Blogs - unleashing your community to create content

May 12th, 2008

A great local company, Utilikilts is very hip in many ways, especially how they’ve unleashed their community’s creative energy.

Utilikilt’s customers made mockumentries on their behalf, just because they love their kilts and the company.

Free, fun publicity, just for asking. Now, not every organization has developed the rabid following among the media-creating generation as Utilikilts, but, today, most cellphone users can capture images and video.

How might simple content help make your site more alive AND deeply connect your clients to your organization?

SEO, blogs, Google, and the Beatles

May 12th, 2008

The best news of all

Once you start building your blog, you’ll start rising in the search results.

Google has changed the way most of us use the Internet. Even if I know the web address I am looking for, I often use Google to search for the site so I don’t have to type the whole thing in.

Recently, the minds at Google realized that when you search for things, you want what’s real, current, and reliable. So, they have given priority to dated blog content in sorting out the search results they show you. That means, if your blog post title includes the key words of someone’s search, your post may end up very near the top of the search results.

So, each blog post becomes like a very specific bread crumb for your potential clients, customers, or donors to find. With a blog post, they see what they’ve searched for, and all your key information surrounds what they are reading. I recently wrote a post about understanding financial statements and drew a parallel to the Beatles song Let It Be. Within minutes of publishing that post, I searched on financial statements Beatles, and was amazed to find my blog entry #1 in the Google results. See where it is now.

The key is, clearly, writing very specific articles that include words your audience might be interested in seeing. Your current staff and volunteers are the perfect ones to help create this content as they ARE your audience. They share interests and use the same words.

Of course, your staff are probably not professional writers or photographers. I suggest forming an editorial committee that drafts and periodically enforces (by weekly review) standards for your organization. This will allow the rules to be generated by the people in charge and also by the creators of content, who may have a more nuanced sense of what will work and won’t.

If you really want to get wild, ask your customers or your wider community to create content for you!

Blogs change the focus from designers to authenticity

May 12th, 2008

It used to be that organizations wanted to seem “professional.”

Now, the key is to seem both professional AND, more importantly, authentic.

If your brochure is too slick, I won’t trust you.

I want to see the real you.  I want to see the real work and life of your organization.  With web search capabilities, I’m going to the good and the bad about you whether you like it or not.  Just type in some company name and “problems”, “angry”, or whatever adjective or expletive their past customer might have used.

So, you might as well get real with me or someone else will!  Maybe even one of your employees, past or present.

Here’s one I got when I searched on “Starbucks” and “angry”

With Web 2.0, it’s easy to build and control your own site.

May 12th, 2008

No more designers required. If you can type and download pictures from your camera, you can have a powerful web site. Some folks call it a Mashup. I call it using cool, free tools to let your staff, your volunteers, and your community make your web site unique, relevant, and a lot more visible.

The essential pieces of a web site:

Old way:

  • Content
  • Text
  • Images
  • Presentation
  • HTML coded pages assembling

Web 2.0 way

  • Content
  • Text
  • Comments
  • Images
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Presentation
  • Blog software
  • Mashup within the blog posts of images, video, and audio from other sites (like Flickr, YouTube, etc,)

Blog editorial boards could help

May 12th, 2008

Consistency of focus, quality, pace, and style across your organization will be crucial for the long-term success of your blog-based web site.

The editorial board should include:

1. Someone from top leadership - to drive the process, have final say on style and content issues, and to ensure the blog content supports the strategic direction of the organization.

2. Your most vocal evangelists (or sales people) from within the organization.

3. Your most persnickety grammar and punctuation person.

4. Ideally, a user or customer… someone from the group of folks you hope will be reading your pages.

This group should meet weekly in the beginning, and probably twice per month once things are really rolling smoothly, to:

1. Discuss the upcoming content - ideas, tone, etc.

2. Review the content posted since the last meeting for - style, tone, alignment with goals, interests of the reader, etc, etc.

This group will become a social unit with it’s own normative forces… ie. Everyone will know what’s expected, what’s OK and what’s not, etc. Groups naturally cohere, so policing will not be top-down, but self-generated simply by having the review process in place.

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