Before you begin downloading, installing and customising, take a look at the principles for public sector social media, these will give you a pretty good overview of the operating framework for any social media platform in government.

The blog

I am an unabashed fan of WordPress. Why? Firstly, because it is open source. The philosophy of open source software is, I believe, a natural fit for the public sector. It also has an amazing support network, and an array of functionality that is without equal. And it is dead simple to setup and run.

You will need to install it on a server: the current version requires PHP version 4.2 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. Talk to your IT people about what you are currently running, or are paying a provider for.

Support tools

The basics

Once you have installed it you, or someone you contract, will need to theme it, ie., give it an appropriate look and feel. Even if you don’t do this yourself, you will want, from time-to-time, to tweak the way the site looks, and this is where these tools will come in handy.

If possible, run Firefox as your web browser. Not only because it renders pages accurately, but because – like WordPress – there are a range of incredibly useful tools that have been developed for it, including a few that will make working with your theme so much easier. Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar are two extensions that I would recommend you install to help you run your blog effectively and to the requisite web standards.

If all this is starting to sound like too much hard work, it’s not really. While it is not necessary to understand HTML as WordPress has a solid wysiwyg editor, if you are interested in social media then it would be a good idea to get your head around it.

As well as the basics, you will also require a little more social functionality:

• a web statistic package, like AW Stats
• an RSS feed statistics analyzer
• Plugins for subscriptions, tagging and bookmarking (I use subscribe2, simpletags and sociable, respectively)

For the monster list of WordPress plugins, see this Mashable post: WordPress God.

Images

You should think about the judicious use of images in your posts: they definitely can add to the post and will make the blog a lot more approachable and usable (particularly for those who read your posts via RSS).

You will need some sort of image editing software to resize, crop and/or tidy up your images. I use Photoshop, but apparently the GIMP is just as good (and free).

Networking tools

Of course, running a blog is not just about posting to your pre-determined schedule. It is just as much about the way you interact with other bloggers and commenters in your niche. Track other blogs that are also in your field of interest, leave comments and post in response to their posts: be part of the conversation. To do this, you will need some of these tools.

RSS

Without RSS, you are doomed. It’s that simple. You will need an RSS aggregator (either a desktop client or a web-based one like Google Reader) to track blogs and to follow comments. Yes, you could do it all through laboriously visiting each site in your Favourites, but you would be clinically insane after a couple of weeks…

Collect feeds of all the blogs that you read or monitor, search results from the various blog search tools that help you track what is being said about your agency and you can access it all from one interface. Genius.

Comment tracking

You also need a tool to keep track of the comments you leave on other blogs. Again, you don’t want to have to keep randomly returning to the post page to see if anyone has responded to one of your comments. Tools like co.mments make it easy for you to follow all your comments from one spot. Naturally, you can subscribe to a feed from your account page so this just shows up in your RSS reader as well.

Bookmarking

I have posted before about the importance of social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us for public affairs and these tools are equally as important when you begin to blog. Not just for syndicating links to your blog, but for tracking how your posts are being bookmarked by others. Open an account and start bookmarking your posts, this allows you to discover more about your readers and their content preferences.

SEO

Public sector communicators often overlook the importance of search engine optimisation, probably because in the .govt.nz namespace we are already pulling quite hefty page ranks. There are, however, some techniques that you may want to consider to ensure that your posts are well indexed and easily discoverable. There are also some pitfalls you may want to avoid.

Conclusion

This should get you started. I am sure there is stuff that I have missed — feel free to add your suggestions in the comments. What this should give you is a (hopefully not too daunting) feel for exactly what is involved in running a public sector blog. As I have said before, the easiest way to tackle this is incrementally; launch it as an internal tool, iron out all the bugs and then you will be ready to take it to the world.

Photo: eshm