Blog Subject: One Hour Strategy Session

State your editorial strategy early in the blog's planning stage, read more below.

You can develop a blog strategy in one hour. I use this technique with people without a clear picture of a blog. Some people see and read blogs and want to do something of their own. This happens with many people who have something useful to say but need to work out the details. This happens with professionals and managers with some sort of specialty. Once you have a "one hour" strategy you can think better about your overall message. You can also integrate the blog strategy into your overall strategy. What can you do in one hour? Take the following attributes as a starting point. Add attributes of your own. Take a look at a few blogs or newsletters and see if you can "reverse engineer" the strategy behind their work.

• Subject matter: Describe the posts in a few sentences or a paragraph. Computer professionals refer to subject of blogs as "meta" information (information about information, see M-W metadata). In my Tel Aviv blog I wrote: "Tel Aviv, Israel's second largest city, is one of the hidden gems among cities. Streets are noisy with cars and people. Cafes are open early and are full by 11. There is music and theater in styles from western to middle eastern..." Seth Godin's blog is about his books and ideas related to them. He uses various techniques to stimulate discussion. This is something most people can not do but works great.

• Exposure: How are people going to find the blog? Who will be interested in spreading the word? Here you can also add details about the content and articles. What are you going to say that will make people want to share what they read? Exposure is probably the most variable factor in blogging today. Some blogs like Arianna Huffington's political site is virtually a digital newspaper. While some product blogs are so specific they will never have thousands of readers.

• Frequency: How often are you going to write? What time sensitivity are important for publication (news items, company or product press releases). Some blog strategists advise on a post a day or every two days. Blogs are a flow of information, you are better off with short articles more frequently than long articles. Although Clayton Christensen blog a Harvard business school strategist on innovation and Tim O'Reilly blog on Internet and technology trends are clearly based on long articles with deep thinking. Both blogs are authored by a team of writers.

• Writing Quality: Who writes articles? what is the ability and experience of the writer? What source material do they use? What can be gathered and reused from other sources? (company / product / newsletter). Writing quality is probably the one item that can make or break a blog. There is too much competition for "eye balls on the screen" to neglect this point. If you can not write well on your own get a good writer or an editor. The same goes for material acquired from outside sources, if it is not high quality it will detract from the blog's attractiveness.

• Editing Quality: Think of a blog as a newspaper column. Or even a tiny magazine. Even with one writer, the editorial role is crucial. Who and how are you going to set subject matter? What is the important message you need to deliver? What series of topics are you planning? Who is the planner? If you don't think an editor can make a difference, read the book by Lauren Weisberger "The Devil Wears Prada" (there is also a movie).

• Sample Blogs: This item takes more time and you should probably do it ahead of time. There are millions of blogs and probably thousands of really good ones. Take a look at the subject matter, does it fit a similar line as your ideas? Take a look at the design, the content, the writing style... all the attributes that matter for your work. You can take one sample and use it as a prototype, I get request from people who ask "can you make me one like that"? You can take one attribute from a few blogs. You should also have a list of what you don't like. Sometimes if a blog has something you don't like it is more important. I would not advise you to pre-design all the fine details at this point. Give yourself slack to experiment later in the design. You will also need to work with a design once you have articles, comments, and other components on the page. If you want to search for blogs take a look at Technorati. A portal for blog rating and tagging. The amount of information about blogs is staggering. Google blog search is also useful in finding articles in blogs, no rating here.

• Resources (staff, budget, equipment) These are items crucial for the corporate blogger. While you can use free or almost free products as an individual, companies usually want to tie blogs to their overall Internet operation. If you need to schedule setup, installation, software purchase or licensing do it as soon as possible.

• Policy: In some corporate or organizational (government, military, etc.) you will need to set policy, mission or target goals. You may need to comply with higher level policies in terms of disclosure, intellectual property licensing / attribution. For example, the State of Israel owns a great deal of writing and images. They do not have a licensing or attribution mechanism which is useful for blogs (i.e. small projects). You simply can not use any photograph from a government ministry without permission and it is difficult to obtain permission on many items. University material can have the same issue. Authors do not necessarily own their material or they own only a fraction of their work. You will need permission from the university to publish. On the positive side you can usually set your own publication policy. Take a look at the New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism. You will not need this much of a policy on the first 100 blog posts, but it's good to know that someone can be your beacon of light on policy.

• Business drivers: What is the driving forces behind the blog? What are you going to achieve? What products or projects are you supporting? Are there secondary factors or outside interests in the blog? Who is responsible to the blog's results? In business there is always a dependency on external factors. Make sure these are clearly defined before the project takes it's own shape.

• Corporate drivers: Following the business drivers point do the same with the organization itself. In non-corporate environments this could be a more crucial strategy element. In governments there is usually a clear and strict policy on publication. You may need approval on your subject matter or the writer's rank (low level workers in most governmental organizations do not have publication authority).

These strategy items will get you started. Do not take more than an hour. Do as much as you can quickly. Than let someone review, critique or modify the strategy. If someone comes to me with a strategy it would be much easier and faster to get a plan together. It will also help in getting things nailed down once the work starts. Finally, if you work in an organization with many different interests this could be a way to unify strategy for the blog. Take this as a first cut (you only spent an hour). There is no need to finalize a strategy or policy. There is also no need to have too many specific details. Blogs started out as an informal communication sites. By their nature they are more personal and revealing than formal publications (official web sites). Use the history and scope of blogs as a guiding standard for your strategy work.