Learning To Blog As A Community

One of the demonstrations I use in training bloggers is an example of how important shared community is in creating excitement.

You start in a room, and ask one person to clap. The person claps a little, sheepishly looking around at their colleagues.  You ask a second person to clap, and to do it with gusto.  That person claps a lot louder, faster, and you tell them they did a good job, but that it sounded a little hollow.  You ask for volunteers, and let anyone else try.

You pause a beat, and then ask the first two people to clap together. They do so.   You encourage a third person to join in, and then you encourage all three to show a lot of energy.  The sound increases, and ultimately, someone adds a whoop or a shout into the mix, and the sound transforms from a few people clapping to a celebration.

Then you stop, and you begin clapping yourself, lightly, and without rhythm, and you say, "This is the essence of blogging."  Alone, your voice is hollow.  Combined with others, your voice is part of an explosion of excitement and energy.

Blogging Is Not About You
The first and most important rule of blogging is understanding that your blog is not about you - it's about the community.  It's about your readers.  It's about your industry. It's about anything other than your marketing pitch.

When communities grow, they grow because the shared conversatiin is greater than the individual conversation. An indidividual has a limit on what they know, a point where their expertise ceases to be worth listening to.  A group of people obviously has a much higher limit to when they cease to be effective, and using a blog, no one voice can drown out another.

Combine the level of expertise in a community with the excitement generated by numerous voices, and you have the advantages of community.

So how do we accomplish this?

<p>When we all first started blogging, we gravitated towards Recruiting.com because it promoted our individual voices.&nbsp; The job, as Jason, Anthony, Michael and I saw it was to find what was good about what the community was saying and bring it to one place.&nbsp; </p>

<p>Today we lack a central gathering place, and instead have devolved into a series of individual voices (and yes, even recruitingbloggers.com counts as an individual voice) - each trying to create legitimacy, but lacking the excitement we held just a year ago.</p>

<p>I'm not saying that recruiting blogs were better before they sold out and went corporate - that may be true for Dave Matthews, but blogs are still cool, and still exciting.&nbsp; But other blogospheres are growing, and expanding and monetizing, and having a true impact on thei industry as a whole, not just the technologically advanced subsection that gets social media. </p>

<p>If we want to be relevant to the hiring process, we'll need to go back to the earlier days of blogging and replicate the small details that made blogging energetic and growth-oriented. </p>

<p>Today we have 585 recruiting, staffing and&nbsp; HR blogs that I have tracked, and from what I can estimate, we have about a 1000 active recruiting blogs posting at least once a week.&nbsp; If we want to see that number grow to 5,000 and 10,000 and 20,000, we'll have to do the work of evangelizing our successes and encouraging new bloggers. </p>

<p>Right now, recruiting bloggers are clapping alone. What can you do to turn that hollow sound into a symphony of celebration? </p>