Slides that I developed as a crash course for PRs on blogging

1. Blogging: what’s it all about? Ged Carroll: director, digital strategies

2. In this presentation What is a blog Why should I care? Things to think about in a blog Writing for blogs Commercial opportunity Measurement Issues management Blogging & ethics Blogging & UK law

3. What is a blog anyway? A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. (Wikipedia) Picture by laverrue

4. Why blogging? It is one of the easiest ways to publish content on the ’net 77% read blogs (Universal McCann) 346 million worldwide read blogs Easily republished and publicised Attracts inbound links - cost-effective SEO Picture by foxypar4

5. Why blogging? Global marketers viewpoint Which of the following most closely matches your personal point of view on the potential impact that social media will have in business? TNS media intelligence/Cymfony polled 70+ marketers around the globe about their experiences incorporating all types of social media tools in their marketing strategies. Represented countries include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and France.

6. Things to remember about blogging: listen Active listening Utilise Google blog search and follow relevant blogs using an RSS reader Is there an existing community? What are they saying? What are their community norms? What can you bring to the table within those community norms? Picture by pasukaru76

7. Listening to engagement Respond on a reactive basis to debate Proactive engagement What do we want to achieve? (macro -> micro) What value do we bring to the community discussion? Why should the community interact or listen to you? Who should be the spokespeople? Aggregate and showcase advocate community content to aid discovery Picture by JoF

8. Being a blogger Think about your audience Always think three moves ahead – Steve Davis Write in your own tone of voice Picture by Daquella_manera

9. Blogging etiquette Do link out generously Do read and comment on other people’s blogs Don’t delete comments that you disagree with Do stick with it Picture by casey.marshall

10. Blogging tips & tricks Great content comes from everyday things Keep an inspiration book Use pictures How can you continue a dialogue? Don’t finish your posts Ask your readers for their opinion Picture by Jóinn

11. Writing for blogs Standing on the shoulders of giants (beat generation, the new journalism) Tone-of-voice Formality PoV Involvement: scene setting rather than historical narrative Humanity Record everyday events Transparency Speed Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs division, Van Vechten Collection

12. Running a client blog

13. The why The right reasons: We have something to say We would like to be able to have a dialogue with our customers We’re passionate about our industry and have something to say (and folks are likely to listen) We’d like to share some of our know-how with the wider community The wrong reasons: The board says that we need a blog Someone down the golf/squash club thought that it would be a good idea PR Week said that blog is the word of 2006 We want to tell people about our latest XXX (insert client product details here) Its something I can get you guys to do

15. Start thinking about editorial: not only the first few posts but longer term planning

16. Get them to think about ongoing resources for writing posts and responding to comments and indirect feedback - Is training required?

17. What is the blog(s) designed to achieve?

18. How will that success be measured?

19. How will employees be incentivised to participate?

20. Do the management team realise the long-term commitment that a blog requires?

21. How doe the blog fit into the organisations overall web strategy?

23. Specification | design 16 SEM Submit your site to Google, Yahoo! | Bing, Ask USABILITY - KISS Don’t go with a fixed-width One column if you can Flash is mostly evil, AJAX can be good Think navigation – archives, categories/tag clouds Make it easy to subscribe Easy to search via Rollyo or Google Co-op to name just two options

24. Specification|design 17 Choose your platform to run the blog on carefully Moveable Type WordPress MSN Spaces Blogger Microsoft Community Server Think about the posts, now and in the future Measurement, bookmarking, video enclosures, dynamic content – support for JavaScript, AJAX, RSS feeds, audio files, images, documents, blogroll, contributor pages for transparency 8/18/09

26. Application and ISP hosted service

27. Spam protection

28. Comment and community management

29. Access to hundreds of plug-ins

30. Fully configurable permissions system

31. Native support for multiple blogs

32. Static pages and archiving

33. Optional paid professional support

34. Automatic RSS feed generation

35. Open source – more information at wordpress.org

36. Application, ISP and wordpress.com hosted service

37. Spam protection

38. Comment and community management

39. Access to hundreds of plug-ins and themes

40. Password protection on blog and individual posts

41. Doesn’t need to rebuild after every posting

42. Large support eco-system of free and paid expertise

45. Attentio

46. Market Sentinel

47. BuzzMetrix

48. Cymfony

49. Biz360

50. Factiva

52. Monitoring Measurement tools often don’t have the speed of near real-time updates and you have to go back to basics Google alerts: Ongoing monitoring Google news alerts Google blog search Technorati: RSS-fed buzz with authority meter Yahoo! Site Explorer: Inbound links Website analytics Radian6 – commercial offering that many major brands like Pull this all together with RSS

53. Social media monitoring Many of the search tools looked at earlier will provide an RSS feed for future finds This can convert our snapshot into a moving picture – monitoring Using Yahoo! Pipes we can machine translate foreign articles and merge RSS feeds to provide a monitoring stream. Creating a ‘pipe’ is as easy as creating a flow chart in PowerPoint

54. Blogging ethics and legal niceties

55. UK legislation From end of May 2008: Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 No astro-turfing No sock puppetry Up to 6 months jail time What can you do legally? Notify the service provider if content violates their terms of service, there is usually a feedback email in their help section, or content will have a flag button by it For blogs, where there is content that you could take legal action to remove: Notify the legal department of their hosting company

56. Ethics From WOMMA Consumer protection & respect are paramount The honesty ROI: honesty of Relationship Opinion Identity Respect the rules of the venue Manage relationships with minors responsibly Promote honest downstream communications Protect privacy and permission

57. Case study

59. Namaste & thank you for listening http://ruderfinn.co.uk | @r_c