I'm really tired today, and feeling a bit sick, so I hope I am not missing the point(s) entirely, but I was reading bmart's post about blogs tied to association magazines, and Dennis McDonald's response, and I am not sure I get it.
Per Ben's post:
1. If an association publishes a magazine less than twice per month, it will probably run out of blog content in the interim if it is only repurposing magazine articles for the blog.
You think so? Why would a magazine have a blog if it wasn't to generate deeper conversation about the articles? In fact, if a magazine is published only every few months, wouldn't you hope the blog content to be much wider, and the magazine would condense that conversation and push it out periodically to a larger (read non-blog-reading) audience?
2. Additional content, like extended stories, member-generated articles that didn't make the editorial cut, and source audio from live interviews, can be gleaned from the publishing process to supplement association magazine blog content.
No argument there.
3. Should an association magazine have its own blog, or should it be rolled into an association's "organizational" or "master" blog? The latter: Magazine content should be rolled into the organizational blog. There are easy ways to segment the content into categories, and it will help you attract more readers via the long tail.
Not sure I agree with this. I think you can quite happily have an "official" blog, a magazine blog, and any number of user/member blogs coexisting happily and linking to each other. I think (and I know may be wrong on this) that an official blog will normally have less subscribers than the others, simply because people are not so interested in the company line.
4. Associations have the ability to overtake dominant blogs in their industry or profession because they have large membership lists to whom they can send email promoting their blog. It's not too late to dominate. Yet.
Not sure about this either!! I think in this paradigm shift, people tend to be suspicious of promotional material in general! I think what associations need to do is, like for-profit companies, learn how to generate word of mouth marketing and nurture their member evangelists through their engagement, not market to them via email blasts.
So if I then go back to Dennis' response, I think he's bringing up similar points, which are, basically, that you need to be aware of all the different ways your association's members communicate with the association and between each other, and while you can consolidate your messages across different communication channels, to some extent, you don't want to abuse any of them and turn people off. And this goes back to the myth of control - I think we as associations need to learn to let go, on the one hand, and nurture, on the other, so that things like blogs (whether member-created or association-created) can really bring in value.
3.07.2008
Blogs and associations
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The ultimate question becomes: would you rather have 5 blogs that have 10 dedicated commenters, or 1 blog with 30-40?
ReplyDeleteI am inclined to go with the latter. It is easier to go from 40 to 100 than it is to go from 10 to 25. I think blogs catch on like compound interest. Instead of spreading out content over a bunch of blogs, it might be better to put it on one.
At the same time, having other venues for content such as message boards, wikis, etc. is another story. You don't want to leave these out or you might lose out on some potential engagment.
Let me clarify and back up my answers with some facts and observations. Remember that this entire panel discussion was couched in how association magazine publishers could use blogs. For #1, let's assume an average association magazine. In my experience, they have 3-4 feature articles and are published monthly or less frequently. If you simply repurpose magazine articles for your blog, and if you aim to post once per week (you certainly won't want to post all 4 articles at once), you'll run out of content before a month is over. The point is, you'll need additional content to make up the difference.
ReplyDeleteWhich leads to point #3: I am an advocate for putting all your blogs into one basket. Why? You wind up developing lots more posts on a single blog, and then that long tail really starts working for you, and you subsequently get all kinds of good things from it: higher technorati rankings, higher page ranks, more eyeballs, comment activity, etc. In addition, I've witnessed first- and second-hand how fragmenting your blogging efforts leads to staff miscommunication, lack of posts, reader apathy, and other crummy stuff.
On #4, let's look at ASAE's Acronym as an example. As a long-time association blogger I've watched the rise of Acronym very carefully. Bear with me, this is a long and winding explanation. As you know, I have about 300 subscribers to my blog. Although ASAE doesn't publish their subscriber counts, there are proxies to determine approximately how many subscribers they have. Through a proxy, I can extrapolate that ASAE probably has at least 500 subscribers. Now, I've been blogging twice as long as Acronym has been around, but Acronym overtook me in pretty short order. How did they do it? Now, the Acronym and Certified Association Executive blogs aren't exactly two peas in a pod, but we're not all that different. The most significant difference between Acronym and my blog is that ASAE has 22,000 email addresses to advertise the blog to. They do this through their InTouch newsletter. Every edition, there's a link to Acronym. It's a smart move that has allowed them to overtake all the association blogs with longer tenures (PrincipledInnovation, AssociationInc, HighContext, etc.). They, like many associations, also have the ability to guide their members towards using certain things, including their own programs, such as blogs. So I stand firmly by my point that associations can overtake dominant blogs in their industry because they have many resources, such as email databases, with which to promote their own blog.
I do have to agree with Matt and Ben about keeping your bloggy eggs in one basket if possible--at least organizationally speaking. Individual members should have as many blogs as they want (and wouldn't it be great if a large chunk of the membership did start blogging?), but for an association, more blogs = more hungry mouths needing content. Unless you can really dedicate staff to building blog content, I think it's easier to build good blogs if you limit the number of blogs you're building.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention, if you have more than one blog, you need to make sure it's genuinely different from the blogs you already have. In our case, for instance, I think it would be hard to really differentiate an Associations Now blog from Acronym--but for an association that doesn't already have a blog, a magazine blog might be a great way to get blogging without worrying as much about where the content will come from.
What an organization thinks and does about its web presence sometimes has more to do with its own structure and policies than what its users or members think.
ReplyDeleteMembers might care little about the organizational boundaries that are reflected in separate publications, web sites, or blogs. They may be just more interested in the writings of a particular individual, a specific topic, or some other factor that has little to do with how the organization organizes itself.
I would therefore be more concerned about the ease with which an individual can locate (initially and on a recurring basis) whatever it is that interests him or her than maintaining editorial boundaries that have more to do with management than reader utility.