Day 1 of the Social Media VCO experiment #socialmediavco

Welcome to Day 1 of #socialmediavco, the experiment to see how social media might help the smaller voluntary and community organisations (VCOs).

Read the Background and the Introduction.

We’re starting off by exploring Blogs. So what is a blog and how can it be of use to a VCO?

Well to state the obvious, this is a blog. More specifically a blog (short for Weblog) is a form of website which anyone can set up and use for free. A blog acts like a webpage onto which you can put lots and lots of stories. These stories (posts) can be just about anything – articles, events, news, anecdotes, announcements, information – and you can include all sorts. Most often included are links to other places such as websites, other stories either within your own blog (such as Background and Introduction above) or others, other social media places (Facebook, YouTube) or documents such as pdfs etc.

There is a good and amusing introduction to what blogs are here (a link within this site, though it is set to open up in a separate window so that you don’t close this article).

So now that you know what a blog is let’s explore a couple of areas, namely:

• How can it be useful to VCOs?
• How do I set one up?

I’ll start of by explaining how it is useful for me and then extrapolate out to other VCOs.

Part of my role as Regional ICT Champion is to communicate with the infrastructure organisations within the voluntary sector in Yorkshire and Humber and either via them or directly to connect with the frontline VCOs. Now I am in a fortunate position in that all my clients are online. They all have and use computers, the internet and email. So that is a starting point.

“Hang on,” I hear you say. “If they all have email, why don’t you just email them?”

Well I could do and indeed I do – once a month. But I put up blog posts (sometimes quite a few) most days. That’s a lot of emails to be sending to people especially when I don’t know if that person is interested in what I have to say. You see my blog covers quite a number of areas (ICT stuff, news, jobs, funding etc) and only some of it is relevant to some of my clients some of the time, though hopefully every story is relevant to someone! So they wouldn’t thank me for sending them what would amount to spam several times a day.

Of course I could just send them a weekly or monthly newsletter like many organisations do, and I do send a monthly round up (an email with links to this month’s stories) which suits some of my clients very well. However one of the great benefits of a blog is that it is instantaneous and can provide urgent and breaking news – perhaps funding opportunities or events that are close to deadline. In the monthly round up a number of the stories are already out of date.

Also, and a big plus, is that people can comment on what I have to say, and everyone can see those comments (though I do have control over this). So it can be an excellent place for discussions, idea gathering and sharing. This is where blogs really come into their own.

So although there are still quite a few unanswered questions such as ‘How do people know when there is something on the blog?’ you can see how it is useful to me. How could it be useful to you?

To answer this I will ask you a few questions.

• Are most or all of your clients/potential clients/users online?

If yes then carry on here. If no then scroll down.

• Do you have any information which would be relevant for them – events, news, stories, articles, fun stuff, how to articles, other people’s news, ideas, questions?
• Do you want to know what your clients think about any particular issues/ideas/stories?
• Do you want somewhere where you can share thoughts, videos, photos, reports, documents?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, then I encourage you to keep reading and start entertaining the idea of having a blog.

How do I set one up?

It is very easy and free and once set up it works very much like Microsoft Word.

This blog is created using WordPress. There are other blogging sites such as Blogger (also free) or Typepad (free trial only) and others. I’m going to stick to WordPress which is the largest and has millions of blogs.

To set up a WordPress blog you need to have email access. Go to www.wordpress.com and Sign up now. You will be asked to put in a username and password (please make sure this is secure and not just the name of your dog). Once completed and confirmed by email you will be taken to the WordPress start up page where you can choose a theme for your site ie how your site will look. There are loads of themes and many of them are customisable. Also you can change a theme at any time so don’t be afraid to experiment, in fact, please do. Once you have chosen your theme that’s it, you have a new blog and you can start to put information onto it by adding a New Post.

Try it out. You don’t have to publish the post (so that everyone can see it) so you can just muck about and get a feel for it and I encourage you to do so. You will have a Dashboard (this is the ‘back end’ of the site where you control what you do) from where you can add posts see visitor statistics and manage the blog in all sorts of ways. You can even add pages and create a website.

Now my role here is not to teach you how to use WordPress but to help you to understand how a blog may be useful for you. If you want to go on a course then Electroville offer an excellent Website in a Day course using WordPress. Contact them for more information.

You probably still have lots of questions or comments about this. Please comment on this article and I will be pleased to respond where appropriate. I will continue to explore blogs over the next few articles of this experiment.

If most of your clients/potential clients/users are not online.

If this is the case then at this moment a blog may not be a suitable form of social media for you – yet. But don’t panic. There are other social media tools which we will be exploring which are great for those who aren’t online but have a phone or digital TV or access to the internet outside of the home. So please keep following the experiment.

Of course the face of internet usage is changing daily. The Race Online 2012 programme aims to ensure that everyone in the country has access to the internet by the end of 2012. The elderly are one of the fastest growth areas of internet users. Why? Because far from isolating individuals and breaking down communities, internet usage and social media in particular is building and enhancing communities, bringing people together on and off the internet, providing people with connections with loved ones and within their immediate community and combating isolation. So don’t make too many assumptions and know that for most VCOs, most of their clients will at some point use the internet.

So keep following to see how I get on with the #socialmediavco experiment.

Over the next few articles I will be exploring the various ways to make sure that my (and your) blog will be as successful as possible. See you then.

Thanks

Simon