Make blogging an essential tool in facilitating your group

Michael Norton

Growing your group, refreshing your member and keeping everyone in the loop as to what is going on is essential to continued activity and engagement in your online community.

Blogging can be a great tool to help you do this. But how do you get started? How do you plan and review blogs and what different styles can you use?

Let’s start with the basic

As you always have to quote Wikipedia in a blog (unwriten rule) here we go.

blog (a truncation of the expression weblog) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Webconsisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts"). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. (Wikipedia)

For me over the last few years Blogging has started to become an essential tool in a group facilitators armoury. Not only can it be used to promote the group and the activities, it can lead to recruitment and recognition of what the community is doing,

It can become the place that holds the knowledge and history of the community due to it chorological order allowing new members to see what has been happening and allowing you to remind the members of what you have been able to accomplish.

What are the fundamentals of blogging?

I would say there are 4 things to think about when writing and developing your blog posts. The First 2 are around writing the blog. The second two are the forgotten ones. What’s the point of writing a blog post if no one has a chance to read it and if they do, what made them read it?

Pick a topic and a title

Pick one topic to focus on per post
Make the value of the post clear
Make sure the title describes the post
Keep the title between 50-60 characters (shows the best on search engines)

Format and optimise the post

Whitespace is a good thing
Use section headers to highlight points
Use bullets and numbering
Bold important statements

Promote your blogs

Share on social media
Share via internal newsletters etc
Link from previous post
Add links to relevant previous blog posts

Analyse the performance

Number of views
Number of comments
Number of likes
Shares, likes etc on social Media

So, what are the different styles of blogging and when can you use them?

There are a number of different styles of blogging that you can use to support your community.

I have broken them down into 3 different themes to help you pick the style that you want to use depending on the situation.

Looking to promote your group

Type	Description	Buzz	Difficulty
Reporting back from events	Instead of just letting your team or close colleagues know, you can now tell a wide range of people who were unable to attend and look for further discussion from people who did.	1 out of 5	Easy
List blogging	This is the highly popular of the top ten list (or any other number) list about something. Blog posts in this type of format are frequently bookmarked or shared	5 out of 5	Medium
Interview blogging	Conducting an interview and publishing either audio, video or transcript of the interview into a blog post.	4 out of 5	Medium

Looking to grow your group

Type	Description	Buzz	Difficulty
Recruitment	Writing blogs pointing out the work of your group or interesting things that are relevant to your group are great ways to recruit new members as you can also add a link to your group.	4 out of 5	Medium
Re-post	Taking a post or article from another location and reposting a significant part of it as a blog post with limited original commentary	1 out of 5	Easy
Topical	Concentrate on a particular specialised topic. Using links to news or articles and personal opinions.	3 out of 5	Easy

Keeping members in the loop

Type	Description	Buzz	Difficulty
Live blogging	Blogging at a face pace about something in real time as it happens. With constant updates to a blog or a stream of blog posts.	4 out of 5	Hard
Announcement blogging	Break news about an announcement or news that was not previously available elsewhere. For maximum effect, being the first to break the news matters most.	5 out of 5	Hard
Link blogging	Collecting a series of links to websites, blogs or other online content to create a list of resources with links in a single blog post.	4 out of 5	Medium

Remember. You don’t have to create all the content yourself.

Just look around and you will find lots of content and ideas that you can cherry pick for your group.

How do I start?

Follow relevant Twitter #tags.
Join other online communities.
Sign up to organisational newsletters.
Identify and follow influential bloggers.
Sign up to newsfeeds on relevant websites.

If you have already started to do some of the above, you have already started on the content curation journey. Now it’s about flagging up interesting items that you have been writing in your blogs and sharing with your member. You can do this via ‘Announcements’ and ‘Group messages’ leading to greater engagement within your group.

2 Comments

Very nice and useful @michael.norton , thanks a lot for putting it together! How did you come up with the "buzz" measure? Two tips I would add to blog writing: start with a capturing first sentence and end with a question that would engage the community.

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Thanks for the tips @ivan.butina I'll add those when I repeat the webinar in the future. The buzz rating and styles come from the work of Rohit Bhargava

http://www.slideshare.net/rohitbhargava/the-25-basic-styles-of-blogging-and-when-to-use-each-one and I have been adapting it based on how I have seen different bloggers use those styles.

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