And also thanks to Haggiso (Colin Campbell), comes this: A Blog is Your Home. Twitter is Happy Hour. And How You Can Make Friends With Authors. | The Talent Buzz:
To build relationships online, you need a blog and you need a Twitter account.
A blog is like your home. It’s where you talk about things that interest you. It’s where people can learn more about you. And it’s how people keep up to date with what’s new in your life.
If your blog is home, Twitter is like happy hour. Imagine walking into a bar and seeing a room full of people. Everyone is standing in groups of three or four people, chatting back and forth. Now imagine that you have a remote control that can pause all of those conversations. That’s what Twitter does. Twitter allows you to dive in and out of each one of those small conversations. You can jump in, share your perspective, and build a relationship with someone new… all without going through that awkward process of introducing yourself.
Traditional social networks are for maintaining relationships. Blogs and Twitter are for building new ones.
But neither blogs nor Twitter can compare with the good old-fashioned discussion forum. The mailing list is like a dinner party. You can discuss anythinbg and everything with people around the world in Worldchat.
Worldchat is for general chat, but you'll find some other more specialised forums listed in the sidebar of this blog. Blogs are a one-to-many medium, but these are many-to-many.
4 comments:
To build relationships, you need a blog?
I've not got Twitter yet, but I must admit since I've gone on Facebook, I've noticed a curious blending world.
Time was when my blogging identity was something separate from my real life identity- quite deliberately so.
When I went on Facebook at first, it was simply for bloggers, but since then I've actually opened up my Facebook profile to real life people, as I guess was inevitable. Though of course, I have to be aware when adding people that adding them allows them to say both areas of my existence, so I'm still careful about who I add.
Conversations on Facebook, are, of their nature more bantering. Also there is the fact that people I refer to on my blog by pseudonyms are to be found on my Facebook page engaging in far less elevated topic than I would blog on. Adding bloggers mean that bloggers can see me and my mates winding eachother up over football scores, discussing music, planning parties, etc, etc.
Adding real life people means that they can then find my blog so I have to be careful there too- I'm happy to add EX girlfriends, but would never add a CURRENT one...:)
It has moved from being a fairly minor tool in my life to holding a far more pivotal role, because I now use it for generic announcements. It's the only place where my blogging identity and my real identity cross- or I permit to cross.
Several people have tried to persuade me to add Twitter to the mix, but I've not as yet checked it out. I may do yet.
James Highham,
No, you don't need a blog to build relationships, but it is one of the ways in which you can build relationships.
There are large numbers of people on Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog who have said they want to be my "friend". Now if they belong to those outfits, it would show up if they read my blog, but they quite clearly haven't.
If they not only read, but commented regularly, it would build some sort of relationship, though I would say it would be acquaintance rather than friend.
I do have online friends that I haven't met in the flesh, and we do read each other's blogs and comment on them, but we've also been exchanging e-mails for years, and discussing things in more interactive forums than blog comments.
But when people want to list me as a "friend" on the strength of nothing more than a profile, then I would say yes, to build relationships you need to read a person's blog rather than just their profile.
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