If you build it, they may come, provided you are consistently compelling.

 

Hello, it’s me.  I’m a blogger. I’m just one person who creates the content for a corporate blog and sometimes my own as well.  Read me. Engage with me.  Comment please.  Because I am starting to wonder if you really exist.  By you, I mean the person who would engage with me and comment on my blog.  You see, I’m feeling a little like a Zen riddle.  No one is responding to my commentary on industry news, or my witty posts.  I write, religiously, day in, day out.  I post daily.  Religiously.  And yet the comments, they do not come.  If you write it they will come I thought.  Hello, it’s me.  Are you there?  

I just attended the PAN Marketing Round Table 2010 .  

The marketing roundtable featured Harvard Business Review editor Eric Hellweg moderating and four participants: Andre Pino, analyst at Forrester, Lynne Bohan, vp of marketing and government affairs at HP Hood, Evan Falchuk, President & COO of Best Doctors, and John Dragoon, VP of marketing at Novell.  The discussion focused on social media, content creation and covered a span of topics related.   

One thing that resonated over and over again: social media is not “magical.”  Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.   

This is especially true when it comes to corporate blogs.  The truth is, many corporate blogs toil in obscurity. And then there are those blogs that we all want to be, at least when it comes to number of readers.  The  Seth Godins,  Guy Kawasakis, or the alpha-blog in your industry.   We all want to be those blogs.  We all want engagement, two-way discussions. It lets us know that we are alive, followed, loved.  

So what makes the commenters comment, the engagers engage, and the followers follow?  Turns out it’s something that’s been around since the written word: compelling content. The alpha-bloggers are the top bloggers because they persevere and write consistently compelling content that people wanted to read about.  Alpha-bloggers are thought provoking, substantive, and almost require people to engage with them. And they frame it well.  They are not just slapping up content–instead they are expressing their opinion, their spin, their “take” on that content. And they do it again, and again.  It ain’t easy  or ”magical.”  It’s hard work!  

And mea culpa by the way. The blogs I’ve started and abandoned could fill an orphanage. But take heart–there’s Twitter. And I am running out of things to say…find me on Twitter where my taxed imagination has more liberty to roam.