A lot of conversations are taking place on line via twitter, facebook, blogs, seismic, etc. With the inherent addition of conversation tools and the addition of conversation starters, the value added to the end user slowly begins to dwindle. The amount of noise begins to increase and this causes the quality of the conversations to collectively decrease and become harder to find. That being said there are a few things that I try to do to create value to the conversations that I engage in or create.

Stay on topic (most of the time)

This mean knowing your readers (if the conversation is on your blog) and understanding the environment in which the conversation is taking place. For example, if I join a friendfeed room or leave a comment on someone else’s blog, I try to look at who else is participating and what their stance on the issue being discussed is. This really helps to keep the conversation going.

Ask Questions

This goes for virtually any social media platform you choose to use for your conversations. I try to ask questions at the end of all of my blog posts to get YOUR feedback. Many times the questions (or the post) get discussed via other social media channels aside from blog (twitter for example) but that’s ok. As long as I am able to create a discussion and participate in it, I don’t mind going to other channels. Questions not only help me encourage feedback from others but they also make me more in depth about the issues I discuss.

Show Your Personal Side

I know you may think this goes against the first point I mentioned earlier (Stay on Topic). The key is to find a balance between your personal side and your business side. I have found that my blog readers or twitter followers enjoy hearing a bit about my personal experiences or current projects. This doesn’t mean that I am going to start writing about my daily activities and divulging my personal secrets (hehehehe). I love people and I love the engagement and interaction I get from everyone. Sometimes it’s good to mix in a bit of personal information and attitude to make for a more engaging conversation. After all people engage more in conversations when they know that they are actually dealing with another emotional human being.

Engage and Respond Whenever and Wherever You Can

This has to deal with how you actually engage with your conversation group. For example, if someone leaves you a comment on your blog, do you respond? If someone send you a @ reply on twitter do you ignore it? Do you have Google Alerts set up to monitor your name or your blog name? All of these things help me find out about and engage in the conversations that involve me.  Remember, these conversations don’t always have to happen online either, there are plenty of offline conversations that you can engage in at conferences, tech events, parties, etc. What other ways would you recommend to help add value to the conversation?  Did I miss anything?

Thanks for reading

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I spent a little while playing on compete.com and found the following charts rather interesting.  I decided to compare the trends of a few popular social networking sites such as myspace, twitter, facebook, youtube, and linkedin.  It’s really interesting to see the growth or decline of these sites.  When looking at the graphs ask yourself what may have caused the following trends.  I also added a brief commentary under each graph, I didn’t want to go in too much detail, but still, I gave my 2 cents.

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No too long ago I wrote a post about social networks, I decided to open up the question to a larger audience and thus asked the question on linkedin. I many great responses and wanted to share a few of them with you here:

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We have all seen how rapidly all of the social networks are growing.  Myspace and facebook are just 2 in a sea of endless networks.  Nowadays you can find a social network to cater to any niche you are interested in.  So with all the extra time that we are spending on like making “friends, connections, fans, and followers,” are people really being brought together or are they just living under a technology facade that is actually keeping them apart?

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First off, my apologies for not posting in the last few days, I was quite ill with the flu. I am still not 100% but am feeling good enough to write, which is all the matters.

I am a fan of utilizing linkedin to ask questions to my network as I have found the I receive great feedback and thought provoking answers. The latest question I asked was as follows:

“Should Social Networks Charge? Would you Pay to Use Twitter/Linkedin/Facebook? How Much Would You Pay?”

I received several great responses from folks in various industries. Before you scroll onto the next page ask yourself the same question, should social networks charge? and would you pay if they did charge? Really think about this for a moment. Here are a few of the responses that I received…

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