Navigating the Blogosphere: Using Blogs to Market Resources and Services
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Elizabeth Schaub, The University of Texas at Austin presentation at VRA 28 Atlanta. From the "Utilizing Blogs to Improve and Market Resources" session.
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Navigating the Blogosphere: Using Blogs to Market Resources and Services
- 1. Elizabeth Schaub Visual Resources Association Annual Conference Wednesday, March 17, 2010 Navigating the Blogosphere: Using Blogs to Market Resources and Services
- 27. :: conclusion ::
- 28. :: thank you :: [email_address]
Editor's Notes
- As Scott Rosenberg describes it in his book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why it Matters blogs began as a means for “overshareing.” People created blogs to put their thoughts and ideas out into the blogosphere; business and academic institutions have followed establishing blogs as a marketing tool to communicate their message and disseminate various types of information to a broader community.
- The growth of blogs over the past decade has been astronomical. Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, reported that in September 2003 there were one million blogs and 7,000 new blogs created per day. By April 2008 the number of blogs Technorati was indexing had increased to 112 million and 175,000 new blogs were being created per day. The explosive increase in the number of blogs between 2003 and 2008 illustrates the ubiquity of blogs in our online culture. However, the increase in the number of blogs does not necessarily mean an increase in actual content. In a June 5, 2009 New York Times article titled “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest” the author notes that [quote] “According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream—or at least an ambition—unfulfilled.” [end quote] It’s important to note that the bar for entry into the blogosphere is low but once you have established a blog it takes time and energy to ensure that your blog is relevant and the platform is being used in a way that meets your customer’s expectations. Douglas Quenqua,“Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest,” New York Times, June 5, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?_r=1 (accessed February 17, 2010).
- In this paper I will discuss why the visual resources collection I manage established a blog, how we went about doing so, strategies we’ve employed to ensure new content was being posted to our blog on a regular basis, means by which we’ve repurposed blog content, how we’ve marketed our blog, and how we’ve measured its impact.
- Simply put, in response to our customers’ shift in use from analog slides to digital images and the resulting consequence of less foot traffic in our physical space, we wanted to utilize social networking tools to communicate about our collection, services, and other resources that might be of interest to our community of users. Since our face-to-face contact has decreased we need to meet our users where they are—online—and a blog is an ideal means by which to engage the community using a platform that has the potential for more interactivity as opposed to just using a static Web site.
- Karen Holt, who at the time was completing her MSIS degree at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information, authored a “Web 2.0 Technologies Marketing Plan” in the spring 2008 for the Visual Resources Collection (hereafter referred to as the VRC). The aim of the plan was to develop a strategy for implementing various Web 2.0 applications that would support the goals outlined in the VRC’s Strategic Plan. The plan also included a timeline for staggering the implementation of recommended technologies so that we could more effectively manage roll out without putting undue strain on staff members who would be engaged in the process.
- The implementation timeline was broken up into time frames defined as immediate (two months), short-term (academic year 2008-09) and longer-term (2009-2011). We decided that we could move forward and create the blog immediately because the Marketing Plan clearly outlined how a blog supported two of the VRC’s strategic goals, first: to act as an instructional and reference node within the School of Architecture and second: to promote the VRC’s’ services and resources, paired with the fact that it is relatively easy to start a blog.
- There are virtually no barriers for entry into the blogosphere. After making the decision to create a blog the first thing I did was to figure out what to call it and then I investigated our options for establishing the blog.
- There are a number of free weblog publishing tools like Blogger from Google and the open source software script called WordPress. WordPress offers a service on their WordPress.COM site that allows you to get started with a free WordPress-based blog but is not as flexible as the version of WordPress you download and install yourself from the WordPress.ORG site.
- The VRC’s blog, named Deep Focus--after the photographic technique that results in a large depth-of-field where the foreground, middle-ground, and background are simultaneously in focus--uses the version of WordPress that requires that you have a server that supports PHP, a widely used general purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development, and MySQL, a relational database management system.
- We worked with the School of Architecture’s Webmaster who downloaded WordPress and, with our input he created the look and feel, also known as the theme, of our blog. However, by using Google’s Blogger or the hosted version of the WordPress blog, it’s just a matter of signing up, coming up with a snappy name, choosing a theme and in minutes you have a blog!
- While setting up a blog is easy and free it’s important to go into the blogosphere with an understanding of how much time and effort it is going to take to ensure that your blog is vibrant and relevant. There is an expectation from your readership that your blog will reflect fresh content on a very regular basis. Therefore, it’s critical to balance the need to keep the blog fresh while ensuring that staffing resources are not being overtaxed. Once Deep Focus was online, I set an objective for myself to post something new at least three times a week. This worked well until the following fall semester began and I found that I had less time to devote to blogging. It was then that I familiarized a graduate student with the WordPress interface and she posted the majority of the entries on Deep Focus until which time I gave authoring permission to an additional graduate student resulting in the two of them contributing an equal amount of energy to blogging. In sum, I’ve spread the responsibility around so that this task does not fall on any one person. Since the inception of our blog in April 2008, during the last twenty-two months we have added 379 posts averaging slightly over four posts per week. Our high level of productivity would not be sustainable without the effort of multiple contributors. In addition to the time required to produce the volume of posts that is ideal in order to make the blog vibrant, one aspect of blogging that I thought would be overwhelming was that I’d constantly need to come up with something interesting to blog about. In order to overcome this potential barrier you will need to plug yourself into content generating engines, like other blogs or listservs, that will point to resources that you in turn wish to feature on your blog. For example, I subscribe to the VRA, ARLIS/NA and IMAG-L listservs, Librarian in Black and Very Short List. And, one of my graduate assistants charged with blogging searches for relevant links on Delicious. When she finds a site that seems relevant, she’ll also look at other sites the user has tagged to decide whether to blog about them on Deep Focus.
- Since you are spending a great deal of time and energy creating content for your blog you want to think about ways to get as much mileage as possible out of that content.
- Realizing that not everyone we are trying to reach is interested in subscribing to our RSS feed or visiting Deep Focus for updates, we’ve leveraged social networking tools such as Facebook and Delicious to disseminate information we’ve blogged. In addition, we’ve continued to maintain an annotated list of sites we’ve blogged about on the VRC’s Web Resources page.
- Facebook allows you to import entries from an external blog. It is important to keep in mind that Facebook considers your external blog entries as “notes.” You have the option to display your external blog entries—or “notes”—on your wall. You can think of your Facebook wall as your “home” page. As of February 2010 according to Facebook’s documentation there is approximately a three-hour time lag between when you post to your blog and when that post is imported into Facebook. If this is a feature you are interested in taking advantage of, use the Facebook Help Center to locate information about how to import entries from an external blog. I found the most straightforward way to get to this documentation is to do a Google search using the search string “facebook help notes.” Facebook Help Center, http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=12431 (accessed February 18, 2010).
- We are also using Delicious to highlight content that we’ve blogged about on Deep Focus. Delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save, tag, and share bookmarks online.
- In addition, many of the resources listed on our Web Resources page link to sites we’ve blogged about.
- These links are annotated, organized according to broad subject categories, and relate to curriculum taught in the school; and, in many cases they appear on more than one category’s list.
- Once you establish your blog you’ll need to spend some time and energy promoting it both when you launch it, and, on an ongoing basis. When Deep Focus went live we used a mix of strategies to get the word out. I added a link to Deep Focus in my e-mail signature. We sent e-mail to faculty, students, and staff members advertising its existence. We publicized Deep Focus in the school’s online “eNews” publication (July 10, 2008). We also produced a video that we posted on the VRC’s YouTube Channel highlighting Deep Focus and explaining how RSS works while encouraging the community to subscribe to the blog’s feed. Our Webmaster added a link to our blog on our home page and added a “new” logo to the “blog” button on our navigation bar. More recently I have discussed placing a link to Deep Focus on the Architecture and Planning Library’s Web site with the Architecture Librarian Martha Gonzalez Palacious who is responsible for the site. Last summer I approached the graduate affairs coordinator and was able to obtain a list of e-mail addresses for all incoming graduate students. I found that this is an ideal demographic to target since most incoming students are likely to use Facebook and looking for ways to connect to the school in advance of their arrival. Because we were importing content from Deep Focus into our Facebook page and therefore keeping our wall fresh, we were able to keep our burgeoning fan base engaged with very little additional effort. Based on the positive response, this approach is one that I will take before the start of each new fall semester. At the beginning of last fall we created bookmarks promoting our use of Web 2.0 applications, including Deep Focus. These bookmarks were distributed to incoming undergraduate and graduate students during their respective pre-semester orientations. We partnered with the Architecture and Planning Library to distribute five hundred of these bookmarks; bookmarks were inserted into material at the time it was checked out. In addition these bookmarks are available at the VRC to faculty and students on an ongoing basis.
- In December of last year the university’s Office of Public Affairs launched a new Web initiative branded “Know” to [quote]“...give [one] a more immediate connection to how the university’s missions of teaching, research and service respond to and affect local, national and global concerns.” [end quote] This initiative includes a Social Media Directory listing links to sites generated by university affiliates. http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/alumni-news/2009/12/18/be-in-the-know/
- The VRC’s sites made up the bulk of the links listed under the School of Architecture when the Social Media Directory went live. This was a great opportunity for the VRC to promote not just Deep Focus but our use of other social networking tools to the broader university community. In addition, it drove the point home to the school’s administration that the VRC was leading the way in our use of social networking sites to connect to our community and providing a model for the school in a broader sense.
- Once you’ve taken the time to establish and publicize your blog you want to have a means for measuring it’s reach.
- Google Analytics to monitor traffic on its site. It is free and relatively easy to use and Google provides a lot of good documentation about the product on their Analytics Help site. In a nutshell, Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your site and how they interact with it. “The Analytics tool allows you to track and discover information about your users, including what pages they visit, how frequently they access them, how long they stay, what they click on, and where they give up.” Brian Mathews, Marketing Today’s Academic Library: A Bold New Approach to Communicating with Students, American Libraries Association (Chicago, 2009), p. 136.
- For example, I have the ability to look at the number of times visitors entered the VRC’s blog for a given date range,
- what percentage of total site traffic this number represents,
- the specific pages and
- number of entrances for each page, and the list goes on. There are many ways that you can look at and analyze the data captured by Google Analytics and I encourage you to investigate this powerful tool.
- After spending almost two years in the blogosphere I’m happy to say that Deep Focus has been an effective marketing tool enabling us to advertise the VRC’s services and resources to our users and provides us a means to connect our users to additional information of interest. Blogging does require time and effort but the payoff is that you create an information node and the content on the blog can feed multiple outlets. It is incumbent upon us to enter our users’ information flows and blogging, and repurposing the content we generate on our blogs in such places as Facebook and Delicious, helps us rise to that challenge.
- Thank you.