ASK AN AMBASSADOR: Does It REALLY Matter Who Owns ActiveRain?
Jonathan Washburn
Market Leader
Trulia
Zillow
and now Ben Kinney.
What do they all have in common besides being at the helm of ActiveRain?
Not one of them has ever given me direction of what to blog. Day after day, that choice has been mine. As long as I follow the ActiveRain guidelines, I've been safe to choose what I want to write each day. And as far as I know, those AR guidelines have been in place and not altered for years.
So if ActiveRain has changed, is it the fault of management or us as members? Personally I look for management to supply these key needs:
- Keep the platform up and stable (what good is an epic blog post that results in a 404???).
- Keep the members adhering to the guidelines.
- Do that SEO magic so our posts get found
- Keep the fees reasonable
- Don't favor one model over another
Outside of that, most of the rest is gravy to me. Training? Contests? Featuring posts? Just extra things that add to the experience but not the main reason I'm here daily.
If we don't like the blog topics being posted, well there's the option of skipping past post after post until we find something we want to read. But accept that market reports, listings, community FAQs and local events are part of what gets our phone to ring and they're not going away.
And if we allow the pursuit of points to dilute our content, even cause us to publish posts of poor quality, well all we have to do is look in the mirror for the culprit. And I'm not faulting posts written solely for fun, they definitely have their place and I enjoy them too. But ultimately, to each their own. At the end of the day, we're all adults and have blogging free will. We choose or we don't choose: what to write, how often to write and where we write. Your blog, your call.
So does it matter who owns AR? What do you think?
Questions? Just Ask An Ambassador!
Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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