Sharing is Caring, but it's Also Hard: Why Your Audience Won't Comment on Your Blog
Flickr Photo: hekman2007i just finished a whirlwind two days at the NetSquared conference in San Jose. As always, the TechSoup folks did a great job, and I'm truly amazed and inspired by the creativity and passion of the community.
While everyone was excited, I felt that there was one big disconnect, though it's not unique to NetSquared. I see this a lot. Lots of folks got up and showed off social media tools and strategies, telling the audience how these tools can help their stakeholders have a conversation. The assumption is that your stakeholders WANT to have a conversation. That they are just waiting for you to ask them to share, and they will unleash a torrent of comments, photos, and widgets about your cause.
Maybe they don't.
What no one addressed, and I will confess that I am similarly guilty, is that your stakeholders won't necessarily want to interact with your organization, at least not at first. You may launch a blog to start a conversation only to find that no one wants to comment. You may create a Flickr group only to find that people don't upload their photos. You may build it, they may not come.
Of course, this is not to say that I don't think you should be experimenting with social media. I think you should be trying as much as possible. What I am saying is that your audience may not be ready to have the conversation that social media enables. That's because social media does not just enable conversations. It enables PUBLIC conversations.
- If you blog, do you remember your first blog post? Did you feel awkward and silly for publishing your two cents where anyone could read it. Did it make you feel like a bit of an egomaniac?
- Have you posted a photo online and wondered what your boss, colleague, or significant other would think if they ran across it online?
Digital natives probably don't struggle with these issues the same way. They've grown up sharing and expressing themselves online. For the rest of us, and that's still most of your audience probably, the comfort to share your thoughts publicly doesn't always come naturally. Unless you like attention. And then you probably starred in your high school musical.
So along with figuring out how to implement the technology tools, you will need to figure out how to make your community comfortable sharing. You will need to help them know that their opinion counts, and that it's a valued part of the work you are doing.
Here are some of my tips for preparing your community to share:
- Demonstrate that it's ok. Find a few community members (not staff!) and ask them to participate in your conversation, and encourage others to do the same.
- Use social media like a normal human. You will be more successful at having a conversation if you don't participate as "THE ORGANIZATION." Empower your staff to participate as individuals, sharing the right mix of organization party line (Check out our new program!), as well as personal news (I got a new puppy!).
- Keep at it. Building a true, interactive community takes a lot of time, and it happens slowly. Keep plugging away at it, and be consistent in your attempts and it will start to pay off.
Where have you found success in engaging your audience in conversations through social media?
Beth - glad to hear that Alex covered these things. I'm a big fan of hers! And I agree, it does take time and patience, it won't happen overnight. But the place to start is by walking a mile in the shoes of your audience.
Building and sustaining a lively conversation takes time and it isn't just about your own blog posts or content or messaging. And, it is just commenting on other blogs, although that is important. A lot of techniques we learned about online conversation facilitation have their roots in online discussion communities over the past 10-15 years and a lot of those techniques work well on blogs. Alexandra Samuel did an excellent workshop on bringing your community life at NetSquared -- covered a lot of these points.
Ashley - I want to echo that Twitter really helped me in this regard too. When I finally got comfortable on Twitter, all this other stuff seemed completely normal. I have been following and using these tools for a very long time, but I'm just now getting comfortable in my own social media skin.
Johanna - I love your attitude here! Failing stinks, it never feels good. And while I would rather not fail, I would rather fail than not try at all. I think that's the spirit we all need when trying this stuff out!
Holly, you read my mind. We have some success encouraging interaction on the blog and our facebook group, but not as much as I would like. And part of the reluctance likely is the public aspect of social media. Nonprofit finance is not a topic that people usually want to gush about. However, we want to encourage transparency and openness on this topic. I think real conversations about financial management, and sharing of best practices, really benefits the whole nonprofit community.
As an aside, I agree with Jordan. Being an active commenter and online community member can be a lot of work. As a supposed "digital native" (and one who is truly jazzed by the possibilities of the web) I still struggle. Part of it is carving out the time, but for me, it's trying not to let the perfect get in the way of the good. Just pushing publish, send, etc and letting something fly, my inner perfectionist struggles. Maybe that is why I like twitter - it's helping break me out of that mold.
Ashley
PS. I am toying with creating a private, membership space - as a complement to our public web presence - for people to share lessons learned and build community around this topic. But I need to weigh whether or not this would actually diminish the reluctance to interact with the added time of another thing on my plate. So, we'll see.
When we started our blog, we had excellent tutelage from NTEN veterans and--in advance of each post--we lined up community members to comment who are particularly chatty in real-life meetings and who are comfortable online. That helped habituate our users and now people comment more frequently on their own, but the conversation is not voluminous and I know we are not reaching some people who might be wiling to share in another format.
We are about to experiment with a listserv for this reason. We know our constituents are most comfortable with email. We know some of the things they want to say might need to be a little less totally public. We will seed conversation at the beginning of the listserv experiment, like we did with the blog, and make one our most involved community members a moderator.
The bonus of having multiple channels of communication is that one can feed the other, and vice-versa, which I think NTEN does excellently with its blog and the NTEN-Discuss list.
Our new listserv might fail, and that's okay. And if it fails, we might try it or something similar again in the future.
I really like the addition in your post of openness and honesty. I really believe those are key also. It's a big part of building the trust that folks need to feel in order to engage.
It's tough! It's really difficult to remain focused on where your audience is at. I'm guilty of it all the time. I think we should all keep newbies in our pockets to act as our social media advisors, reminding us when we are drinking too much Kool-Aid.
Holly, your post is so dead on! Just today, I was talking to Tad, who always gives me a hard time about "living" on blogs, Twitter, FB, etc (it's my job, right?!), about how I have to remind myself to reach out to others online more often and work to be a part of ongoing conversations.
At the end of the day, it's just as important that I comment on blogs and reply to people's questions on social sites like Twitter, but I think we all find this hard to do. I'm not quite sure what the answer or strategy to maintaining both sides is, but I'm working hard to at least find some middle ground for myself :)
Was going to comment but decided it was worth a link and further comment on my blog - www.diaryofareluctantblogger.com.