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Positioning, “Social Polarity” and Vibrant Blog Communities

Written by: Michael Reining

Article Overview: Blog communities and commenters play a role in defining the blogs they socialize in. What’s your community of blog commenters like? If you had a chance to build your blog all over again, what would you do differently? Blogs are great tools for knowledge sharing, and in essence the blogosphere is one gigantic self-organized online network of individuals sharing their raw and unedited thoughts openly. It’s a vibrant and ongoing conversation, and the saying “there’s strength in diversity” holds in this case.

Positioning, “Social Polarity” and Vibrant Blog Communities

Blog communities and commenters play a role in defining the blogs they socialize in. What’s your community of blog commenters like? If you had a chance to build your blog all over again, what would you do differently?

There’s a prevalent notion which says that if you comment in relevant blogs and forums, eventually people will click over to your blog. Over time, more people arrive and gradually you see comments being left in your posts. From there, the community starts to take shape. That’s fine, but let’s enhance it a few steps further. Let’s go beyond the importance of great content which adequately satisfies the principles of supply and demand. Let’s get to the “packaging” of this content so to speak.

So, How’s Your Blog Community Like?

Blogs are great tools for knowledge sharing, and in essence the blogosphere is one gigantic self-organized online network of individuals sharing their raw and unedited thoughts openly. It’s a vibrant and ongoing conversation, and the saying “there’s strength in diversity” holds in this case.

Let me elaborate.

Picture this:

1. blog posts with many comments from trolls.
2. blog posts with many comments saying something along the lines of “I agree” or “great post.”
3. blog posts filled with many smart comments and vibrant conversations containing diverse views.

The first case is bad and hurts your brand. You might as well have a few comments and a tiny community rather than many trolls infesting your blog and adding no value to the conversations in it. The second scenario creates good social proof which is obviously lovely. The last scenario is the best. You have social proof, a smart community and hence a great learning environment for your readers.

Now, there’s nothing groundbreaking with such observations of course. The challenge is in how you nurture a great community around your blog, and for me to briefly explain that, I’ll have to get into the concept of “polarity.” There’s no mystery here, the word explains itself.

Infusing Social Polarity Into Your Blog

Step One

Before the community arrives, the blog comes first. The first thing you would want to do is figure out your topic and then set out to create an enemy for your storyline and future quality content. Create an enemy and don’t be neutral. Remember, what we want is polarity, not neutrality. Neutral is boring, and boring is unattractive. It’s as simple as that. In fact, I remember Frank Kern talking about creating an enemy too in his excellent Mass Control course.

Some worry that going down this road will cause them to lose “balance” and “fairness” but this isn’t necessarily true. It depends on how you justify portraying the enemy the way you do. Pick your enemy, and explain why it’s so with research and solid facts. The key is to be genuine and passionate. Plus, no matter how “fair” or “balanced” you try to be, in the eyes of some you’ll always come across as biased.

Step Two

The second step is marketing your blog at the right places. This involves the usual steps which I’m guessing you’re already familiar with, but I’m also guessing these steps don’t incorporate the concept of social polarity.

Most - but not all - of your marketing efforts should be directed at crowds sharing your polarity (and your “enemy”). The rest of your marketing - a minor portion - should then be directed towards those who like and support the “enemy.” Disagreement to a certain extent is good, but you don’t want the destructive kind. This is why you should take it nice and easy. You don’t want to have excessively polarizing discussions, but creative disagreements.

Let me give you a simple example off the top of my head. You like internet marketing and think it’s a much better option for financial freedom than multi-level marketing which you’ve tried previously but found highly lacking. Your subject can then become internet marketing, and your evil “enemy,” multi-level marketing.

You get the idea. ;-)

And That’s Pretty Much It

Again, keep in mind that the smarter, more mature and more intellectual the crowd you’re trying to attract to your blog is, the better the quality of debates and conversations will become, which inevitably impacts your brand’s positioning. Moreover, once things get going, you can steer the direction of the discussions by participating in them appropriately, and you can also manage the quality of these conversations by moderating comments when necessary.

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Article Tags: blogosphere, blogs, conversations, diversity, great tools, groundbreaking, knowledge sharing, learning environment, mystery, notion, polarity, shape, smart comments, smart community, social proof, supply and demand, tiny community, trolls



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Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
Re: Marketing 2.0 - What Are Your Thoughts - Hi Shri, Thanks for posting this. I also read it and I believe Social Media is here to stay, until the next best thing comes up. Social media proved to be useful for me many times and I think everyone should use it for their business.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.
Jen's Blog - Spam protection - Jen, I like the Blog and just posted a comment to one of your articles. From my experience you need to implement some sort of SPAM capture tools. i use them on my Blog and it's been a life saver as I'm getting hit by spam atleast 5 times a day. I use Wordpress and they have plugins like Captcha and SPAM Karma installed.


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