Bad Manners Can Cost You Opportunities

Our host today is Geoff Crane. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.

For the last six months, I’ve been writing a blog about project leadership, ownership, and becoming great. Papercut Edge has been an incredible thrill ride of ups and downs. While my background is in project and portfolio management, to blog effectively I’ve had to learn an awful lot about new things like SEO, site structure, design and other things I had no clue about when I began. Ultimately, my quest for that knowledge led me to Nick here at Site Sketch 101.

I was speaking with Nick just the other day and we were talking about nofollow policies. In blogging land (I’m learning) this is where you set a policy of passing Google PageRank through a link to an external site, and sharing some of your hard-won rank with the people you’re linking to. There’s positives and negatives with this approach.

Personally, I’m of the mind, if someone leaves fabulous comments, and obviously takes the time to interact and help my community grow, they deserve any meagre bonuses I can send their way. I have a clear policy about comments, and I’m not shy about telling people if I don’t believe their comments add any value or are obviously self-serving, they won’t make it through to any of my blog posts. So if a comment meets my criteria, I believe in giving the author whatever reciprocity I have to give.

But that’s me. Every blogger has their own style and criteria for how they want to handle comments, and they’re all equally valid.

The problem of course, comes when we open our blogs to the world and the comments start coming in. People respond to our policies and styles in ways we never expected. Sometimes those responses really cause us to raise an eyebrow.

“I Can Haz PageRank Nao?”

Community-building is a fine line. On the one hand we want to build our communities. We want many people to benefit directly from our efforts. But we’re also more selfishly motivated–for our efforts we want traffic and numbers and hopefully, in some fashion, reward. That works on both sides of the post page. As a blogger I want recognition and reward for my work on my site, and as a commenter on other people’s blogs I want recognition and reward for the time I spent thinking and writing the comment.

The effort, of course, is mine. As is the initiative. While I work very hard to set up models where I can get the recognition I seek, I also understand that others participating in my space want recognition too. So I give it where I believe it’s appropriate, and ask for and take where I think it’s right, too. The more this happens with the same people, the more I develop relationships with them. It’s those relationships that pave the way for new, exciting things. Comments lead to Skype calls. Skype calls lead to sneak previews. Sneak previews lead to revenue. It’s a slow process, but an incredibly rewarding one.

It all starts with the comments. So good manners in comments are incredibly important.

Asking for special dispensation regarding Page Rank? Bad manners. Asking for special policy breaks? Bad manners. Asking for pretty much anything for free before we know one another? Pretty bad manners.

There are consequences to our actions. If I behave poorly when I reach out into the community, I need to be prepared to be shut out in the cold. I need to be prepared to sacrifice all the good that could come from the beginning of a relationship, for the sake of one quick grab. And so do you.

Is it worth it?