Katie Lips: Social Media Strategist

(The Chicken and Egg Problem in developing Blog Readership)

I’ve been working with the Institute of Knowledge Transfer to launch a new blog project: “Knowledge Transfer Conversations“. So far it’s going OK, we’re growing our authors, and our readers but perhaps not as quickly as we’d like and I’m hoping to explore why; and then to fix it!

The Institute is keen to develop a blog which engages a diverse audience across institutional, organisational and corporate boundaries by offering thoughtful discussion sparked by Knowledge Transfer experts. The aim is to embrace the open platform of a blog and to host and promote public, and free-flowing conversations. In the spirit of openness I want to share my experiences of the successes and failures (not so successes) of the project so far and hopefully chart the rise of the blog from launch, through careful footsteps of developing initial content, through audience development to a successful blog.

The new army of Knowledge Transfer bloggers; experts in their field across academia and industry has been recruited, consulted, trained even, in the art of devising blog topics and creating exciting articles. They have also all been ‘indoctrinated’ by me on the finer points of blog etiquette: when to blog (a lot); what to blog (things people will want to read); and how to interact and support fellow bloggers (comment on posts).

The ‘newbie’ bloggers are signed up to take part in the community conversation each dedicating their own time to contribute. The conversation has kicked off, we’ve found some audience, and have some comments. BUT…….

We’ve hit that ‘chicken and egg’ problem with starting a new blog: you won’t get readers until you get some great content, but the authors aren’t particularly compelled to write great content for a blog with no readers.  When you write your own blog as an individual, this is not really a problem initially; it’s just for you. If you gain a large readership then it’s just you who benefits. If you’re just interested in documentation, archiving your thoughts and work and aren’t even that concerned with a large readership - then again, it’s just for you. But when you’re asking experts to write in a public forum, then you really need to offer them answers as to why they should bother: fame, glory, influence, …. and of course all of this depends on offering them readers!

So I wanted to share the issues and strategy for getting the IKT Conversation out of the ‘new blog closet’ and into the consciousness of the Knowledge Transfer community - in the UK at least.

As a Social Media Strategist I am often asked to help people to blog, and often the people that ask expect me to show them how to use the Wordpress CMS. Which I don’t. Not at first at least. Blogging is about so much more than just publishing content which is where many people fall down as they they implement a Wordpress blog and instantly expect readers (much as many people do when they launch a website or web application). So I began thinking how to fix the IKT Blog readership problem and thought I really aught to follow my own advice. I tried to extract key points I offer as blogging advice as follows:

Excellent Infrastructure

• Use a great platform (Wordpress) and extend with Plugins
• Analyse with Google Analytics
• Add a Google Sitemap so we attract organic traffic

Write Good Content

• Focus on your niche content topic
• Post regularly and often
• Be topical and be natural

Grow

• Link to other people and use pingbacks / trackbacks
• Comment on other people’s blogs (naturally, and often)

Publicise

• Submit your blog to Search Engines
• Submit your blog to Blog Directories
• Submit your blog to Technorati

Don’t just blog!

• Use social bookmarks - bookmark your site and posts
• Use Social Networks - start a group maybe
• Tell your friends, send them the link, ask them to read and comment
• Push content out - developing partnerships
• Pull content in - events feeds, related sites and so on

Develop the Growth Strategy
So that’s not ‘just’ it and there’s no one size fits all in terms of a strategy for growing a blog or an online community but the above things will all help. Certainly my work as a Social Media Strategist goes a lot further and is about finding niche communities, developing unique methods of interaction and intervention but essentially I do aim to help online communities to grow organically.

Frantic Activity
Whilst we like organic growth, perhaps sometimes we all need a little ’steroid injection’ to really get things going. I’ll be keeping track of the various simple suggestions I made above as I implement them and I’ll be reporting back.

Image: NET9 on Flickr.