I had an interesting experience last night where I almost left a blog comment (but didn’t). Here’s a short video I made to discuss what happened… I’d love to hear your reactions or thoughts if you’ve had a similar situation:
What do you think?
Social media can be all about networking and building relationships with others in your field. Through blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and other online resources I have “met” and developed relationships with dozens if not hundreds of photographers and other professionals. One of the best ways to build these relationships over time is also one of the easiest: leave comments on blogs.
Let’s quickly talk about the mechanics of leaving a comment. Leave your name, your email address, and (assuming you have a website), your website or blog’s URL. When it asks for your name, leave your actual name. Your name is not “Boston Wedding Photographer” or “Cheap Event Photography” or “Seattle Senior Pictures.” Some less-than-helpful SEO guys will try to convince you otherwise, but at this stage in the evolution of the web, trying to stuff keywords into blog comments is just spammy.
A good blog comment will (hopefully) provide value to both the person leaving the comment as well as the blog on which the comment is left. If you’re the one leaving the comment, you’re injecting yourself onto the radar of the blogger. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my posts, I make sure to read it thoroughly and (if the commenter left a URL) check out the person’s website. If their website is interesting, I’m going to bookmark it or subscribe to the RSS feed. In short: if you leave a comment on one of my blogs, there’s a good chance I’m going to become a regular reader of your blog.
Over time, as one leaves comments multiple times on the same blog, you’ll start to be a known quantity to the blogger. Bloggers remember the people that leave meaningful comments on their blogs. Blog comments are a great way to do some virtual networking and build up relationships with peers, vendors, and other voices.
Do you leave blog comments as often as you’d like?
Photo by Barsch28, used under Creative Commons licensing
I mentioned blogs and comments when I talked about social media being about conversation but I wanted to expand on that thought. Your blog needs to have the comment feature enabled. It’s one of the things that differentiates a blog from a traditional one-way press release.
If you’re blogging about your services or a new package you’re offering, why not give readers a chance to say what they like (or don’t like) about the offering. If you’re posting some examples of your work, let folks leave a few thoughts… those comments will almost always say positive things about your photos. If your blog is aimed more towards other photographers, you’ll be talking about techniques or gear or some industry news; why not let your peers chime in with their thoughts?
You might be thinking But what if someone disagrees or wants to argue?. Let them. Opposing viewpoints won’t hurt. You might learn something from what the commenter is saying, or it might give you a chance to respond and clarify your statement.
The power in social media is the ability to have two-way conversation. Blog comments enable this conversation.
If you’re out there reading a variety of photo blogs, business blogs, or even blogging blogs, odds are that you’ve learned something useful from someone. Today I have a simple assignment: leave a comment on a blog post (or a few) that have taught you something. Let the author know specifically what you learned or what you liked abou the post. And in order to spread the love… leave those comments somewhere other than this site.
And…. go!
Photo by aloshbennett, used under Creative Commons licensing
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One of the cornerstones of my definition of what is social media is that social media features conversation – two-way interaction instead of traditional marketing which often consists of a one-way broadcast. There’s a certain type of social media user that really wants to keep things one-way… I refer to that as antisocial media. Here are some specific examples as photographers:
Blogs Without Comments
Comments are the usual method of enabling the “social” side of blogging, although there are a (small) number of bloggers that feel they don’t want feedback via comments. In the marketing world there’s Seth Godin, and in the photography world we have Scott Bourne at Photofocus. Even though these folks have some good ideas, they’re missing out on the opportunity to participate in a conversation. Yes, there are a variety of reasons why comments can occasionally become a burden (trolls, spam, etc) but modern blog systems contain anti-spam measures and the issue of how to deal with trolls is one which has been discussed to death.
Twitter Without Conversation
Yesterday I linked to an article talking about four styles of marketing on Twitter. Coincidentally, a couple days ago Nicole Young posted Ten Twitter Tips for Photographers. I disagree with her on this one:
4. Minimize your personal conversations. If all I see are random conversations between you and another person (or several for that matter) then it’s the same as being in an elevator listening to another person’s conversation when I have no idea what’s going on. Usually the “ignore” flag goes up and I move on. Replying to people is awesome, but when it goes on-and-on then your tweets are viewed as “diluted”. You want to try and maintain at least a 80/20 ratio … for every ten tweets you do try to keep about eight of them relevant to photography.
I’m in the opposite camp… if someone isn’t having conversations, I won’t follow them. I don’t want to hear someone only talking about themselves and ignoring feedback. Even if it looks like someone is having tons of conversations, you won’t see all of them. Twitter only shows @replies when you follow both parties in the conversation. If you’re following me, and send an @reply to someone that you’re not following, you won’t see that reply. The rest of Nicole’s tips are pretty good, but I think that discouraging conversation is the wrong way to go.
Are you using social media tools as mechanisms for conversation? Or are you perhaps being a bit antisocial in your usage?
Photo by Katie Tegtmeyer, used under Creative Commons licensing
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