Last night was the inqugural London Net Tuesday. With 45 people in attendance, we filled the space and more than our scheduled time slot with lively conversation, quality knowledge sharing, business cards exchanging, and even some drinks.
Our first event focused on blogging with a head-to-head competition of sorts and the building of a blogging strategy.
Head-to-Head Blogging
Brave and beautiful participants volunteered to represent some of the main blogging platforms including Community Server, Movable Type, Typepad and Wordpress. We had a cheat sheet with pros, cons and comparisons (if you weren’t there, you can download the cheat sheet here) that was created via crowdsourcing before the event. I posted the structure and basic content in a Google Document and then published it for others to contribute to - sending them the link via email and Twitter.
Our platform reps fielded questions from the crowd and shared stories from their personal experience using the blogging tools. Questions included:
- How much do you cost?
- How tech-savvy do I need to be?
- Can I monitor comments?
- Can I control who sees my posts?
- How quick can I get set up?
A winner? Well, there wasn’t an official vote (though a very important vote was happening back in the US!), but the majority of bloggers in attendance used Wordpress.
Blogging Strategy
After our lively ‘debate’ of platforms, we took a step back to discuss what is most important for organizations to consider when just starting out with blogging. We came up with lots of great things to keep in mind, questions to ask, items to identify, and so on. After the big brainstorm, we picked out the five most important aspects of starting a blog:
- Identify your goals (goals for content, goals for relationships, goals for measurement, etc.)
- Write about what you are passionate about and know about
- Practice writing blog posts for a month or so without actually posting (you’ll be surprised how much your posts change just in that first month, and you can identify if you are ready to go live or not)
- Use your community (invite staff, volunteers, donors and email subscribers to read and comment)
- Integrate your blog (link and content) with everything you do (email newsletters, handouts, business cards, other social media presences like Facebook)
What would you add?
London Net Tuesday
If you missed last night’s event, that’s okay. Connect online to be sure you make the next one! If you were there last night, what would you add to this run down?
- What was your favorite conversation?
- Who did you meet?
- What questions did you not get to ask?
- What ideas do you have for future events?
UPDATE:
Miko has posted her terrific run down of the platform comparison. And here is her post about our strategy conversation.
UPDATE:
Farhan has a great post about the event and blogging here.
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