Crisis and the Community

The more research I look into on Heather Armstrong and Dooce.com, the more powerful and amazing I see blogging to be as a means of a lifestyle and career. It’s challenging enough to come up with compelling content in order to keep a constant readership engaged, entertained and willing to come back. For so many, that’s where blogging begins and ends and seemingly why other blogs have not taken off the way Dooce has.

When you’re a blogger like Heather Armstrong, your business and entrepreneurship is a totally different ballgame than that of a corporate entity, but many characteristics coincide. Corporations all report to their directors and shareholders who have invested a great deal financially in the success of a brand. For blogging, advertisers invest a great deal of money into the writer knowing and seeing the emotional investment readers take into the content of such a site. 

Rohit Bhargava wrote an interesting chapter on blogging in his book, Personality Not Included. The chapter focuses a lot on how beneficial a blog can be for a brand. Though the Dooce brand is a blog, many of his suggestions and guidelines ring true to Armstrong’s successes. While in all the time I have been reading Dooce, I have never seen any posts directly looking to involve government entities; though Armstrong makes a great effort to keep her blogging on a consistent schedule attempting to post at least something each day.  Should be away from home on a business trip, she makes her readers aware of why the posts will be few and far between and when she is expected back. As a woman who blogs about family, it is little details like this that make her readers feel as though they are a part of a bigger familial circle. She makes her readers feel like an extended family not only related to her but also to each other.

Her blog posts consistently have links to previous posts, sites relating to various topics and pictures that create an intense visual for her platform of each entry. She promotes her content by many times promoting something else – usually linked to sponsorship deals. Overall, Heather Armstrong and Dooce.com do well for themselves reaching and appeasing those who are invested in the site both financially and emotionally.

If previous gushing wasn’t proof enough, my favorite part of the site is the Dooce Community forum. Any questions anyone can think of are usually asked from “what’s going on?” to topics relating to life, death and everything in between. In order to reach out to readers and give them this amazing open space, there are very clear and succinct Community Guidelines all readers and writers must follow in order to keep the forum as genuine and welcoming as possible.

community.docce.com

Armstrong herself and her personal assistant monitor the site, but she also has brought on some of her most loyal readers as moderators to keep reigns on the flow of information shared on the site.  The guidelines make it very black and white to readers that this online space is for entertainment and Internet camaraderie. It has been tried various times to point out that each topic brought up is to be posed as a question and all other topics should be formed as group pages to keep from too many people posting about similar ideas. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and the Community is littered with statements and opinions rather than questions and answers. The moderators have done a phenomenal job lately of keeping this issue at bay. If they can continue this, the Community will only increase in awesome-ness.

These strategies Armstrong has taken on to keep Dooce the success that it is, has not stopped even in times of hardship. For a brand like a blogger, crisis management usually revolves around the life and times of the writer themselves. Heather Armstrong has made her enviable fortune chronicling her life. She has willingly made herself vulnerable to the public in hopes of making sense of her own struggles and being able to reach out to others in need. She wrote a book about the scary, dark times in her life dealing with post-partum depression after the birth of her first daughter, Leta. She was always open about the amount of work she put in to make her marriage work. But the biggest shock of all was when she first announced that she and her husband were separating in January of 2012. 

Heather Armstrong Announces Separation on the Today Show

While it was a personal crisis for her, it became a crisis on many levels for her online life. Many readers wondered and speculated what could have happened and why so little was being said to the readers. A majority of readers respected when the Armstrongs announced officially that they would be divorcing and that no other details would be spoken of publicly. Loyal Dooce fans knew that Heather Armstrong had a history of mental health challenges along the way and worried about the fate of her site – would she stop posting for long periods of time? Would readers ever hear about what happened or what the final straw was that ended everything? What does this mean for the future of their family and the future of the Dooce business – one so centered around the nuclear family unit? Armstrong’s strategy to deal with this crisis was on point. She did not deny or skate around the issue. She addressed it head-on giving out as much detail that was mutually agreed upon between her and her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Much like her time suffering with post-partum depression, Heather Armstrong used Bhargava’s technique during this most recent family crisis to forge relationships with other bloggers and readers creating a communal fellowship to lean on outside of her real-life relationships.

As a blogger, your life is your living. When you’re up, your blog is up. When you’re down, it’s a toss up finding out how the public will respond to your news. In Dooce’s case, her most loyal fans were right beside her just like they would be face-to-face if given the opportunity. Her readership is her community and she has given every emotion possible to keep people invested in wanting more in the day-to-day life of Heather B. Armstrong.