I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to encouraging participation and interaction blogs are not enough. I don’t think this should necessarily be the case because the comment feature would allow give and take. If folks ever used the comment feature much, the rise of social media services seemed to siphon off whatever interest in interaction existed.
Facebook has been the social media go to site for most. I do have a presence on Facebook, but I have not invested in posting the education-oriented content I write there. I have an objection to the business model Facebook used to gain widespread acceptance offering a free service that users pay for with their personal information. This personal information does provide for more useful ads, but it also allowed large scale manipulation that has done a lot of damage.
There are quality alternatives to Facebook and I have explored most of them. The challenge they all face is the network effect. The value of social sites over blogs is the interaction that social sites prioritize and once membership builds up to provide this interaction, it has proven very difficult to get Facebook users to even try other services. A quick experiment exploring other sites is likely to be disappointing as there will likely be few opportunities to find others with similar interests.
I have decided to give a couple of other social sites a year commitment and I invite you to join me. I have created a group on these sites and cross-posted content I first added to my blogs so there would be content available for anyone who took a look at these groups. I can’t say I have had much success. I can generate some views of my content, but I can’t get others to post to the groups. As far as total views go, I would be better off focusing on my blogs. Just because I created a group and posted multiple items to these groups does not mean I want the focus of the group to be on what I write.
So, the intent of this post is to offer an invitation to others. Ignore me as the originator of the group. If you are a blogger, take a look and cross-post your material. React to my posts or to the posts from others if such posts materialize. Give it a month or so and see what you think.