One of the Christmas traditions people in the UK like to enjoy is speculation as to what will be the Christmas #1 Single. It usually ends up being the song that grandmas and grandads buy as a Christmas present for their grandchildren. Songs that have topped the charts in past years include Bob the Builder’s ‘Yes we can’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and ‘Mr. Blobby’ by Mr Blobby (look that last one up). It’s not the hugely significant cultural event that it’s made out to be (some people are nostalgic for a non-existent time when there were no novelty songs) but it’s part of the shared experience that lets people in the UK get into the Christmas spirit.

Now over the past four years the #1 single has been the winner of the X-Factor, one of Simon Cowell’s ‘talent’-spotting reality-TV-shows. The format may be familiar to you as American / Brazilian / German (insert your country here) – Idol. In case you don’t know it’s a show in which hundreds of contestants try to impress a panel of judges and the viewing public with their singing performances in order to progress through consecutive rounds so they can be crowned the winner. They get a record contract, money, C-List celebrity status and become an international pop-star (maybe) for 6 months. Then a new season of X-Factor starts and the whole cycle repeats.

This year Jon and Tracy Morter were a bit fed up with the predictability of it all and decided to thwart the eventual winner of this year’s X-Factor, Joe McElderry, in his quest for the coveted #1 spot. A Facebook group was started and they set about recruiting people through websites and twitter accounts asking them to buy ‘Killing In The Name’ by Rage Against The Machine so that it would be the top selling song of the Christmas period. Just imagine families sitting down to watch Top of the Pops and hearing RATM?

Long story short, RATM came in at number 1 on Sunday, setting records for being the first download-only #1 and the fastest selling download in UK chart history.

So what does this mean? It depends who you ask of course. Some people wanted to make a statement against Simon Cowell, against the X-Factor (on the whole there seemed to be little malice intended towards Joe McElderry), for rock / ‘real’ music, to support a charity for homeless people (profits from the RATM song will be donated to Shelter, more than £70,000 has been raised so far), or simply as a joke.

This is what it means to me. Two people were able to create a ‘tribe’ that went viral. They asked the tribe to buy a 17 year old song. More than 500,000 of them did just that. No money was spent on marketing as the channels were free social media sites and applications like FaceBook and Twitter. They successfully beat a TV show that is probably the most watched show in the UK and which has thousands of words written about it in the UK media every week. The single was unavoidable in every supermarket and department store across the country. To me it’s a real life example of ‘the Long Tail’ and the power of social media.

Not only was Old-Media thoroughly trounced when it came to marketing Joe McElderry’s song, they were sorely lacking (as usual) in realising the significance of how it happend. Of course you would expect that since old-media is rapidly losing viewers and readers to internet alternatives. I don’t know how many articles I’ve read in which blatant untruths were recited over and over proving once again that the poor excuses for journalists working for the big UK newspapers have not yet discovered that you can research stuff by looking it up through search-engines.

Writers at the Guardian and the Times thought they were very clever when pointing out that RATM are signed to a major record label owned by Sony and are therefore hypocritical with their ’stick it to the man’ message. Somehow they didn’t find any of the countless interviews with RATM guitarist Tom Morello in which he has discussed this apparent conflict. The band’s opinion is they’d rather get their message out there through mainstream means than have fewer people hearing it in the first place. In the same way that you can buy Noam Chomsky’s books in chain-stores they feel their message is not invalidated by the method of delivery (remember they got started before the internet was in mainstream use, to get big you needed to be with a major record label). Professional journalists were made aware of these and other mistakes in the readers comments sections but so far none of those articles have been amended or taken down.

What do you think, is this a significant moment in the history of new media / social-web / web 2.0?

And which song do you prefer?

Stay cool, stay awesome.

Now even though my site is a blatant review site, on which I even include negative reviews of products, I like to think that I provide additional value for the visitor with informative articles and blog posts. The niche that I’m writing in is of particular interest to me so I don’t think I’ll have trouble updating the site for a while.

But at then end of the day the life blood of any site is traffic. It doesn’t matter how good I think the content is if nobody sees it. Rhere are a few ways of going about getting people to visit your site, one of which is ranking high on SERPs (search engine results pages) for particular key words and key phrases. Over the past 6 months I’ve been focussing on one particular key phrase for which my best ranking was number 6 on Google and number 4 on Bing. Now I haven’t been spending as much time on this aspect of traffic building in recent months and I’ve now found that I’ve slipped to 10th place on Google, which is right at the bottom of the page.

One of my friends had already warned that I shouldn’t focus on trying to game Google, instead I should focus on creating sites, products and information that people actually want so that they find it organically or through word of mouth. I didn’t dismiss his advise, just took note and decided that I needed to go ahead and give this method a go for the learning experience at least. I did the same last year when I set up a blog for the purpose of making money through affiliate links. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to sustain blogging in that niche for more than year but decided to do it anyway as it was better than doing nothing.

So even though I’m not entirely surprised that I would steadily drop down on the SERPs, I am a little disappointed that it would happen so fast after I actively stopped working on my ranking. Especially since I don’t the other sites are that great, in fact that top site only has 3 articles that don’t seem relevant at all. The only reason it’s at the top is because it has thousands of back-links.

Now I’m not whining about this. The people that own those other sites put a lot of work or money into getting their rankings but it does highlight the fact that if I were to depend on this method of traffic generation I’d need to be working on building link almost continuously. Either doing it myself or paying someone else to do that. To me that just seems like a waste of time, effort and money. Creating my own products and services is definitely the way to go. That way I can set up my own affiliate programme and let other people worry about generating traffic.

The two main reasons I set up this blog are first so that I can connect with other people in the lifestyle-design community and second in order to help motivate myself to follow through on my plans. This meant that I started to think about whom I wanted to connect with and how I wanted to do that. Should I try to get as many readers and subscribers as possible or should I focus on getting a small group of dedicated fans? Should I market myself in a particular manner or should I strive to be as authentic as possible? Thinking about these things led me to think about what people refer to as personal branding.

Personal branding seems to involve creating or cultivating your image or the content of the awareness that people have of you. Often this is in the context of work and business. The premise is that customers and consumers have instant access to millions of businesses, service providers and varieties of entertainment through the internet and in order to grab their attention we need to create a strong personal brand that stands out from the crowd.

Now I understand that people form impressions very quickly both in real life and online and that this often determines how people behave towards each other. But it concerns me that it’s yet another part of our lives that is being defined by marketing and consumerism. Do we really want to reduce ourselves to a brand? The problem with brands is that they have to be simple and concise, easily recognizable and consistent. However in real life people change their opinions, beliefs and careers all the time. Does this tarnish their personal brand or enhance it? People have enough trouble as it is breaking free from restrictive roles given to them by society, it seems silly to create yet another one for yourself. For example I feel sorry for someone like Michael Phelps. He won 8 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics but has to pretend to regret smoking pot because he would otherwise lose advertising deals. Who’s in charge Michael or his personal brand?

Since the purpose of this blog isn’t to make money (though I’m open to it happening as a side benefit) I don’t feel the pressure to present myself in any particular way. Although saying that, the title of my blog and my online name, NomadicNeil, use alliteration and is memorable. I’ve used photos of myself doing cool things in interesting places around the world. Why did I not put up a picture of myself wearing a suit sitting in front of a computer as that’s how I currently spend 8 ½ hours of my day? Is it because I want people to think I’m a cool adventurous guy? Or is it because I’m creating an image for myself to live up to, to remind me of what I’ve done and keep me going in the right direction?

Do you consciously create a personal brand? How do you do it what do you intend to convey? Do you think I have a personal brand? What do you think it says?