Running a Group Conference Blog: What I'm Learning

This Tuesday I'm flying to Burlington, VT for my annual brain food festival -- the conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). I've been working with this group since 1990, and I have a lot of friends there, so this event is always a blast.

This year, I set up an unofficial SEJ2006 group weblog. It's "unofficial" because it's a strictly volunteer, independent effort by people who are either SEJ members, attending the conference (speakers, exhibitors, others, etc.) or who are working on the conference (staff, etc.). I did this mainly because it was more efficient to just set it up by myself, on my own, than to have to deal with any organization to get it done.

To be quite honest, this blog has been consuming much of my time this week. More than I'd intended -- but this is an experimental project, and experiments always entail unforeseen resource demands as well as results. It's OK, I've been learning a ton of useful stuff from this effort.

So if you're considering setting up a blog in support of your conference, benefit from my experience. Here's what I've learned, so far...

1. DON'T BE A BOTTLENECK

Choose a blogging tool or service that allows multiple authors to post to the blog. (Typepad allows this, as do many others.) This tool should have a simple interface that would be easy for blog newbies to learn.

You want your contributors to access this tool and learn it so that, by conference time, they can publish direct to the blog without your (or anyone's) approval. If you can't trust your bloggers to post on their own, you'll end up becoming a bottleneck -- and nothing will get done.

2. LOTS OF LEAD TIME

Ideally, you should set up a conference blog at least 2-3 months before the conference. This is because you'll need to recruit people as bloggers, get them trained, and get them used to posting.

If you do this right, a conference blog can be a great way to build buzz about the conference -- thus increasing registrations and media coverage. But you won't get those benefits if you don't start early.

3. GET READY TO TEACH

Expect that some or most of the people who volunteer to contribute to the blog have never blogged before, and maybe have never even read a blog.

Therefore, if you want this to work, you'll need to educate your blogging team.

On the SEJ2006 blog, I'm using the blog itself to deliver this education. This is incredibly valuable, but it's taken a lot of my time. I think it's worth it, though.

In the Author Tips category on that blog, I've created 3 short video tutorials plus other tips (such as on managing libel risk) that are there for the bloggers to speed their Typepad learning curve and to have a clearer idea of what they can & can't do with this particular blog.

I realize these types of educational postings aren't ultimately what people will want from this blog in terms of content. However, the blog is the most effective way to share these lessons with my contributors. They're definitely checking this stuff out and putting it to use. And once the conference starts, all the education stuff will be bumped off the home page quickly enough.

Later on I'm sure I can rework all this educational content for future conference blogging efforts. I'm actually planning to make this part of my business. So even though I put in much more work than I expected on education, I'll get mileage from it beyond this conference.

4. BLOGGING IS FOR THE SELF-MOTIVATED

As in any group of volunteers, levels of experience and enthusiasm vary. More people have signed up as authors than I actually expect will post -- at least more than once or twice.

That's OK. You don't need a huge crew of volunteers to make a group weblog a success. Honestly, if just 4-5 people end up posting a few good items each, I think we'll be in good shape.

As far as I'm concerned, I've set up the blog and provided training materials. That's as far as my hand-holding goes. I've told my volunteers that they shouldn't expect me to be available for blog tech support or hand-holding during the conference. I've got lots of other commitments then; so they're mostly on their own. Some of them will do fine with that, others won't. Really, it's up to them. I think most of them will do fine with that.

I think setting realistic expectations is vital to avoiding stress. That's part of why I'm doing this experiment -- I want to find out how much blogging I can realistically expect from a volunteer crew of mostly blog virgins.

5. SOME POSTS WILL REALLY SHINE

The real reward for this is that some excellent content and discussions will result from this kind of effort. I'm already seeing that.

For instance, yesterday Dave Poulson from the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism posted a thought-provoking piece that probes a recurring sore spot at every SEJ conference: Clapping at SEJ. I bet this will come up in conversations at the conference! As well as attract interesting comments online.

...And we're only just getting started.

If you like, please keep an eye on this project (we offer e-mail alerts and a feed) and let us know what you think. Anyone is welcome to comment on the SEJ2006 blog.

Comments

[Denise]

These conference blogging posts are terrific, Amy. Thanks very much.

[Benefits of Video Conferencing]

The first time when I used the video conferencing I was really nervous about how do I look or how do I speak through the equipment, but it was a great feeling.