Yesterday I shared one aspect of blogging I could do without: groupies. Today I’m exploring ways to avoid becoming a groupie and instead engage as a genuine community member.
For me, this starts with choosing the right vehicle and approach for engagement. I’ve worked with a lot of people who fret over the specific tools to use when engaging online (e.g., “Teach me Facebook so I can connect with my customers.”), but I think the first order of business is considering the following:
How and when should you circulate, converse, or cultivate within your community to become a valued member?
Circulate
This simply involves passing an idea of resource along and warming up the bloodflow in your particular online community. Circulation is not an especially demanding approach to engagement, and it can be the most humble depending on how it is done.
Groupies tend to circulate a lot in order to align themselves with bigger fish in the social media pond. While circulating ideas, posts, and resources can be very valuable, groupies tend to focus on volume, and they have some weird ways of circulating information. I imagine this is because they can’t just share a link without extending a virtual high-five to the big players.
Savvy circulators seek efficient, relevant avenues for sharing resources, such as retweets on Twitter. A groupie, on the other hand, wastes your time by writing a one-paragraph post with a link, just so they can share that on Twitter and drive traffic to their blog. I feel so duped whenever I fall for a catchy headline and end up on Joe Schmo’s blog, just to have to click again to get to the real content.
When you circulate well, you tell the community, “I don’t have an ego. I just want to help everyone find better resources to do a better job.”
Converse
This is a middle-of-the-road response, and it often comes in the form of a comment to share why a particular post resonated with you or an @reply on Twitter to acknowledge a peer’s perspective. When done well, this exchange focuses on:
- The value of the content rather than the individual who created it.
- Affirmation of a fellow community member rather than a desire to get attention from that community member.
- Encouraging meaningful connectivity among community members rather promotion of individual community members.
Cultivate
I remember learning about primary sources and secondary sources of information in grade school. Secondary sources were viewed as a sort of second-class citizen, to the point that there were strict rules for how many secondary sources could be cited in our papers. I try to keep that ugly perception of secondary sources in my gut when I write, because I think it is what true cultivation is all about.
Rather than simply responding to the content of others or mashing secondary content together, I want my writing to introduce new concepts or repackage current thinking in a way that adds value. I’m not suggesting that everyone can, will, or should strive to always develop groundbreaking content. But you’ll notice the groupies especially do not care much about this, making it obvious that their focus is on getting attention rather than making contributions.
To avoid falling in the same trap, I’ve been trying to brainstorm original ideas in an offline notebook, away from online noise. And in those instances when another community member inspires me to write something, my hope is to give credit where it’s due, but then quickly move on to reshape that idea in my own context. I believe this kind of cultivation can be accomplished by:
- Offering personal experience, which can add validity to another post or idea.
- Connecting a new idea to an older idea to explore areas of disconnect or synergy, which can add depth to a discussion.
- Providing tools for putting an idea into practice, or tools that lead a conversation to action, which can add progress to an issue.
- Framing an idea for a different audience, which can bring awareness to the bigger picture.
As always, I’m looking forward to comments and hope to hear your ideas. I’d also love to see examples of posts where you tried to add value to a conversation, or posts where you explored what it takes to both write and engage well.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm. I find that this is a constant struggle for me. I hate when people respond to what was a time consuming or well thought out post with “Way to go, rock on” or whatever. At the same time I know I have been guilty of the like. Often I read something that I totally agree with, or which really resonates, but I am not sure how to respond meaningfully in a way that adds to the discussion. I do try, nowadays, not to respond unless I feel like I really have something meaningful to add. And it does depend on the blogger. I read a lot of blogs which don’t really seem to invite discussion or conversation.
At the same time, while I love to engage with others, and I love discussion, I suffer, as do many, with a complete lack of time. I find myself wading through a lot of nonsense in order to find that gem that sparks some thought, inspiration, or thought process. And as a person who is relatively knew to the whole idea of social networking via the internet, taking it on blindly can be completely intimidating. Some of us are just hopeless newbs.
Tania
Hi Emily,
I’m really enjoying your writing. You write with clarity, style and simplicity (in a good way). Very impressive. But what I really wanted to say is…
I, too, strive to develop fresh content and concepts, but, boy can this be hard. I, like you, have a wonderful little notebook that I’m constantly writing down ideas in, and I do think it’s helped me in the last few weeks come up with some decent concepts. It’s a challenge to come up with truly groundbreaking concepts, but it’s definitely worth aiming for.
Emily,
I’m probably starting to seem like one of your groupies. Sorry for that! But I liked this article and I think you hit on a great point about circulating.
I think so many bloggers would do much better if they promoted other people’s posts 80% of the time and their own posts only 20% of the time. So on Twitter, if for every link you put out from your own blog, you post at least 4 links to other people’s blogs (good links, of course).
As for the “no ego” part… well, I don’t think any blogger is without an ego of some sort :) But certainly it’s important to add to the community rather than just generate artificial traffic to your own blog.
This is a great blog and great fine. I subscribed to your RSS. I really enjoy reading the third component on cultivating. I’m going to shut down the computer next time I work on original work.
Emily, found your blog via Ryan Paugh and love the way you picked up on your interview with him with this useful post.
One of the things I find most frustrating about social media is that people with great online marketing skills can get their content to go viral, even though their primary motivation might be the attention rather than the desire to share ideas or publish something interesting. You alluded to this above… But at the same time, I think this is part of what makes online interactions somewhat genuine and that element of social media is extremely powerful.
Lately, I’ve been trying to take my blog in a new direction. While I’m spending a lot of time “circulating” with a view to tracking the media coverage of Gen. Y (here’s a typical post – http://schiffreport.blogspot.com/2009/01/first-millennial-member-of-us-congress.html), I really love the exchange that can accompany good “cultivating.” Here’s a recent example from my blog: http://schiffreport.blogspot.com/2008/11/single-sex-workplace.html
I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reading more from you.
Hi everyone, thanks again for the comments… it’s really a thrill to see all the feedback after posting!
@Tania — I agree with how overwhelming it can sometimes be to find the content that matters enough to stop, read, and discuss meaningfully. I find Twitter is really helpful in that regard, acting as a filter. If someone I follow retweets a post, it is much more likely to get my attention — it has a stamp of approval. A very informal one, but with enough time on Twitter, you get to know the people who share the best resources and the good reads. I end up paying more attention to their retweets for that reason.
@Angela — It means a lot to hear that you enjoy my writing… I actually made a point of reading a handful of your posts before I got started again with this blog, because your writing is much more straightforward than mine has been in the past! (Yeah, who sounds like a groupie now? :)
@Monica — Your 80/20 rule is great, and would be a good benchmark for people to use in measuring their social media behavior. Sometimes it’s hard to quantify good social media practice (it seems people would much rather spend the time quantifying their site traffic, unsurprisingly).
@Daniel — Thanks for stopping by, and I’m eager to read more from your blog. Your interest in organizational development, coupled with your social media background, definitely appeals to my reading habits… I recently shared with a client that while my skills may be in online communications, my real interests are in organizational development (communications is just a means to an end). She seemed surprised to hear me describe it this way, but I think it’s an intersection that people our age work within regularly, perhaps without even realizing it. I’d be interested in hearing if you have a perspective on this, or experience carving out/positioning yourself in such a hybrid role.
@Jaclyn — I’ll check out your blog, and you hit on a really good point when you allude to the differences between marketing and social media. This bubbled up on Twitter recently, and there were some interesting articles about it, which are included in this post: http://www.newcommbiz.com/death-to-social-media-and-their-experts/
Emily Stoddard Furrow’s last blog post: Be more than a social media groupie: Circulate. Converse. Cultivate.
I particularly enjoyed the fact that you followed up your last post with an answer to the groupie “problem.” I think that’s one of the many reasons to blog, to form a community of individuals interested in cultivating relationships and circulating ideas.
I wrote something about transparency in writing, but it was more of a musing on soul-searching via the means of social media.
I think that if people are genuinely interested in being engaged, they’ll create those venues and avenues for engagement to actually happen. Instead of promotion, they’ll invite (and encourage) discussion. I think groupies actually weed themselves out of the conversation because it becomes hard to take them seriously…
Raven’s last blog post: Transparency in the Blogosphere and Beyond