Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation
MW 2008 Conference

The following workshop took place at the Museums and the Web 2008 Conference on Wednesday 9^th April 2008 in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation

Title

Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation

Facilitators

Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Mike Ellis (Eduserv)

Abstract

The dust is starting to settle after the initial heady rush of blogging within the museums sector. While the benefits of blogging have been well documented, it's now time to take a step back and look at some very practical elements involved with identifying potential barriers to implementing a sustainable blogging service within your institution.
This workshop will offer real user experiences with issues of using blogs (weblogs) and blogging in your museum. The session will start with an update on blog fundamentals - how the tools for blogging have developed, blog-specific search tools and blog aggregators.
Next are issues involved in setting up a blog, such as selection of software and hosting decisions. Using examples of best practice, we will move on to policy and procedure considerations such as blog scope, writing style and frequency of publication. Finally we'll discuss how to measure the success of your blogging efforts, focusing on user feedback, return on investment and impact assessment.
This workshop will be of interest to those who are new to blogging, or those who have experimented with blogs but would like to learn more about strategies and metrics for developing a sustainable and cost-effective blogging service.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the workshop session participants will:

• Have learnt about up-to-date blog features and tools.
• Have identified potential issues with the implementation of blogs within an institution.
• Be able to outline policy considerations which best fit their individual or organisational purpose.
• Have learnt about tools for measuring blog success.
• Have heard about and discussed examples of best practices which participants will be able to make use of in developing a sustainable blogging service locally.

Interactive elements

The workshop session will include brief presentations, demonstrations and group exercises. The interactive elements for the workshop will include:

• Comparing hosted blog sites.
• Group discussions on identifying issues for consideration in the development of a blogging policy
• Demonstrations of tools which can be used for measuring blog success.

Date And Time

This workshop will take place from 09:00-12:30 on Wednesday 9^th April, 2008.

Biographical Details

Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus, a post funded by the JISC and the MLA which advises the UK's higher and further education communities and museums, libraries and archives sector on best practices in use of the Web. Brian is an experienced presenter, and has spoken at many conferences and seminars and organised many workshops. Brian works at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management, which is based at the University of Bath.

Mike Ellis has just emerged from 7 years working as Head of Web for the National Museum of Science and Industry, UK, which comprises the Science Museum in London, Media Museum in Bradford and Railway Museum in York. Mike is now working for a Bath-based company called Eduserv who are a not for profit IT services group. Mike's interests are in user generated content, Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing and innovation and how to lever these for maximum benefit in cultural institutions.

Timetable

The draft timetable is given below:

Note that the tag mw2008-blog-workshop was used for this workshop.

Feedback

The following comments were made on feedback forms:

• Thought it was awesome. Only thing that could have made it better--another exercise or two to make it more interactive.
• It's all new to me, so I enjoyed.
• great job!
• Excellent!
• Excellent and accessible session. An excellent start to the conference. Thank you.
• Limits on time--but lots of good threads. Session was well done, well shaped by participants. Difficult to cover scope in limited time. Good job by both!
• really great. I'm all fired up!
• Would have liked to see more "good" blogs, specifically museum blogs
• Presenters responded quite well to audience interests, moving presentation in that direction
• Did not get through all they planned and might have kept a better eye on the clock. I would have liked something on building community which we did not reach. Brian is a very skilled facilitator.