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

I think that it is safe to assume that we have reached the tipping point when you see these sorts of announcements. An Enterprise Edition of Wordpress strikes me as a significant indicator that corporate blogging is about to enjoy the sort of uptake that personal blogging has over the last 2-3 years.

However, before we get too caught up in the hype, as the article goes on to note the availability of the product is in no way equivalent to its success. Does this quote ring true for you?

Enterprise folks are notoriously slow to adopt new technologies, especially something like blogs, which many people in big business still see as “dangerous” and uncontrollable. Hopefully, this shift towards enterprise self-publishing will improve the speediness with which businesses react to customer demands.

It will also be entertaining to see how many businesses hop onto blogs without fully understanding the secret ingredients that make them unique — right before they fall on their faces.

I particularly like the bit about “dangerous and uncontrollable.” The whole issue of control is worthy of a post in itself…

I would also argue that the ingredients are not all that secret but, apart from that, I would second the cautionary note – in the public sector anyway. Not because I think that we aren’t ready for blogs, but because I don’t think that there are (currently) all that many situations where a blog would be the best solution for a communications strategy.

The glaring exception to this (sweeping) statement is internal comms. If your agency is looking at firing up an internal comms plan for a particular project, then I would urge you to consider a blog as a powerful tool to help communicate with your staff. Any takers?

This blog is intended as a forum for members to discuss ideas, trends and strategies as they impact upon our professional lives. It is also a tool to trade tips & techniques, or to simply announce upcoming events that will be of interest to Network members.

The publishing software that runs this blog, Wordpress, supports a much richer functionality than the static HTML pages on the Network website. You can submit articles for publication, comment on others contributions and discuss these posts with your peers, all through the web browser. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to keep track of exactly what is happening on the blog, and across the Network.

So, welcome and please, get stuck in and have your say…