Last week I read a post from Chris Brogan, one of Boston’s superstar social media mavens, declaring April 28th as “Read and Comment” day. This seems like a great idea, because so often it seems the we can get so wrapped up in creating social media, that we ironically forget to maintain the “social” aspect of it all.
Over the last month or so I’ve been getting more and more into the Twitter community which has introduced me to a dozen or so new blogs to read (this is, in fact, how I found Chris Brogan’s blog). Twitter has allowed me to be in touch with the authors, send them messages and praise, and ask and answer questions. Basically Twitter has enabled better social networking around the blogs that I enjoy.
Twitter has been helpful for me because I’ve recently realized that I’ve been becoming less social online. Allow me to explain: in a given day I read around 1,000 blog posts (let me sub explain: I’m a Social Media Consultant specializing in blog tracking building a social media monitoring tool) and as you can imagine, the only way to keep up with that volume is through a RSS reader.
I have a number of ways to follow my blog feeds, through the new tool we’re working on, and also for testing: Google Reader. I can go through a hundred posts in about ten minutes now, flagging things to read later, posts to share, posts for clients, posts for the office… and so on.
What I don’t do that much, is comment. If I’m reading everything within a feed reader, I usually don’t even see the comments. And I’ll only follow through to the comments if I want to see what others are saying. This is wrong.
Basically, RSS feeds have taken the social aspect away from blog reading. And now with other feed readers like FriendFeed, it’s easier than ever to just passively participate in social media. Which ironically removes the social aspect. Since converting almost entirely to RSS feeds for blog reading I have to assume that my comment volume has dropped so significantly.
My goal today is to work on fixing this. I’m going to Twitter more, mainly with replies. I’m going to comment more on other blogs. Heck, I might even write on someone’s Facebook wall. The point of social media is to be social. So today, branch out, and say hello. Become part of the community and engage in the conversation. Or you could always just pick up a newspaper and read it. I mean, I think they still make those…
And hopefully this goes without saying, but feel free to add to the conversation by commenting below.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I’ve started thinking of RSS as the early warning that gives me an idea where to drop in and participate in a community. What do you think of that?
April 28th, 2008 at 10:50 am
I think it’s a great idea and in theory is exactly what I try to do… in theory.
The problem is that in practice, I often either a) forget to go back or b) feel like I’ve missed the window (which isn’t true, but for some reason bugs me).
To be pretty honest- it was actually your idea of “read and comment” day that made me even realize how little commenting I even do these days.
So thanks for the kick- hopefully it’ll inspire me to be more social in my media.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
The problem for me is that I get completely overwhelmed….Google Reader is awesome until I haven’t visited it in 2 days and I’ve missed 8 million posts. I like the idea of using it as a filter to see if you actually want to participate in a community or not…that’s a good idea.
Probably need to be more selective in what I subscribe to too as well….there is just so much tempting stuff out there.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Agreed- it becomes overwhelming. Sometimes I stress about my reader getting over 1000- because then I don’t know how out of control it’s becoming…
That been said- I’m addicted to it. If I read anything I like- I’ll add the feed. All this has done for me though is teach me to skip through feeds really, really quickly. Which them seems counter intuitive.
I think I need to find a better balance between subscribing to a lot and reading tons but missing conversations - and missing reads but adding to conversations.