Syndicated Blogging – Don’t Be Where Your Readers Be

Along with many of my blogging peers, we are syndicated across a number of CRM related properties. Sounds great, doesn’t it? More readership means more exposure for us. You might be surprised to hear me say that it isn’t all a bed of roses, though. In truth, I’m a big believer in the Social CRM mantra of engaging with your customers wherever they are. That could be in a community, but let’s be real…not everyone is going to have an online community.

In the case of blogging, the engagement is through the commenting system – and to a lesser degree Twitter. Twitter doesn’t really count, in my opinion, because of it’s loosely coupled relationship to the blog post (thru back links and 3rd party products). The real engagement has to happen, back and forth, through comments on the post. So, what’s the problem, you ask? Syndicated blogs have worse than loosely coupled relationships with the originating post.

It’s The Comments, Stupid

For the same reason that I don’t like dealing with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gist, etc. and etc., I struggle with the fact that comments on one of my posts could be scattered around the known Universe. I’m not even sure I know every place my post could reside, let alone know when a comment has been made at that location. There is simply no tieback to the originating post other than an inbound link. Not in a meaningful way (not even a pingback).

How can bloggers and content writers engage where their readers are commenting? Do we really have to spend all day hunting them down? Did anyone in the social media world bother to plan for anything they built? I mean, did they understand that we still have jobs, or are they hoping that new, clerical jobs would be created to support this disjointed social architecture?  It’s a great example of a non-strategic implementation of technology.

Let’s Go Fishing

I heard my friend Prem Kumar Aparanji mention something in our backchannel (yea, it’s secret!) about a protocol called Salmon. If a fish doesn’t make sense relative to blogging, then allow me to take a few moments to explain – because it’s a cool idea. The salmon protocol is all about unifying conversations regardless of where the participants are conversing. 

In my business, I try really hard to eliminate silos, or at least connect them. In the social media extension to relationships, the last thing we need is more silos. One of the disturbing trends I see in social media solutions is the come to my silo mentality while talking about social engagement. It makes no sense. So I was very pleased to hear that someone was actually working on a solution to this.

The concept is that when a blog post is syndicated, any comments that are posted to your syndicated copy will swim upstream to the originating post. Thus, the name Salmon. Now, the really cool part is that it doesn’t just swim upstream. Any comments on the original post also flow out to the syndicated content. And not just the posts originating at the original post, but also any comments from any other syndicated copy that have flowed upstream. That means that I can have conversations where I want to have them (my blog) and my readers can converse with me where they want to be (the syndication website).

To me, getting this right means that someone is getting relationships right. I can imagine the day when I bitch about having to jump from my CRM platform to my blog. Wouldn’t it be cool if this kind of protocol managed all the social conversations you might have within the platform that’s supposed to be managing your relationships? Imagine being on a contact record /page and being able to respond to a Tweet or a comment posted on a remote blog, syndicating your content, and have the response actually reach that contact where they’ve chosen to engage with you. I can’t wait! Is it even coming?

We’ll see how much resistance it gets from the sleepy footed giants who fear change yet want to make a difference somehow. Maybe someone will make the Social CRM protocol. It’s all about relationships.