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New Client — Career Consulting Physicians
What makes an online community a community is interaction. People pay attention to you, and you pay attention to them. The trick is finding both a way to be compelling and attentive to others. Career Consulting Physicians provides an excellent opportunity to explore these points.
I had lunch today with Ivo Drury who's launching a new business, Career Consulting Physicians, to help practicing physicians with the more complex medical career structure that has evolved over the last 20 years. Ivo's site is quite sophisticated, and it is clear that he has made an impressive start with blogging (5 posts a week without fail since October!). So, what does The Community Engine have to offer him? I think plenty, and we’ve agreed to work together.
I see a few things that we might help Ivo with, all have to do with helping him find and connect to his audience. The first is finding other companies and individuals who are already publishing/blogging in his space (he has done some of that; but I suspect there is more). Combined with this step will be developing efficient practices for monitoring what these other sources are talking about, engaging in conversation with them, and through these conversations discovering other opportunities for engagement. Robert Scoble recommends reading 50 blogs to learn how to blog, but how do you do this efficiently and effectively? In the coming weeks, we'll tackle this head on with Ivo.
The second thing I see helping Ivo with is finding the compelling thing he has to write about on his blog and writing more about that. I have found it is really important to unleash yourself with focus on your blog in order to influence people.
As a third thing, I'd like to see the blog take more center stage. Right now, it is kind of hidden under a heading called “Reflections Weblog”. The way his site seems to work is by getting people to come to the main page via various link exchange deals, and then people find their way around. This is a standard approach, advocated by many information architects (e.g., Lou Rosenfeld). However, online communities do not really work this way. What winds up attracting attention are the pointed micro-contributions (i.e., single blog posts), and these can gain tremendous search engine ranking. Why not put these front and center since they attract people? Then Ivo can let them explore the rest of his site, having already had a value-added experience.
Bud posted this on January 25, 2005
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Comments
Useful thoughts.
A few of my own and a clarification/elaboration or two.
My primary audience is the medical profession, and generally speaking individuals in the 40+ age bracket. Recognizing that blogs are more the province of the young, I've been using it to a) get to the young who hopefully will let their non-blogging senior peers know about me {no evidence of success so far], b) get to non-physician readers, given that much that I discuss has broader human applicability, and c) to sharpen my writing skills as I aim to write a book about life as a physician, and in fact am trawling for a book agent as I type. With that caveat, I'm open to any/all suggestions to build attention to my site/blog. I see no downside.
I'll discuss making the blog more front and center with my web designer, but feel free to pitch suggestions. I'd wondered about adding a third square off to the right of the pages on each site like the two that feature there now.
Regarding writing about "the compelling thing", my instincts tell me to cast a widish net at present. Fimding something new to say *5 a week is challenging. A feature of WordPress that I like very much is the ability to categorize posts as I've done in ~ 8 groups at the moment. If feedback from readers clearly indicated that the major interest was say physician burnout or issues for womens physicians, I could slant more posts that way. Right now, I'm a bit in the dark.
I definitely need help with linkages to other blogs, those both medical and those addressing professional ennui in other disciplines. Pile on the tips.
Finally, at least for now, I don't in fact have any link exchange deals going. The sites I referenced in my web resources page were all voluntary on my part. It's not altruism, rather a sense (right or not, I don't know) that my site would be stronger by the open inclusion of other sources of information and support. After all, it doesn't take much work to find this stuff out anyway nowadays.
Thanks for interest, and for stimulating my thinking, Bud
Posted by: Ivo Drury at January 26, 2005 09:04 AM
