Fight Club
Uploaded by Polina Sergeeva on 23 Nov 08, 7.01AM BST.
We have had a fight of EPIC proportions!
- When I say EPIC I mean World of Warcraft heroic dungeon level 70 in the Caverns of Time.
- When I say EPIC I mean Fight Club disturbing scenes where your girlfriend squeals.
- When I say EPIC I mean dirty mean kicks on the shin at your local football club (if you haven’t had one of those you don’t know how to fight).
And here is the juicy gossip for all of you: We fought because we both thought something was crap (yes, yes, crap) and we wouldn’t admit it to one another. EPIC FAIL I call that in the prevailing lingo.
It’s true. The website was CRAP. It’s still there if you want to check it out and it’s still CRAP. Go on, visit it. Learn. Submit your opinion (but it’s still crap).
Why was it so bad?
Because we subscribed to the prevailing logic of what a company website for a company *like ours* should be. Here is the low-down. There isn’t a company *like ours*. If it’s *like ours* there is no reason for us to be here. Go to the other guys. They were here first.
We managed to create something that was half ‘the other guys’ and half SoMaFusion. Bad idea. It should be ALL SoMaFusion. Even if it’s against prevailing logic. Even if it’s against all the rules.
Who makes these rules anyway?
Oh you know. Me, you, the wiz kid from California, my friend, the network, the community, the revolution. Here is something we forgot: Each and every single revolution contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Especially with Social Media we all act as if we discovered the secret to Eternal Life. (You do have that feeling, admit it!) And now we started codifying the knowledge, putting it in little boxes, making rules like ‘10 essential things to have on your blog’, ‘the absolute rules of self promotion’, ‘the True Path to internet stardom’ etc. Guess what. We are only making sure that the death of what is called Social Media experts will be quick and painless.
You think we’re wrong? Think back to the dot com bubble. Some good ideas caught on. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon. They analysed and over analysed the successes. They made charts. They found statistics. They put things in little boxes. And then it died. It had no space to breathe anymore. Nothing new was happening. Everyone was following the same recipe.
There is no spoon
We managed to talk so much about the rules that we forgot who we are and what we want to do. Forget the rules. There is not spoon. For that matter there is no client. There is nothing.
There is only you!
We managed to forget that SoMaFusion is about projects that we want to do. It’s not about the money (as welcome as it is). It’s not about us against the other companies. There are no other companies that have us. There can be no comparison. Not because we are better (we are not). Because we are all different. And that’s exactly how it should be.
The web is not about us all being the same. Communications are not about all of us doing the same thing. It’s not about twitter, it’s not about blogs, it’s not about flickr. It’s about people and their conversations. It’s about what works for them.
How can I explain this?
(Seriously if you are under age stop reading now or get a parent/guardian to OK this before you go on. I’m just saying.)
You like sex right? (assuming you are a consenting adult etc.) Do you like all sex? Every time? No. Take two guys. Able bodied. Will the sex be the same? No.
Why?
Because it’s not about having all your tools in operation. You can have the best body in the world. You can have all the twitter accounts in the world. If you are not interesting, honest and engaging you are not satisfying – in sex or in anything.
We are NOT all the same
Equality and human rights aside we are not all the same.
We don’t want to play the same field. If you are a client and you like the field there are lovely companies out there who will do exactly what you want better than we ever could (I will even suggest one or two).
We want to play our field. With our customers. The ones who like us. The ones who DIG us. The ones who trust US.
And the only way to trust and like us is for us to be ourselves. The website was crap because we pretended to be someone else. OK fine, for one day but we still did. We were not different, interesting, honest or engaging.
So there you have it.
Lesson learned the old website remains as a stark reminder of how crap you can be when you are trying to be someone else.
Let’s see what horrors we will be unveiling now that we are ourselves.
