I will be a millionaire within a few years thanks to people on twitter, facebook, youtube, blogs and elsewhere. I will be king of the hill, popular, my words will be drooled over and studied through the ages. I will follow their advice, all of it, my google reader shall overflowth with marketing blogs. My night time reading will be a social networking ebook and the next podcast I listen to will be by a blogger guru. Then I will do as they say, every day, every month…….and many do just this.

What’s happening to personality and individuality in the social arena? It's there, but far too many sheep also! What about those who just want to produce personal unique content with money as secondary goal or even not a goal at all? Many give up after a while, overwhelmed by the experience, frustrated and constricted by time, whilst trying to implement 'expert advice', not really meant for them anyway. Sure research, follow advice (such as this blog) when suitable, but also experiment! Learn from the mistakes. Don’t be scared or worried about everything you do. Write a blog post because you feel like it, create the most boring youtube video ever if that is what interested you, take a photo and upload it without spending four hours playing with histograms, lighting and cropping the image. As nike says…. Just do it. Otherwise the whole process can become overwhelming, time consuming and yes boring.

Blogging used as a way to express yourself, interact, share media and other content can be fun. Yet professional bloggers forget not everyone is bothered about thousands of visitors, oodles of comments and revenue. Sure it’s nice, not everyone creates a blog for the same reason. Personally I write posts because firstly I enjoy doing so, any related benefits are secondary.  If  I get  bored of a topic,  I stop talking about. This enables me to produce more  content and enjoy  the  process.

Same for a youtube channel. I have over a hundred videos on youtube. They are short videos, most have no intro, no voice. Filmed in low quality  and are not action packed. I record, I upload, I move on. Turns out some videos that I would deem the dullest have been the most popular, whereas the ones I prefer have far fewer hits. Would I still be recording and uploading if each individual video took a lot of time to produce? No. Others have asked me for permission to use my videos and they are involved in a new fun personal project. Yet at the end of the day, the same original motivations are my motivations today. Probably why after two years I'm still producing them.

What about new services? I regularly sign up and use different services. Like Chirbit for voice recording. Doesn’t mean that I will keep using it, who knows, but it’s different, fun to do and a different way to engage with people.

I laugh when I see people ask for retweets or retweet a follow Friday with their name on twitter. What about those who retweet others they want to get attention from or respond only to ‘supposed’ influential people? Tweet when you want to and what interests you. That says more about you. Try creating ‘an image’ and you will get bored and so will others. Just be you.

There is plenty of useful advice to be found, such as on this blog. Chuck it into your google reader, but make sure you don’t end up with countless blog feeds, following advice that probably will make no difference or (maybe) worse yet you’re not actually producing anything.

However right now, work out what you want from the online social arena and why if you don’t know already.

Then have some fun and don’t be a sheep.

Thank you to Lee Sargent for allowing me to post here. I recommend you follow this blog and you can find me here: www.andrewemmett.co.uk