Chit Chat, and the Yankee Blog Swap

Chit-Chat:
Noun - light conversation; casual talk; gossip
Verb - to indulge in chit-chat; gossip

The holiday season is a special time of the year when we get together with friends and family. It's also a time when we attend lots of holiday parties where we don't know anyone. You know, the corporate soiree. The friend of a friend's Festivous party. Our wife's best friends uncles sisters friend from Russia get-together. You get it, right?

At these parties, we usually have a drink in hand, which always helps us relax anyway, and probably stand around looking at a bunch of strangers wondering what to talk about. Should I compliment her on her candy cane stockings? Do I interrupt the group next to me, which I've been eavesdropping on for that past 20 minutes, and interject and tell them that blogs are not just a fad? What do I do? With so many groups of people talking, how do I make myself part of the conversation? Since I'm shy, maybe the best thing to do is just listen anyway? I wouldn't want to make a fool of myself by saying something off the wall. What do you do?

Anyone who has found themselves in the above scenario understands the discomfort that interferes with personal communication. Awkwardness around strangers, shyness or stage fright keep people from sharing. Unless you are a natural or experienced, you have to work on your interpersonal skills. Enter the phenomenon known as small talk or chit-chat. Small talk is a way into the conversation. It has a way of building. It starts with the weather or sports and ends with world politics. It's the seed that if watered well, grows into a juicy tomato. Tasty.

We believe a similar scenario exists on blogs. There are many great authors out there with strong opinions on a variety of subjects. They love to talk and share their ideas and opinions. The problem is, more often than not, only a handful of daring souls engage them in conversation. The rest just look on. They don't become part of the conversation. Maybe it's like the corporate party---awkwardness, shyness or comment fright.  Post-comment is de rigueur for blogging.  But is there another way to engage blog visitors?  Maybe it's Chit-Chat.

Some of the advantages of the Chit-Chat may include:

• Anonymous feature lowers inhibitions
• Organic flow mirrors offline, face to face conversations but it's easier to leave
• Unstructured conversation need not be based on a blog post
• Immediate feedback
• May lead to return visitors
• May lead to future comments
• Allows visitors to interact with each other
• Novelty may spur use

Coincidentally, both the Real Estate Tomato and Sellsius° have begun experimenting with a chat feature on our blogs. We are trying Gabbly. We wanted to see if it would help create another way for our readers to communicate with each other, but on a whole other level. Since we just added the feature, we don't know the effect, if any, it will have on visitor interaction. Maybe this post will help both our blogs' readers take a minute to test our chat feature. Stop by and say "Hello". How's the weather? How those Seahawks doing? Leave a message.

We hope there's no blogging rule written somewhere by the blogging police that says chat widgets are banned from blogs. If so, oh well, we love being different.  Feel free to blaze your own path and try new things that might help improve the blogging experience for your readers. As everyone knows, there's more than one way to eat a tomato.

Thanks Jim for allowing us to borrow your Tomato.

Joseph G. Ferrara and Rudolph Bachraty

Comments

[Christine]

Oh My God... I can't even read your post - that tomato (you say Tomato I say Tomato) Is just way over the top!!!! I love the disguise

[Jay Thompson]

A great post from J&R at Sellsius. Now there's a shocker. Just goes to show it's the guys (or gals) behind the keyboard, not the platform that makes a blog what it is...

Off to the next swap!

[Bonnie Erickson]

Written by the originators of Blogoholics anonymous and so well done, guys!

[Gena Riede]

Excellent! Can't wait to try out your new diggs!

[rudolph d. bachraty III]

christine - plum sorry for the distraction ;) we're on our way to make the rounds.

jay - your analogy is so true, we appreciate your support.

bonnie - happy you enjoyed it. from one blogoholic to another, blog on!

[geno petro]

Hey, My name is Geno and I think I'm a member... This is the coolest one I've seen today. To me, that which is nonverbal (and in this case visual) is consistently more powerful than the written word for afterthought purposes. Can't quite remember what you posted but that little tomato dude rocks!

[Brad Nix]

Ditto to Jay's comments about the person typing the posts that makes the blogs! Quality and consistency - I love it!

[Pat Kitano]

Fine article guys... I like the chat feature and would love to try it, but I'd have to limit my live hours to the evening. Frankly, I could never figure out why enterprise chat service providers like liveperson provide such poor interfaces. gabbly is simple and works.

[Jim Cronin]

To be honest, I am less than thrilled with the feature. I could be a nice element, but at this point, I think that it is just occupying valuable side bar real estate and will be removing it next time I go to work on that side of the site.

[Richard Nacht]

You've probably read that 90% of blog readers never comment, 9% participate occasionally, leaving only 1% who actually engage the conversation routinely. So says Jakob Neilsen anyway.

Noah Rosenblatt over at UrbanDigs.com has been using a chat feature on his blog for sometime, though he uses it to hold chat sessions with home buyers, so it's a bit of a derivation. Nonetheless, I think chats and blogs are a natural fit, and an extension of blogging as a source of social media. Great post! Oh, and Fodey.com also has talking cats! My wife will love that.