From Mashable:
Bloggers! Here Comes Navel Gaze Sunday
A trend: sometime every Saturday afternoon Eastern Time (now), tech bloggers run low on real news, and a story about bloggers themselves gets an unnecessary amount of airtime. On Sunday, it rises to a rabble before dying down as the Monday news starts coming in – call it Navel Gaze Sunday if you like
No, there’s nothing really disruptive about this at all. But it does lead me to ask whether bloggers (in general) are creating communities around themselves, or are the collective “they” just one community?
If you choose to start or use a blog to promote yourself, your company, your book or whatever ideas you want to put out into the market, while you are working to make it less promotional and more a part of the so-called blogosphere, you also have to remember that it needs to appeal to YOUR community, and not the community of bloggers.
You tell me: By talking about bloggers talking about bloggers on my blog on Sunday, have I participated in the tradition I just tried to warn against? Would it have been possible not to?
5 thoughts on “What if your navel stared back?”
Jeff,
Does your question assume that we can only have one audience?
And aren’t some of the bloggers also potential clients? Or referral sources?
And what happens if one of your clients suddenly launches a blog. Does that mean they aren’t your target audience any more?
It is an interested web we weave, eh?
Drew
Drew:
It is at that!
It’s so true that we’re all members of many communities at once (a base assumption of my brand of marketing).
You might, for example, read my blog as a marketer interested in Disruptive Marketing, or as a blogger wondering about another blogger. Or both – or maybe more than that. Still, I hope that my content is relevant to the marketer in you. At least.
I wonder if you seeing my tweet and commenting on my blog and linking back to your blog makes this officially a navel-staring event?
Or does all of that make it a new kind of marketing where a relationship is formed before either party know if they are the buyer or the seller? Or both?
Drew
Drew:
It is in fact the kind of marketing I practice (is this new?) that assumes that buyers and sellers enter into relationships of some kind (they can be strong, or very weak, but there is some interaction) before transactions are even considered.
I urge (and train) my sales and marketing people now to assume that before you ever have any contact at all with a prospective customer, that customer has had contact with you. That can be references, advice from friends, exploration of your web presence or any number of other interactions.
I’m hoping to center my posts in the coming weeks around this idea and how marketers (and their companies) deal with communities, contact and interaction, and how it changes the game.
It should be an interesting conversation 🙂
–Jeff
Jeff,
It should be interesting indeed. I’m looking forward to it.
Drew