Not a Thing but Web 2.0 related....
During our team day recently I and some colleagues did a session on blogging. Many of the academic liaison librarian team write blogs to support their subjects; I write one for the fashion business courses I support and I collaborate with the two other business librarians on the blog to support Westminster Business School (WBS). My part of the session focused on promoting these subject-related blogs.
It goes without saying that, with the effort we put into the blogs, we want to know there's someone out there reading them. Earlier in the blogging session Jemma, one of the IT training team, had fed back on a survey she did of students, their knowledge of our blogs and what they thought of them. One key thing that was highlighted was the visibility of the blogs- most of them thought it was a good idea but just didn't know about them. I therefore wanted to look at how we can make the blogs more visible and where we can position ourselves in our effort to promote the blogs.
Where are the readers coming from?
Before the blogging session I checked the stats for our business blog. Blogger has its own section for stats, where you can get information about how many people are visiting your blog, where they're coming in from (referring URL) and even what operating system they use. Sitemeter and Feedburner offer similar services and we use these too. Despite the dry nature of statistics it's actually pretty intruiging- for example, 94 page views this week on my fashion blog from France, more than the UK. The stats are also useful for identifying whether promoting the blog is working, what posts prove the most "readable" and to get some ideas of whether we have been promoting it in the right areas.
So I checked our traffic sources to see how readers had got to the business blog. This showed a range of different entry points including, amongst others, my LinkedIn account (where I have a gadget which automatically updates with new blog posts- I am linked to a few of the academics on this social networking site), Blackboard (our VLE- we have a page of useful library links on one of the module pages), a module leader's reading list webpage (which I previously had no knowledge of- a link to our blog was listed at the top), my Twitter account, and a page we had set up to promote our services on the WBS intranet pages. There were also many who came in via a search engine. You can even see what keywords they used in the search engine which took them to the blog. Ours included "ISI dealwatch" "Mintel chocolate report" and "university of westminster infolinx mintel". There were several variations of the last example- InfoLinX was our previous e-resource platform, now superceded by "Library Search" which unfortunately isn't quite as "findable" when searching the internet as is "InfoLinX".......
Internal promotion
We have made a start in promoting it to academics and to students, this has mainly been on an ad-hoc basis- in coversations, via emails etc. The links appearing in Blackboard and on reading lists are a result of such conversations and really help in promoting to the students. They are far more likely to look at something a lecturer tells them to, rather than me, and this is probably why the module leader's webpage (as mentioned above) is one of the top referring URLs.
As a team in general we have tried to raise our profile on the intranet and, although we have a lot of work to do on increasing the visibility of such pages, some readers have managed to find their way to the blog that way. On my personal profile page I have added both links to the blog and a link to subscribe directly via email from my profile page (they don't even have to visit the blog!). I promote this profile page (which has all my contact details too) to students in training sessions and try to remember to point out the blog then.
Another initative from the blogging team was to ask lecturers to contribute with guest posts, and to ultimately make the blogs fully collaborative with the Schools, making them school-based resources, rather than library-based resources. This would help promote the blogs, create further links between the Schools and the Library and give it a sense of authority. This is an aim of mine but very far from being fulfilled. I have, however, posted an excellent guest post from the Honorary President of the Fashion Retail Club (a career networking online club run by University of Westminster for all fashion graduates and students around the world) for my fashion business blog. Reflecting on this exercise I can see the benefits for liaison/relationship building as from me asking her to write a guest post she invited me to a promotion event for the club and we have discussed how we could work together in the future.
External promotion
The aim of looking at external promotion was to acknowledge the fact that the blogs aren't, at the moment, very visible. They need to be visible both internally and externally because, from looking at the blog's referring URLs, the readers might be arriving at the blog from anywhere.
In the session I mentioned sites which would help with raising the blog's visibility externally such as Wikio and Technorati. I also talked about using tools like Feedburner and Twitterfeed to promote the blogs to social networking sites, such as Twitter. These elements require a bit more pratical explanation and illustration and I am aware that my blog post is already far longer than the usual advice given for keeping a post concise. I will therefore post on these elements soon, including how to set up a feed to Twitter and the tools to use to promote to the social web.
The point I was trying to make mostly in this section of the session was there are several things that can be set up quite easily, which will run automatically with no extra effort from you and which will push blog content to the areas in which potential blog readers inhabit. Thus you are positioning your blog for them to access in a time and place of their choosing.
Keeping an eye on the stats
Having set all these things up it is important to keep an eye on the stats, and particularly the referring URLs, to monitor whether promotion has increased the number of visitors to the blog and whether this promotion has been in the right "place" i.e. have more come in from Twitter or from Blackboard. With any luck the numbers will be up and the visibility raised!
Picture: Last year's bounty taken by Ellie
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