A place where everybody knows your name

If I had only realised how important branding was in blogging, I would have paid more attention in marketing lectures.  It seemed like such a little thing when I started, ‘please enter the name of your blog’.  That’s simple, my name is Fa so my blog will be faniemi.wordpress.com.  Oops, that isn’t available because you created and deleted it last year.  Well my full last name is Martin-Niemi, so that’ll work.  What was I thinking?!

For all of its simplicity (more like simple-mindedness) famartinniemi.wordpress.com is neither catchy, memorable nor easy to spell (even for me).  It gives no indication of the blog’s content or theme.  It is just the first thing that came into my head, ‘hey I am starting a blog, so I’ll name it after me’.  The troubles started almost immediately after I committed to the url, ‘please enter the blog’s tag line’.  Uh…. Fa’s Blog   A Blog about, hmmm….

Then the worries started about why was I starting a blog and what was it about.  It was in this moment of panic and fear that this would be another Seinfeld blog (about nothing), I decided it would be about me.  Well, you know, about my research (which is essentially about me, but whatever).  I want to know why people blog, so I’ll blog and read blogs and talk to bloggers and hopefully this will lead me to either understand why people blog or at least I’ll have “met” some interesting people and call it good.

So what’s in a name?  Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet?  Yes, but if no one can remember it or spell it, then no one can smell its sweetness (or fill in your own profound thought about one hand clapping or trees falling in the wood).  If I had to do it again?

Norm!

Répondez s’il vous plaît

I am just back from my short trip to Hamilton on the North Island to attend a conference on student research at the management school there.  I had planned to spend the morning getting some work done and writing a blog on the highlights of the conference, but just as I was about to I realised that I have eight un-responded-to comments.  That has put me in a bit of a panic because with the oldest comment over two weeks old – I feel like I have not upheld my end of the blogger-reader contract -> respond in a timely manner to comments posted on your blog.

If someone has gone to the trouble of reading a post ~and~ commenting I think they deserve (and expect) a response.  And not a one word-er like “right?” or “thanks!”.  It strikes me as funny that I have put so much effort into trying to attract readership and engage in dialogue, but when dialogue happens I don’t know what to do.  If I felt pressure before about writing blog posts, I feel even more now that readers are talking back to me.

There are probably some norms on blogging behaviour that have been measured and studied.  I’ll need to look into that, but for now I need to figure out why I have been so lax in responding and how to motivate myself to fix that behaviour. It might be that the rhythm of the conversation is out of synch and it is hard to get back into a conversation with the post-comment lag.  Or else it could be that I feel that I must always say something of value, but most of the time I don’t really have answers to their comments, just more questions.  Whatever it is, I feel like the clock is ticking and there is an expiration date on comment responses which may have already been exceeded. Right? Thanks!