Bang the Table

This post is a redevelopment of earlier blog I contributed last year. It is based on our experiences to date with the “project news” blog we added to the Bang the Table template last year, a great post on www.webcontent.gov, and some “random” thoughts of my own.

A blog is essentially an online diary that allows you to make regular entries to your website to keep your community up to speed about your project. The key difference between a blog and a normal website is that most traditional websites were static. The information was loaded once and then left or updated only intermittently. They tended to get old and stale very quickly. A blog provides the opportunity for a much more fluid, open and real-time interaction with the community.
Blogging is new to government organisations and most corporations. It presents new opportunities to keep your community in the loop about the latest developments but also carries certain risks that need to be carefully considered and managed before leaping into the fray. This sheet is the first in a series that will consider the benefits, issues and challenges of blogging.

Benefits of blogging include:

1. Creating a blog is fast and cheap. It’s very easy to do and usually doesn’t require technical skills. Using a blog is even easier than using any word processing program. Publishing a blog is much simpler for example than using MS Word.
2. Blogs put a human face to your organisation or project. They can make government and “corporations” more “open” by allowing more interaction between government and its citizens.
3. If your project already has a “human face”, a community engagement officer, place manager, project manager or a range of other people who have regular interaction with the community, then a blog is a great way to keep the relationship “live” between face-to-face meetings. If your team is already out there in the community building relationships and rapport, get them writing the blog entries in their own name rather than a faceless corporate entity, and in their own words rather than government/corporate speak. These blogs are likely to be received much more positively than generic “project team” blogs.
4. You can also use a blog to support cultural change across your organisation. You don’t need to talk about a specific project to make a blog worthwhile and useful to the community. For example, you might assign half a dozen people within the organisation to be “corporate bloggers” – this requires empowerment through delegation and thoughtful protocols; you can’t ask someone to blog and then expect them to get approval from 15 tiers of hierarchy in order to publish their thoughts. Pick people with an open personality and excellent writing skills from a variety of sections within the organisation. Obviously there would need to be some boundaries around the topics of discussion, but the point of blogging in this context is to drive a cultural change program towards a more open, accessible and dynamic organisational culture – so don’t be too restrictive.
5. You can choose to allow the public to comment on your blog posts. This flexibility is important. If your community engagement strategy is essentially about providing good quality up-to-the-moment information, then it may be unnecessary to turn on the ability to comment because by doing so you create the impression that there is a degree of decision making flexibility. If there is some flexibility, or a lot of flexibility, then turning on the ability for the public to leave comments creates an opportunity for a conversation between your project team and your community. Like any conversation, whether online or face-to-face, this requires good communication skills. If you do decide to allow the public to post comments to your blog, you have a finger on the pulse of your audience.
6. A key component of blogging is that people can easily post replies to any comment the blogger makes and others can then comment on comments. If your project is flexible enough to take on board ideas, opportunities and concerns raised by the community then community responses to your blog is another way (along with online forums, telephone hotlines, letters, and face-to-face processes) to gather information to make the project more contextually relevant.
7. Blogging is also a great way to address any issues that arise during your engagement program early in the project life cycle. It is very easy for issues to spiral out of control once inadequate or incorrect information finds its way into the public domain. Responding to factually incorrect headlines, editorial or “letters to the editor” is stymied by the publishing timeline – for example many regional newspapers are only published weekly, but which time the incorrect information has been absorbed into the community. Providing proper delegations are put in place a blog can be written and published very quickly. Your online community can notified of the new blog entry via an RSS feed or bulk email; this community can then spread the word among their friends and colleagues for you.
8. Blogs are also an excellent way to keep your community informed about the latest information about your project. They are more flexible and much faster to produce that a traditional newsletter, but the content can be used later for those newsletters – whether online or hard copy. You might, for example, want to let the community know that a submission closure date has been extended, or that a series of communities are planned, or even that there will be workers in their area – so they won’t be surprised if they see surveyors or drill rigs or a team of student planners knocking on doors asking questions!
9. When linked to a discussion forum or a survey, a blog can be used to test new ideas. They can be an excellent way to share and explore innovations, product/service/community development concepts. If you are thinking about launching a new project, a blog is a great way put the concept or options out into the public realm early for consideration and discussion in a related forum. Monitor the forum and respond regularly to the ideas and issues within the forum and through your blog.

This work by Bang the Table Pty Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.

This entry was posted in Online Community Engagement, Opinion, Water Cooler. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.