Teresa Valerio Parrot of the higher ed communications firm SimpsonScarborough asked me to talk about blogging for her company’s blog. I’m always more than happy to talk about blogging (or about myself), even when I don’t really know what I’m talking about (on either subject), so I was happy to oblige. Anyway, she posted the result. Enjoy.
Everything in the Q&A is accurate. But the intro part, where it says, “He maintains three blogs for the university as well as his own,” is not. I do not maintain three blogs for our university, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I’m fortunate to be a part of what — based on what I’ve seen in higher ed PR and marketing shops — I would call a fairly progressive blog culture. I’m one of five staff members who blog regularly on five different sites at UMR.
So, a shout out to my hard-working fellow UMR bloggers: Lance Feyh, Mindy Limback and Mary Helen Stoltz, who all co-blog with me on Visions; and John Kean, who maintains our sports blog and who has somehow managed to avoid posting an easily Googleable bio. Someone should interview all of you about all the good work you do. Maybe I should do it. Sound like fun?
We maintain three other blogs: Experience This! (Lance Feyh’s main domain); our name change conversations blog (my project); and eConnection, our internal newsletter, which is making a monumental transition from email newsletter to blog over the summer. Working behind the scenes to make things happen are Cheryl McKay, Mark Remer and Kevin Tharp, who constitute our office of electronic marketing communications.
While I’m confident that our staff is fairly progressive in the use of blogs and blogging as far as colleges or universities go, we could still be doing a lot more than we are (as I mentioned the other day). One thing about being a part of a team that embraces the changes online communications has wrought is that they’re ready to launch into new projects and explore new ideas. More often than not, it seems, I’m the one dragging the feet.
So, how did we cultivate this blog culture? It sort of sprung up. It began with Visions, which began as an electronic newsletter about UMR research that we put together and emailed quarterly to alumni and other readers. The problem with a quarterly newsletter sent out electronically is that a few days or a week after it hits the inbox, most people forget the newsletter exists, so when they receive the next issue some 11 weeks later, it’s not fresh in their minds. We wanted to be fresh in their minds — at least in the minds of those who would actually care. So we switched to a blog format. This gave us more freedom to write less and more frequently about more things. It seemed to work, and it really wasn’t much additional work. In fact, it was kind of fun to blog. We could experiment with less constrained, non-traditional (read: non-press release) writing styles.
Then John Kean worked with EMarComm to convert his sports website into a blog. A few months after our chancellor started talking about a name change for our university, we launched the name change conversations blog to encourage discussion about the merits of that proposal. (Now we’re using that blog to share information as we move from one name to another by Jan. 1.) This past spring, we launched Experience This! to promote our student design team work, and then this summer we switched to a blog for our internal newsletter. This latest project has been perhaps the most challenging, because we’re asking our internal audience of about 1,000 faculty and staff members to move into a blogging culture with us. But we’re committed to moving forward with this. There’s no turning back now. Once you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, there’s no climbing out. Who knows? Maybe one day we won’t even do news releases. Maybe we’ll just blog our news for all to read.
Andy writes! 
Andy–
Just a quick update to let you know that I’ve adjusted my posting to reflect the work of your team :). Thank you for the clarification. Blog on!
–Teresa