Democratic blogging

On the weekend I had a conversation with a colleague about our staff blog at work. (Yes, I know, so sad to be talking work on the weekend, but that’s how it goes). He said that he found the blog to contain little of interest to him, and that the posts that he did enjoy, he enjoyed because of the writing style of the poster, rather than the topic. He went on to say that the idea of a democratic blog is perhaps not a good one, as the best blogs are those written by one person, with a real and recognisable voice, whereas this staff blog was a bit of a mess, and he felt it was probably largely ignored. He also made the point that the blog could be seen as an “in” crowd thing: that with a relatively small number of active bloggers, we ran the risk of being seen as a bit exclusive.

Blogging at a museum

We have been blogging at my museum now since October 2006. While we were far from being the first museum blog, we were among the first 100 listed on Musuem blogs.

The journey has been an interesting one, and we have learned a great deal by taking it, arguably more by doing than by watching. But we are still learning, and it is this that interests me. Looking back on what we have done has the effect of skewing the view, as it is easy to forget why a certain choice was made at a certain time.

The difficulty in talking about events as far away as October 2006 -or even October 2007 – is that hindsight gets in the way, and it is hard to remember how things really happened. It is easy to see the results of decisions, but not so easy to see what was decided when and in what order. After having to read a lot of glowing case studies for a university course in marketing that I am doing, I realised that the problem with tehm is that you rarely read about the bad or even poor decisons, the last-minute panics, the long discussions about risk management and dealing with the “what if” questions that come up over and over again. And yet these are the very things that we seem to struggle with all the time. Maybe if I can record some of what we are dealing with day by day, and how we manage to figure out what to do, it will help me find a pattern in what is happening which will help me better prepared next time. And it may even help someone else.