Blog Building: Our Social Media and Networking Tactics

Posted At : August 21, 2008 3:21 PM | Posted By : Matt
Related Categories: JJHill Library, Blog Building

As a follow-up to Allen's recent run-down of our blog building experiment I wanted to drop a few quick notes about some of the specific social media tools we used, and talk a bit about some of the online networking tactics we employed. We are – as is readily apparent – novices in this field, so if this report doesn’t convince you to replicate our tactics directly, perhaps it’ll inspire you to go further with this than we have.

In any event, here’s what happened with social media and online networking…

First, the bad – but perhaps unsurprising – news. Our social media strategy wasn’t a huge windfall. Both Delicious and StumbleUpon were fine. I liked using our Delicious account to keep track of Web sites, and will continue to use it for that. And, according to our Web tracking software it also drove a smallish amount of traffic to the blog (581 visitors in H1 2008).

StumbleUpon (our account) is a cool tool for whiling away some time browsing through random sites in a particular topic area – and is a completely different and interesting way of searching the Internet. It also drove some good blog traffic (1,596 visitors in H1).

Sphinn and Small Business Brief, though, were a disappointment. They aren’t particularly open to new users, they can be difficult to navigate, and I think the content is only so-so. I found myself thinking about changing how I post – making Top Ten lists, being confrontational (gasp) – in order to succeed on these sites. It doesn’t make any sense to misrepresent our blog just to draw one-time traffic, though. I’d much rather we continue to post in the way that’s gotten us our current readership, rather than potentially alienating that fine readership with a disingenuous “Top Ten Ways the Internet can Make You Younger, Get you a Free Ipod and Earn Your Business an Extra $10,000 Per Week.” As you may be picking up, I feel cantankerous about these two sites.

Note: I should add a caveat. I would never dissuade someone from trying something new, so please, if you feel the urge, try Sphinn and Small Business Brief for yourself. They might work better for a different type of blog or business than we have.

Another of our stated tactics was to participate on other bloggers’ blogs, in the hope of drawing their attention, building relationships, and having that somehow feed into increasing our readership numbers. I set up a separate feed in my RSS reader for the blogs we identified, organized them fastidiously, and read them religiously, but I haven’t invested much in actually interacting on those sites. It’s probably my retiring nature (I’m a librarian from the Midwest after all), but this type of interaction feels too daunting.

A strategy that feels a little more natural to me, and still involves participating with other bloggers, is social networking. As a bit of an afterthought to this blog building plan, we set up a Twitter and FriendFeed account. I wrote up a note last month about how exciting these sites are, and I’m still excited by them. Addicted might be a better word. I think they’re a great way to interact with colleagues and influentials in an industry without coming off as pandering (at least that is my hope). While I’m not exactly sure how much Twitter and FriendFeed have boosted our actual blog readership, I’m positive they’ve increased our online presence.

All in all:

I’d recommend Delicious, first for personal organization and second for outreach.
I’d recommend StumbleUpon for both browsing the Internet and moderate outreach.
Sphinn and Small Business Brief were a waste of time.
Blog commenting (with a motive) might work for some bloggers or industries. It felt unholy and daunting to me.
We’ve had some early luck with social networking sites like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Thanks for sticking with us as we wade through these experiments. And thanks, as always, for reading!