You can be charismatic or be innovative, if you had to choose, which would you prefer?
I asked on Twitter and got overwhelmingly “Innovative!” as a response. This is pretty much what I hoped and expected to hear.
While most people would say they value innovation more highly than charisma, I look around and I am not sure this is how the world works.
Take politicians for example. Who gets voted in? As Scott Adams likes to point out, the tallest candidate with the best hair. We don’t tend to see successful innovative politicians but we do see lots of well groomed sound-bite-spouting smoothies. If you work for a large organization, is it the smartest people who get promoted all the time?
What does this have to do with blogging?
I have been looking over the nominations for the Performancing awards. There is some real talent there. Some very original blogs. Stuff I have never seen before. Why do we not know these blogs?
Maybe my mind is just winding down for the holidays, or perhaps in trying to make space for the holidays my brain has fried, but I wonder if “being remarkable” isn’t as important as delivery. Is it possible that if you take two bloggers, one charismatic and the other innovative that the former will be more popular than the latter?
I wonder if there is a trend in blog reading that we like nicely packaged, un-challenging, charming blogs, just like the tabloid celebrity culture we are all familiar with. While blogging isn’t all about popularity, I have to think the charismatic blogger might get a bigger audience, more traffic and adsense clicks or whatever their goal is.
The lesson, if I am right, is you can’t rely on your smarts alone. It is not enough to have brilliant ideas and original thinking, how you delivery it is at least as important if not more so.
As well as brainstorming fantastic post ideas, brilliant tactics and strategies, original ways to view the world, you must also spend time crafting your storytelling and building connections with your audience. This is not about dumbing down but making your content accessible to a distracted and hurried blogosphere.
Then you will be charismatically innovative 🙂
What do you think?