(In an expansion of our Bloggers We Love series, the Outside.in blog will now feature occasional guest posts authored by Bloggers We Love. Why? It’s simple, really: these hyperlocal bloggers have knowledge and experience to share, and we’re thrilled to be able to bring more of their insights to our readership. This inaugural guest post comes from Steve Shanafelt, a Blogger We Love and the publisher of the Spartanburg Spark, a hyperlocal community site based in Spartanburg, SC. Steve can be reached at publisher@SpartanburgSpark.com or via Twitter: @TheSpark.)
One of the trickier things about building a community of readers on your blog or website is giving them some reason to stick around after they’ve read your most recent content, listened to your video or watched your latest vlog. For the vast majority of us, the best kind of reader interaction we have to look forward to on our own sites are comments, which are a mixed bag depending on how much of a troll-magnet your website’s niche tends to be.
What most of us don’t have the ability to create is something truly interactive, and something that can build a genuine user community where people actually invest their time, thought and personality into creating content — even personal content — on your site. In fact, if you use social networks to market your site or blog, you’ve probably noticed that your readers are just as likely to talk about your recent posts on Twitter or Facebook status updates than they are your actual site. When you’re trying to build a community — not to mention traffic — that can be infuriating.
But who can blame them? People like being able to express their individuality and connect to other people who share interests, and most blogs and websites simply don’t offer that kind of deep interconnection. After all, Facebook has spent untold tens of millions building their social networking system, and the coding skills needed to create even simple social networking is far beyond the abilities of most bloggers.
Or it was until last month.
That’s when the folks over at Automattic released the latest version of their ever-impressive WordPress blogging software. It’s the third version — WordPress 3, that is, nicknamed “Thelonious” — and it’s by far the smoothest, easiest-to-use version released thus far. The range of features and options is astonishing, even for WordPress, and it might just be the best standalone, open-source blogging platform ever built.
It might also be the start of a complete revolution social networking.
Why? Because of the easy, novice-friendly integration of two WordPress-related projects, WordPress MU and BuddyPress. Respectively, these allow a standard WordPress blog to act like a blog network, and that same blog network to act like a social network. While this integration is far from new — BuddyPress has been around since 2008 — what is new is the lack of technical expertise needed to bring all three elements together.
With a few clicks and some very basic file editing, practically anyone can create their own social network within moments on their own website or blog. Visitors to your site can start their own sub-blogs, create their own user profiles, private message each other, form their own social groups with their own forums and connect with each other in ways that were previously limited to dedicated social networking sites.
You may be saying: “So what? Why is this relevant when there already is a Facebook, a Ning, a MySpace? My little blog will never have that kind of user base, and my users will never create that depth of content.”
Maybe not, and if you run a personal blog where you are the star and there’s little motivation for other people to participate, you’re probably right. But for a project like the one I run, a hyperlocal community site at SpartanburgSpark.com, it’s a complete game changer. We’ve gone from a glorified blog — the lowest level of the media totem pole — to a proper DIY media outlet and local social networking site, all from a simple software upgrade.
And now that the users can talk to each other, they’re actually able to have discussions on our site that would have previously happened on Facebook. Our users can organize — or self-organize, really — in ways that were previously impossible when we were a standard blog. They can talk to each other about things that interest them without having to wait for us to post a relevant blog post about it. They can start their own groups and forums, directly message each other, create elaborate user profiles and do all manner of new and interesting things with each other, all while staying on our site.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what the software is capable of, and our page views and time-on-site stats are steadily rising, with almost no extra effort on our part.
What’s interesting isn’t our specific use of this software — we’re a very small fish in this whopping great internet ocean, and we’re using this technology in a completely off-the-shelf way — it’s that everyone now has the ability to start their media projects on this level. In fact, this will soon become the standard, in the same way that things like user commenting — a cutting-edge technology only a few years ago — is now so much a part of the culture that it seems weird when a blog or website doesn’t provide it.
Thanks to WordPress 3, fully enabled social networking will soon be the new starting point for every blogger, every website and every online media project. And as social networks in general start to become more interconnected thanks to better APIs, the ability to bring new members into our own website network is growing daily. To put it another way, WordPress 3 has started a trend where Facebook isn’t siphoning off your users and pageviews, but rather where your network can be a vital part of your users’ online social experience.
When everyone can — just by deciding to click a few options — start out with their own micro version of Facebook stitched into their website or blog, it fundamentally changes what it means to be a website or a blog. It’s a sea change for internet culture, and it’s definitely something to be aware of, to plan for, and to incorporate into your online strategy.
