Kudos to Compassion International for taking the risk of sending 15 bloggers to Uganda to do some live blogging. As Jeff Brooks points out, this wasn’t cheap, and there was no guarantee of a consistent positive message:
Looked at with old economy eyes, Compassion is taking a huge risk, letting go of its marketing to 15 different near-strangers who might do anything. Looked at with modern eyes, Compassion is smart: willing to give up control in favor of being talked about by real people.
Compassion also offered free stuff to the first 500 people to blog about Compassion during “Compassion Blog Month” and is encouraging readers to start their own compassion blogs, providing tips and free resources for doing so.
I’ve been following (sort of – see below) the newly-launched Compassion blog for the past month. Posts are written by different contributors, each sharing a perspective on his or her involvement with Compassion.
It’s a great idea, but I’m finding that because Compassion doesn’t publish their full post in their feed, I’m not reading very many posts in their entirety. I subscribe to a more than 50 blogs – and I know I’m not unusual in this – and thus I very rarely take the time to click through my reader to an original blog. This reminds me of Siege Curmudgeon’s comments on partial vs full feeds:
In the short term, forcing people to the site puts them in front of the ads that generate revenue. But in the long term, it makes it more difficult for people to get to your content, and that makes them less likely to bother with you in the future.
And why am I not sharing this on the Compassion blog itself? Well, reading their ground rules, I see that I am supposed to use my full name to share a comment. I actually don’t have a problem doing that, except that right now I’m blogging using my first name only. I want to stick with that for now.
Caveats aside, I’m excited about Compassion’s venture into the blogosphere – I think that they’re onto something good. I wish them every success with this, and I hope to read about it — about all of it — in the future (hint, hint).
Filed under: media Tagged: | blog, Compassion International
Thanks for the hints.
Just last night I modified the amount of each post that shows up in the feed. And we aren’t necessarily married to a summary feed. We’ve adopted it, not because of ad revenue (We don’t have ads on the site), but because of individual preferences.
For every person that prefers the full feed, there’s someone that prefers the summary. However, we’re still going back and forth over this.
Even though the ground rules said a commenter should use first and last name, it also said comments “may” be deleted if the rules weren’t followed.
The truth is that we weren’t “enforcing” that rule. It was a remnant of an early draft of the text. I have updated the page.
http://blog.compassion.com/ground-rules-for-leaving-comments-on-the-compassion-blog/
Thanks, Chris, for responding to these ideas – and so quickly!
Your point about the debate between full text feeds vs. partial text feeds is fair — it does seem to be pretty evenly divided between the two camps. I happen to have fallen in the camp that likes full posts. I’ll look forward to seeing the modified posts in my reader, though.
And the truth is, I love the ground rules for commenting that you’ve laid out, especially in their new revised form. They’re easy to read and make a lot of sense.
Really looking forward to tracking with you on your blogging journey.
Lynnita, thanks for the link to our blogging trip. Much appreciated.
I’m the guy charged with putting together the next trip (details coming) for Compassion – a recruiter I suppose – and getting the word out about Compassion on blogs of all shapes and sizes. I just started. We just launched http://www.CompassionBloggers.com as a first step. All that to say, I’d love to hear any advise you and your readers have to offer me/us. All this is new and we’re learning. Send any thoughts my way at contact@compassionbloggers.com
Thanks again for the public encouragement.
-Shaun
Good luck in pulling together your next trip — I look forward to watching that come together. I’m subscribed to just about every Compassion feed available now …