The social network burnout backlash continues: Noted by Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection (and others, but that’s how I found it), the GigaOm blog has a very interesting post today about a project which will allow social network style functionality in WordPress and other blogging systems, called DiSo (also here). There has been some buzz in the blogosphere lately from some of the bloggers I respect, such as Hugh McLeod, Brian Clark, and Darren Rowse about how social networking isn’t exactly stealing any thunder from blogging.
I’ve noticed that some of the new services and plugins available to WordPress bloggers specifically (and in some cases bloggers on other platforms) are designed to enhance and facilitate the social experience of being part of a blogging community (a blog’s authors and readers). Examples are nested comments plugins, subscribe to comments plugins, and forum-like commenting services. So the idea of enhancing the social networking aspects already found in blogging is on trend in the never-ending drive for markets to be conversations.
This trend in general, and the results of the DiSo project in particular, are important to note for business bloggers: freelancers, consultants, micro-ISVs, and forward-thinking companies, all of whom nowadays tend to have to blogs as their main “customer interface.” Having and strengthening that strong connection between you and your customers is critical to maintaining and driving business with a blog. Less technically-inclined people and those who are very busy don’t want to or don’t have time for managing multitudes of social networks. If you already have their trust, time, and attention, you can maximize that by enhancing the social networking aspects of your business blog. This is something that you can look forward to being implemented here, on Remarkablogger, in the near future. I’m going to participate in this general trend in order to see if the case can be made that it will benefit business blogging as I believe it will.