By Alpidia Barraza, MLIS, President, Synergized Info
Wednesday evening's San Andreas SLA Chapter meeting entitled, "San Andreas Chapter Blog Launch Party" was hugely informative.
The meeting began with brief presentations by blog co-editors Mary-Lynn Bragg and Claudia Cohen. The co-editors reviewed the Chapter's new blog, touting the fact that the San Andreas Chapter is only one of a handful of SLA chapters incorporating blog technology into their communications strategy. Of the 58 SLA chapters, only seven or eight chapters have blogs.
The highlight of the evening was speaker Michael Sippey, Vice President of SixApart.
While Sippey's presentation gave an overview of SixApart's four blogging products, Sippey spent a significant portion of his presentation addressing the unique functions and benefits of blogging.
SixApart has four blogging products categorized by market focus:
(1) Typepad and (2) Movabletype are geared towards the professional and business users; while
(3) Live Journal and (4) Vox are geared towards the consumer market.
To learn more about each product see SixApart's website at http://www.sixapart.com/
Sippey defined blogging as the "next generation website." A few of the features unique to blogs that Sippey mentioned included:
1. Blogs are easy to update.
2. Blogs are automatically categorized and archived.
3. Blogs enable conversation with your audience.
4. Blogs get the message out via web, RSS feeds and email.
According to Sippey, blogging is about building a new type of relationship with one's readers. It is moving beyond a one-way monologue to a two-way dialogue.
Blogging differs from email communications in several ways:
1. Content within a blog has a permanent home. Blog content is indexed in Google and becomes permanent, while an email is read then trashed.
2. Since blog content is permanently captured, bloggers can talk to future customers; whereas email communications can only be directed towards current customers.
3. Blogging enables current and future audiences to find you via online searching.
Sippey mentioned a stat from Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, indicating that a website can increase its traffic by as much as 39% by having a blog, since blogging content is archived and Google's crawler likes content! According to Sippey, "persistence is important because it means that Google can find you."
So, how do you get your blog started? Sippey offered the following advice:
1) Write down your goals for your blog.
a. What do you want to accomplish?
b. Who do you want to emulate?
2) Assess your tools.
a. Do you want a hosted service?
b. Do you want installed software?
3) Start privately. Before you open up your blog to the world, experiment with your blog in private first.
a. Initially, make it password protected.
b. Create your design; experiment with your posts.
4) Draft a simple blogging policy.
a. How often? When? About what? Guests?
b. How will you handle comments, especially disruptive comments?
Lastly, while Sippey acknowledged there are a lot of books on the subject of blogging, he recommended two. Debbie Weil's The Corporate Blogging Book is primarily a "how-to" book on getting started. The second book was Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, written from a public relations perspective.
Alpidia Barraza can be reached at [email protected]
You can download Michael's slides from our website (PDF, 6.7MB).
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