Guest Post – The Science of Blogging
The kind offer to post here (thanks Andy) is very timely for me. Recently, much of my energy has been abducted by a challenging blog-related issue at my new job. One of my new charges – the crowdsourced scientific publishers – Faculty of 1000 – want me and a colleague to tell them what to do about blogging. You’ve heard the story before: they’re pretty sure they should be active residents of the blogosphere, but couldn’t easily say why, much less how.
The team is perfectly placed to shine in the blogosphere, having as they do the keys to some really rich content in a specialised field (Biomedicine). However, speaking to a few of them, it didn’t take many grins, frowns and sucked teeth to discover that amongst them is a scarcity of paid-up believers, an encouraging number of fence-sitters who seem willing to be convinced, and a handful of true doubters.
It seemed quickly obvious that the “How” will never be of interest if not pre-empted by the “Why”. In order to win over a small number of the team to becoming our keen bloggers, we need to justify the effort, and this proof should be founded upon a few digestible benefits, backed-up by real examples. I see these benefits being:
- Getting into dialogue with an influential audience
- Exposing and immortalising your current thinking, rather than letting it be lost
- Feeling the personal rewards of the very exercise of writing
- Presenting the otherwise unknown human face of the organisation
The How – the sustainable process – will only work if we can evangelise each potential new writer to the mindset and culture of blogging. I want to find, a few weeks down the line, people writing posts and commenting on external blogs without prompting; enjoying doing so. We’ve invested in some complex, enterprise-level platform with which to manage our blogs and I pray it will be easy to use, otherwise it will be a huge task to empower our writers to get going. Once they start I’m sure some support will be needed at first but I hope to let go and watch them run with it.
With the likelihood of starting with a negligible audience, there could be a feeling of “what’s the point?”. With the sensitivity that comes with corporate publishing, especially when it’s this specialised, editorial inertia could grind us down. Lastly, few time-poor executives find it easy to generate interesting commentary regularly or, worse, may feel compelled to post “safe”, self-promotional company news which no-one wants to read.
The plan is to invite anyone interested to a workshop, which my cohort and I will host once he joins me from his previous post, being, thankfully, a blogger and scientist in Oz. By sticking to good reasoning, presenting examples, and if the tools are usable, I can’t wait to see each new blogger finding that enlightening moment when a well-placed comment evolves into a conversation with someone they respect.
That’s our starting point, in summary, in theory, with faith. Fingers are crossed. We’re writing the workshop at the moment but this is all new, certainly to me, so we’re working it out as we go. If you’ve done this before, or feel like you should have, speak up. In any case, I hope to report back once we’re on the other side.
