Blogging presentations

A few months ago, I was asked to give a *quick* overview of blogging to a local nonprofit interested in blogging. These are those slides.

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For those interested, I am also posting some slides I ran across today for more detail on optimizing one's blog. The content is by Scott Hanselman and the slides are by Josh Holmes.

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When stacked against the likes of either Josh or Scott -- I'm no where near in the same league here or here. Regardless, we all blog for different reasons. Me...it's mostly to keep all the different pieces of me together.

Blogging as transformational

Gerald Kanapathy's recent post on successful blogging points towards Microsoft as one company that has been transformed by blogging. Specifically he talks about how blogs "opened up Microsoft" and goes on to say how "it's now amazingly open and responsive."

While great as that sounds, I'd have to agree with Yag in that the most interesting part is when Kanaphathy writes:

What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain
organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules. In fact, it
requires acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, tolerance of risk, openness to
criticism, and a degree of confidence. These are not things that can be
proceduralized, but instead come from how the organization is, uh, organized,
and simply the underlying values.

To me, this is key. At the end of the day, blogs are a means by which people communicate. It is a means, not an end. So for all those wanting to start a blog because everyone else is, ultimately it comes down to something more intangible. How open and willing is your group or company to change? To uncertainty? To risk? To criticism? To engage with people in an open an ongoing conversation?

At this point, all the marketing types and measurment gurus are probably screaming as this underlying value cannot be adequately captured by a simple measurement such as web views nor time online. There are some intriguing indexes in the works to better capture this space, and there are other ways of measuring the impact however...what is ultimately settled on, if there is such a thing, remains to be seen.

While this may come across to some as staying away from blogging if the underlying values are not there, it's not meant to be. I just wanted to call this out by illustrating that blogs are not an end to itself. It's part of a much larger picture, and ultimately it's success (or failure) depends upon so much more than what we can traditionally measure at this time. Should a company, organization or person for that matter get into blogging, I hope they do so with their eyes open to the whole process.

Forums for a civic process -- Seattle Center

Forums for Seattle Center? This should be interesting. It's nice to see that the Forum has some starter content. I also like that there are basic guidelines posted, though I would have made the guidelines a "sticky" post in ideas forum, rather than it being a standalone post in a different forum. While we're talking about suggestions, I also would have waited on the blog post until all of the forum topics as outlined in the welcome message were live. Anyway, I could go on about community building via blogs or forums, but that is way too close to my day job :P

Tech / community strategy aside, it is encouraging to see outreach through a variety of means -- open house sessions, blogs, and now forums. I do wonder how all of this is going to work from a macro level. For example, there are meetings posted (as a pdf) on the 21st Century page of Seattle Center. This schedule lists a "Public Forum for Organizations" on January 30th. The blog, in reference to the same meeting, says that it is a proposal deadline for anyone (individuals and organizations) to submit a one page summary vision for air time with the committee. Based on the content recently posted in the Forums and on the blog post talking about the meeting, it is clear that the public meeting on the 30th was not solely for organizations as originally stated on the schedule. How does an inconsistency such as this get resolved with the venues (blogs, forums, website) present? Is there a definitive place for all of the information? Better yet, is there a way to ensure consistency of information across venues?

Something else to consider...the Forums seem to imply that they exist for capturing other ideas / summaries not already raised (in meetings or elsewhere) while having content for people to discuss. If that is the case, I'm unclear as to why there was a deadline for proposals in the first place if it would all happen online anyway. Granted, I'm not privy to any of the inner workings of the overall plan, so this may make a lot more sense than what I've seen so far.

Of course, I realize that what Seattle Center is undertaking with the blog , and now forums, is still a work in progress. While there are things I would personally change with what I've seen, ultimately I am excited that folks at the Seattle Center are bringing innovation and leadership to a new civic process for the 21st Century. I look forward to working with folks to bring about even more amazing things for all of us.