Ok, I agree that my version of that line is sad, but you do get the drift, huh?
Long before social media happened, our echo chamber size was small too, much like everything in physical life, dictated by geography. So, we at least had the opportunity to assume that our opinions and thoughts may perhaps be not the most accurate ones, since the world is wide enough to prove us wrong, sometimes.
When social media happened, much like the size of our friends, connections and random acquaintances, our echo chamber expanded too.
So, we have our regular set of cohorts online, across platforms, to whom we look up to, for feedback and perspectives. And we get it too, consistently. And that’s how we seem to be building and maintaining our personal echo chamber. The flip-side to that is our dependence on this echo chamber for a lot of our thought process and realizations.
That is not necessarily such a bad thing; after all, at 150, the famed Dunbar’s number could also be used to partly represent our echo chamber. But what is interesting is that when we propose an opinion or offer a perspective, we tend to value feedback from our personal echo chambers the most and not care as much for counter-opinions from outside that circle. This, for the simple reason that our opinions may not be traveling beyond this select crowd in the first place!
Granted – we do not know those outside our echo chamber, but there may be tremendous value in listening and being open enough to invite and accept opinions from outside the circle.
Take for instance, a blog’s RSS readers. These are people who have shown interest in a blog and have chosen to opt to read latest posts in that blog. If you post an opinion in that blog, besides organic search results, these RSS readers may be the first (and perhaps, only) regular readers of that post. Your RSS reader count could be anything – 100s, 1000s – but it forms a network within which that piece of opinion stays. Of course, one cannot ignore the fact that the web allows for things to viral very easily.
The other example if that of Facebook and LinkedIn. When you post an update, it stays within your immediate network in these platforms. But interestingly, if you cross-post it on say, assorted LinkedIn Groups (that you are a member of), that piece of content goes beyond your immediate network and gives you a chance to listen to perspectives from far beyond.
From that point of view, Twitter works fascinatingly well. Despite your follower count, given the high-speed real-time’ness and volume of buzz on Twitter, every minute is perhaps a network of its own. So, at 9am, if I tweet something, it goes to a network that is sub-set of my follower count. At 9:05am, the same network may be slightly different.
This level of awareness could come in very handy in content marketing – at a personal level or at a professional (client) level. Where we used to submit our content to search engines for people to land in it organically, we now use social and professional networks to market pieces of content. Here, people may not land on the content via a search, but by a push-style marketing.
Beyond pushing such content via existing networks, taking them to a wider audience may help that content gain wings and get us more feedback and create better conversations.
For example, I cross-post (within context, as always) select blog posts across many LinkedIn Groups. I may not be connected with many people on those Groups, but I believe I get immense value in the form of comments from those Group postings. Even though the ultimate (after thorough distilling) objective is personal branding, the immediate objective is to put that content in front of a lot of people and seek feedback, opinion and start conversations. Sometimes, the number and kind of feedback I get on LinkedIn Groups is far higher than the ones I get on my own blog comments. Does it bother me that the conversation is happening elsewhere? Of course not – the point is about conversations, not where it may be happening.
On Twitter too, I have noticed that timing the tweets could help spread the content to a much larger set of audiences. What seems to stop many of us is good old real world etiquette – repetitive tweets through a day may seem equivalent to shouting the same thing, again and again, from your roof top. But consider changing the tweets, with the same link – it worked for me during a social experiment in the last 2 months of 2010, but I also learnt not to take followers for granted. So, I learnt from the feedback and started adding a note to signify repetition, if the tweet – however different it may be from the earlier one – pointed to the same post.
And it works wonders. Like the LinkedIn Groups cross-post, contextual repetitive sharing on Twitter helps that piece of content travel much better and expands way beyond my regular echo chamber.
Other examples of breaking the echo chamber include guest posting in another blog – it always gives us a fresh set of audiences. To a lesser degree, the holy grail of blogging – a blog post that emanates out of another post (what should have been a comment, but turned out to be long enough to be a post on its own) – is, in a way a good example of breaking the echo chamber. Trackbacks help in combining the audiences of both blogs and expand the network. Even a simple retweet that adds a line of personal opinion could be similar, in that case, more than native retweets that simply announce the original (someone else’s) tweet to a new network.
Sometimes, the method to break open a part of the wall in your echo chamber may seem like a coarse exercise, but the results are totally worth the effort. It helps us understand and expand our own thought process, if we are open to assorted kinds of feedback. Each feedback is an opportunity to learn and evolve.
And of course, no more living with echoes.
Photo by MMMMichelle, via Flickr.