Month: April 2010

Infographic of the day: the social media triage

Here’s a great “social media triage” diagram/flow chart that outlines a process for responding to social media messages. Click on the image to see a bigger and more readable version.

socmediatriage

I found this chart thanks to a tweet from the always helpful Davina Gould, who got it from Mark Greenfield, who got it from @imeldak, who in turn got it from Charlene Li, who created the thing and shared it during a recent seminar. Check #socialchecklist for the Twitter stream from that seminar, or check out Li’s presentation with co-presenter Jeremiah Owyang on slideshare. (The social media triage image is on slide 20.)

What’s the frequency, blogger?

At the risk of starting the week with a phoning-it-in post, I’m going to return to a question as ancient as the blogosphere itself:

How often should a blogger blog?

As a rule of thumb, I try to post a few times a week. A lot of bloggers tend to fall into that same pattern.

But some, like Scott Stratten (aka @unmarketing), think frequent blogging isn’t as important as valuable, albeit infrequent, content. In a recent post on this topic, Stratten writes: “Daily, weekly, monthly, blogging is not dependent on how frequent, but more on how impactful.” Read the full post for his supporting arguments.

It’s hard to disagree with Stratten, because impact and content are the reasons people read blogs. (And, I hope, the reason all of us who blog do what we do.) And while I do agree with Stratten’s point that “It’s only a freaking blog, people,” and that there are many more important things in life than blogging, I’m more likely to check in on blogs that are updated frequently (at least weekly). That’s because the frequently updated blogs show up in my RSS and Twitter streams more often, and therefore they’re on my radar.

The bloggers who post regularly may not hit the grand slams every time out, but at least they’re stepping up to the plate and getting their at-bats. (Bear with me; it’s baseball season.) That’s not to say the less frequent bloggers aren’t honing their writing craft in other venues — writing for other sites or publications — but if they are, you might not know it by visiting their blogs. (Back when I was writing more for other publications, I’d usually drop a post on my personal blog redirecting readers to my latest column or entry elsewhere, because that’s just good self-promotion.)

But back to Stratten. If it weren’t for his Twitter persona and this status update, I wouldn’t even know about his blog. Now that I am, I’ll be sure to check in once in a while, because he writes good stuff there. Just not very frequently.

So. Is frequency important? I think so. Is good content important? Most definitely. How a blogger balances frequency and content is a personal choice. No one size fits all.