Let’s do a hypothetical. You like western saddles. You search for them every day on Google. Google gives you relevant results from a) your Google Plus peeps and then b) the most relevant, most SEO’d results. Let’s assume that your peeps straddle the lines of friends, family and business contacts, so the results or likelihood that there will be content from these people about western saddles may be 50/50.
You continue to search for info about saddles. I am a marketer that sells cowboy hats or western hats. I know that if I use the term “western saddles” as a key word, page title, hyper link, hashtag, splog site or blog post in some social networks or platforms, the likelihood of you finding or landing on my pages might be pretty high. Why? Every link that you will find will ultimately take you to my western hat pages. I may or may not have much on saddles, but the bottm line is that I sell hats not saddles. Will you buy from my site? Maybe not. Of course I will or may affiliate links on my pages that will get you to a site that sells saddles but…the “quick” search has now turned into an hour’s worth of chasing the long tail of a bullshit game of bait and switch.
Is that a good user experience? No, but it’s the reality of search and social.
The more content that is created, the more that you have to choose from. The more that you have to choose from, the more of a chance that the content is watered down and possibly gamed. The more that search and social become intertwined, the more that you may become the victim of a bait and switch. Clicking on a link in the hopes that it is the right link-has become more precarious these days than it ever has.
The more that search and social lines become further blurred by the notion that content drives the machine, the more the user will get played. Pretty soon it won’t be social media any longer, it will be social mediocrity.
Why Should You Comment On A Blog Post?
Published February 3, 2012 blogging 4 CommentsTags: blog comments, blogs
I was reading an article today titled, Behind the Wheels: An all-too-real Cinderella story it had 12 comments. The piece was beautifully written and it was interesting to see what those 12 people had to say. Which got me to wondering:
How come useless throw away blog posts and articles have tons and tons of comments and the good stuff gets next to nothing?
Part of the question also emenated from this post, Why Your Networking Sucks — And the Secret to Doing it Right which had 30 comments, but also sucked people in, including me, because it held the promise of revealing a…secret.
I felt like a sucker. I knew that the post wouldn’t really reveal a secret that I had not read countless times before. So why did I click on it?
I have narrowed it down to these five things:
But the next component after you have read the post is, what do you do? Do you share it, save it, or comment? Why should you comment? Here’s a couple of ideas or thoughts.
Social media has changed the game for journalists, for newspapers, for magazines, for bloggers and readers. It’s created a two way mechanism to have a conversation. When you write a blog post or an article, do you write it for the purpose of being heard, to offer up your two cents, to share your perspective, or to have conversations, or for SEO purposes?
As a reader, should we all be obligated to comment on a blog post? What would our world be like if we all were required to provide an educated, thoughtful comment to anything we read? I know some of us barely have time to respond to emails let alone a blog post, but I take solace in the fact that we all now have the opportunity to be heard should we so choose. Though we have an obligation to comment thoughtfully, it just doesn’t happen that way. As a reader or “blog commenter”, have you ever thought about what you wanted the outcome of your comment to be? Think about that.
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