Building a community for your blog

Successful blogs are part of a community. They don't just repeat content from other websites but they are part of a collection of other sites that share interest in similar issues - although not necessarily similar views.

On a simple level, you can identify the community of a successful blog by looking at the sites that are listed in the blogroll - usually provided in the right hand panel of the homepage. However, the community is more than that - it's about an interaction in the content between different sites.

Take this example from Tory blogger Iain Dale. He has written about a story he discovered on Biased BBC. They may share a similar political belief (Tories traditionally dislike the Beeb) but they have a different focus in their writing.

Alternatively, Labour blogger Luke Akehurst republishes content from (unbiased) Guardian journalist Dave Hill but they share another similarity: they are both residents of Hackney.

It doesn't always work favourably though as I pointed out here, even a negative review can help your website's search engine profile!

So when you've setup your blog and you want to get readers, how do you start to build a community? Here are some starting points:

• your content - find out which other sites report your content
• your beliefs - which blogs share your beliefs or directly oppose them?
• your interests - which blogs are in your local community, get on the same train as you, read the same local newspaper as you, both hate/love marmite?
• degrees of separation - which other sites might interest your readers or who can you do a favour to by reviewing and linking to their site?
• things you support - use social networking sites or Twitter to find out where you share an interest with people. Do you like a band that shares a bill with another band? Think laterally.

Let me know any other great tips and I'll review your site and give you some extra publicity!

What I'm reading today

There's only one article I'm reading today, and I'm doing so ad nauseum:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tomfordyce/2008/12/the_downer_down_under.html

Dyson's - they're great when they break

I got a Dyson a couple of years ago. We needed a new vacuum cleaner, my wife was not thinking about the cost properly and I persuaded her to get a Dyson because they look cool and are as manly as you can hope for from a vacuum cleaner.

Recently, I wondered why we bothered. It stopped working after less than two years. That's when I realised how great Dyson's really are. Why? Because:

1. They come with a five year guarantee

2. The helpline is really well run, with long opening hours and staff who seem to know what they're talking about

3. The Dyson is so well designed with colour coordinated parts that you can take it apart yourself (with instruction from the aforementioned helpline) to find out what's wrong and fix it. It's so good that even the individual components have diagrams so you don't need to resort to an instruction manual.

Now I would always by a Dyson, not just because they're the Apples of their field but because they are so well built.

Protecting and promoting online reputations

Newscounter has just launched a Google group about to identify best practice and emerging themes for organisations and their staff charged with protecting and promoting online reputations.

Take a look and join in the debate.

Measuring Twitter impact

There's an interesting debate on measuring the impact of Twitter.

Our experience is that not many companies track their products on Twitter. There isn't currently the volume to justify it. However, there's a growing case for doing so because:
a) Twitter is an incredibly useful tool for SEO (see Newscounter's Twitter page.)
b) Opinion formers use Twitter
c) An increasing number of journalists use Twitter personally and for new content

See some of the discussion here.

Do you know anyone who uses Twitter to monitor their brand reputation?

Newscounter website problems

I don't like to over exaggerate but we've had a nightmare over the last month with our new website. We wanted to update it to better-reflect our core business. Things are developing so quickly that, inevitably, by the time we had the new site up and running, it needs further revision.

But our biggest problem was with hosting. I won't bore you with the intricacies, but the end result is that newscounter.com is no longer in the Google top 10 for Newscounter. A good thing, therefore, that no one searches for Newscounter! Anyway, we're now running from newscounter.co.uk which is a short term fix and - unfortunately - has far fewer links than newscounter.com so ranks lower in Google.

An important lesson for anyone developing a new website - get the hosting packages right before you change with the website content.

Citizen driven media complaints

A couple of months ago I was considering how you could open up the Press Complaints Commission. Two of the biggest problems with the PCC, as currently constructed are:

1. that it will only accept complaints from a very small number of people. The majority of complaints are stopped at source.
2. that mediated corrections (the majority solution) are rarely perceived to be commensurate with the original story

My solution was Digg meets Pledgebank meets the PCC. It goes as follows:

1. You join the citizen media complaints commission. You pay, say, £5 a month to join
2. Anyone can register a complaint with a piece of media coverage. The complainant makes their complaint and states how they want it to be addressed
3. Members of the commission vote as to the most deserving complaint.
4. The winning complaint gets all the money in the kitty to pay for publicity to rectify their complaint. This could be Google advertising, a billboard outside the newspapers, students paid to flyer journalists - whatever.

I've not been able to take this forward in 2008. So I'm asking for your help to finesse the idea, restructure it, mash it up - whatever. As long as you can commit some time to making something happen in this space in 2009.