Here’s a tip for anyone wanting to develop theories about blogging and social media. Adopt a friendly, forward thinking journalist and get them blogging.
Last year I persuaded Birmingham Post journalist Joanna Geary to start her own blog. She took to it like a duck to water and continually surprises me with the ways she’s using the medium. I can suggest things to her to try out and, if she thinks they’re suitable, she implements them in ways I couldn’t have dreamed of either proving my theory or, more interestingly, forcing me to rethink my ideas.
A while back she was having the perfectly normal problem of having too much to write about and no time to do so. I suggested limiting her posts to a few paragraphs, flagging them as just thoughts and ideas and throwing them out there. This made sense to her so she gave it a go.
Here’s a screen-grab:
Check the comments at the bottom there. 34 so far and the debate is still raging from a post that I’m assuming took about 20 minutes to write and publish, if that. I’m pretty sure that if she’d spent the whole evening writing 2,000 words of carefully thought out prose she’d have maybe gotten a couple of comments and the odd link. The latter might have been a more valuable document but the former has created a debate. The comments thread on that post has become an ad-hoc forum for that particular subject bringing together people from disparate communities, some of them her regular readers, some new to her site.
What’s interesting here is that Jo is happy to be wrong in her assertions. She doesn’t know the answer but has the kernel of a notion as to what it might be. She’s putting forward a position but wants people to develop it or even dismiss it. The post isn’t an end in itself – it’s the catalyst for something new and unknown to develop.
This, I think, is what defines Social Media as opposed to media as we used to understand it. In fact what I’m writing here is in the tradition of non-social media. You’re welcome to comment but it’s not my intention in writing it that it spark a debate. I’m essentially broadcasting and while feedback is welcome it’s not going to drastically effect the essence of this post. And there’s nothing wrong with that – sometimes broadcast is the right way to go – but what Jo did in that post is mix up publishing with discussion, a document with a conversation. It’s media but it’s social. And we’re still figuring out exactly what that means.
In terms of effort to response you are right. Leaving people with a problem is far more interesting that solving it in advance. (Be reasonably sure though that your query is sincere)
I used to run a web site where long-winded articles and reviews would get very few comments (in the double figure), short articles or reviews would get many hundred, sometimes thousands. Only controversial articles would draw comments.
However, even if slashdotted and 30-100 thousand hits in a few hours, the comment section could still be low (possible 5-10 at most). Most would read the summary on slashdot, click on the link and not bother to go past page 3 or 4 of the article, the majority cannot be bothered to read it all, even though we had a policy of 200 words per page and a maximum of three images. We found ways to get more people to read more pages and comment by use of white background instead of navy blue, and to use a 7-10 words per line.
Anyway Pete, your post was long, I do not expect many comments. :p
Interesting stuff. When I wrote a ‘ten things’ piece on the custard factory a couple of people subsequently described it as ‘link-baiting’ which sounded a bit derogatory to me. I’m not quite sure what that term even means. My intention, like Jo’s, was to see in what direction the reaction went and hopefully have something useful come out in the debate. It attracted 18 comments which is good for me but then I felt a bit uncomfortable with being described as a ‘link-baiter’ implying I’m in it only for the attention it reflects back on me (which is only half the story). I don’t think Jo and I are doing anything different in our writing yet the language used to describe it seems different.
@Dave Heh, the linkbaiting comment came from me so maybe I should explain. It wasn’t intended as derogatory though I can see why you might have thought that. It’s just that it ticked a lot of the boxes for the sort of post people write when they want to encourage links and comments. There’s nothing wrong with that – it can often be a good thing. You wanted links and comments so you wrote in a style that would encourage them. Where it can be derogatory is where someone deliberately writes something controversial purely to drive traffic to their site, not because they want to query their readers. A post like, say, “Blogging is dead” would be classic linkbait in the negative sense.
Fishermen use bait to catch fish. What they then do with those fish (eat them, throw them back, gut them and use them as a funny hat) is up to them.
But yeah, I probably should have rephrased that.
Personally, I’m inclined to think that it is Joanna’s subject matter that provokes the discussion, not her brevity. But then, as someone who regularly writes blog posts that are 1,500+ words long, I would say that, wouldn’t I ;-)
The more you write, the less you leave for your commenters to say. Leave enough gaps and people leap in to fill them for you.
[...] Birmingham Post’s Joanna Geary has been posting her quick, incoherent thoughts of late. Here’s my stab at writing a mere musing that’s been ticking away in my brain since [...]