Working with blogs

WBI Social Reporting Apprenticeship Program

October 2012

Intro/Definition

“A blog (or web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”

Source: Wikipedia

Key functions it supports

Sharing ‘news’, stories and opinions

Communicate quickly

Document /share lessons learnt in projects and programmes

Share results from meetings & events

Transparency International Blog“Showing how you what people are doing to stop corruption around the world”

Key features

RSS and syndication

Audience’s engagement & interaction

Combination of text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other related media

How to blog

Decide on type of content and what topics you want to post about

Think about who you want to write for Assign time and responsibilities for creating quality

content Create linkrolls (lists of your favorite links) and tagrolls

(links of your most commonly used keywords). Make sure your blog is on local or thematic blog

directories Use RSS feeds Create a readership

Source: iMark - Web 2.0 and Social Media for Development

M&E

Most common platforms (Blogger; Wordpress) have own analytics tools

– Blogger can be easily integrated with Google Analytics

Third party applications (ShareThis; AddThis) will allow to monitor when content is shared

Comments as proxy for user engagement

Feedburner to monitor feed circulation and email subscribers

Finding blogs

Google blog search – http://blogsearch.google.com/

Technorati - http://technorati.com/

Blog aggregators– Global Voices - http://globalvoicesonline.org/– Afrigator - http://afrigator.com/

Hands on exercise

Logon onto http://www.pro-act.org/

OR

Set up a blog with one of the following services

– http://blogger.com– http://wordpress.com

Post a new item, with title, text, links and pictures

Blogging on Pro-Act

Sign in on Pro-Act – http://pro-act.org/ – Create a new account if you don’t have one

yet

Blogging on Pro-Act

From the top navigation, click on ‘Share’ then “Blogs”

Blogging on Pro-Act

Click on “Add”

Blogging on Pro-Act

Add – Title– Text (also

embedding images and videos)

– Tags

Blogging on Pro-Act

Define– Date– Privacy– Comments

Blogging on Pro-Act

Decide if you want to save the post as draft, preview or publish it

Blogging on Pro-Act

Your blog will appear on the “All Blog Posts” list and in the different network activity streams

Working with blogs

WBI Social Reporting Apprenticeship Program

October 2012