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Creating Community Through Blog Conversations

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Purple pink Community puzzle“You create community by having conversations with people who are excited about the same thing as you are,” says Elizabeth Gerber, associate professor of design at Northwestern University.  Gerber is one of many scholars exploring what really compels people to give to other people online through crowdfunding. As much as crowdfunding is a modern economic phenomenon, writes Elizabeth Kelsay in Psychology Today, it’s also a social and psychological one, fueled by fundamental human impulses.

As business blog content writers, we have reason, I think, to be intensely interested in this research on the crowdfunding phenomenon. Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, believes the secret is that giving online appeals to the essential need to feel like part of a group.

Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School studied nearly 7,000 articles in The New York Times to determine what was special about those on the most-emailed list. He found that an article was more likely to become viral the more positive it was. When we share information, we create an energy exchange, Berger says, that amplifies our own pleasure.

Kevan Lee of bufferapp.com says we measure blog traffic by digging into analytics, but don’t pay enough attention to the immeasurable elements of blogging which cannot be quantified. Instead of tracking how many “views”, “likes”, and “clicks”, Lee says, we should be asking whether the content:

  • is so good you’d bring a coworker over to see it
  • you’d email it to a friend
  • the reader will learn something new

“The only people in a community are those that believe they are, not those that have a completed a registration in 30 seconds,” observes Richard Millington in MOZ. Increasing a sense of community means adding an explicit, shared goal to the group. Increasing a sense of community means asking individuals what skills and experiences they can contribute to the group, Milligan says.

How is that best done? Ask a question for your readers at the end of posts, suggests blogger Melyssa Griffin. Add a poll or reader survey and share the responses, she says.

In a way, as bloggers, we start out ahead of the game; the readers who found their way to our blog are, by definition, excited about the same thing as we are.  Now it’s up to us to foster that sense of community.

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Not-So-Palatable Blog Topics

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non-palatable
“Fury or eternal apathy. These are the two feelings you’ll evoke from your reader if you dare dip your foot on these not-so-palatable topics,” writes Eunice David of Adhere. And what are those terrible taboo topics when it comes to blog content writing for business?

  • political topics
  • religious talk
  • highly contentious topics
  • redundant topics
  • capitalizing on tragic events
  • self-promotional posts

Let’s talk a bit about that political topic taboo thing. “Choosing a politically charged topic for your business blog pretty much equates to planting a virtual time bomb,” says David. “Your business blog would be a sitting duck for pundits who won’t hesitate to fire back and dent your credibility.” But taking a stance, I’ve found, is what gives a blog post some “zip”. And after all, doesn’t being a thought leader involve stating your own thoughts on the matter under discussion?

Sure it does. Whether it’s business-to-business or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use owners’ opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. But where politics is not directly related to the business or practice, I agree that it’s best not to dip your foot – or your content – into the political arena.

In essence, the same guideline applies when it comes to religion. Assuming your target audience is not a particular religious community, nor is the product or service you’re marketing to them religious in nature, it’s best to stay focused on the topic at hand.

In terms of capitalizing on tragic events, AT&T’s attempt to capitalize on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (encouraging social media audiences to take pictures on their phones of the scarred New York city skyline) turned out to be a disaster, points out mic.com. “There is no useful connection between remembering a tragedy and shilling their product.”

Ford did a better job using a tragedy, mic.com adds, by posting a respectful thank you to the first responders of the Boston Bombing, without mentioning any Ford products.

Blatant self-promotion doesn’t work any better for blogs than it would at a party. Blogs are advertorials, if anything, and that means finding the right balance between story and sale. Sure, when people go online to search for information and click on different blogs or on different websites, they’re aware of the fact that the providers of the information are out to do business.  But as long as the material is valuable and relevant for the searchers, they’re perfectly fine with knowing there’s someone who wants them for a client or customer.  The secret of successful business blogging, I found, is just that – not coming on too strong, staying in “softly, softly” mode.

Since, in writing business blog content, you’re out to elicit neither fury nor apathy, a healthy respect for the negative power of non-palatable topics is in order.

 

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Using Your Business Blog to Stop the Salience Effect

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book-the-art-of-thinking-clearly

 

Often, eye-catching details have the power to render us blind, which is how author Rolf Dobelli, in his book The Art of Thinking Clearly, explains the salience effect. Dobelli’s entire book is devoted to cognitive biases, simple errors we all make in our day-to-day thinking, and the author’s hope is that by knowing what those are and how to spot them, we can make better decisions.

As blog content writers, of course, we’re in the business of helping people make decisions, hopefully decisions that will turn out to be good for them as well as good business for the business owners and professional practitioners who are offering products and services for sale.

One phenomenon that Dobelli “spends ink” explaining is the salience effect. What is salience? “A prominent feature, a stand-out attribute, a particularity, something that catches your eye“. The salience effect describes the fact that outstanding features receive more attention than they deserve, it influences the way people interpret the past and imagine the future.

Say a book with an unusual fire-engine red jacket makes  the best seller list.  It’s easy to attribute the success of the book to its cover, but you might be very wrong. If two men rob a bank happen to be immigrants, we fall into the trap of concluding that immigrants are responsible for the majority of bank robberies.

Myth-busting is a tactic blog content writers can use to grab online visitors’ attention.  I explain to newbie content writers in Indianapolis that citing statistics to disprove popular myths gives business owners the chance to showcase their own knowledge and expertise.

One caution is in order: since one of the purposes of any marketing blog is to attract potential customers, it would be a tactical mistake for freelance blog writers to imply they’re out to prove online visitors mistaken, unwitting victims of the salience effect.  Business owners can use corporate blog writing as a way to dispense information and address misinformation.

Using your business blog to stop the salience effect shows clear thinking!

 

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Motivating Others Through Our Blogs

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“Motivating others requires a connection to people’s deep desires. It’s not just about loading them up with a lot of how-to information,” write Steve Chandler and Scott Richardson in 100 Ways to Motivate Others.

Since as blog content writers, we’re trying to motivate readers to take action, what lessons can we learn from this book of 100 ways? I’ll choose just a few pointers offered by the authors that I found most relevant:

1.  “You can’t motivate someone who can’t hear you….In order for someone to hear you, she must first be heard…Tune in before you turn on.”
I remember, years ago, listening to a speech by radio host Michael Medved in which he told us that we need to listen to our clients with “three ears”.  That’s because we need to hear what they say, hear what they’re not saying, and even discern what they don’t even know how to say!

If we as blog writers can go right to the heart of any possible customer fears or concerns (which we’ve learned through deep research into our target market!) we have the potential to breed understanding and trust.

 

2   Stop criticizing upper management. “Maybe you do this to win favor and create bonding at the victim level, but it won’t work…The word ‘they’ solidifies the impression that we are isolated, misunderstood, victims.”
The authors are talking about managing employees, but the same lesson can be applied to the attitudes we convey about our competitors. Other providers are viable alternatives for our customers, and readers don’t like to be “made wrong” for checking out what our competition has to offer.

Although one approach in a business blog is comparing your products and services to others’ it’s important to emphasize the positive rather than “knocking” a competitor.  That means that, rather than starting with what the competition is doing “wrong”, use the power of “We” to demonstrate what YOU value and the way YOU like to deliver your products and services.

 

3.  “ Do the one thing… The truth is, there is only one thing to do, and that is the one thing I have chosen to do right now. If I do that one think as if it’s all I have to think about, it will be extremely well done.”
In blogging, doing the one thing takes the form of what I call “the Power of One“ –  addressing, in each blog post, one message, to one audience, targeting one outcome.

It’s here that blog posts have a distinct advantage over the more static website copy.  Each post can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business.  The more focused out efforts are on connecting with a narrowly defined target audience, the more successful the blog will be in converting prospects to clients and customers.

There are, no doubt, at least 97 other ways to motivate readers through our blogs, but these three make for a good start!

 

 

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Bloggers and Travel Agents Bring Clarity and Curation

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Passports to world travel

“What stresses people today,” explains Matthew Upchurch, CEO of the Virtuoso luxury travel network, “isn’t the lack of information. It’s not knowing if they are asking the right questions….People don’t go to advisers for information anymore,” Upchurch adds. “They go for clarity and curation; they need someone to distill the abundance of information available to them.”

Upchurch may well have been speaking about all internet search activity, not only about travel, I couldn’t help thinking. After all, we business bloggers serve, in a very real way, as interpreters and consolidators, and curators. For that reason, I teach, effective blog posts are less information-dispensing than they are perspective-gaining tools for readers to use. You might refer to our work as offering new understandings about things readers already know.

Travelers, writes Jill Schensel in the Indianapolis Star, were “drowning in TMI (too much information.”. The life rafts for an increasing number of those travelers is once again becoming a “friendly, flesh-and-blood travel agent”.

Again, there’s a strong parallel here with blogs, which offer business owners and professional practitioners the chance to inject their own special personalities into each piece of content. One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we translate clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, that’s the reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

I like to compare the interaction between blog writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews.  These don’t focus on facts, but attempt to reveal the way the prospective employee functions, discovering the person behind the resume. Just as employers want to know how reliable you’ve been in the past, your blog posts need to include stories about how you solved client problems, and what lessons you’ve learned through your experiences that you’ll be applying in your dealings with them should they choose to become your customers.

Just as Upchurch described Millenials’ renewed use of travel agents to help guide their purchases, people don’t go to websites purely for information anymore; they go for clarity and curation, and for a human touch!

 

 

 

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