Welcome to “Blogging Evangelism 101,” led by the ultimate non-techie. This session isn’t just for newbies. It’s also for veteran techies for whom blogging has become a way of life, but who are getting sick of explaining what a blog is to people who have never heard of one, or to people who are dismissive of blogs without really understanding what they are. It’s a support session for people who could use some help spreading the gospel to non-technical blog-skeptics in their workplaces and communities.

So a person or group has the urge to communicate, or to get a message out. Why should they blog, rather than set up some other kind of website or start a listserv or chatroom?

For those who are completely new to blogging (and I hope there will be a few at Bloggercon), we can point you to the range of blogging tools and techniques out there, with some advice about which ones are most accessible to non-technical people, and how to get started.  For people who recently started blogging, this is the place to get answers to all those questions you and I would be embarrassed to ask geniuses like Dave. I’ve asked plenty of dumb questions since I started blogging in January. Let’s share our experiences and learn together.

For people who are trying to get their companies, departments, organizations, families and communities to blog, we’ll brainstorm about strategies for approaching non-technical blog-skeptics…or the lazy and apathetic.  I hope we’ll have some people in the room who’ve won over their workplaces or communities and gotten them to blog – either internally or publicly. I’d like to share experiences about what turned people on to blogging and what turned people off.  Are there some kinds of groups and projects that really lend themselves to blogging and others that just don’t?

There are lots of civic, non-profit and activist organizations out there with static websites – many with valuable information on them that the public ought to know about – that don’t get noticed because nobody can find them. How do you convince them that they should be blogging if they want to get noticed? I’ve been telling people who work for non-profit activist organizations that they can save a lot of money by having a blog rather than hiring somebody to set up and run a website for them, AND they’ll get a much better Google ranking with a blog than with a static website. Problem is, if they’ve already got a website and a webmaster, somebody’s job may be threatened. How do you deal with this? How do you deal with IT departments that don’t want non-techies messing with their organization’s web content?

Finally, there’s the fear that blogging will cause an organization or group to lose control over its image, and that it will turn into a “free-for-all.” How do you convince people to let go of this fear?  What groups or companies have been most successful at overcoming resistance and fear, and why?

# Posted by Rebecca MacKinnon on 9/30/04; 9:34:24 PM - --