On networking in the dolly community
Written on March 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm by MichelleFiled under: Article with tags: networking
Regardless of if you’ll be selling things in the Blythe/community or not, it’s always fun to be able to network with people and make friends. Not all of us are lucky enough to live in cities with a large Blythe community, so we turn to the internet. My discovery of Blythe began on the internet, I somehow stumbled onto one of the Blythe forums and learned all about these big-eyed dolls.
A great way to make new friends is to join a forum or a Livejournal community. If you’re a member of Flickr, you can join one of the many Blythe-related groups there as well. Networking is all about getting to know other people and making yourself known as well, so you should be willing to make your presence known and share a little about yourself as well (such as your doll photos!).
Not everyone can have a big presence everywhere, so don’t try to stretch yourself too thin. If you want to focus on making friends on one forum, that’s great. It’s a lot easier to spend most of your time posting in one place than trying to spend similar amounts of time posting in several other places as well – plus it’s also rather time consuming as well. It does help people ‘know’ of you better if you stick with the same username everywhere – so if your username is BlytheGirl2011 on Forum A and on Forum B, it helps people notice that “Oh hey, I know that person!”.
Chances are, given the size of the doll community, you’re bound to run into people that you know on various forums, Flickr and even Twitter and blogs. Having the same avatar does help, but not everyone seems to do that as often as they have the same username.
It’s always more fun to be in a hobby with other people! You might even find that you have some things in common with people, besides loving and having Blythe dolls.
Some forums to consider: