Ian M Rountree

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What Happened to Blog Reactions?

April 19, 2011 by Ian 5 Comments

Rock Platform - Nigel Howe | Flickr

This week’s #blogchat focused on engagement – comments got all the cred.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised – comments are great. They exist on your platform, they’re relatively long-form compared to some other reactions (like tweets and Facebook comments), but it felt like the really big, high caliber blog engagement actions were missing.

What happened to blog reactions?

In the hey-days of LiveJournal, one of the biggest signs a conversation was – well, big – would be when someone on your friends list actually entered a post in direct reaction to something you wrote. Not just a comment-length “check this out” notice, but a full on essay-length journal entry eviscerating, deconstructing, or otherwise responding to what you wrote.

It was fairly commonplace, at one point, to follow chains of journal entries ten or fifteen layers deep before finding the initial instigator. Does that happen any more? Not so much.

We’re worried about spam. Not just comment spam – trackback spam.

The same way comments have become a great place for less-than-ethical linking, trackbacks to unwary bloggers have turned into the vogue Den of Thieves to be avoided at all costs. We want social reactions, comments, and shares more than we want other bloggers linking to our specific articles – we want them linking to our domains, which are evergreen, rather than individual articles which are timely and may grow stale over time as information changes.

But is this how we build community? It’s mechanistic, pragmatic, and unsustainable – it furthers no conversation, and encourages blind authority over the communion of conversation.

In our rush for personal authority, we seem to be losing some of our community.

We all want to be the instigator – to get the comments. Yet we all talk about contributing to community and furthering the conversation already in action at the same time – what better way to do that than to react to something in a thought-out, constructive way? We need to remember that adding to a conversation assumes that you don’t have to be the origin of that conversation. Starting new work all the time is like perpetually saying hi. And that gets video-game-esque really fast.

Give yourself some leeway to pick up where someone else left off now and again – and not in the way you pick up where an author left off for a book review. The instigators will probably want to converse with you a little more, if you’re really thorough in adding to their conversations – and your regular readers might find a new resource or two in the mix as well.

What say you? Bonus points if you continue this on your platform instead of mine.

Image by Nigel Howe.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: #blogchat, bloggers, Blogging, community, Facebook, feedback, livejournal, reactions, writing

Notes from #blogchat – Anonymity vs Identity for Corporate Bloggers

July 5, 2010 by Ian

The major question of tonight’s #blogchat is one that keeps coming up all over the place – how should corporate bloggers identify themselves – by name, or should they remain anonymous?

It’s a difficult question to answer. The web both embraces and despises anonymity in equal measure; identity and obfuscation both have their uses, if you’re respectful of them.

Before my notes from #blogchat, I thought I’d share some articles – one from TED, and three of my own.

Prominent notes on anonymity: m00t speaks at TED about anonymity on the web.

My take on anonymity in general: Anonymity on the Web – Privacy, Courage and Anonymity – The Webspace/Realspace Divide in Courage

Now, the notes:

There was a little discussion with @prosperitygal about the differing advantages and challenges of multiple personas on the web versus simply maintaining multiple presences – it’s a challenge either way, but the voice here is the key.

The wide concensus early on was that multiple authors should be identified on company blogs. This sentiment split by the end of the night – some people like @SbuxMel advocated for personality and passion, citing a Starbucks customers blog‘s lack of both, despite its lip service to varied authors. I mentioned there’s a big difference between writing a blog that’s worth subscribing to, versus writing one that’s worth bookmarking. Tricky difference, but an important one.

Others (myself included, mostly) brought up the disadvantages of varied identity on company blogs. If the favored writer goes away, what happens to the blog? Similarly, a personality only helps if you have one; Identifying yourself to an audience only helps if the audience identifies with you, more than just identifying you alone.

What didn’t get much talk, was the actual differences between a company’s voice and a varied personal voice. Identifying authors is one thing; addressing their personalities as compared to the company’s planned marketing voice is quite another. The process is difficult, certainly, and doesn’t get a lot of the right kind of attention.

From Monsanto, @JPlovesCOTTON mentioned Monsanto sends interns to blog at big events, for ground-up experience – which I think is brilliant, both from a guerilla content point of view, and from an experiential point. How else to gain this kind of experience, having your work out there, than just to do it? Segregating official channels from the varied voice, here, is useful and appropriate. Here’s the blog JP mentioned: Beyond the Shows.

One of the last things I noticed was a discussion of challenging your audience. I agree with this – but how to define challenge? Is it bringing direct calls to action? Inviting discussion? Challenging an assumption? How a company does this speaks volumes about its culture. However, there’s no silver bullet for challenge. What’s appropriate for a pharmaceutical company is not the same for a farmer.

The overwhelming argument I need to bring up is that identity of company bloggers isn’t the core issue; how a company approaches blogs is. It’s not what, it’s how. The assertions of so many participants were that all bloggers for companies should be identified. I agree, there are benefits to this, but also cautions.

Especially in smaller companies, where blogging isn’t a full time position, identifying a blogger is a mixed bag of snakes. If five web designers blog for a company, and identify their work, what happens when clients begin to request a favourite designer to work on their projects?

Bonus Round: “Blogs are a medium, not a genre!”

Apparently, people are touchy about what they blog. @GeoffLiving opined that blogging was mutually exclusive from writing – I disagree. Blogging is a medium, a method of writing or publishing, not a genre. The same way fantasy fiction is a genre independent of books, movies and so on, short-form opinion writing is not an exclusive product of blog publishing software.

When I mentioned I wasn’t expecting to spark such a kingdom-genus-phylum argument, @elizabethonline called me “the Linneaus of the Net” – I’m not sure whether to be amused, or expect it was a sardonic remark. Either way, funny.

What do you think? How strongly tied should blogging be to identifyable authorship, especially in corporate environments?

Participants List: TweepML #blogchat for July 5th 2010.

Transcript: What The Hashtag transcript for #blogchat, July 5th 2010.

Update 12/07/2010 – Comments have been closed to combat massive spam. If you’ve got something to add that’s really important – please, see the Contact page. Thanks!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: #blogchat, blogging, blogs, feedback, social-networks

Argue with me, dagnabbit!

December 14, 2009 by Ian 2 Comments

photo by Wonderlane
photo by Wonderlane

I’ve been hearing a lot about the idea that books on Amazon and other places with nothing but five star reviews don’t sell as well as books with mixed bag ratings. While this doesn’t surprise me entirely, I suddenly wish there was this kind of easy metric for blogs as well.

I read a lot of blogs. I also read a lot of comments for blogs – some of the most interesting stuff is in the comments, I’ve found most of the people I read through their comments on the sites of others. Some of them even comment here now and then, for which I am eternally grateful. They don’t always agree with me, but I like that. Why?

I’m a fan of opposing opinion. The vast majority of what I read in the comments of other blogs starts with sycophantic drivel and decomposes from there. One thing a lot of these commentators miss is that dissent, in many ways, proves you’re listening. Even if the lesson was unclear, or had less merit than as presented, distension and deconstruction, more than flat out disapproval, show that you give enough of a crap about what just got said that you’re willing to help improve it.

I wish I had more dissent here.

Why? Because I like to discuss things. Can’t say for certain if this puts me among the perpetual contrarians of the world, but I love tearing part a preconception and making sure the gears all fit together, especially if it’s mine. So I want you to argue with me. I want you to challenge what I say, because there’s no better way to prove you’re listening. I promise I’ll respond in kind. If you bring me value, I’ll try to add to it. If you flame me, I will mock you viciously.

Sound like a fair deal?

I await your scorn.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blogs, contrarian, feedback, internet, rant-alert

Location, Tweets, and Missing Pieces

December 1, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

photo by 416style
photo by 416style

I thought it was really cool when Google’s Latitude came out; but then, I spend a lot of time in the same area, consistently missing people I know by less than a hundred feet. I also think FourSquare is awesome, for different reasons than Latitude – although it may be seen as an extension of the same. I think I was the only one in my clique who skipped over the obvious “No More Cheating In The North End” implications of permanent location awareness.

Still, it’s a little weird seeing so many people dive all over FourSquare, spending a week with @julien (Julien Smith) posting nothing but “I’m at [insert venue]” tweets, and then get smacked in the face with:

The fallacy of location based social networks is thinking that I care more about where you are than what you think. – @bradjward

The stupid thing is, he’s totally right. But he’s also missing a beat. The displayed assumption is that everyone will adopt these geo-social networks, and use them in the same manner that others, like Twitter, are used. If Julien is any indication, he’s right, which sucks.

Social networking itself addresses one of the aspects of modern living technology had heretofore removed; the sense of real, organic connection with others in your peer group. As these networks grow, it become blisteringly obvious that many of them have the same core functions; status updates, uploading of some form of file, and a dynamic profile connected to other dynamic profiles in a web of private and no-private ways. Regardless of their other toys, or their disparate aims, this kind of view lumps LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and a slough of others on the same plane. You can treat them as your own website, even if you have one. I’ll call them Home Base networks.

On the other hand, Twitter, Plurk, and their kind are much more narrow, specialized toward nothing but constant status update, microblogging is a good word but it doesn’t address the possibilities. Twitter, as an example, has a very extensible API, which means there are already hundreds of other sites, applications and services which link to Twitter externally and do neat things with the service. Because of the way it behaves and how horrible it is for real conversation, Twitter makes a great handshake, but not much of a good first impression if you’re paying attention. But, like the applications that use it as a framework, it can be used as a foot in the door, a way to find people, and send them back to your home base. Other people use the term Outposts, so that sort of fits with the Home Base analogy; I’ll stick with that.

See where this is going? It makes the entire game of social networking feel quite a bit like an RTS. You’re setting up bases, sending out your tweets – er, troops – and gathering allies and audience. It’s alliance more than community, on its face; what you do with the people you’ve then gathered can become community, but social networking on its own is not enough.

This is the part where I tell you where Brad missed the step, right?

Back when you didn’t spend your whole Friday night on a computer, you spent it calling all of your friends to see if they were up to anything, and then going out. Computers, cell phones, the internet – it all made that process a lot easier from some directions, because text messaging and now social networking were so much faster and easier to broadcast. Now, however, your friends have maybe a hundred other friends. Or maybe you’re bored of all your existing friends, and want some single-serving friendship. Or maybe you actually want to get out and meet new people (gasp).

This is where geo-social networks are interesting, because they easily provide a way for others to see where you are, see what’s hot. It makes an awesome ice breaker. It gives you tips for finding new things. Instant, on-demand serendipity.

The assumption that everyone needs all of these tools is a weak one, so please don’t make it. I read enough of Brad’s blog to know that it’s not where he was going with his original tweet, but you’re on notice anyway. When you’re deciding which social networking applications you’re going to use – personally, as a business, whatever – you need to spend some time making sure not only that you know how to use them, but how other people are likely to use them.

If you already have a website, what are the benefits of aHome Base style social network? Maybe it’s a good funnel point; it’s never a bad idea to have some presence somewhere, no matter how inactive.

Similarly, if you’re lacking outposts, there are probably conversations you’re not hearing that you could.

I didn’t even touch on YouTube, or other visual broadcast media – dip your toes in there. Even I’ve done this, much as 5 views of a video in its first month mean anything.

But what about Geo-social networking? Businesses don’t go anywhere, but they can certainly use these tools to draw people in. And for people – should probably get to this point, since it’s the whole point of the exercise…

For people: Geo-social tools are not about where you are. They’re about the conversations that can be encouraged, the experiences you have when you’re AT these venues.

But maybe you’re afraid of having a first-hand experience. In that case, keep your head in your cell phone when you’re at a coffee house, spend all your time in your own meta and stick to Twitter.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: commentary, Facebook, feedback, follow-the-linker, google, internet, MySpace, social-networks, twitter

Learning To Accessorize!

August 3, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

CNN.com did a feature over the holidays, listing 10 gadget gifts under $500. I’m all for sharing ideas, but it does seem a little weak somehow, playing let’s-drop-the-name with toys for the holidays.

The only thing worse than getting a toy you dislike, is getting a toy you’d love, if only it came with the right stuff. Getting someone an iPod? Get them some headphones too, because the ones from Apple just don’t cut it, nothing said of the worry over getting mugged because of your white earbuds. Maybe a good case would be useful as well, considering how fragile these things have proven to be.

Surprising someone with a computer? How about a good laptop bag, or a really killer mouse. Something, anything to put you, as the gift-giver over the top.

I know, it sounds like a bit of a sell-out – trust me, though, and think of the last time you found out someone returned a gift you got them? It doesn’t matter the reason, it’s not the best feeling in the world. Just like when you buy something for yourself, it’s worth putting the effort into your gifts so that the people on the receiving end get things they’ll actually enjoy.

Incidentally, I’m aware that “gift giving season” is still four plus months away, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the best gifters begin shopping nearly six months ahead of the event itself. How do you stand up against the brilliant gifters in your life?

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: feedback, shopping

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