Is Blogging Yesterday's News? No Way!:
The How and Why of Arts Blogging

June 2009
Chelsea Jones, Client Services Manager, Patron Technology

If you're Twittering, Facebooking, e-mailing, text messaging, and your organization is everywhere online in a bunch of new and exciting ways, you may not be focusing on your organization's main home on the Internet — that is, your own Web site! Are you keeping your site as fresh and up-to-date as the rest of your online presence?

That's what this article is all about. The simplest and most important thing you can do to energize your Web site and motivate repeat visits is to make it a place that patrons can count on to provide relevant, updated, and compelling content. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is by blogging.

Starting a blog on your Web site is incredibly simple (and potentially free!), but just like with all marketing techniques, you need to make sure that you're taking the right approach. And as an avid reader of blogs — especially arts blogs — I'm here to help! I'll go over some of the basics, such as how to set up your blog, and then I'll show you how to make your blog enticing to read, and how to get the word out so that your readers know to keep up with it.

But first, let's take a step back and make sure you're as convinced as I am that this is a hot idea.

Why should I start a blog?

The easy answer is that everyone reads blogs. In eMarketer.com's report, "The Blogosphere: A-Twitter with Activity," experts are predicting that the nearly 97 million people who read blogs will increase to a whopping 128.2 million, or 58% of all Internet users, by 2013.

For the past few months we've been discussing Twitter (see here and here if you missed it), so you already know that it can be an extremely useful tool in reaching out to your audience quickly. But as popular as Twitter is, its audience of 12.1 million users doesn't come close to touching that 97 million people! Besides, tweeting can in no way replace the more thorough content that a blog can offer.

Think of it in terms of your e-mail. You wouldn't send out an entire newsletter twice a week, would you? Of course not. Nobody has time to read — or write! — all of that. But you might send a couple of e-postcards here and there to remind your patrons about important events, in addition to your monthly newsletter where you go into more depth. It's the same idea with blogging. A Twitter update can be great, and can reach your audience much like a postcard. But you still want to make sure you're giving them more.

Okay, but how do I start?

It's incredibly easy to start a blog. You don't even need to have access to update your organization's Web site (though you'll want to integrate your blog with your site eventually, of course). There are many free blogging software tools that will provide the hosting, design, and the necessary interface to receive feedback from your audience. Two of the most popular ones are Blogger.com (which Google purchased in 2002) and WordPress.com.

All you need to do is visit one of those sites and sign up, and within minutes, you have your blog — either at http://yourblog.blogspot.com or at http://yourblog.wordpress.com. You'll be able to customize the look of your blog using templates that the hosts provide. Depending on your level of technical expertise, there are plenty of configuration options that will give you a lot of freedom with the layout and design.

Then, of course, you can start posting content. You'll have a "comment" link on each entry you post, so that your patrons can leave questions or feedback, either as registered users or as anonymous viewers. What's great is you can control what kinds of comments you want to allow: Iif you want to keep viewers from posting anonymously, you can change your settings to lock them out, or you can choose to screen all comments before they get posted publicly. You'll be able to reply to commenters to address any issues, or you may want to use what your audience is saying to prompt your next blog posts.

Sounds simple, right? Now let's slow down a second, and get back to "start posting content."

Yeah, what do I say?

How can you create compelling blog content? You need to start by thinking, "What can I say that I'm not already saying elsewhere?" If you're already e-mailing your list about your events, and listing all of your events on your Web site, then there really won't be any need to copy and paste that information to your blog. Your patrons have seen it, and they're not going to become active blog readers if it's all just repeats of information they're already getting.

So, what else can you do? Maybe you can offer exclusive behind-the-scenes footage. The Sill, New York performance space Ars Nova's blog, bases most of its posts on YouTube videos from their creative team, giving an inside look at their rehearsal process or performance schedule:

Ars Nova doesn't include a lot of text in their blog, and their posts consist almost entirely of video or photos. If you've got people who like to be on camera, this can be a very quick way to get content up without having to spend much time writing. It also gives you an easy way to distribute a variety of content to your audience — maybe a sneak preview of a performance you have coming up, or footage from an event they may have missed.

Here's another great example from New York City's dance venue Joyce Theater. They created a video introduction to one of the dancers in their upcoming performances:

This is another great example of providing exclusive information that's going to turn your blog-reading audience into an audience of insiders. The readers of the Joyce's blog will be able to go to the Trey McIntyre Project performances already familiar with the performers, having been given this sneak peek that they couldn't have received anywhere but on the blog. And obviously, a more educated audience member is a more involved audience member, and a more involved audience member is more likely to be a repeat audience member.

You may also decide that you would like to write posts about other information you find interesting, such as news in your field that doesn't directly relate to your organization itself. Take, for example, this post from Dance Theatre Workshop.

Linking to outside content like this lets your readers know that they share a common interest with you, and if you prove that you share valuable content, they're going to come to rely on you for news or features that appeal to them. I like when blogs do this, because a lot of times, it leads me to new sites and blogs that I may not have known about before.

Blogging can also be a group effort. Most blog-publishing products will allow for multiple authors. Why not encourage your staff members to each take on the role of blogger, and set up their own voice and identity on your blog. After all, if your audience can feel a personal connection with the staff of your organization, they might be encouraged to be more involved.

A great example of this is The Modern, the blog for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Staff members take turns posting about events or news, and even blog-exclusive contests, including one called "FIND ME," where they set up a riddle to correspond to a piece of art in the museum. The bloggers often share real-life details, such as their vacation plans or personal thoughts about the artworks. This is a great tactic to create informal and affable blogging personalities that your readers can relate to.

Developing your voice and identity is also key in building your blog's community. As I mentioned, you'll have the ability to allow users to leave comments, which gives your patrons a quick way to leave feedback and lets you know what they're responding to most favorably. If you encourage this kind of community interaction, you'll often see comment threads develop into lengthy conversations between you and your patrons — or sometimes just among your patrons!

We can see a great example of this in Pittsburgh museum the Mattress Factory's blog:

Here, the Mattress Factory blogger had posted about an installation in the museum's Gestures exhibition series. He quickly got feedback from a patron who had been and had a strong reaction. He responded back, and mentioned that through her comment, he was able to find her write-up of the museum on her own blog. Being able to get that kind of feedback and have such an easy way to respond can be tremendously helpful.

But will anyone read it?

Good question! If you build it — will they come? After all, we've certainly spent a good chunk of our time over the past few years telling you that it's impractical to count on your patrons visiting your Web site unless they have a specific reason to go there. There are a variety of ways to let people know when you update your blog: your e-mails, your Twitter updates, etc. But your patrons can also subscribe to your updates on their own. How? Well, this is where Web feeds come into play.

A "feed" is a tool that automatically sends your blog's content to a recipient that requests it. A feed reader is a program that lists a person's feeds that they subscribe to. One of the most popular readers is provided by Google, but there are other readers, such as Feedreader.com or Bloglines.com. When your patrons use one of these, your blog feed will be added to the list of blogs they're already reading.

Let's look at my Google Reader subscription lists:

Now, I keep my blog feeds a little obsessively organized (some people may even never even touch the folder options, let alone try to categorize everything into subfolders), but as you can see from my open folder — some of my favorite music blogs — it's showing mem in bold, the newest posts from the blogs I've subscribed to.

You can make it easy for your readers to subcribe to your blog feed. Almost all of the blogs I read include links to their feeds. Even the ones that don't spell it out directly usually include the standard feed icon:

You can also be more explicit and post links to add your blog's feed to specific readers or feed sites. Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra offers a number of links, including one for Google Reader:

Blogger and Wordpress both automatically offer links to your feed, and it works the other way around, too — most feed readers offer buttons you can display on your blog's page so readers can subscribe. Here, for example, is Google's.

You can also offer your readers the option to subscribe to your feed via e-mail. That's what my co-worker Michelle has done on Patron Technology's social media blog. She's using Google's FeedBurner, which is an excellent — and very user-friendly! — way to make sure your patrons have easy access to your feed and thus your content.

Indianapolis Museum of Art uses a different approach that can be tremendously helpful in the marketing of your blog and your organization. Since there are a tremendous number of ways to share links these days — on Twitter, Facebook, or sites unique to link-sharing, such as Digg and delicious.com — why not provide easy access for your patrons to get your blog posts out there using those sites?

These are set up from another user-friendly (and free) service called AddThis.com, and it's a great way to encourage your patrons to not just read your blog, but share it with others, too.

Great! I'm off to go blog now.

As you can see, there is really no shortage of ways for your patrons to have a direct connection to your content if you're blogging. And luckily, blogging keeps getting easier and easier, with free and simple tools and services available to everyone. So why not get started right now?

I can't wait to read your blog posts, and hope you will share them with me. I can be reached by e-mail at chelsea@patrontechnology.com.