Networking, part 2

Helen on Facebook

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Networking

In lieu of content. 🙂 Been a rough week–turns out my dad has a Jefferson fracture of the c1 vertebra, and my brother was assaulted in a bar the other day and wound up getting stitches in the ER. I really don’t think I can take much more of this, and the 5,000 unread messages in my email are making me feel overloaded.

Google madness

I love the fact that I can run two browsers — in my case, firefox and camino — and have two separate google identities to keep all my social media stuff in one space, exurbanista, while the rest of my universe goes to the multi-identity playground serving several different domains of mine at realname. That way, I can use each browser’s bookmarks to save pages to del.icio.us, save RSS feeds to iGoogle and Google reader, and manage individual bookmarks. With distinct Google accounts, I can avoid being distracted by chat messages that aren’t work related by disabling chat in the personal account while leaving it on in my social media account.

metablogging

So there’s blogging about social media for the sake of interacting with other social media professionals. but ultimately, what I *need* to do is start blogging content for our members. Not here, but on the blog I will be signing my name to.

so I’ve been trying to figure out why some “organization blogs” are good and others aren’t. Content is, of course, king, and that’s a refrain I’ll sing again and again. But one mistake I’ve found is mistaking the technology for the content. You can put the call and response technology on any old article and say it’s a blog entry. But that’s taking 1.0 content and expecting it to become 2.0 content by virtue of having a comment box on it. And then there are no comments. Why?

Because we are conditioned to respond to 1.0 media without actually responding to it.

What comprises a blog post? I got an email today from a colleague, forwarding a youtube link to me. “Yes,” I said. “But would this be of interest to our members?” It would, she said. “So this is an example of good blog food,” I said, and illustrated it thus. Good blog content is usually one of two things. “I found this. Here’s why I think this is neat. What do you think?” Or, it’s “I made this connection today/dreamed this up/had a really cool conversation with person x/wrote a story that’s got people talking, and here’s why I think this is neat. What do you think?” It’s more than just an invitation to comment: it’s opening a dialogue, even when (as now) it’s one person talking and no one listening, yet. I have to cultivate the exurbanista audience.  Hi. *waves* I can blog about my cats instead, if you like. Cause there’s always the blog content that goes, “This is really friggin’ hilarious, and I totally have to share it with you, regardless of what you think.” Harder to do on a professional blog, but hey, I’m a humorist at heart.

Do you think about what you blog? How would you characterize your blog content? What are its pieces?