Understanding the Three C's of the Social Web

Before we dive into the technical how-to stuff, we should talk about general social-media philosophy. Technical tips without philosophy are meaningless. If you don't have the general philosophy down, your results are going to be poor because your interactions are going to be very one-sided affairs.

My daily actions on the Web are dictated by the Three C's: content, communication, and consistency. Over time, I've developed these Three C's through trial and error, and by observing others. Seeing how others used the Web as entertainers and bloggers helped me figure out how to get the most out of Internet as a platform. By examining these theories, you can better understand how to apply them for your own personal social-media use.

Content

The first pillar of my daily action on the Web is content. Although the Web has seen a growing shift away from content to community, I still believe that content is king. Communities based around common interests fall flat unless they have the content there for people to gravitate around. Facebook groups, for example, dominate because of the wealth of content they offer: the posts, links, videos, and other media people create within that group. Without the content, the group wouldn't exist.

Content is the single biggest plank in my social-Web philosophy. When I began to blog on MySpace, I had a small following of about 30 people. Over time, I saw that the more I wrote, the more people spread the word about my writing, and I realized that more content basically equaled a larger audience for my work. I examined other successful bloggers and found that one of the common threads between all of them was the amount of content that they were putting out — successful bloggers tended to post multiple times per week. I decided that I needed to focus on putting out more content, and you should, too.

However, content for the sake of content isn't necessarily in your best interests. To ensure that you provide the best content possible, make sure that you do these three things:

• Focus your content. People expect tailored content. I found this fact out the hard way when I began to increase the number of blog posts I wrote and posted. I'd write about anything, and sometimes I'd post on topics that weren't necessarily the reason people were coming to read my blog. One day, I'd post my musings on the latest pop harlot, and I'd follow it up with a long piece on our current foreign policy in North Korea — and I'd lose a significant number of subscribers because there was no focus to my writing. People wanted to read my blog for certain reasons, and they wanted content tailored to what they expected. The most successful bloggers have a narrow focus, and they write for a niche.

  When Problogger.net author Darren Rowse, an authority on professional blogging, first began blogging, he tried a wide-ranging approach but discovered it didn't work. “My blog had four main themes and different readers resonated differently with each one. A few readers shared my diverse interests in all four areas, but most came to my blog to read about one of the (or at most a couple of) topics. A number of regular loyal readers became disillusioned with my eclectic approach to blogging and gave up coming.”

  The need to write to a tightly honed niche was something I had to discover the hard way. I decided to stick to comedy because it allowed me to cover and talk about a wide variety of subjects. Also, people knew what they were coming for and what to expect from me.

• Have a voice that people want to hear. While I progressed with writing, I also figured out how important voice is. People didn't care about the mechanics of the writing as much as they cared about the voice. Although my grammar and spelling weren't always perfect, readers would only rarely call me out on those kinds of mistakes; readers never told me that they found my blog hard to read or that the occasional mistakes annoyed them. If I caught and corrected a grammar error after a posting and made a note of it, people would usually respond that they weren't coming to read my postings for my grammar. I wasn't alone. Other bloggers, especially ones who post large amounts of content, often have typos and errors in their posts. Tucker Max, one of the most popular comedy bloggers, switches between past and present tense often — a grammar no-no. He's aware of this problem and doesn't care, but neither do his readers.

  Max knows that he's developing his own style: “I know, I know. The whole concept of tense in speech has always given me problems. In undergrad and law school, I never really took any creative writing or English courses; it was pretty much all econ, law, history, etc, so some of the basic things that most writers get right, I fail. Of course I could learn tenses, but I have never really made an effort to get it right for a reason: I want to write in my own voice, regardless of whether or not it is “correct” grammar or not. By switching tenses, I write the way I speak, and by alternating between past and present I put the reader into the story, instead of just recounting it.”

  Tucker says that the only time people complain about his grammar mistakes is when users want to argue about the content of his blog. They use the grammar mistakes as a plank in their attack. However, this attempt to belittle him hasn't slowed his growth or success. His voice, after all, is what has made him successful.

• Present your content well. The actual look of your presentation matters greatly. Adding images, for example, enhances your posts in a number of ways, including
  • Giving posts a visual point of interest
  • Grabbing attention (really making your RSS feed readers stop and read)
  • Drawing people's eyes down beyond the first few lines of a post
  • Illustrating examples
  • Giving your blog a more personal touch
  • Engaging the emotions and senses of readers
  • Giving posts a professional feel, which can lead to an air of authority

  In my early blogs, I often wrote long, poorly formatted postings, and people didn't comment or interact with my content: not because of the length of those postings, per se, but because of the way that I displayed them, as long paragraphs of endless text. Over time, I realized that pictures, highlighted words, bullet points, and other such tricks give the reader's eye a break and can make your postings more attractive and more professional looking.

All these blog elements are extremely important on the social Web. People want to read and view information that they find interesting, that's well presented, and that's specific to their needs. Make sure you consider all these facets of a blog when you create content for your blog.

Communication

Communication is the second pillar of my philosophy about the social Web. While my blog's content grew, I decided to make a concerted effort to write at least three times a week. The more I wrote, the more comments I'd get. At times, I'd get as many as ten comments on a blog posting. I couldn't believe that ten people actually felt it was worth their time to devote a couple of minutes to replying to what I'd written.

I had such a high regard for these comments that I didn't respond to them. MySpace allowed responses to comments, which appeared nested below the original comment, but I wouldn't respond to readers' comments because I thought it was somehow taking away from their responses. Instead, I'd write personal messages to people if I felt they wanted a response. At this point, I didn't understand the idea of public communication on the Web — I thought that people would want their own comments to stand out and have their own place within my blog. I thought they didn't want me to upstage them by focusing the attention back on me with a reply comment. Little did I know that I should have been participating in the conversation, rather than ignoring it.

WordPress guru Lorelle VanFossen expresses the true value of comments and how they changed how she uses the Web: “Comments change how you write and what you write. I suddenly wasn't writing static information. People could question what I said. They could make me think and reconsider my point of view. They could offer more information to add value to my words. And most of all, they could inspire me to write more. Comments made writing come alive.”

As I continued to blog on MySpace, I began to examine the most successful blogs according to MySpace's blog rankings chart. I noticed that these successful bloggers engaged readers in the comment section and created conversations away from the post, that they used the blog post as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion. This phenomenon was occurring across a wide variety of different blog genres.

By participating in the conversation, I retained more readers, who many times would revisit my page during the day to see the new comments and replies in the discussion. Communication — and, more specifically, public communication — had a large impact on my blogging career. Directly participating in the conversation on my own blog increased my popularity and also increased people's attachment to what I was doing. Public communication helped my readers feel personally connected to me. The evolution into community discussion resulted in a drastic increase in traffic and comments on my blog. VanFossen writes of her blog, “My site isn't about ‘me’ or ‘my opinion’ any more. It's about what I have to say and you say back and I say, and then she says, and he says, and he says to her, and she reconsiders, and I jump in with my two shekels, and then he responds with another view . . . and it keeps going on. Some of these conversations never end. I'm still having discussions on topics I wrote 11 months ago.”

At this point, I came to a major realization. I had grown this far this fast with just word of mouth, but if I did some promotion, I could probably really build a sizeable audience. However, I wasn't sure really how to promote without coming off as a nuisance. I examined the growth of my blog and felt that the comments and my responses to them played a really large part in the rapid growth of my blog. I decided to apply these techniques to other blogs: I'd go to different blogs and take part in the discussion. By choosing blogs that were somewhat similar to mine, I could draw attention to myself with a witty comment but also be part of the larger blogging community beyond just my blog. Early on, this approach really worked; not only was I building a readership, but I was part of a larger community. People started linking to other people, and writers were sharing information with other writers. MySpace had a budding blogging community that was growing holistically.

Understanding the social aspect of the social Web was vital to my success. People use the social Web as a major mode of communication. The communication aspect of my blog and others plays into the overall online conversation that's going on, a conversation that can get started by an article, which a blogger covers in a blog post about that topic, which a reader comments on, which prompts another person to blog a response to those comments or that blog, which gets its own set of comments. Having a grasp on this concept and seeing how it operates not only brings you better success on the social Web, but also makes you a better participant. Having an approach by which you only want to take from the social Web leaves you ultimately unsuccessful: No matter how great your content, you need to have a level of participation and make people feel that you're communicating with them, not just speaking at them.

Consistency

The final pillar of my theory is the idea of consistency. When you produce any type of content that you offer multiple times a week or on a daily basis, people begin to expect consistency. Many bloggers don't post consistently, and as a result, they frustrate their readers. Although this expectation applies to blogging, in general, it really matters on MySpace and other social networks where the interconnectivity between the author and the audience reaches new heights. This applies to authors who have large followings on Facebook and Twitter, and who use them as their main point of contact with their reader. If you plan to write five days a week, actually write five days a week and try not to deviate from that schedule. If you plan to post only two to three times a week, stick to the days that you usually post (unless you want to cover some important breaking news). As a blogger, you have to give people a pattern to expect so that eventually they can know when to look for your posts. This idea is like knowing when your favorite TV program is on — you come to expect it and maybe even plan around it. Although I didn't see a lot of bloggers being consistent with their content posting I felt it was important. If I missed a day on which I usually posted or was severely late in posting, readers sent me e-mails wondering where my post was for that day. My audience was conditioned on when to expect my content.

While my blog grew, I needed to keep in mind that some bloggers get really excited by the attention they receive and start to overdo it. I found seeing the hits and the comments come in exhilarating, but I couldn't let the numbers impact how I posted. The last thing I wanted to do was over-post. Although some bloggers would argue that you should keep momentum on a particularly popular post, you run the risk of overexposing yourself and burning yourself out — plus, your content can quickly become watered down. When bloggers begin to gain some traction within a community, they begin to want to feed their audience more content. Sometimes the content becomes heavily watered down because they are posting so much. Bloggers often begin to lose the quality control they have by posting everything that springs to mind. The quality of the content, what the people are there for, quickly begins to erode and you can lose the audience you have built. By sticking with a routine and establishing consistency in your posting, you let readers know what to expect and you become a part of their routine. If you ingrain yourself in someone's life, he or she is going to return to your blog frequently and become an advocate for what you're doing.

You also need to account for long breaks in your posting schedule. I had to figure out how to deal with the fact that I had a life away from writing and also sometimes just didn't feel like producing content. I decided to prewrite posts when I had a lot to say and keep them so that I could post them at times when I wasn't inspired to write. Some people get burnt out on blogging and can't fight through the grind of it. I didn't want that to happen to me. Some bloggers take a month off from writing or post very sporadically. But if you really want to build an audience, you can't suddenly decide to take a month off because you're tired of it. Taking a long stretch of time off can kill a blog's momentum and audience. I look at taking a break from blogging for an extended period and not posting content as the equivalent of taking ten steps back. You can explore other options, instead of leaving your blog dormant. If you've built an audience, you can rather easily find a guest blogger to step in for a bit. Also, by creating a discussion and letting users run with it, you can allow those users to step in and generate content for you.

Take pains to ensure that the quality content you produce doesn't suffer from blogging more often. Bloggers often capitalize on a popular post, gain an audience, and then become inconsistent with the quality of their content. They either shift away from their original niche or begin to post poorly thought-out or put-together blog entries. When their blog quality suffers, those bloggers begin to lose their audience and never can recover. It's just not possible for every post or piece of content that a blogger comes up with to be high quality. Also, you can't easily judge which posts are going to be successful and which aren't. I've personally written posts in five minutes that got more views and had a better reception than posts that I took hours to craft. But readers can really tell when you're phoning it in and just posting for the sake of posting. If you force yourself to post for too long, the quality of your blog and your consistency can go out the window.

Consistency doesn't apply only to posting — it also applies to communication and promotion. When I started to reply to comments on my blog, I found out quickly that ignoring a person's comments on multiple posts can offend your commenter. I can't even imagine the number of people who just didn't return to my blog when I failed to respond to their comments. Nowadays, I try to reply to most comments that my blog receives, at least to say thanks for their comments or join in on whatever conversation topics spring from the blog posts. I had to really focus on replying to messages and e-mails while my blog grew to prevent communication from turning into a one-way street.

Promotion also became an important factor while my blog grew. The lion's share of the time that I currently spend blogging involves promoting content, not producing it. When I started blogging on MySpace, I had to create a routine of promoting my work on a consistent basis, even if it was for only ten minutes a day. Establishing a routine and becoming consistent in what I did helped me create a larger following than a lot of other bloggers had. Most people were reluctant to promote their content, which I've always considered foolish. No matter how amazing your content is, if you don't have a promotional strategy, nobody will ever find out about it.

Always keeping the idea of consistency in the back of my mind helped me develop a work ethic and also kept me focused on what actions are important to success. Being consistent in production, communication, and promotion helped me expand my blog on a consistent basis, and I didn't have to fight a peak-and-valley roller coaster ride.