I missed the Technorati memo…

3 Responses to “I missed the Technorati memo…”

1. Dale Vile Says:
   April 18th, 2008 at 12:13 am

   You are obviously being a bit tongue in cheek here, I don’t believe for a minute your blogs are being ignored However, it brings to mind some general principles that I have worked out that sometimes go against the grain for the hard core social media advocates.

   You have probably heard me say this before, but I regard blogs as just a publishing mechanism. To produce a ‘publication’ with a sustained readership means a) defining your audience and b) writing stuff they want to read and c) distributing or promoting that publication.

   In the narrow attention span blog world, the latter comes down to reminding people you exist by reaching over to other blogs and commenting there, and using this and other mechanisms to draw attention to new content on your own blog. Carter Lusher, for example, has cleverly used a combination of his Analyst Twitter Directory, which almost guarantees everyone on it follows his Tweets, then promotes new blog posts through this. This is in addition to making guest posts on other people’s blogs via comments, etc.

   Two of the guys at Freeform, Tebbo and Jonno, do the readership maintenance, engagement and reach-out thing quite well too, and this is reflected in both traffic on the blogs and the level of interaction. The rest of the team here, me included, don’t pay as much attention to it, and drive more in the way of volume and reach by cross posting blog posts on major news sites. It’s the difference between focusing on creating a successful blog-based publication versus the objective of driving audience reach in the broader sense. The latter matters much more to me than being seen as a successful blogger – i.e. blogging just one of several means to an end.

   The purists hate it when I talk in these dirty objective terms, especially when I draw parallels between blogging and traditional publication principles – ‘cos it’s all so new, different and revolutionary. They tell me I don’t understand the importance of viral spread, community participation, etc, and that I am missing the whole point. But, if you look carefully at the non-superstars who are using blogs successfully, they put quite a lot of work into the promotion and readership maintenance process – or, as in the case of ZDnet blogs and some of the stuff we do, simply piggy back on the back of traditional publications that already have an established audience.

   So, general advice to anyone out there is not to rely on the “build it and they will come” Field of Dreams principle, or even the “attract them and they will stay” ideal world principle. Neither of these reflect reality.

   None of this detracts from the community engagement motivation BTW – but you can only start a conversation or engage interactively with a person or a group if you have their attention.

2. Barbara Says:
   April 18th, 2008 at 8:22 am

   Dale, Excellent insights.

   I very much see bloggers failing into the two mindsets you’ve described — those focused on publication/expression, those focused on making themselves into an A-lister. Few bloggers seem able to do both; you’ve explained the upside of finding the time and energy to pull it off.

   Sadly, I’m not joking about problems with Technorati. If it’s becoming a tool focused only on the Top 100,000 than I need to find another ranking system.

3. Norman Bartlett Says:
   April 20th, 2008 at 11:03 am

   Dale,

   A well structured analogy with mainstream publishing.

   The ‘A-listers’ that Barbara refers to would be analogous to those who go in for vanity publishing - or is that being too harsh?

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