Blogging | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogs Twice as Trusted as Congress

Josh Bernoff, a Forrester analyst and co-author of Groundswell, has issued a new report and has written a new blog post, entitled “People don’t trust company blogs. What you should do about it.” As people ranked sources of information, “company blog” came in dead last, at 16 percent.

I don’t trust it.

Don’t get me wrong. I have immense respect for Josh, and I think his post does point out some useful takeaways about how a corporate blog can be successful.

But I think the question that was the basis of his research was essentially meaningless.

It’s like asking people for their approval or disapproval of Congress. Before the last election in the U.S., the approval rating for Congress was at an all-time low, I believe. Something like 9 percent.

But people don’t vote in their local elections based on their opinion of Congress as a whole; they vote based on their local member of Congress and their perception of his or her record.

As Matthew Grant said in the comments on Jeremiah Owyang’s post about this study said, what’s really interesting is that the trust rating for personal blogs was only two points higher.

“Blogs” in general have negative connotations, just like “Congress” as a whole does. But a blog is just a type of Web site; one that enables interaction. I ‘m sure lots of people go to blogs and don’t even realize they are on a blog. They just perceive it as another Web site.

People are distrustful of companies in general and politicians in general. And they’ve had good reason, as demonstrated yesterday by the Illinois governor’s arrest for trying to sell Obama’s seat in the Senate. Rod Blagojevich’s trust level is probably around 3 percent today. Even after the recent vice presidential campaign, I’m betting Sarah Palin’s approval rating in Alaska is at least 20 times that.

People make distinctions among blogs (company or personal), just as they do among members of Congress. Or governors. The Blog Council (of which Mayo Clinic is a member) has a post discussing the Forrester findings as well.

As Shel Holtz put it nearly two years ago:

I trust certain people, and some of them have blogs. Therefore, I trust their blogs. It’s the person I trust, in other words, not the medium.

So as Josh says, be different. Be one of “the good guys.” If you’re going to have a company blog, don’t make it a regurgitation of the company line. Provide useful information and an opportunity for interaction. Let people make their voices heard on your site. And listen.

Trust me!

You can pass this along to people who trust you with the handy buttons below:

Twitter 121: Sharing Photos with TwitPic

Note: This is the first in a series of reviews of third-party applications that are part of the Twitter ecosystem. If you would like to write a review of another application, please contact the Chancellor about becoming a SMUG Associate Professor.

Twitpic is a site that lets you share photos using your Twitter account. It’s easy to use; You don’t even need to sign up separately. You just log in with your Twitter username and password:

Then, from the main page you can click the “Upload Photo” link:

This starts a three-step process. First you select your image (I chose for the sake of illustration to use the same image I embedded above):

Then you enter information about the photo, including where it was taken and tags. If you use a real address, the photo will show up in a Google maps mash-up. I’m trying a non-standard approach for this one:

Finally, you enter your Tweet and hit “Post It”

Here’s what the Tweet will look like in your timeline on Twitter:

The link to your photo shows up right after your username, and if people click that link they can see and comment on it.

And of course, their comments also become Tweets:

And from the TwitPic site you can share the photo via several other social networking platforms:

Lest you think TwitPic is just for screen shots, here’s the first photo I shared via TwitPic. I was in San Francisco earlier this year and caught my first foul ball at a major league baseball game.

Assignments:

Sign up for Twitter if you haven’t previously.
Comment on my baseball photo.
Follow me on Twitter (I’ll follow you back.)
Upload your own photo to TwitPic.

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Blogging 119: Managing Multiple Blog Contributors

For many people, blogging is a solo effort; an exercise in self-expression.

But if you’re considering blogging for a business or organization (like our Mayo Clinic News Blog or Podcast Blog, or a global university like SMUG 😉 ) you probably don’t want to have the entire responsibility resting on one person.

You’ll want to get multiple contributors involved.

One way to significantly increase the number of voices represented in your company blog is to, well…capture their voices. And their pictures. Using a video camera. Like the Flip. That’s going to be covered in Blogging 130: Video Blogging.

WordPress (and its hosted service, wordpress.com) is ideally suited to enable lots of people to contribute text for a blog, while still enabling the blog manager (or the management group), to exercise final control.

It does this through its hierarchy of user levels:

Contributors can write posts, but they don’t have authority to hit the “Publish” button. When they are finished, their posts are in the “Pending Review” status, until a higher-level user reviews and approves for publishing. If you were to use WordPress to publish and online newspaper/newsblog, for instance, and wanted to maintain an editorial process that would have articles go through review by an editor, you could have most of your “reporters” be Contributors, so that it would be impossible for one of their posts to be published without that review. Associate Professors at SMUG are in the Contributor role.
Authors have the authority to publish a post and upload files, and can edit their own posts…but not anyone else’s. They can also save their posts as “Pending Review” but if you want to have that two-step process, you should have most users be Contributors. As an author, someone will inevitably hit “Publish” instead of “Save” and have a post published before it has been reviewed. But if you have a blog in which all of the authors are relatively equal and its just a forum for them to publish their thoughts, Author level access is appropriate.
Editors have access to publish, edit or delete any post, page or comment. They can do almost everything an Administrator can do in terms of the day-to-day blog operation, but they can’t add or remove users, for instance.
Administrators have complete control over the blog, including the ability to delete it. When you start your own wordpress.com blog you become its administrator. But you could add me or any other wordpress.com user as a contributor, author or editor. And if you want to become a SMUG Associate Professor, I can add you.

It’s really easy to add new users in different roles. Just click the Users link on the right side of your blog’s dashboard:

And then, at the bottom, add the email address of someone you want to add as a user:

If that address already belongs to a WordPress.com user, he or she will be added in the role you specify.
If not, you’ll be prompted to send an invitation for that person to create a wordpress.com account.

When you click “Invite your Friend” you have an opportunity to tailor the personal message before clicking “Send Invite”

Be sure to check the “Add user to my blog as a contributor” box, and then when that user joins he or she will be in the Contributor role on your blog. You can always promote to a higher level (Author or Editor) once that’s done

It’s that simple. And on WordPress.com, it’s free. On Typepad, you have to pay at least $149.50 a year for similar functionality.

The WordPress.com FAQ offers some further illumination on user roles.

Assignments:

If you haven’t started your WordPress.com blog, do it today. Then, if you need or want to have multiple contributors, go through the steps above to add them.
If you would like to become a SMUG Associate Professor, leave a comment below, and I will add you as a Contributor.

Blogging 116: Writing a WordPress Blog Post

When writing a blog post in WordPress, as I will demonstrate in the video screencast that accompanies this course in the Blogging curriculum at SMUG, you can format your text in many ways, similar to what you do in Microsoft Word. And the toolbar is much like what you are familiar with in Word.

You can make text bold, or italic (or you can even strikethrough, which is what you should do when correcting an error in your posts after they have been published, so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to rewrite history and avoid ‘fessing up to your mistakes.)

You can have

Bulleted
Otherwise known as
Unordered lists

Or your lists can be numbered, with the

First point
Second point
And so on.

Continue reading “Blogging 116: Writing a WordPress Blog Post”

Blogging 118: Trackbacks

As I said in Blogging 117, blogs enable conversations, and one key way those happen is through comments. And comments you leave on other blogs have the additional benefit, if you comment thoughtfully, of encouraging readers of those blogs (and perhaps the authors) to visit your blog and see what you have to say.

Trackbacks are a special kind of comment that require special mention and explanation, because they involve some mysterious lingo that isn’t intuitive.

In essence, a Trackback is a comment on someone else’s blog post that you leave on your own blog. It’s sort of a mega-comment.

Here’s how it works.

Continue reading “Blogging 118: Trackbacks”