Marketing, Community Building and Other reasons to Blog

On the back of recent posts from John Wagner and Lee Hopkins I thought it would be prudent to again write a little about why I blog.

I look back to my previous posts Blogging Case Study & Unrealised Milestones for the answers I have given before.

I will continue to blog as it is a nice, simple way to figure out who I am and where I am going. For that part, I am one of the eventual billion diarists ‘diaring’.

Diary style weblogs I find are the quickest to die, the easiest to lose interest in. Those that type their posts just to record their thoughts will more often than not lose interest. As a self-improvement junkie, I see blog writing as a tool to evaluate me and my future self.

Lee offers this thought:

So then why blog? I see two purposes:

• one as a marketing channel for a product, service or ourselves (reflecting the Brand You concept of Tom Peters et al);
• the other as a tool for community building.

For those that do not host a website it may be purely to build a web presence, to feel validated. As I have said before, I do not believe in anonymity on the internet.

Before I have accepted that people may just like floating in the ether as it were, commenting wherever they come across but not holding a place of their own. However, recent events have prompted me to turn off anonymous commenting to this blog because the people that like to do this tend more often than not to be trolls.

Marketing sounds so deliberate. For better or worse, if you are going to identify yourself on the web then the possibility exists for your present or future employer to read the material. So if you are not marketing yourself you are either missing an opportunity or potentially putting yourself in a spot of danger.

So if you name yourself and narrow down a location, you are marketing yourself, by intention or otherwise, whether you like it or not.

Community building, one of my favourite reasons for blogging. The magic number being banded about on the internet is 150. This is the maximum number of people a normal human can establish a proper relationship with. For the internet, the number is 150 and the relationships may be one-way or two-way.

Back in the olden days, this number would be 151. A community, isolated by geography, where each individual has a relationship with 150 people and each one is reciprocated.

So here I am, offering my voice in my community which I built, because on the net you do not fall into a community the same way as you would in your geographical location, you have to build your own.

Technorati Tag = Marketing Community Building