The New Media Diva

I was prompted to check out Tom Regan’s news blog over at NPR when he took over the post of ONA executive director this week. I hadn’t checked it in a while. To my surprise, I found that the news blog had been shut down.

The following is the comment that editorial director of digital media Dick Meyer left about the situation:

This is a delayed good-bye to the News Blog that Tom Regan has been writing valiantly. I apologize that I didn’t post more promptly. I should have.

I’m the new editorial director of digital media at NPR.org so I’ll explain why the blog went away. Simply put, the News Blog suffered because our site doesn’t quite have the resources and social media tools needed to truly develop a big, flourishing community around a blog right now. While the the News Blog did have a solid core of readers and commenters (and some of you have chimed in on its ending), it was hampered by our commenting system and even by a lack of in-house contributors.

Although I hate the fact that the news blog is gone, I have to give credit to Dick for facing up to the problems his shop was having keeping it going.

Way too often, businesses and organizations blogs because of the “cool factor.” Hey, everyone’s doing it so we should too! (Not saying that this is what happened at NPR). They neglect to consider the work that goes into keeping a blog going. I’m certainly a culprit with my private blogs, but when an organization’s is putting its web reputation out for folks to see, keeping fresh content is a must.

Here are some things to think about off the top of my head:

• If someone brings up starting a blog at your org, ask “why.” Define a purpose from the start. Will it be to keep site visitors up to date with what’s going on? Will it be for employees to post their views? If so, have you thought about a disclaimer?
• Think about if you’re really prepared for two-way communication between your org and your site visitors. Don’t just focus on what they may say, focus on if anyone will have time to respond to comments left by visitors. That’s part of blogging too!
• When choosing a blogging tool, choose one that is easy enough for the most non-blog-or-web-savvy person on the staff to use. They may have a ton of ideas to contribute to the blog, but are perhaps wary of complicated backends.
• If someone on your staff *is* blog savvy, get them in on the planning stages. Pick their brains. Let them tell you about the mistakes they’ve made on their own blogs so you won’t do the same.
• How will you get the word out about your blog? Put an announcement on the main page? Send a newsletter? Get folks to link to it?
• Will you invite outside contributors?
• Put one person in charge of the blog. Make them the person who absolutely, positively must update it at least every other day. Allot time for them to do it no matter what…even if another project is looming. Do not depend on other members of staff who are not tasked with blogging to blog.
• Think of the cultural aspect: Organizational blogs are probably more common in the US than in Europe for various reasons. In my extremely humble opinion, formality is one of them. Workplaces are more formal in Europe than the US, at least in “Germanic” Europe. Blogs *may* equal “informal atmosphere” to some, making them uncomfortable. Have a plan to educate them about the blog and its purpose.
• And please, please, please don’t reinvent the wheel. Do not try to write a blog authoring package from scratch unless you are working in some type of top secret environment. There are way too many packages out there that can be tweaked and branded to do this.

Reading over my list, I see more “don’ts” than “dos.” Believe me, I’m very much in favor of organizational blogs. Two-way communication (a la Cluetrain) is wonderful. It’s just that I’ve seen more than one org blog bite the dust because of poor planning. I believe in what org blogs can do (or better yet, what people can do with org blogs (oggs?). But, I’ve been in more than a few situations in which folks have used their lack of planning for a blog, and subsequent failure of said blog, to “prove” their point that blogs are useless.

And that’s just not the case.