Where Is Your Blog Community?

January 6th, 2009 by Easton Ellsworth

Your blog community is at your blog, right?

Duh. That was easy.

Wait a second. No, it’s just centered at your blog, but it has octopus legs at your Twitter account and at your Facebook page and at all your other social media accounts, right?

Um … or maybe your blogging community resides at all those places and in your email inbox and at the blogger conferences you attend? Maybe it’s everywhere?

Actually, it’s nowhere.

Community is only in the mind.

Your blog’s community lives only in the minds of those who belong to it.

And they belong to it only because they feel like they belong to it.

So helping them feel that way is the true secret to building a vibrant blog community.

Don’t get me wrong.

Community is real. It’s just intangible.

But it requires tangible events, and those require place and time.

And each blog post you write and each offline meetup you host – each event – is a tangible spark for thought and conversation and for people to mentally join your community.

But where should you focus your community-building efforts? What if there are more people talking to you via Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, etc. than in your blog’s own comment threads? And how can you unify all the fragments of your blog’s community so that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts?

I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Thanks to David Sandusky for asking the question that inspired this article.

Do you agree that blog community is a matter of the mind?

photo by Jo Jakeman

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