Commenting is Dead. Long Live Commenting!
Is commenting dead? Or is it more alive than ever before? No and Yes. And Yes.
Here are some thoughts on why.
DARN IT, I JUST STARTED BLOGGING AND NOW YOU…
Just when Corporate America was catching up on blogging and other social media, Twitter and FriendFeed swoosh out of the blue, grab comments out of blogs and sprinkle them all over the interwebs.
Comment fragmentation, as it is called, has a lot of people talking on blogs and Twitter and FriendFeed. The fear is that commenting on blogs is dead or at least 2/3 dead.
Is this true? Are comments really dead or dying?
POPULATION BOTTLENECK
The rumor of the death of the blog comment may have been over-exaggerated, but there’s actually a poignant truth to it. Evolution via natural selection suggests that change is almost always inevitable.
Rather than the extinction of an entire means of dialogue, mutations are spawning new species of commenting tools (think FriendFeed). As these tools proliferate across the interwebs, comment fragmentation becomes increasingly more common in spite of tools to fold them back into original blogs.
As comment fragmentation grows, a critical mass of comment fragmentation builds (see the red line pictured above). This critical mass creates a bottleneck in the flow of information across the web which traditional blog commenting may eventually face.
Think of a population bottleneck as a horizontal version of Seth Godin’s Dip, except a lot crueler. Population size is the number of traditional blog comments, assuming services like FriendFeed do what Robert Scoble expects them to do in the coming years or even months.
The Recovery line would be the new species of commenting that will evolve over time. Extinction is possible, of course, but not inevitable. There are tons of businesses on the web which have yet to adopt blogging. And when they do, blog comments won’t necessarily be their primary purpose of the blog. Rather original content would be.
I believe that these bottlenecks will not extinct comments per se, but they will help to evolve new forms. In fact, that’s just what population bottlenecks can do: they help spur novel changes that lead to new ways of doing things.
SURVIVAL OF THE REMARKABLIST
Remarking will become an almost standard feature of future web-based socializing (personal and professional). Those vectors of remarking which are easiest to use and to help spread messages, will be the ones increasingly adopted.
Right now FriendFeed, Twitter, Disqus, ping.fm, etc. don’t hold a substantial share of the interwebs. But eventually, such services will go mainstream. When that critical mass hits, traditional commenting will likely reach its bottleneck.
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF COMMENTING
So I don’t think this a time to mourn the death of comments. Rather there’s a rebirth of the original spirit of blogging which is now taking place. That spirit was in part was to establish a place on the web to have a *conversation*.
Blogging also evolved into a sort of financial instrument. That also will see change. Comment fragmentation will have positive and negative financial impacts on many blogs.
Yes, as services like FriendFeed and its ilk evolve and grow in web presence, the traditional dynamic of leaving comments on a blog’s post will likely erode. Bloggers will still be a vast source of content, but the comment-genie is now out of the blog.
Even with WordPress plugins and other tools to loop web-wide comments back into posts comments are now going to be everywhere.
Commenting is an important link between people online. There’s tons of revenue in comments. Tons. You can strip-mine them of course and hope that you have control over the selective pressures of the web. Or you can accept the fact that our world is now getting asymptotically closer to a perfect word-of-mouth paradigm of information flow.
If the brains over at FriendFeed are smart (and I think they are), they will launch an algorithmic revenue-sensing model that will tap into the commenting–not exactly in the way AdSense works, but by exploiting all of the social data being generated between and among people.
COMMENTING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE COMMENTING!
If you’re worried about the evaporation of comments on your blog, remember: your commentary is now being published without much effort on your part. If you play it right and get involved in the new ways of communicating then you just might figure out a way to make good returns from those small efforts.
So keep talking. Keep blogging. Keep commenting. Commenting is content and content is still king. It always will be.
Commenting is dead. Long live commenting!
Image source: Wikipedia, markup via Skitch
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Bloggers Wanted: Why You Should Volunteer for a Hospital Blog
Of the billions of bloggers out there (albeit most with an average readership of 1), how many talented ones would be willing to volunteer their time to help out a community hospital with its blogging?
As I’ve discussed in the last post, hospital blogging can be a costly project. The opportunity costs of blogging can be huge (time spent on research or improving operations). But: the opportunity costs of not blogging can be even bigger (not showing off your knowledge base and expertise or establishing community trust and authority).
So to help the community of hospitals (large and small), one possible route is to solicit help from the community of bloggers. The blogosphere a disparate and often talented community. It includes soccer moms, engineers, web designers, doctors, politicians, forest rangers, comics, and a whole assortment of other resourceful individuals. Many of them also have other skills pertinent to business and process management.
I’m willing to bet that there are plenty of bloggers (some amateur, others experienced pros) who would be delighted to offer their services to community hospitals. There’s really no University of Blogging per se. And no one company that stands out to fill the role of uber-consultant. So hospitals interested in looking into blogging or other Web 2.0 projects could reap handsome rewards by reaching out to the blogging community.
Why would bloggers volunteer their time, even it would be for an hour per week? Here are some off-the-cuff benefits to volunteer hospital-blogging:
1. Boost traffic (slightly) to their own site (as appropriate)
2. Help enhance their reputation and authority
3. Develop another blogging “voice”
4. Build their brand (or resume if that’s what they want)
5. Expand their horizons
6. Offer a chance to become evangelists for healthcare technology on the web
7. Enhance their value to other bloggers
8. Network with other bloggers
9. Change the mix of their daily grind
10. Gain a sense of participating in a noble cause.
I hear people laugh and offer a lot of (understandable) sarcasm at the idea of bringing blogging and other social media to hospitals. That’s fine with me. As long as they have ideas for improving healthcare. And understand what it is that I’m driving at.
Cynicism is not skepticism.
Cynics put down the truth. Skeptics lift it up.
For you folks who find it a nutty proposition, please argue with any of the ten items I listed above. If you reject them all, would you just do me a favor and offer your own lists for improving healthcare. People are suffering. They could use your help. You’re brighter than me, so radiate your brilliance!
For those of you who believe in the values of hospital blogging let me know why you think volunteer blogging makes sense. Do you think it’s a realistic proposition?
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Are We Generalists, Specialists or Speneralists?
I’m a speneralist, aren’t I? And you: aren’t you as well? I don’t know if that’s a good or bad characteristic these days. Maybe you can help me decide (because you need to know too). Let me explain.
Photo: Tidewater Muse’s photostream
A Brief History of Our Species
A long time ago, most people were generalists. They knew how to hunt animals and cultivate the best plants, made living quarters out of mud, and maybe even painted on cave walls in their spare time or uttered poetic stories at night. They specialized of course, but in order to survive they had to be generalists. They had to know it all and do everything. Or die.
Then these generalists got better at refining their civilizations. Their economies sprouted up and out. They invented new gadgets, like printing presses and steam engines and assembly lines. To be good at something, these people had to become specialists. They had to specialize in printing books or navigating ships or installing gear shafts. Poets started to get paid less. Painters starved. And our modern world arrived like a thief in the night.
Our World Soul Got Owned
And this modern world brought forth more gadgets and grew things like computers and transmission protocols and weblogs and AdSense. Specialization became a specialization onto itself. And the unconscious manifestation of all this specialization was the invention in 1968 of the cubicle with its eventual domination of our Anima mundi (world soul).
We’re all now plugged in. Soon we will be enmeshed. Information is flowing so fast at us now, that we can’t depend on others to do specialized things like journalistic investigation. We have to specialize a bit in journalism and skepticism ourselves if we are not to be fooled again and again. We have to write our own blogs and tweak our CSS or compose our own slide shows for those special presentations. We are able to specialize in many things in order to accomplish our specialized tasks. But wait: doesn’t that make us generalists? What, exactly, is going on here?
Outsourcing Your Marketing Department to Your Customers
On one hand, in order to thrive in the economy of the 21st Century you must specialize, you must be better than best: you must be so damn good that your customers become your marketing department. Being a know-it-all doesn’t cut it. And yet you leave out so much of the life radiating around you when the very focus onto your specialty is laser-guided. You’re stuck in a trap my friend, or fast approaching one.
So, again, the question: we’re Speneralists, arent’ we? Isn’t that what you call a stressed out, Moore’s-Law-spaghettied group of human beings tweaked between the need for specialty and the widsom of generality?
Those two animals up there in the picture. What are they? Well, they’re both mammals. Is the dolphin the specialist whose evolved refinements enable her to sleekly fly in and out of ocean waves? Is the cow a generalist who learned to specialize in acquatic miracles and really good Photoshop? Or is she a speneralist? Evolution is a snappy bitch, ain’t it?
Long You Live and High You Fly
That cow. That cow is what we are beginning to look like I think, dear friends. A swimming cow that leaps over turbulent green. But should she be doing that? Is it cool? Or is it utterly nuts?
So, what do you think that you (or the company you work slave for) is? A generalist? A specialist? Or a speneralist ready for anything under the sun?
The dusk is coming. Will your personal or corporate philosophy open its wings, or fold?
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Blog ROI: It’s About Value, Stupid!
Simple question: why would a hospital have a blog? Or use Twitter? Or maybe even FriendFeed? Simple answer: value.
A hospital aught to be one of the most valued kinds of facilities in our communities. Every effort aught to be encouraged for such organizations to optimally utilize those resources which can improve the delivery of care, expand an organization’s presence, and even generate positive returns from the investments in those resources.
But not every organization blogs. Not every one needs to. Why? Because the theme of returns and cost efficiency have been propounded so heavily into our heads that we overlook the obvious. We need to kick ourselves and say: It’s about value, stupid.
Hats off to ROI Harper and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
Before addressing the specifics of hosptial blogging we aught to dip into some accouting theory, finance and arithmetic.
Organizations benefit greatly anytime they can create interactive means for people to find, experience and share value. A company’s Return on Invesment (ROI) is a simple quantitative method to express the expected gain from a deployed asset. But often, analysts focus so much on the number that they forget the value that drives it from the start.
Investing in social media is an investment in an intangible asset. Intangible assets generate both tangible and intangible losses and/or returns. Tangible assets include hospital beds, ventilators, infusion pumps, buildings, operating rooms, etc. Accounting theory offers ingenious methods for quantifying these assets in order to provide valuable information to investors and other stakeholders to make the soundest decisions about their resources.
Intangible assets include competent nursing care, physician experience, goodwill, communication styles, etc. They also include blogs and other social media that are currently evolving. Accounting theory has yet to work out how to measure a blog’s asset valuation (it could use a market costing methodology perhaps).
But the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) hasn’t yet seemed to issue a promulgation on the matter. If you’re a CEO, CFO, CIO or CAO of a publicly traded company maybe you can get a conversation going with the SEC or FASB (who knows, you might be able to get some tax deduction rules going: hint, hint).
Until someone establishes a standard measure of Blog ROI, I think it’s helpful to focus our lens on a fundamental question:
What information is needed to decide whether a blog is worth its cost?
There’s probably a complicated anwer to that question, one which depends on the economics of your particular organization. In its place, I’d like to offer up three simple intution pumps:
- Value drives ROI
- Price is a function of Value
- Value-Multiplied is replacing Value-Added
Value Drives ROI
ROI is just a noun. A number. A goal. It’s important.
Value is a verb. A movement. An infection. It’s essential.
If you want to generate positive ROI, you will have to create the setting through which customers (who these days aught to be called citizens) feel the value they seek (consciously or unconsciously). You will not only have to be the creator of value, you will also have to provide the means through which citizens can express their passion for the value they perceive.
So if you’re not able to derive an equation that gets you to ROI, you’re still not in the dark. If you’re trying to decide about developing a blog for your organization, you can just follow one word: value. What value would your blog offer to the people who read or join? Could you list out the (hypothetical) values? I think you could: around a conference table or in your armchair.
Price is a Function of Value
If your service isn’t valued there is no price strategy that will keep your going concern, well, going on. Price is simply a numerical expression of value. It’s either determined by monopolistic Short Snouts, oligopolies, government regulation, or the Long Tail of perfectly competitive market forces.
Be the Genhis Kahn of social value.
Photo: Dunchaser’s Photostream
Your strike-price is a derivative of the value people perceive. So strike value right into the hearts of your target. Be the Genghis Kahn of social value. I say Genghis Kahn because his small horde of lithe soldiers wearing silk shirts conquered more land mass while ridding on tiny horses than any other force in history. His enemies wore thick, heavy, metallic armor and everything they did was big. Why did his strategy and tactics work? Because in silk, there’s value. (Lesson: you’re going to get wounded, so make it easy to pull out the arrows.)
Value-Multiplied is Replacing Value-Added
It’s no longer good enough to “add value”. You’re sinking down the Long Tail. You might be in denial about this, but it’s true. Technology will own you (sorry, we’ve passed the singularity). The value you create and which your customers/citizens perceive has to be multiplied, not simply “added”.
And that’s where intelligent applications of social media come into play. Can you think of a better way to multiply the shared values of your going concern? Word-of-Mouth (WOM) was always king. But know the kingdom of WOM has come. Know thy king. He’s a little different this time around. He’s wearing new clothing: a crown of truth, a cape of respect and a staff of democracy. In fact: he’s you!
You cannot lie in the New Kingdom of WOM without being cast out. This is good news: you can now multiply your value with nobility. You can now impress your citizens with your infectious passion.
Value-Multiplication. That’s the new math you need to learn. And learn well.
Family Values are Social Values
There is an endless list of things people value in general. Here are some activities that I think most people value greatly:
- Kvetching
- Praising
- Sharing
- Bragging
- Linking
- Being flattered
- Being Right
- Never Being Wrong or Hurt (unless it’s a Dominatrix service)
- Loving
- Being Loved
- Inputing
- Suggesting
- Being Listened to
- Commenting
- Creating
- Meeting Others
- Learning
- Getting Great Free Stuff
- Taking Action
- Being Offered Simple, Easy Choices
- Hearing “Thank You” (even when they mess up)
These are all ingredients to successful blogging. Successful relationships. Successful business. Succesfful Successful anything, really. You don’t need Excel for the formulaic recipe. But you can cook. Be creative, use your senses, surprise yourself and become a remarkable presence in the kitchen of your marketplace.
Remarkable Opportunity Ingenuity (ROI)
Let’s redefine ROI. Let’s give ourselves permission to take a few steps back from the professorial whiteboard, put down the calculators and take a look at where we are along the Long Tail. If you don’t know where you are or what value your blog will create, how will you ever hope to properly calculate the returns on your investment? Would it even matter?
“There are some things that count that can’t be counted. And some things that can be counted that don’t count.”
You’ve read Seth’s blog (I hope!). So you already know what to do. You know the answer: be remarkable (don’t just feign it). Be remarkable in your decision about whether to blog or not. It’s not as easy as it looks. It’s hard. It’s costly. Which means it can be numerical and maybe calculable. But do the calculations AFTER you do the valuations. If you lay down the tracks for your customers’ value-train then ROI will come chugging along.
Some Rationales/Reasons for Hospital Blogging
Let’s return to hospital blogging, since it seems to be one of the most challenging. There are considerations in the healthcare industry that may not exist in others, including but not limited to:
- Patient Privacy
- Empolyee Privacy
- Safety
- Efficacy
- The Provision of Authoritative Content
There are of course other considerations. But they are manageble Dips. They’re not dead-ends (although I think many hosptial cultures automatically conclude that these are the dead-ends that deceptively justify the easy choice: not to blog at all).
So what are some of the rationales for crafting a remarkable hospital blog? Here are some suggestions (I use the word citizen in place of patient, family member and general public because it’s the only word that makes sense in a remarkable democracy):
- Citizen Complaints (These Should be Prominent!!!)
- Citizen feedback and praise
- Services updates (a new Operating Room or Surgical Procedure)
- Introduction of New Staff
- Nursing Notes (I Know a Bit Nightingalish)
- Up-to-Date Content on Disease Processes and Management
- Community News
- Pledge Drive Announcements
- Guest Posts from Prominent Doctors, Nurses & Other Healthcare Professionals
- Staff Recruitment (Show Off What a Remarkable Facility You Have - Be The Zappos of Healthcare!)
The same could be (partially) true for services like Twitter or FriendFeed. Here are some values to be shared through those media:
- Tweeting facilities about emergent crises
- Using Twitter for staffing needs
- Using FriendFeed to keep a stream of blog posts and other information about your facility for the whole world to see (also: if Google purchases FriendFeed, wouldn’t you want to be listed on their prime SERPs?)
- Using Twitter or FriendFeed as an educational tool for nursing and medical students (let them follow the best in the business)
Conclusion: Value Multiplied by Infectious Interaction Equals Gross Blog ROI
If all of this is new and bewildering to you, perhaps you aught to focus your investing efforts on a blog. For one, blogging develops the kinds of skills needed for effective social media marketing. Also, it offers a simple interface with your citizens.
Being passionate about your hospital and the services it provides is important. But: that passion must always be subordinated to something even more important. Be passionate about infusing your citizens with the infectious vectors of value that they can spread through the community.
A blog is one component of the passion-pump. Additional social media tools offer more options, which I will talk about soon (Twitter & FriendFeed). For now, you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my feed and we can continue the discussion. And feel free to (respectfully) obliterate my arguments here. Quality of life is at hand here.
Whatever your background, a blog is a good start to a healthier hospital. Then again, you could just let someone else do all the talking for you while you keep handing cash over to lawyers and PR wizards instead of your nurses and doctors and capital equipment. Who knows, with all of the ultra-portable devices around these days, you could just let your organization become a featured superstar on Youtube. Just what are you waiting for?
For remarkable resources on blogging and social media, follow these links:
Darren Rowse Problogger (No Nonsense Mate from Down Under)
Chris Brogan (Knows his stuff and knows how to communicate it!)
Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Blogging (A Great Collection for Beginners & Pros)
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My Blog is Worth $0.00
I installed a widget from Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities and it confirmed my suspicions about the dollar value of my blog. According to the API my blog is worth precisely $0.00:
My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?
It raises a very good question about the whole purpose of blogging. How much is a blog worth? If it’s monetized, you certainly could generate a pleasing stream of cash flows through ecommerce or advertising.
But there are non-monetary values to blogging, all of which derive from the many purposes of blogging. I’ve been blogging for a very short time, but I have enjoyed the little writing I have done. What’s more, the whole process has forced me to come up to speed fairly quickly on the available tools for publishing and has opened me up to the the possibilities and challenges of web connectivity.
A friend of mine asked me the other day how many visitors I get to my blog. I hadn’t run Google Analytics recently enough to give him an answer but the latest analysis reveals less than 100 since this blog’s inception. His question, though, led me to Dane’s widget and when I ran it and it returned “Your blog is worth $0.00″ I loved it! Zero is a nice round figure. If I decide to seriously zap the blog with focused monetization strategies, I’ll be curious to know what the widget says later on as my blogging continues.
But the question “What is your blog worth” is a actually deeper than a simple matter of monetary value of a blog. There is the matter of personal branding. Most of us were taught to go to a good school, get a good job and maintain a good resume. And most of us followed directions very well and we got into good schools, got good jobs and maintain good resumes. And yet, wouldn’t the more valuable instruction to us have been: brand yourself? The question “How much is your personal blog worth” is getting at your success in branding who you are. If I had to do things differently in my career I would have ditched the resume and gone for branding. I grew up listening to people who didn’t have resumes: Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Steve Marriott, the members of Pink Floyd and The Who and Jefferson Airplane and the list goes on. These names were brands. Remarkable brands. How much were those brands worth? I’m guessing a lot more than what they would have been if those folks were resumes.
So today my blog is worth $0.00, which is to say that my brand needs some work. Perhaps that’s why I’m blogging: to forge my voice and establish my reputation. Isn’t that what a brand is, a mark of voice and reputation? Sure it is. Certainly a blog is worth more than its sales price. How long will it take for blogs to be just as important to employers and business as resumes? As long as it takes employers and businesses to figure out that a blog is a far more three-dimensional measure of a personal brand than a resume.
So the value of a blog matters I think. Whether that value can be expressed in dollars may or may not be the important thing. But for me, if the money follows, well that leaves more toys to play with. And if the well stays dry, then at least I’ll have the key ingredients of a personal brand: a voice and a reputation.
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