeal and relevancy.

Two things you need to do to grow your site

Go viral

As Laurie mentioned previously, their soft launch and word of mouth approach has allowed their site to grow in spurts and not have a huge wave (the Digg post being the exception) that has them flying high and never growing beyond their initial push. Mentions from key bloggers like Guy Kawasaki has been instrumental in helping start these growth spurts.

Attend conferences

The other way they are seeing growth spurts is having the co-founders and editors attend conferences to promote the site. Whether it be speaking, sitting on a panel or just spreading the word in the hallway, it seems to have a positive impact on making those growth spurts happen.

What the future holds…

We expect to see great things from Laurie and her team to really go all the way to the top and create another success story for women entrepreneurs. Men and women alike can learn from her sage advice on growing a site without a lot of up front capital, building something that the market needs and growing it at a fast yet managable pace. We expect to see the site continue to evolve and get more popular than it already is. If you haven’t already, make a visit to Kirsty.com and as viral marketing goes “tell your friends, so they tell their friends, and so on”.