How and When to Respond to Conversations – Managing Your Own Virtual Water Cooler
Over at Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel has been sharing today an interesting weblog post that I thought would be worth while commenting on as well. In How and When to Respond to Conversations he is actually wondering “whether companies needed to address every single comment/question that comes in on their blogs” or not.
I generally tend to agree with the comments mentioned by Steve and others, but I would go and take things even a bit further. As I have mentioned already elsewhere, I have always been saying that weblogging is all about having conversations with other people and as such I have always felt that weblogging is like having your own virtual water cooler where you invite people to participate in different discussions with you on a specific set of topics.
And like in every water cooler whenever you have got few people, therefore few weblog comments, you always have a tendency to engage with them all in the subsequent conversations. Thus in weblogging the same thing would apply. The complicated thing though would be when you have got far too many people talking at the same time over at the water cooler. Normally, you will have the tendency of summarising the different thoughts and add your own to the overall topic of discussion or, on the other hand, you will just pick up a subset of the conversations taking place and engage further with those knowing that everyone else would do the same thing, surely you know that at the same time your conversations are taking place so are others with other participants and therefore everyone is engaged into the discussion(s). No one is left behind.
That multiple level of interactions is in the end what will make the conversations ever so much more enlightening and richful and as such, before you would realise about it, you would be fostering the creation of multiple groups or networks within your own weblog or the (virtual) water cooler that would be able to carry on further the conversations while you may be busy preparing the next set of interactions. At least, that is one of the things that I have been experiencing myself over the last couple of years that I have been weblogging both on the Internet and the Intranet and how I take every single comment that goes into each of the different weblogs that I manage. And so far it seems to be working.
But how about you ? Are you one of those who prefer to manage your virtual water cooler and engage with it as much as you can or rather you prefer to let it go and allow others manage those comments for you ? Is it always good to try to be in control ? It is worth it ?
[tags]Metablogging, Virtual+Water+Cooler, Conversations[/tags]
[...] Over at Knowledge Jolt Jack Vinson created yesterday a very interesting weblog post coming from a trackback from Amy Graham’s weblog post on 10 Reasons Why Blogs Are an Awkward Conversation Tool. His weblog post is titled Blogs as conversation and I have certainly enjoyed the conversations so far from both weblog articles. I must say that there are a couple of comments that I just couldn’t help but agreeing a great deal with Jack on how I view myself weblogging out there in the Blogosphere. In a previous weblog post I mentioned how in most cases I view weblogging as a conversation with others pretty much like you would normally have conversations while hanging out at the water cooler or with your friends, but in this case it will be a virtual water cooler. That is why his comments on “my blogging serves to add my voice to a larger conversation around topics of interest to me” and “blogging has been a source of a growing personal network of people who are similarly interested in the topics I follow” are spot on for me, too ! That is exactly how I view weblogging; as a powerful method to channel through my voice on topics for which I have got a passion and also as a way to try to help nurture my virtual network of connections from all over the place. Trying to do that with regular conversations would be a no go. At least, for my case. [...]