I've been thinking (and talking) about community a lot recently, and it was while speaking to about 50 people at a seminar held by Sift last Friday that I had an epiphany: most media people don't realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don't think of it as a conversation.This is clear from our traffic figures. Those blogs that do really well are those that are aware of there being a wider web world outside our sites' confines and which talk directly to the readers. Those whose traffic is abysmal are those who show no awareness of a wider conversation around their topics and who adopt a "wisdom from on high" tone of voice.
And perhaps some of the failure of the latter blogs is my fault. I've been so embedded in online community activity for well over a decade that I instinctively think of the internet as a social place. Thus, I fail to articulate that clearly to people for whom this is a much more recent idea. But, to me, there's no doubt that blogging is all about personal voices interacting with one another, not about personal voices lecturing. And that's something that the media usually misses.
Continue reading Why Media Gets Community Wrong.
I'm never slow to criticise