Thursday, January 28, 2010

Social Consolidation

My job has kept me crazy busy over the last few months and I've pretty much dropped off of the map in regards to my internet presence. Now that things have slowed back down to a more normal level, I've been trying to get my digital house in order as it where. Unfortunately, this means dealing with several different sources, thus this post examining my current usage and whether it makes sense to attempt to consolidate some of them...

First I believe I will simply list out the services/sites I'm using and why I'm using them and then we'll see what conclusions can be drawn.

  • Twitter - This is my primary public social face. Noone cares what I tweet, but I shall persist.
  • Facebook - This is my primary private social face. Friends and family. I mostly read and occasionally post comments. Any status update is from a link to Twitter.
  • Blogger - This blog, created with the thought of it being an extension of Twitter when I need to express something taking > 140 characters.
  • BoatOwnerBlogs.com - Site created by myself in an attempt for boat owners to write and post pics about their boats. Only user is still just me...
  • GlastronOwners.com - Site again created by myself in an attempt to create a community for owners of Glastron boats. Was going pretty well until I fell victim to an e107 exploit. It was during my busy time and I didn't catch it until it was too late. My host didn't have an old enough backup. Anyway, I kept a blog there specific to our Glastron. There were a couple other blogs, but most activity is within the forum.
Okay, so where does that leave me? Well, I think Twitter and Facebook stay as-is. They serve separate purposes for me and any content I add is short and easy to deal with. So that basically leave the blogs. I've already shown my inability to consistently blog about anything, so is it really necessary to inconsistently blog on three separate sites? Unfortunately as I write this, I'm beginning to think that it is. In list form once again, let's examine why I use these sites...
  • GlastronOwners.com - As mentioned, this is my site which I'm trying to grow. That means it needs content. So the blog posts related to my Glastron provide content for the spiders and the spiders bring the users who provide more content for the spiders, etc. So I think an active Blog on this site is needed. Unfortunately as mentioned above, I'm going to have to start over from square one here. I have a couple of the blog posts mirrored on my other site, but otherwise have lost them all... At the very least going forward I will be keeping my own backups...
  • BoatOwnerBlogs.com - So far this site doesn't appear to be going anywhere. Of course there's no marketing behind it, so I'm not sure how I expect it to go anywhere. Just as above though, if I'm not going to pay for marketing, then the only way to drive visitors is to provide indexable content. So it too should probably stay...with the only question of what content goes here? Boating only?
  • This Blogger Site - This is my most recent Blogging endeavor...so why another blog when I could have made use of one of the others. I think it comes down to content. It seems to me items on boatownerblogs should be related to boating. And that's what's there for the most part right now, boating and tow vehicle related posts. The posts on this site are all pretty much technical in nature and just don't fit in on a site called boatownerblogs... I could just close down that site and move the boating content here also, but one of the reasons I created the site was to also have a gallery easily associated with the blog. Although it would allow me to make better use of my picasa gallery if I moved the image content there and linked to it from here. The only thing I would lose would be the possibility of boatownerblogs taking off and becoming the next big thing...I'm not going to hold my breath on that one though.
Conclusion? Well, I think I'm going to close down boatownerblogs.com, since it has no current following(except alot of spam bots). I will probably leave the doors open and make a last ditch effort to drive some traffic there, but the plan will be to move the content to this blog and let the labels keep things separate. That's the Google way isn't it? Dump everything in once spot and label the heck out of it.

I'm sure no-one else will get much out of this post, but it was a great exercise for me and I really and truly didn't reach a decision about what I was going to do until I typed it out. Anyway, hopefully more content on the way.

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