ResearchGoddess

This will be a short post, because I don’t want to pay too much attention to this. Marketers, social media professionals, and PR types have already written about this topic ad nauseam, so there’s no sense in beating a dead horse.

An echo chamber in this sense is defined as any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space. Typically, this might seem to be reserved for media professionals but I see a lot of this seeping into our little recruiting community. We all chirp in (pun intended) to add no value to an article, just wanting to say “Me too!” Or we hawk for follows/clicks/reads/validation and try to pass it off as authentic attention.

Hey – I do it too. From time to time, I jump up and down and say “Look at me! I want attention!” just like all of you do. We all want others to read our stuff, so we pimp it to our networks.

Just a couple of things to consider when operating in the echo chamber:

• When was the last time you checked your blogroll? I’ll bet there are blogs on there that haven’t been updated in quite some time, and other blogs that you never read but you put on there because you think it makes you look educated and well-read.
• Are you a quid pro quo blogger? That is, do you only link to another blog if they link to yours in return?
• Do you write original content, or do you simply regurgitate what others are writing and say “Yeah, me too”?
• Do you have ‘deals’ with certain people to pimp their stuff if they’ll agree to pimp yours, and never stray far from this band of brothers?

The whole purpose of a network SHOULD BE to enrich its members and add new viewpoints to allow for new perspective. If the network is closed, the same stale ideas will keep getting thrown around and new ideas will rarely be introduced. In my opinion, this is not a network but rather a good old boy’s club, where members hang around patting each other on the back and telling each other how awesome they are.

I challenge you to think about who you promote and why, and consider reading and learning outside of your comfort zone. There are so many little-known authors, industry professionals, and resources to learn from outside of our recruiting community. Work on broadening your scope of learning and you’ll start to discover how much you actually don’t know. Only then can the true learning begin.