Chapter 3 Reading Response

The most important thing mentioned in the readings was that you must know your
audiences before you start writing. People tend to only read things that they are interested in.
For example if you have the hobby of coin collecting you would want to read about coin
collecting. However not everyone is interested in coin collecting so they won’t bother reading
what you wrote. Also if you need to figure out what type of audience you have you can evaluate
the audience by creating surveys.

Another important thing mentioned was that you have to know how to perform a
conversation online, which is very similar to a conversation face to face. You have to first listen
by reading other blogs and reviews. The second phase was to participate in conversation while
listening. To participate all you have to do is do a blog. The book also mentions other ways that
you can participate which includes: contributing to a wiki, tagging, offering a survey or a live
chat, and/or joining a forum. The next phase is to share content either through licenses or
offering RSS feed. When it comes sharing medias such as videos and photos you can use
websites such as You Tube and Flickr.

Ways to evaluate a blogger are to see how many visitors and hits that each blog gets,
which I guess can be gotten from “Google Analytics”, which is now able to tell you how long a
visitor stays at each blog. Also look to see how many subscribers each blogger has. Also you
can look to see how many other bloggers use a certain blogger/blog in their own blogs. Plus it
wouldn’t hurt to look at how many people left comments and see if the comments were useful.

The book also talks about how to go about blogging if doing it for a company. The first
step is to see what corporate policies are in effect for blogging. Then you have to set goals that
are reasonable with the time and resources available. Then you have to determine the type of
customers that suits the type of product and services in the blogs. You must have the help of the
company to fully support and provide necessary information for the blogs. Once the blogs are
set up you need to evaluate the effectiveness of reaching the community and make any necessary
changes as needed.