Hi.

Apart from being in pain that makes me want to vomit, lately I’ve been alright.

In becoming an “official blogger” for the Dallas Gluten & Allergen Free Expo, I’ve noticed something with them and with their subscription box that is pretty stellar and should be done by other major/serious PR folks: my stats don’t seem to matter.

I applied to become a blogger using Charlise’s blog, just because I have been feeling “blah” again about 6birds, and her blog isn’t that “big” compared to 6birds in terms of age, traffic, etc.

Yet, I was accepted, and with a simple email to ask if she could get in as press as well (because we basically run it together), she was also added to the press list.

And she applied to be a reviewer for their Send Me Gluten Free* box, and recently, so did I, but I used 6birds for the blog.

Not once was I asked for stats, and that’s nice, you know?

I feel like too often people worry about the stats of a website and don’t pay any attention to the interaction. Since I took over the BBN, I’ve found myself receiving more emails requesting all of the network stats than I’ve received from random PR people about guest posting some crappy post to 6birds — and that’s a lot!

Sometimes, I feel bad when I say I’m not currently tracking the BBN’s traffic with Google Analytics, or that no, I don’t want to feature your lengthy giveaway on the blog. Maybe that’s bad ownership on my part, but I’ve spent the past two and a half years reading blogs about directing communities[1. 1) You say “directing”, because direct a community; “owning” a community is more like owning a blog, in that it’s yours and you control everything. I am the “director” of the BBN, thus meaning I do not dictate everything that goes into it, I simply enforce and encourage the rules for safety.

2) “Communities” DOES NOT pertain to having communities on your blog; in the world of communities and community-niche blogs, it is more along the lines of non-blog communities. It’s really, really complex and hard to explain. Contact if you need more of an explanation.], and “the numbers game” is a completely different sport for online communities, because the amount of traffic and followers do not matter. Instead, it’s the number of active members, plus the number of lurkers, plus the number of total posts; as well as the average posts made per day, and then per user. What’s more, having other ways members can interact with each other is important as well, and you can’t necessarily track that [unless you want to take up a lot of memory/database space].

It’s just not a big deal.

Anyways, point is, I really admire and favor the companies and bloggers who aren’t all about the numbers.