You Don’t Talk To A Conversation

Once again, I see the spectre of age-rage happening around the blogosphere. What’s with all the let’s-get-the-young-people-gardening angst and counter-angst?

It might help by starting with a quote from Marshall Macluhan to set the stage, “Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”

When you and I were young Maggie, we implicitly understood the nature of television and laughed at those who told us it would rot our minds and ruin civilization as we knew it (maybe as those radio folks knew it) When rock and roll burst onto the scene, the young implicitly understood the message, the old never did figure it out. Similarly rap music, computers, iphones, iPads, and video have left successive generations scratching their heads at “what the young people are doing”

The young people know.

My take on this is a fairly simple one – in my generation, there was no conversation between writer and reader. It was a one-way street. The tv generation was similarly a one-way street as was the first mobile phone, and the first iPod. Writers and other creative folks sent their messages out and they were consumed.

But something changed a few short years ago with the rise of new immersive, communication technologies. The young implicitly understand they aren’t on the receiving end of a conversation anymore, they are the conversation. They aren’t on the receiving end of a marketing message, they’re either the marketing message or they aren’t. There’s likely little in-between here, you’re either on the bus or off (thank you Ken Kesey).

You’re part of the conversation. Or not.

So talking to young people – a one way flow – to convince them that gardening is good is pretty much a waste of time. Producing videos for them to consume is pretty much a waste of time. Creating one way flows is, well, a waste of time. These people understand they’re part of a flow of communication – back and forth – and if you want to engage in that flow, you do so in ways they understand. Not in imposing your level of technological understanding onto theirs. It’s why radio-generation folks just don’t get the power of the Net. It’s why advertising – a one way street – is a tough sell the younger you go along the age/tech-level highway.

For example, in normal life, a young person is texting, sharing video, chatting with nearby friends, moving their body and listening to music – mostly at the same time. When we take them into a classical music concert or gardening seminar, (or most other places) we say, “Turn off your phone, don’t text, don’t take videos or pictures, sit still, don’t talk, don’t fidget with friends, and absorb this information”. Their lives as part of an ongoing conversation are stopped – they’re taken out of their cultural life and expected to enter one that was relevant several hundred years ago.

In the garden world, it’s pretty much the same thing. When was the last time you saw an ad that involved the target group you wanted to reach (other than we old guys). There’s no conversation happening there – it’s still one way. Instead, try figuring out a way to get younger folks into your garden or botanic garden – inviting them to video, text, and share what’s going on as it’s going on – create a relevant, interesting-to-them conversation.

Conversations are the future? No. They’re the now.

Even this blog is pretty-much one way. It’s old tech based on Internet years (roughly comparable to dog-years) and yes, a few of you may actually drop me a note about this but the vast majority don’t enter into a conversation around blog posts. It’s no longer done to any large percentage of the readership base.

Conversations still happen within smaller groups though and that’s strong. Where my generation had them on the single family telephone in the kitchen (heck, I still remember country party-lines – yes, I’m that old) this generation lives within a conversation that’s multi-layered – from fully public in larger groups to (they hope but are never sure) fully private and all stored online in multiple platforms.

You don’t talk-to a conversation. You either enter it or leave it alone.

Does Facebook Replace Blogging?

I suspect the question is a bit broader than that and can instead be posed as, “Does Social Media Replace Blogging?”

And the answer – it depends. It depends totally and completely on why you’re blogging.

If you’re blogging to display your creative writing talents, then obviously no, social media doesn’t replace blogging. You need a space of unlimited area and length, one that can display your writing and perhaps images to full advantage. One that is fully under your control and blogging fills that function. This is a marketing function for your creative work – a repository of words and images that enable readers and editors to enjoy your work for whatever purpose you make of that.

In my writing world, having a blog only makes sense if you have a purpose in mind for having somebody enjoy your work. Blogging itself doesn’t seem to make folks a lot of money, it’s the spinoffs that do that. Have spinoffs in mind? Then blog. Have something to say? Blog.

On the other hand, if you’re blogging for the social interaction, the communication directly with readers then the answer imho is clearly yes, social media has eclipsed blogging as a communication tool. It is far easier to gather interested readers and chat, share with them on something like Facebook (or even Twitter and Youtube) than it is on a blog. Sharing of news, links, quick thoughts works far better on social media than it does on a blog.

Social media was designed for being social, for passing along information and interacting around that information, that’s its purpose and the form/function of it encourages that. Blogging was designed as a quick and dirty publishing platform and people have tried to force fit it into different models ever since.

The question then does social media replace blogging turns on the question of why you’re blogging?

In my case, the answer would seem to be yes – social media has completely replaced blogging for interacting with my readers in real time. As they say, “your results may vary.”

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And before you ask – I blog here for no discernable reason other than an outlet to clear my mind of stuff that occupies it. There are no ads from anything remotely recent and I’m moving the gardening stuff slowly but surely from its remnant locations here, I’m not selling anything on this platform so sometimes even I wonder why I bother to do it.

When Answering Garden Questions and Google Don’t Mix

It has been an interesting three weeks in my tech world of online gardening publishing. The CMS I use was “upgraded” in a major way with some interesting new options coming down the pipe but like a lot of tech things, there were a few “bugs” involved. One in particular was quite ugly and while the sites themselves didn’t show any problems if you didn’t change anything, as soon as you added an article, the entire site update system crashed. Bottom line – after discovering the bug I backed away from updating any more of my sites (now repaired and I’m back to full time uploading).

That’s the long way of saying I focussed on some other projects such as driving home from our Southern haunts, seeing kids, checking up on my nursing-home mom, getting out into the garden and kicking seed starting into high-gear. You know – stuff regular folks do in the spring.

When my CMS got back to normal, I checked traffic numbers to discover I had been Panda-slapped by Google. Traffic which had been running at 200% of last year was now just below last year – a major penalty of some kind had been leveled at 5 of my 7 sites in the network. The March 23rd update did me in. Big time.

Google said less than 2% of the sites in its index were hit by this change but that’s slight comfort to me I can tell you and it led to some very fast analytical work. Knowing there are only two reasons for the drop – either I was a “false-positive” hit accidentally or I had transgressed somehow and was engaged in a poor web practice, it was time for some raw numbers and brutal self-evaluation. My stats and I become great friends over that first day as I looked at what could be the problem. After all, if it as a false-positive, I’d bounce back without doing anything but if I had done something, I needed to fix it before the next Panda bounce (every 4-6 weeks).

One of the factors involved in evaluating sites is the length of pages and as it turns out, that (I hope and believe) was my problem. When I answer a gardening question, the CMS makes a new page out of it and I had pushed the boundaries of the number of short pages allowed and probably smashed right though any new levels. After all, how many words can you use when somebody asks, “What side of the bulb goes up?” and the answer is, “The pointy end”. :-) With over 6000 pages on the sites, a great many of them were this kind of Q&A – helping gardeners but breaking Google rules.

So for the last week and probably for the next while I’m working on my sites. Before the middle of May, I need to fix all the short answers. So I’m merging some into longer pages, deleting some, rebuilding the original plant pages to reflect the questions and indeed, rebuilding a lot of pages in any case from the old to new theme. In short, within the next month, there will be very few short pages left on the sites. A major pruning is taking place without removing too much information readers seem to want.

It is indeed a balancing act and it would appear I came down too far on one side of the equation for helping folks and “resembling” a content farm.

The really good news in all this is that other folks who’ve seen this happen have reported a bounce-back beyond their original numbers. Apparently Google recognizes changes like this and rewards the improvements with even more traffic.

So if you don’t see me hanging out anywhere or producing a ton of new stuff, it’s because HTML code and I are currently going steady. A rocky relationship at its best, we’re now engaged in remedial counseling and I’ll get back to you (someday) about how this all turns out.