Day 2 – Social Media VCO experiment #socialmediavco

Day 2 – Social Media VCO experiment #socialmediavco

Background, Introducation, Day 1

For the next few days I will be exploring how to get the most out of my blog and from that, how you might be able to use a blog effectively to achieve your goals. Check out my goals in the Introduction.

To help me to do this I did a search on Google which brought up some interesting results, one of which was Mashable – a social media site. They had a number of suggestions which I am going to explore. Today it will be around Content and Communication.

Content

First rule of blogs – good content. Make sure that whatever you put on the blog is interesting enough and that people want to read it. Hmm. Are you still reading? I guess I’ll know by checking the statistics for the day. Indeed by looking at the stats for the last few weeks, months and years I can see very clearly what is of interest to my readers and it is no surprise that funding and jobs come top of the list. So I make a point of posting these whenever I get them – providing they are relevant of course ie voluntary sector. To do this I have signed up for newsletters from the various consortia and infrastructure organisations in the region.

But this isn’t just an advertising blog for those two areas. Indeed it is primarily about how I, as Regional ICT Champion, can help you by providing you with information, ideas related to ICT which will help you to do your jobs better. On top of that it is about developing a relationship with you through what I say and how I say it. That helps to break down any barriers and build trust, so it is important that what I do write reflects me and my approach to what I do and how I do it.

So for you, how can you be sure that the content of your blog will be good and relevant? Well that starts with looking at the whole purpose of the blog. Is it about you, your organisation, sign-posting, events, discussion? What do you want to achieve from your blog? Take a moment to think about this and perhaps jot a few thoughts down. This will help you to ensure consistency, improve your readership and achieve your objectives.

Communication

There is no point in writing a blog unless people are going to read it. For that they need to know that it is there and be helped to access it easily. So how am I going to do that for my current contacts?

Well first of all I am going to email my contacts to let them know about it. I’ll do this using an email mail merge so that I can personalise each email. It feels better that way and is more likely to be accepted positively. Doing this once only is ok, but I want to be able to post my updates out to them on a monthly basis and for them to visit my blog regularly. So I’m going to set up a blog mailing list and ask people if they would like to sign up for a monthly blog update. For those that do then I’ll put them onto my mailing list. This can be done a number of ways from totally automated to totally manual and depends on your set up. Talk to your web master, ICT person or me if you would like to find out more about this. Initially I’m going to see what response I get by email reply and then decide the best course of action.

Other communications methods I’ll consider  for my current contacts include using email signatures (including blog address on the bottom of every email I send out), letterhead, texting, leaflets/newsletter, email newsletter, telephone.

How you communicate with your clients/users will depend on your situation, what your activities are, how you already communicate, cost, time etc.

Then keep an eye on your blog statistics to see what works – and what doesn’t!

On the next blog I’ll report back on how I am getting on and explore some ways to create or attract new readers to your blog, and how to help people to keep coming back.