Are you blogging Jar Jar Binks?

“Laugh it up, fuzzball.” Driving in the car this week a conversation ignited about how great the original Star Wars were with such quotes such as Han Solo’s line mentioned at the onset. These movies have iconically inserted themselves into our consciousness. How many times have I been sitting in the passenger seat at a busy intersection and looked over to the driver and said, “Punch it Chewy.” More times than I’d like to let on what a fanboy I really am.

But then came the prequels. Remember papa Lucas telling us he had to wait till the technology could catch up to meet his expectations? Remember how we peed our pants just a little bit contemplating how these were going to be the pinnacle  of film. Cassablanca…. Piece of crap. Gone with The Wind… sure if you’ve got a confederate flag in the back of your truck. The Godfather… yeah I’ve got nothing on that one. New Star Wars were going to be the greatest movies ever made…

Sitting in the theater after all those years of anticipation, I quickly realized they just weren’t that good. Sure battle droids, Darth Maul, and Natalie Portman made me watch all three, but I longed for the genius of the first installment. They had their campy moments, but I would rather sit through the battle for Hoth than the battle for Naboo any day.

So what went wrong? Did Lucas lose his creative vision? Were expectations too high? Or did the ease of new and wondrous tech allow the creative element to settle to mediocrity?

I thought a lot about that this weekend. We were forced to be creative about how we networked and interacted in commerce and personal brand building before all of the current advances, and we succeeded in reaching our objectives. Now with blogging, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and the numerous other tools we have to communicate over various platforms the danger is that we start just mailing it in, hoping to be noticed and respected out of volume and not our content.

Here is an example. Ty Downing of Perspective Internet Marketing , a professional I find to be a great resource for SEO and Social media, and whom I follow on twitter for his great insights, tweeted this a couple days ago:

TyDowning The 5 Key Elements of Social Media Hard Workhttp://bit.ly/ayCj3A5:02 AM Mar 5th via twitterfeed

So go ahead and take a look at the link. I’ll wait.  ”The Five Key Elements of Social Media Hard Work”, I was excited. I was going to get a couple nuggets to store away and pull out with a future client. What I got was one of the most droll pieces of “I don’t really have anything to say” I’ve wasted time on. The title could have been “The Five Keys Elements for Washing Machine Repairmen hard work”, or insert your own generic title. It feels like the entire article was written just to give http://www.twistimage.com a back link, and was a total loss of my five minutes.

So this all brings us back to you and me. How are we doing with our engagement?Are we writing just to fill a quota? Have we thought about the content before it goes out to any of our platforms, if it’s something that will engage, interest, and educate? Are we Episode IV of social engagement or Episode I? Would good old Han Solo say to you, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”?

-Bill

@3 years ago with 1 note