The Right Venue for Online Discussion?
This blog? My Facebook groups? A couple of very pointed but sensible comments to my recent post made one thing clear: that this blog is where I should look to spur active conversations, not my Facebook groups. I am frankly confused, and would like to share two comments from yesterday's post.
From Ian Wilson:
Why not just keep discussion centered on this blog? I am sure most of the people signed up to the facebook groups also read your blog.
Right now there does not seem to be any easy way to manage discussions around various web sites...so having them all in 1 place, your place, seems like the easiest way to keep the conversation flowing, imho.
Facebook is becoming more and more cluttered with spam daily, so much so that its cost of use is getting too steep for me, I cant find the signal for the noise. Does anyone else find that?
From Michael Sharon:
I completely agree with Ian. Encouraging conversation around your primary and most visited community - although it's in some respects a limited channel - is far more useful than trying to stimulate discussion within multiple sub-communities based around related topics on sites which have higher barriers to entry.
It may not be your fault that there hasn't been enough discussion in those groups, perhaps it's simply that the conversation and the platform that you have here is enough for most people, most of the time.
You mention fomenting an active dialogue which reminded me of this article about the User Generated Content myth over at Publishing 2.0 (link neutered! google it). I think the reality of the situation is that encouraging an active dialogue within any one of your groups would require a non-trivial investment in attention - which you've chosen (unsurprisingly) to spend at your main site here. For me, Facebook is less useful for high value, public dialogues simply because content within the group is not searchable (through Google or FB). If the intention is for the conversation to be private or limited to group members only, then I think FB is the tool for you, otherwise, keep it in the blogosphere.
I've got to say, Ian and Michael make a lot of sense. But as a test, I am going to run questions in both venues and see what happens. But after reflecting on it a bit, I do think they are right as my blog has far greater reach than my Facebook groups, and the goal of posing questions and stimulating discussion among my readers is to cast a wide net. So in order to raise a new question I had posed on my IA Capital Partners group to a broader audience, I am reproducing it for my blog readers here:
I've got lot of other questions rattling around that I will post soon but this is my question du jour. I'd love to know your thoughts. Thanks in advance for participating in what is hopefully a rich, interesting, interactive discussion.
Roger, not sure if you ever visited Bungie's website, bungie.net, but they have a great set-up where the designers can interact with the community. It's ideal for an online game like Halo 3, which has so many user options and can have its potential maximized by letting the users see which direction the designers were taking maps, weapons, modes etc. It also helps Bungie out in developing and building hype for future maps and tweaking the current gameplay settings as users can get their voice heard.
Where the Wii is about physical community in your living room, the Halo franchise is promoting the virtual community for the 360 and Bungie's website is a great example of this.
Posted by: Tim | December 17, 2007 at 10:43 AM
y, blog better
Posted by: phil | December 16, 2007 at 07:11 AM
I would also strongly agree with both Ian and Michael. You may want to consider adding clearly an RSS feed for comments, if you want to give the blog the best chances in your test.
I'd bet the vast majority of your readers would be interest in participating in the conversations but don't access the comments from their feed reader.
Posted by: Julien Le Nestour | December 15, 2007 at 07:17 PM