Bob Conrad at The Good, the Bad, the Spin has a great post about why PR people should be using blogs, and it triggered a few thoughts about how we could be using them.

Yes, you can use them as a standard corporate communications tool, either internal or external, in the way that most often springs to mind when people start talking about blogging in the public sector. You can also use this incredible technology in some other more innovative ways.

Internal applications

In addition to the obvious applications like the corporate newsletter or management team meeting digest, there are a couple of other creative uses of a blog for your internal communications.

Issues register

Allow people in your communications or senior management team to post emerging issues. The comms team can also add comments detailing mitigations and tactics and include links to media coverage. Anyone else in your organization (with access) can then add material via the comment function. The blog becomes a chronological record of issues and how they were managed. Once an issue is dead, close the comments and update the post with a summary for the record.

Link blog

Set up a del.icio.us bookmarking account and, using the RSS feeds, syndicate the links (and the notes to each link) to an internal blog. Staff can then subscribe to the blog by RSS or, for those that don’t have this functionality in their agency, via email to receive a list of links relevant to their business.

If you are not using del.icio.us (or a similar tool like Ma.gnolia), I strongly urge you to experiment with it. To get a feel for it, have a look at the State Services Commission’s e-government bookmarks.

External applications

I believe that public sector communicators should trial blogs internally before they make the move to the world wide web, but once you have got your feet wet, you may want to consider some other ways to use this tool.

Crisis management

As Bob notes in his post:

Blogs publish information in real time. It’s obvious to say, but the need to release and respond to information in a timely manner is ever more critical. Organizations that fail to respond quickly to allegations and attacks will in effect be giving tacit approval to their critics’ complaints. Blogs offer a mechanism to respond quickly and affirmatively.
The Good, the Bad, the Spin.

This is never more important than when you are faced with a crisis. Your publics will expect an immediate (online) response and a blog will be far more responsive and versatile in a crisis that a traditional, over-engineered corporate website.

Keep the blog dark while you pre-populate all the pages that you will need: contact details, organizational information, pre-formatted media release templates etc. Then, once the crisis arrives, you flip the switch and you are ready to respond.

Another advantage of a blog in this situation is that you can have multiple authors, updating the blog from anywhere there is Internet or cell phone coverage.

Social media newsroom

Todd Defren, who cooked up the social media release template, has also developed a social media newsroom template and, while it is an excellent template, it may be a little sophisticated for most (New Zealand) government agencies. However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be thinking about ways to maximize the effectiveness of your media releases. Using a blog as your publishing platform will immediately deliver a host of benefits.

It will mean that your media releases are native to the blogosphere, therefore the nature and extent of their take up will be more visible through trackbacks and specialist search engines. The commenting function will lead to much better engagement (if properly managed) and, best of all, you will be more easily able to use the hRelease microformat to mark them up.

Conclusion

Blogging in the public sector is a relatively new discipline, and I am sure there are other obvious applications for the technology that haven’t occurred to me. If you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments.

As I mentioned late last year, the Network is hosting the first (of what we hope will be many) one-day workshop for members, on Strategic Crisis Communications.

You indicated in your feedback about the inaugural conference that you wanted more intensive, interactive professional development opportunities, so the Committee have begun putting together a programme of workshops for 2007 that we hope will go some way to satisfying that demand.

If you would like to have some input into the programme of these events, then you can cast a vote for one (or more than one) of the proposed topics on the poll in the sidebar to the left of this post.

We have invited Lynch Communications out to New Zealand to present this workshop. I saw Kym speak in Melbourne last year and was impressed by both the content of her presentation and the experience and authority she brought to the discussion.

From their website:

Lynch Communications provide expertise and training in the areas of crisis strategy, planning and communication. They are regarded as one of the most influential and experienced crisis consultants in Australia with long term clients including many large and mid-size corporations and government departments.

I think this workshop presents a terrific opportunity for public sector communicators to build their skills in crisis thinking, planning and training and to compare crisis communications plans and review case studies for best practice crisis communications response.

Registrations are open

As previously noted, numbers will be restricted to ensure that everyone gets as much as possible form the workshop. You can register here, I would recommend that you do so smartly – 20 places will fill quickly.

More information about the programme can be found on the comms@ site.

NOTE: A second workshop may be held on 2nd March if the first workshop is oversubscribed — but I wouldn’t count on it…