Being an Influential Blogger

Last week Mark Fidelman of Mindtouch posted a list of the 25 most influential bloggers in the technical communication community. I was amazed and honored to see my name on the honorable mentions list. I’ll do my best to continue to make this blog and my social media presence worthy of that distinction.

I was glad to see that I recognized almost everyone in the top 25 and have met several of them in-person (partially due to being at the STC Summit in Dallas earlier this year).  I also already followed them on Twitter and have personally interacted with several more there.

Mark’s post got me thinking about what it means to be an influential blogger.  What exactly makes a tech comm blogger influential? Mark used a variety of different metrics to measure influence, but I’m pretty sure that the fact that I recognize everyone isn’t due to their scores on various metrics.  It may be that their actions and behaviors cause them to have those higher scores, but the bottom line is it’s what they do that made me notice them, not their ranking on any analytical scale.

So what is it that that these people do that makes them influential in the world of technical communication?  In his analysis, after requiring that each individual have a tech comm-focused blog, Mark’s metrics relied heavily on a person’s presence on Twitter.  Colum McAndrew, author of The RoboColum(n) blog, noted the absence of other social media outlets like forums and LinkedIn groups, but since I don’t use those as much myself I’m not sure how much they contribute toward a person’s influence compared to Twitter.  From my experience Twitter seems to be a centralized platform that technical communicators use to send people to other places for information.  But then all roads lead back to Twitter.

So back to the question I started with:  What is it that the top 25 influential bloggers are doing to make them influential?  Providing interesting content on their blogs, of course, but that alone isn’t enough to make them influential.  As Mark alluded to when he commented that Scott Abel would be higher on the list if he interacted more on Twitter, it isn’t just interesting content that makes a person influential, it’s interaction with the technical communication community.  Most of the blogs I follow I found through links on Twitter, either by people tweeting their own posts or by other people I follow retweeting them; in this way I found out about blogs and people that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.  I use the same method to notify people of new posts on this blog and I’ve been very happy with the results.

I think the lesson we should take away here is that in order to be influential you have to engage with others directly.  Twitter is a good way to do that but I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s the only way, and simply pushing out your own information isn’t enough.  I might notice you if you have good content but I’ll remember you if you interact with me, retweeting or commenting on something I’ve said.  The top two bloggers in Mark’s list—RJ Jacquez and Tom Johnson—both interact with the community in a variety of ways, including blogs, Twitter, conferences, webinars, and, I happen to know, personal correspondence.  That’s what makes them the most influential bloggers.