I was chatting with a friend last week who told me he didn’t enjoy Spin Sucks as much these days. He said it used to be much more intimate and now we have different voices from people he doesn’t know so it’s hard for him to care. He said, for him, it’s just more online noise.
That got my attention. More online noise.
While the goal for the blog is to eventually monetize it, it’s equally important to maintain the culture we’ve created. But how do you do that as you grow?
This goes along with something I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks – how do we continue to engage with our community as it grows? How do we continue to make people feel welcome, pay it forward, and debate professionally as it gets bigger? How do we continue to make every commenter feel important when there are hundreds of them? How do we grow without making more noise? Does a blog eventually have to go the way of Mashable and Guy Kawasaki or is it possible to maintain the intimacy and accessibility we’ve created?
I’m not going to pretend that the 94 percent increase in traffic we had in July, after we started having daily guest bloggers, hasn’t been exciting. I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t gotten us months closer to our goal in just a few short weeks.
But this is your blog as much as it is ours. And we don’t want to create more noise. We want it to continue to be intimate; after all that’s the culture we’re building within our four walls. It makes sense to have a common culture in all aspects of the business.
So what do you think? Have we just created more online noise? Are we getting too big for our britches? Do you still see intimacy and accessibility? Or are we on our way to getting too big for you to care?