I have come up with some additional tips on blogging and websites since I published my Blogging for Young Democrats Chapters and The Importance of a Quality Website posts. Here are those tips.
Blogging
- Don’t write open thread posts on your blog unless you know that you are going to get feedback from your readership. A lot of bloggers starting out see established bloggers do them successfully and think that they will get more comments if they emulate them. Open thread posts are great if you have a large, active, and participatory community of readers, but it takes a long time to build this community.
- You have an advantage as an organization over independent bloggers in that you have a membership to encourage to comment. Ask your members to read your blog and comment on posts. You will be able to identify members that may be good bloggers for you in the future.
- I strongly suggest that your blogs RSS feed be set to show the full feed. Some people only use partial feeds as a teaser to get readers to physically visit their page, but my experience has been that those feeds get unsubscribed to and you lose readership.
Websites
- Link your website to your social networking profiles (Facebook, MySpace) and vice versa. Keep those profiles up-to-date and coordinate your efforts with your site and blog with those profiles.
- Use Flickr to create a photo gallery on your site. There are a number of impressive plugins and modules that do this attractively.
As is obvious by my need to post this addendum, I miss out on some ideas when I initially posts. Share your ideas with a comment.
What are your thoughts on using volunteers to manage online media presence like MySpace and Facebook? In the past some candidates have turned to supporters that have created alter ego’s on social networks to provide the campaigns “official” profiles. Are these supporters too hard to control, is the user started phenomenon viable moving forward, or is it just a function of the fact that higher up politicos have traditionally been social network illiterate?
Good question. I’ll put together a post soon with my thoughts on it.
As I’m sure you guys are aware, there are both benefits and pitfalls to having volunteers act as agents for a campaign. The better campaigns figure out how to do this while the weaker campaigns fight with their volunteers. In many ways, the Obama campaign has enabled volunteers by providing tools at http://my.barackobama.com while the Clinton campaign has been late to the party here.
I think that there are a couple reasons why certain candidates have other people run their social network profiles. First is the amount of time that goes in to running a successful profile. In order for a profile to be more than just another outlet for traditional communications, someone needs to be tending to the correspondence and constantly updating content. In a campaign the candidate has many other demands upon his/her time the prevent this. Second, most candidates did not come up during a time when they would have had their own profile personally. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future when candidates that run for higher offices have their own personal profile. Will they create a second official one or will they use their personal one?
There is always a risk in having a volunteer manage a public face of a campaign, yet only the most funded campaigns can afford to hire staff for the purpose of social networking. However, there is a happy medium in accountability between a volunteer and staff: the intern. Interns are less likely to just disappear from the campaign than a volunteer is, and interns seeking college credit are accountable to the campaign.
One important thing to keep in mind is that the person controlling the profile should be on the same page as the campaign, and that the campaign itself is aware of all of the profiles and login information.