Business and Blogging

Five Great Tips for Creating Community on Your Blog

by Des Walsh on March 29th, 2007

One of the key distinctions about blogging that I endeavour to communicate to business people is to see their blog not just as a kind of new style website, but as a way for them to join in new conversations, especially but not exclusively with customers and potential customers. That’s not about conversation for conversation’s sake, but about building a sense of community where the business and customers are seen, as in any community, as having shared interests.

But while we might know how to start or join a conversation in the offline world, not everyone can be expected to know how to do that, and do it effectively, in an online environment. Just because blogging is a good tool for that does not mean people will automatically know how to use the tool to good effect. And telling some business people that a blog is a good way to build a community might seem far-fetched to those are not yet really familiar with blogging.

So I’m always on the lookout for practical explanations of how these high-minded principles of “joining the conversation” and “building community” can translate into plain English for the business owner, executive, partner or solo professional.
Such as the great post I read just now from Robyn Tippins at her aptly-named Practical Blogging, where she provides five valuable tips for building community with your company blog.

I won’t attempt to summarize them, especially as that would not do justice to Robyn’s insightful and nuanced post. But the key points covered are:

Comments - good tips on how to generate comments
Writing to reach - engaging your readers
Subscription - “make your subscription button the most obvious thing on your blog”
Transparency - about being honest with your readers, e.g. let them know who your clients are
ROI - practical advice for keeping track of the conversations you start or join

A bonus is that Robyn reports on some good points made by others at the same event she presented at.

And in line with Robyn’s wise advice about transparency, I must mention that Robyn and I are colleagues on the b5media network and co-moderators of the LinkedIn Bloggers group. I would encourage you to read and subscribe to her blog anyway.

(This is a duplicate of a post from yesterday, which was accidentally deleted while I was learning how to handle some quirks which seem to have arisen since the upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 - apologies for any confusion.)

Share This

Related Stories

• Introducing the Business and Blogging Blogroll
• Papa’s How To Write: No Bull
• The New Web 2.0 Careers
• Are You Communicating?
• New Year. New Beginnings.

POSTED IN: General, Skills, Writing