Tonight’s #blogchat was Open Mic! Anything goes! A reminder – here are the details about #blogchat, from the Mack himself.

First off, @salamicat asked – how do you build your blog’s audience? It turns out @prosperitygal has a radio show, which is awesome, but for the rest of us – a lot of cross-platform promotion is in order. Promoting blog on twitter and Facebook is much easier than promoting on your own space. If no one’s around, who can hear it? Organic growth through 360 degree engagement is the key.

(In an aside, Nic Wirtz and I joked about Social Media Daleks spouting ENGAGEMENT! ENGAGEMENT! – we’ll explain this week.)

Then @cherylfenton asked how big a deal comments were. Of course, there was a lot of discussion about how to go after comments, but at the end of the day, comments are only handy if you’re looking to foster a discussion. Otherwise, writing for comments – or even encouraging them – is useless for some “hard declarative” posts.

There was a question about exploring archives – I’m a huge proponent of this! For you WordPress people, there’s a plugin called Insights – gives you an in-blog search right on the post page to allow for easier archive searches. very handy, especially for drill-down referencing.

There was also a question about self-editing. I wrote something for this – but decided it needed to be redacted. (consensus; self-editing is good until you hit publish. Then, it’s “Typos Are Forever”)

15 minutes in and I’m lost! Tangent time! 3 Guest Post coupons into the water!

Oh yeah, organized posting times. I try to drop at 8am, 4pm or 10pm, and retweet the posts during the remaining available slots of those beofre my next posts. I spent the last week dropping posts at 4pm, and saw a significant increase in traffic. This week, it’ll be 7:30am as a control to see if the time actually meant anything. @danperezfilms tweets his posts hourly and sees good uptake – I may give this a shot too, but keep worrying it’ll annoy people. Would it annoy you?

And then this happened:

@MackCollier: If you got invited to speak at a major SM conf, what would your topic be? Make that your next blog post #blogchat

What a challenge! I may just take it up this week.

Open Mic night is always unpredictable. this week, people were going nuts – in the best possible way! Unfortunately, my head exploded halfway through, meaning I missed the storm of awesomeness.

So, yeah. I totally lost track of the chat. What kind of gold did I miss? What else can we add to what we learned?

TweepML Participants’ List for #blogchat, July 25th 2010

What the Hashtag transcript for #blogchat, July 25th 2010

Image by Tanki.