12 Jun 2012

Comms Chat. Way Cool

Last night whilst staring uselessly at Twitter I read a tweet from
nickie72, an IT guru (Twitter Link)
mentioning something about bloggers and 'comms' and a hashtag.
Hashtags always excite me. I can have the most random thought or dream or idea, and a quick hashtag search on Twitter will show me either of two things
  • I am not alone
  • I am crazy
I went straight to the site linked to, as I always do if it looks promising, and found this

 commschat-on-blogger-relations (link)

Seemed interesting enough. I wondered why I hadn't heard about this before, until I remembered I'd had a good clear out of randoms I was following, and Twitter can only show a selection of tweets at any time, so I must have freed up some tweeting space.

I waited for the chat to begin. It was hosted by

EmLeary (Twitter link)

who led with very interesting questions, and what started off slowly, soon gathered pace and I can honestly say it was the quickest hour of my life.
I very much wanted to participate, but was aware I was in the presence of real blogging and comms gurus, (by merit) such as
which is always a little intimidating. 
I got all excited and asked some really inane questions, and was so caught up in it all, I burnt pasta and my pc was screaming with the pressure. 
I won't go into a blow by blow account, you can find that here (Link) and it is really interesting reading. 
Major themes were the bloggers relationship with PR and transparency and whether bloggers should be governed by the same rules as journos. 

As a completely amateur blogger, just writing because I have to, for me, I can't see a time when I'll ever have to worry about it, but fascinating nonetheless.
I wondered about contracts between bloggers and PR, about whether a negative opinion of a product would influence a bloggers style.
I was shocked, ok, a little taken aback to see that bloggers could inflate their stats, and that bloggers approached PR, I honestly thought you had to wait until you were head hunted, and saw both sides of the transparency debate.

Of course I felt like a useless little troll among these pro-bloggers and comms experts, but I also felt inspired and informed and entertained for the first time in a long time on Twitter.
I've been losing patience lately with the beauty bloggers hashtag. Week after week, regardless of the topic, it seems that the same things are tweeted, its rarely a discussion anymore, just quotes sent out with the hashtag and the feeding frenzy of linkage that starts as soon as the hour is up. 

With the CommsChat, because the emphasis wasn't on the beauty community, it was a more varied conversation of the medium we all use. I guess I'm more of a nuts and bolts girl, the beauty stuff is hardly rocket science, so I like to hear more about the process and the way we're looked at by others.

When it was over, I lit a cigarette, exhaled, and got round to responding  to some of my mentions, and checked back to the hashtag a bit. Lo and behold, a couple of new bloggers had completely missed the point, and were linking up, and outright begging for free stuff. 
My high horse mounted, I remarked on this, but then I thought, actually, it's their life. Just because it's not the way I conduct myself, doesn't mean it's the wrong way. So. life lessons too. 
Excellent. 
Thanks CommsChat, you're going to become the best part of Monday nights.

4 comments:

  1. It was the first time that I had seen commschat as well - I thought it was really interesting and informative - like that it was led by someone, Emleary did a good job of keeping everyone on track and the discussion moving etc also completely agree with your point about the bbloggers chat it does sometime seem less of a discussion and more about posting generic quotes and links!

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    1. Doesn't it though? I get so frustrated. BBloggers is one of my saved searches, and I check it frequently, answering questions and checking links, you would be surprised how little response I get, because I feel the poster checks my stats(terrible) before deciding whether my input is worthy of acknowledgement..so be it, we all want to progress.

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  2. Glad you followed my link and found it interesting. The blogger/pr #commschat streams are always interesting, I've found and I've learnt lots from them.

    And, to be honest, I sometimes feel like an "outsider looking in" but if you ask questions to the right people you get the proper answers.

    If you want to see real begging then follow the #prrequest hashtag or the #mummyblogger one. Very revealing...

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    1. I daren't look. I had to physically restrain myself from saying 'you're ruining it all, you're ruining it all' to the 'ladies' I saw on Monday, post comms chat! One day I won't be so restrained..it's no different from the days when I was a beauty consultant and would see women applying full faces of makeup from testers. There's no written rules, it's not a crime, but your heart breaks and your head knows its wrong, poor sport.
      Thankyou for the link, and the reply!

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