Photo courtesy of I Am Paul’s Typing Fingers

The following is a guest post by my friend and fellow blogger John Haydon.  John writes about marketing strategies for social media sites on his blog at JohnHaydon.com.

Integrity, as Tanveer has talked about before, is a critical factor in attracting and retaining readers, subscribers and customers.

In the offline world, integrity is something people easily recognize. It could be demonstrated by returning something on time that you borrowed, staying true to one’s convictions, or having the courage to protect others from unfair attacks – even if they are “competitors”. In these examples, integrity and character is demonstrated through the actions of that person.

But how do you demonstrated integrity online, through the proxy we call the internet? How can people quickly get a sense of your trustworthiness and character – even though you’re not actually present?

The Trust Of Crowds

The answer is in your crowd – the hundreds or thousands of readers who, on a daily basis, give you the thumbs up.

Blogs by definition have several features that can easily demonstrate crowd-sourced quality checks, or “social proof“.

• Comments – Comments are a qualitative measurement of our character. How many comments, on average, do your blog posts receive? What is the quality and depth of these comments? Is there a diversity of people making these comments? Getting large numbers of quality comments takes years of hard work – even for people like Chris Brogan and Brian Clark.
• Comment Replies – One advantage bloggers like you and I have over people like Chris and Brian is that we are able to reply to each commenter. Two bloggers who do this very well are Grant Griffiths and Liz Strauss. They both take the time to comment back and forth with each commenter. A quick note: Make sure you have set your commenting system to support threaded comments – at least three levels deep.
• Admit When Your Wrong – Or At Least Not Completely Right – No one can know everything about a subject, and often times, it’s our commenters who help us fill in the gaps. When you acknowledge them, and amend a post in response, it says you respect your readers and can admit when you’re not completely right. Click here to continue reading »”How To Demonstrate Integrity On Your Blog”

This post marks a special moment many bloggers look forward to reaching – writing their 100th blog post.  After giving some thought to what I’d like to write about for this milestone, I decided that I didn’t want it to be an introspective piece.  Instead, I wanted to turn the focus outwards, to the other side of the blogging equation – you, the readers of this blog.

Over the last ninety-nine posts, you have encouraged me with your words of support and appreciation for the ideas and concepts I chose to put to pen and share with you through my writings.  You questioned and pondered my take or interpretations of political and fictional dramas.  You shared how my stories have inspired you or how they connected to your own personal experiences.  And you have touched me with your compliments about how much you’ve enjoyed the pieces that I wrote.

And so, for my 100th blog post, I want to take the opportunity to thank you, the readers of my blog, for making the last ninety-nine posts such an incredible journey.

Here’s looking forward to the next one hundred.

Welcome everyone to the new site for my blog, “So, what were we talking about again?”.  As you can see, we got a fresh and distinct new look that makes quite a departure from what I was using over on the wordpress.com site.  Being able to design the site myself, I was able to create a look and feel that I think really captures not just my writing style, but also me as a person.  That’s why you’ll notice some delightfully bright and happy artwork at the bottom of my site, provided courtesy of my children.  I’ve written before about them and the impact they’ve had on both my life and my perspective of the world; for me it was a given to have some tangible part of them present here on my site.

Of course, all of the articles – and your comments that you shared on my previous site – can be found here.  You can locate that content either by Click here to continue reading »”Welcome To My New Digs”

As the title above points out, this month marks my first year of blogging. When I decided to start this blog last June, it was mainly because I wanted to have an outlet for my writing, a place where I could express my thoughts, ideas, and experiences on a variety of topics and issues. Over the course of the last year, my blog has also allowed me to meet and interact with some great people not only online within the blogging community, but also offline with readers of my blog who live in and around my city. Writing for this blog has even provided me with opportunities to write in a professional capacity, a development that is the key reason for the upcoming change I’m using this one year milestone to announce.

In the next week or so, my blog “So, what were we talking about again?” will be moving to its new home at my personal site – tanveernaseer.com. I’m currently working on getting the place cleaned up and ready for the big move (the main excuse for why I haven’t been writing as much new material as of late). I can tell you it’s going to be a fresh and distinctive new look that will better reflect the writing style and content that’s come to define my blog. Naturally, I’ll be posting news of the new site’s launch here, but feel free to bookmark the site tanveernaseer.com in the meantime.

This first year of blogging has certainly been an enjoyable experience and I want to thank all my readers who’ve stopped by my blog over the course of this first year to see what I have to say, especially those who took the time to share their thoughts about the piece in question.

So, here’s looking to another year of blogging on what we were talking about.

(Twitter icon bird set, created by Mirjami Manninen, can be downloaded here)

It’s been about a month now that I’ve been using the Twitter social-networking platform and I have to admit, it’s been an interesting study of how human communication is evolving through our interaction and usage of new software communication platforms. Now to be truthful, I’ve been wary of starting up a Twitter account because like anyone else viewing it from the outside, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Indeed, the most common question posed when someone hears you’re “on Twitter” is what exactly is Twitter. The most common explanations are that Twitter is a “micro-blogging platform” due to its restricting entries to no more than 140 characters or that’s it’s just another social networking outlet to stay in touch with a group of friends/acquaintances. Although my experience with Twitter is still new and thus, rather limited, I think this other definition sums up Twitter best – Twitter is whatever you make it out to be. Confused enough? Well, let me share my own experience with this platform to shed some light on this.

Now as I mentioned above, I wasn’t very keen on joining Twitter simply because the few times I perused the site, I was either confused in trying to figure out how to follow the various conversation streams going on over multiple accounts or being rather put-off with the numerous entries by various users sharing details of what they were eating for lunch or dinner (I still can’t comprehend why anyone would think that others are so interested in hearing what you’re eating. I wonder how many of them would bother to pick the phone and call a friend to tell them “Hey, guess what? I decided to have the roast beef au jus with stir-fried zucchini and a glass of Merlot. Just thought you’d be interested”). So, there didn’t seem to be anything of note within Twitter that would spur my interest in either joining or participating in such a social networking site. That is, until I realized that Click here to continue reading »”Twitter and Me – My Trip ‘Round The Twitterverse”