Thursday, October 02, 2008

Blogging 101 with Bryan Person

Live from the Seminar!

Our last speaker this afternoon is Bryan Person, social media evangelist at Live World. Bryan kicks off by asking the questions....why should you blog and, more interestingly, who shouldn't blog. He cautions that if you are afraid of negative feedback, you may not be a candidate. However, Bryan looks at this type of feedback as an opportunity to learn about your company.

Goal-setting is an important component of launching a blog... so now, here's a theme with all of our social media presenters today. If you don't have a goal, none of these strategies and tactics will be successful for your organization. Light bulb! All PR practitioners should be setting goals, no matter what tools you choose.

Preparing to blog is an important step. Visiting and subscribing to blogs that interest you is important research. Also, people who visit your blog can find you and contact you. Targeting your readers is very important and your blog need not have a huge audience to be successful.

Creating content is the most important part of your blog. Bryan suggests that you raise your industry up with your content, particularly by creating original content and not recycling content. The more you generate, the more you can be found in search engines. Bloggers should have opinions and take a stand, particularly on issues. Visuals can really help draw people into your blog.

Promoting and building your blog is key to its longevity. Bryan hosted a lively discussion about whether ghostwriting a blog by a CEO or organization representative is a good practice.

Quality in content needs to be followed by quantity....the average blogger should post 3 times per week at a minimum. Bryan gave numerous examples of good blogs in the public relations industry, including Slice and PR Squared .

As with all today's speakers, Bryan urged the participants to maintain transparency. Another theme which all our presenters have stated throughout today's seminar.

Amended on October 8, 2008 to add link to Bryan's presentation.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interestinlgy those are the type of question we should ask ourselves to determine how ready we are to start blogging, any doubt would help to stop the process.