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Blogging with Master Bloggers Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly

arkrausehardie's picture
Wed, 2008-04-09 14:08 — arkrausehardie

I'm at MW2008 conference in Montreal, and I’ve just been sitting in a great workshop on blogging run by Brian Kelly & Mike Ellis.

Its exciting to see the diversity of people in the session – coming from North America, Europe and New Zealand, and yet the similarity of needs and goals...

Session highlights:

Challenges to blogs: How do we...

  • overcome institutional inertia
  • build traffic
  • build enthusiam
  • take on one more thing
  • make it sustainable
  • overcome restrictions on the official institutional voice

Why Blog? For museums, specific reasons to use blogs suggested in the room include:

  • giving curator’s personal voice
  • measurable outcomes
  • replace or complement existing websites
  • increase visibility
  • get feedback from audience
  • easy and cheap
  • build community & relationships
  • build traffic
  • exhibition and event promotion
  • blending: generating dialogue both before and after audience walks in the door

What Makes a Good Blog?:

  • Being Passionate
  • Having a personality – a defined tone of voice
  • Finding a niche
  • Two way engagement
  • Intelligent posts
  • Finding new angles not regurgitating
  • Link a lot, and read links you ‘lunk’ to (that's Mike's word)


Differences between Blogs and Official Websites:

  • official website is well official, formal, marketing driven and branded, impersonal
  • blog: unofficial, informal, personal, don’t need IT dept. to update and change

A few other really good points that came up..

  • Use the right technology - the technology should be invisible... so that you can really focus on the message
  • Editorial policy - respond to every comment on your blog

Some Great Comments I heard:

“Blogging, in this context, is about discussion and engagement. It’s not about publishing and workflow." Brian

"Much easier to seek forgiveness then permission" Mike

"You can’t mediate every message anymore. To be in this environment need to play like the other players”

"You’ve got to be opinionated"

“I’m of the opinion that we don’t need to think about why to do a blog, but we jump in and have a go at it.. – that’s the spirit of web 2.0” in response to question about overcoming the need for approval from higher ups..." Gail

What else did you hear? What did I miss?

Comments

Sat, 2008-04-12 10:51 — lyndak
lyndak's picture

can i re-use your notes please??

these are great notes - i couln't attend this workshop. Could I cut and paste them to my blog (http://amarclk.blogspot.com/) or have you already psted them somewhere else on-line?? I'd like to share the comments more widely with others who aren't here.

Sat, 2008-04-12 00:33 — aninev
aninev's picture

workshop overlap

Thanks Rebecca! This workshop overlapped with the podcasting workshop I attended... thanks for sharing these notes so I can share with my colleagues and breathe second life [haha] into our newish blog! I will put my pod notes up tomorrow.

Wed, 2008-04-09 17:52 — Susan Edwards
Susan Edwards's picture

great summary

Great summary! Thanks.

I posted some of my thoughts on my blog (for some shameless promoting here as Mike advised us to do!)

 One thing about the "Cheap and easy" comment - I am not so sure I agree that it is cheap and easy. Maybe we haven't discovered the magic formula, but the blogs we've done at our institution have sucked a lot of staff resources and energy. I think there has to be a way though...we'll keep trying.

Thu, 2008-04-10 09:08 — ingrid Beazley (not verified)
ingrid Beazley's picture

Cheap and easy? Its free and easy!

The Dulwich Picture Gallery blog Dulwich OnView, is run by the Friends organisation who are all passionate volunteers who love the Gallery and are part of the local community.
The Gallery has no official say in what goes out and there is a great deal about the local community with only tenuous links to the Gallery, but that is because it is run by the local community.
And the local community read it and believe it - its not just more Gallery promotion, its the voice of the visitors.
Check it out, and if you are interested in who gives up their free time to run this blog, go to the 'who we are' tab to see the profile of the regular contributors. http://dulwichonview.org.uk

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