Governing People put together a great list of 20 thoughts on government blogging. While they are good tips for blogging in general, I like the usefulness:
- Post at least weekly to maintain an audience. Less than weekly tends to lose your audience as they don’t develop a habit.
- Keep a couple of posts in hand at all times to cover busy periods. Otherwise you can easily miss a few weeks and start losing your audience.
To follow up on yesterday’s post on using internal blogs, Government Technology talks about how Oakland County uses an internal blog to save money:
Phil Bertolini, CIO of Oakland County, Mich., established a Cost-Reduction/Investment blog in summer 2009 on which employees, regardless of rank, could propose cost-cutting ideas. Suggestions from the blog have slashed $600,000 from the county’s annual IT budget so far.
In this video on Government Technology, Seattle CIO Bill Schrier talks about how he helps his organization with an internal blog. On the blog, he can communicate with his employees, explain technology changes to other department heads, and recognize high-performing employees.
The Harvard Business Review has two great articles on using Twitter in business (very relevant to government): on getting your CEO to use Twitter and using current technology instead of looking for new trends in social media (like your website, intranet, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter).
This FederalComputingWeek article identifies 3 methods that different jurisdictions have used to get public input. Includes UserVoice for public input on budget priorities, WikiPlanning for a long-term plan, and blogging for public dialogue.
National Association of Counties: More local governments using web 2.0. Uses include RSS feeds, Twitter (to push news to citizens), Facebook, YouTube, blogs (external and internal), wikis, and others.
Does your company support your blog? Does your government support your blog or look down on it?