Per my previous blog article, the Social Flooring Index ranking of floor covering blogs has been updated for November 2011.
In this next segment of the Social Flooring Index, I explore how networked - or connected - flooring blogs are.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart because it captures the essence of what social media is about: connecting, interacting, commenting, buildling off of ideas generated, expressing trustworthiness and being human.
In other words, if you're going to participate in social media tools such as blogs, you want to embrace being human and interacting with readers, visitors, fans, friends and followers. It's how you learn, build community, establish trust and develop influence.
eCairn Conversation™, which I use to map out the Social Flooring Index, visually represents how networked a virtual community is via a cluster graph. The floor covering blogs included in the Social Flooring Index appear in the image above. Each rectangle represents a blog.
Notice the clusters in the middle - primarily red and purple - and the circle of totally independent and unconnected rectangles. The clusters in the middle are networked around the Carpet and Rug Institute Blog in red and the BuildDirect blog in purple. Networked blogs routinely share expertise via their content and comfortably establish reciprocal interactions with others in the community. Networked blogs, by virtue of sharing expertise and developing reciprocal interactions, establish influence.
The flooring industry is at the early stages of doing so.
To place this into context, I share with you this description from The 2 Pillars of Influencer Analysis on the eCairn Blog:
- Influence is, at its core, a matter of context and trust.
- Consequently, influencers must have both - a deep expertise in the domain in which their influence is going to spread; - a broad network with whose members they have frequent and long-term reciprocal interactions in the context of their domain of expertise.
- Deep expertise requires a substantial investment in terms of time, and is developed over a long period of time. A network consists of links between “close” members, “connected” members, and the rest. The domain’s experts are the ones who indirectly determine each member’s influence through cross-references.
- As a consequence, influence should be evaluated based on meaningful markers (of a certain expertise), over a long period of time (10,000 hour rule), while taking into account references within the community.
In other words, influence is a function of blogging frequently and consistently over time, with passion about topics of interest to you and the community, and into which you invite others to contribute perspective and interact with.
Influence requires other participants and involves sharing valued insights. It does not happen in a void. It is social and celebrates others as Bethany Richmond does in Bentley Prince Street Makes Carpet Couture Collection Fabric in which she refers to Carpet Couture: Taking our Runway Fashions on the Road, Bentley Prince Street's blog article.
For perspective on becoming more networked, I direct you to How To Write a Blog Article or Post: 13 Tips [you might also want to read Online Marketing Advice: How Not To Build Trust].
What's your reaction to becoming a networked blog and developing influence in the floor covering community? Are you ready to connect and interact with others?
