Why I Don’t Care About My Blog’s Traffic

Someone’s bound to yell at me for this. But I simply don’t care about my blog’s traffic. Why? That’s just a number.

Here’s what I do care about.

I care that when you come here, you find something that’s valuable. To you. Either you enjoyed reading it, or it gave you an idea, or you showed it to your boss, or it just reassured you that you’re not the only crazy one thinking these things.

I care that my blog encourages you to connect with me other places. Not just Facebook or Twitter, but on the phone. Email. Over coffee. And hopefully, when we meet in person, we feel like we know each other a little bit.

I care that you feel welcome here. That you feel like I’m glad to have you, and more importantly, like the other folks in my community are welcoming and interested in participating in great conversation with you also. And if you’re the lurking type, I hope you feel like there’s a comfy sofa in the corner for you, always.

I care that I have a place to collect all the thoughts that pile up in my head, every day. To work out my business ideas in an organized fashion. (I do the personal stuff too, over here.) Otherwise, my head would asplode, and that would be messy.

I care that some people have been inspired to start blogs of their own, presumably because they know if a mouthy-pants like me can do it, so can they.

I care that I’ve given people practical ideas to use in their work. How do I know? Because they’ve told me.

I care that my blog has helped introduce me to people that have become friends, trusted colleagues, and even hired me to do real work (thanks, David).

You can argue all you want that my traffic is an indication of how interesting I am, or how compelling my posts are, or how “influential” I am, and I say hogwash. My traffic is an indication that I piqued someone’s interest today. But just today. (Look, I get that this is probably a much different thing for a business, or someone trying to make money from their blog by selling eyeballs or proving their audience, but hey. I’ve gotten a pile of business from my blog, even when it was a tiny thing. So there. I’m probably doing it wrong.)

Subscribers are slightly more nifty, because they tell me someone liked what they saw and wanted more. And I’m grateful for every one of you.

But when all is said and done, if I’m delivering something great to 15 of you or 200 of you or 50,000 of you in a given day, what matters isn’t how many of you showed up. It’s how many doors this has opened from me to you, on a dozen and a half channels, so that we can connect, do work together, visit, laugh, have a beer, and share war stories someday. It’s how many of you want to hang out. Learn. Share. Because hell if I don’t learn something from each of you, daily.

My currency here isn’t my traffic, it’s you. Each of you humans (some of you aliens, maybe). It’s the privilege I have to write stuff I care about, and hear from other people who care about that stuff too. That’s reassuring, and comforting, and thought provoking, and downright fun.

So I’m sorry if I didn’t count you as you came in the door today. Whether there’s five of you or five hundred thousand, I’m going to care about the same damn things.

And if I haven’t said it often enough or loudly enough, I’m just thrilled to pieces that you take time out of your day to spend it here. So thanks.

Five in the Morning

Super cool Steve Woodruff asked me if I’d guest post for his kick-butt Five in the Morning series. And since I’d probably eat sawdust if Steve asked me to, here are a few posts that ran across that I think you should see, too, as part of my “Anything But Another Twitter Post” episode of FITM:

Kellye Crane has a fantastic guest post at Kami Huyse’s Communication Overtones. She makes a careful distinction between that dreaded word “messaging” and truly valuable messages. I like her take.

Beth Kanter has yet another substantive post, this time about the ROI of online communities, and by that she means Return on Insight. (I’m especially keen on this topic given my new jobby job.) She’s been writing some killer stuff lately about the value of listening and engagement, so a stroll back through her previous posts is time well spent.

Liz Strauss has a gift sometimes for getting straight to the heart of something that many folks are thinking but can’t manage to articulate. She does it again here, where she asks how you trust someone you can’t see.

Jonathan Kranz makes a hell of a lot of sense over on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix when he says that marketers are the problem when we’re creating “relationships” when there might not be any. I’ve seen this more than once.

And for last, something completely different. Jon Swanson. Moving, articulate, wise. Reverberant silence. Go read.

So if you’re finding Steve for the first time:

Subscribe to Steve Woodruff’s StickyFigure blog
Follow Steve on Twitter: @SWoodruff

And if you’re finding me for the first time, how about subscribing to my feed or following me on Twitter so you can visit me again?

Thanks, Steve, for letting me share this week. Hope you slept in.

Photo Credit: doug88888

Elements of Web 2.0 Communication Guidelines

As more and more companies are considering a presence in social media, even more of them are asking for guidance for themselves and their employees.

Although the document below uses the word policy (because that’s what some companies call it), I’m not a fan. (It may be semantics, but start throwing words like that around and you’re already shooting your trust quotient with your team in the foot.) I much prefer “guidelines” or “guideposts”. It’s more about steering than control.

But there are several helpful things that you can put down on paper that will help you, your team, and your bosses feel more comfortable with team members communicating in social media. I spent a little time a few months back compiling a PDF of several publicly published communication guidelines from prominent companies like Yahoo, Harvard, Dell, Cisco, and Sun Microsystems. Download it here and save yourself the trouble of searching for them.

Many of these are labeled as “blogging guidelines”, but I think many of the elements in here apply to all types of communication and representation online. You’ll have to refine them for your own business, but in general, here are the points for discussion:

Transparency and Disclosure: Emphasizing that your employees must always be open, honest, and clear about who they are. If they’re representing your company when they’re speaking, they should say so. If they’re not, they should make it clear that their communication is their own and not the company’s. A simple disclaimer example: “My name is X and I work for Y. The opinions I’m expressing here are my own.”

Who owns what content: If it’s an employee’s personal blog, it’s not corporate communication and legally it belongs to them. That also means they’re responsible for what’s posted there. If it’s your company blog, be sure you’re clear about content ownership from a business perspective.

Confidential Information: You may think it goes without saying, but articulating that disclosing confidential company information isn’t permitted is a good thing. In fact, most employee handbooks cover this issue, so you can consider referencing that by participating in social media on behalf of the company or individually, they’re agreeing to abide by that.

Copyrights: Another not-so-common sense thing, but remind folks that posting copyrighted material is just plain dumb.

Company time: Important to set forth your expectations about whether or not your team members can participate in social media during business hours. And remember, you’ll have a hard time saying “yes, but…”. You’re going to have to say “yes, and we’ll trust you to use good judgment”.

Consequences for acting stupid: What happens if an employee does something that negatively impacts the company? Good to outline the possibilities for all to see, including everything from a “good talking to” leading up to termination under particular circumstances.

Handling media requests: If folks are out there speaking on your behalf, or even if it becomes known through their personal activities that they’re with your company, media requests are a real possibility. Give guidance about how to handle/direct those to appropriate people in the company, or provide training and guidance for those that will be expected to respond.

Also included in the PDF is information from the hard working folks over at the Blog Council on their disclosure best practices, which you can find in their toolkit right here. Also, check out WOMMA’s ethics code, to which many well-respected brands adhere.

Truth is, lots of this stuff is common sense, but it bears repeating and documenting, if only to give your execs some peace of mind. You’ll note that some of them are brutally simple, which is the way it should be, in my view.

Do you have other elements of communication and participation guidelines that could be helpful to others? Share in the comments?

The Social Media Stalemate

I had an interesting discussion on Twitter the other night, prompted by this thought:

Why do companies trust their employees to answer a phone, but not to blog or get on Twitter?

It drew a flurry of responses – everything from online activities being permanently etched in Google and thereby carrying more risk, to companies just not “getting” that their employees are likely out there talking anyway, with or without permission. It’s the second part that stuck. (The actual answers to the above question are actually rather secondary at this point).

Once again, we’re at this place of what I’m affectionately calling the Social Media Stalemate.

There are piles of information out there now about the “why” of social media, and there are increasingly bold and prominent examples of the how, from our favorites like Dell and Comcast and Zappos to all of the companies that Peter Kim has been copiously collecting here.  I’m just about done with the argument that what we need is more “examples”. We have examples, what we seem to collectively lack is the stones to execute and try stuff for ourselves (there, I said it).

So this brings me here. What happens when we’re a bit of an impasse? When we’ve outlined examples, talked until we’re blue in the face about the benefits of participating in social media and pointed out the risks of ignoring it, and yet our company or client refuses to hear?

You probably know by now that I’m a proponent of doing things in baby steps, and that complete revolution is often impossible and sometimes even unwise in the face of business. So no, to those of you that may be preparing to launch into a comment storm about social media’s overhype, I’m not suggesting that we jettison everything old in favor of everything new. But doing nothing at all, digging in your heels and refusing to see what’s in front of you? That’s a tough nut to crack.

I’m all for education and teaching and learning and gradual sea change. But even I have to admit that I shake my head at some of the stale rationale I keep hearing to justify resisting the things that are so obviously changing the face of business and media as we know them, even in small ways. And I grow even more confused when what I hear as justification are things like “it’s risky” or “we don’t know if it will work” or “companies are afraid of the unknown”. I have yet to execute any substantially successful communications, marketing, community outreach, fundraising, or customer service initiative in my career that came with a guarantee of success, whether or not it had precedent.

This isn’t fishbowl validation anymore, folks. I’m not trying to preach to the converted or play kumbaya, nor am I trying to assert that social media is the end-all (and I’ve written many times about why it isn’t). Social media didn’t create the mistrust or the detractors or the risks or the issues at hand, it’s just putting them in plain sight, and putting companies in the uncomfortable (or enlightening) position to respond.

So I’m asking you. Can persistence in teaching and education pay off, and is eternal patience the only prescription (besides more cowbell)?

How much analysis and risk evaluation is enough before action is imperative?

And when all else fails, when (and HOW) do you cut bait, either as a company or an adviser? Is there a time when you as the social media champion are forced to choose your company or your cause?

I don’t have all the answers here, far from it. But I’m wondering if any of you are thinking about this like I am. Help me out?

Should the Basics Evolve?

Sometimes a comment spawns an entire thought train for me. Today, it wasn’t a comment here, but rather on that crazy Irish dude from Boston’s blog (can’t remember his name), and by Ken Kadet. I’m actually very much immersed in the thoughts about B2B and B2C not being so different right now, but I’ll have to save that for another post or a comment of my own.

Here’s the bit that struck me:

“The challenge for organizations is that the marketing communications teams feel like they have no time to get what they see as “the basics” done, let alone do “technology stuff” in social media. What they need to do is step back and reassess how their organizations view the basics of communications. That reassessment has to happen across marketing, sales, product management and at the executive level.”

If I look back at my traditional marketing/communications days in a B2B world, the basics were things like mailings. Collateral. The website. Maybe email if we got around to it. Press releases. And they all had the aim of taking the “message” we’d created, writing it down lots of times, and sending it to as many people as we could. The hope, of course, was that the message would somehow:

• Remind our B2B customers that we existed, or let prospects know
• Remind our B2B customers that they should call us for more stuff
• Get someone in the media to notice us instead of our competitors
• Make us feel better that we “got the message out there”

The thing we forgot is that these communication mechanisms spoke once and quit. They landed on someone’s desk, possibly read, certainly soon forgotten. Our 1% response rates sucked (even though we said they didn’t because everyone else’s sucked too, so at least we sucked equally), mostly because acting on it – in our customers’ worlds – required them to remember to do something with the information. We were lost in a sea of people’s other “things to do” and because it lacked anything remotely personal or relevant, people forgot it.

We lost sight of the fact that communication implies an ongoing and reciprocal process. So we’d follow on the first blurt with another blurt, and we’d call that “continuing the conversation with our customers” when what we were really doing was just talking some more.

I’m not saying that some forms of traditional marketing can’t be effective. But how do we EVOLVE them? How do we learn from the pieces that don’t work, and rethink what we consider the basics?  We will spend millions on process improvement to take the slightest inefficiencies out of our production or management, but we won’t work to make our dialogue with our customers ruthlessly efficient and easy?  (I know, I know, we can talk too about “streamlining gone bad” but stay with me here).

Once you’ve talked, then what? Are the basics out of habit, or because they really work? What elements of them maintain their relevance? What pieces are just holdovers because we don’t know what to replace them with?

Maybe some of the answers to scale issues when integrating social media is that some of these things aren’t an AND, but an INSTEAD, or a DIFFERENT.

I’m just thinking out loud, and my thoughts are obviously incomplete. But I think Ken is onto something. This is where you come in. Help me (and Ken) think this through some more?