I’ve been diving deeper into social media and its use to make connections via email and also in real life. For example, I had a great lunch conversation with Alan Porter at Quadralay a few weeks back. We made the connection thanks to a comment conversation on Tom Johnson’s blog, I’d rather be writing. I had asked Alan how Quadralay responded to some constructive criticism about their product wiki, and he said he talked to the blogger at the next conference they both attended and had a really nice conversation, clearing up the confusion. That interpersonal approach works well because it forges the relationship rather than simply connecting blog posts. It’s using social media to make that next connection meaningful.
My next question was, why don’t you have a corporate blog where you could respond to the blogger via comment on the very blog post that could be interpreted as critical, therefore using the blog medium that the blogger was using? Then, when my search about WebWorks wiki came across this post, I could have had Quadralay’s response to read along with the post.
My theory is that the Adobe Technical Communication blog has been set up for this very purpose. In my opinion it’s an effective Public Relations move, because you are creating the record that you want to be available for years to come when the search term is found again. But I’m sure Adobe’s team has to prove that the time spent blogging and the money spent on the blog infrastructure and tools was money well spent.
Effectively, any blogger must prove that there would eventually be a return on that investment of time and money. I think that the return could occur months or years later when someone like me is researching their next toolset. It’s the influence that the bloggers can wield, which then translates to investment, which I discussed in my prevous post about the Reach and Influence of blogging.
Currently, I get paid with a pseudo-currency of community connections more than any actual currency payoff with my blog, and I like it that way. My blog is driving the boringness out.