As a conservative activist and new media enthusiast, I have taken particular interest in the number of local, or smaller, blogs that have sprung up with the rise of the tea party movement. No two blogs are the same (or even look the same) and each blogger has a completely different way of expressing their disgust for all things Obama & Co. With each conservative blog that springs up on the interwebs, we can do a small victory dance that liberals no longer lay claim to technology and electronic communication.

Part of my role as a social media consultant involves finding and monitoring the conversation on the blogosphere, so I spend a good amount of time looking at individual blog sites. My experience has taught me this: the conservative movement may have found its voice online, but in some instances our delivery has left a bit to be desired.

These five tips are my quick suggestions for ways to better format your blogs, grow your audience, share your content online, and influence your communities.

1. Include Contact Information. This is perhaps my most important tip for bloggers. I have tried and failed to contact many blog sites with news information because there simply wasn’t any contact information listed. I understand that many bloggers choose to remain anonymous and I actually wouldn’t recommend including your personal email address. However it is easy to create a free gmail account in the form of yourblogname@gmail.com where interested parties can contact you. Create an account and be sure it is listed on the front page of your site! You never know what information or interesting tips you might be missing out on.

[Note: This also strongly applies to all tea party groups and local campaigns. If you do not have contact information listed, people cannot get involved and other groups cannot inform you of upcoming events that your group may be interested in!]

2. Include An About Page. Similar to including contact information, including an about page helps readers and other interested parties get to know you and your blog just a little bit better.  You can retain anonymity while providing readers with insight into your potential expertise about the topics you are blogging about, your political ideology, and your location. For example, your blog post about efforts to raise the cap on charter schools in the North Carolina General Assembly may carry more weight if your readers know you have been teaching in the NC public school system for over two decades.

Additionally, many statewide blogs and nonprofits looking to build out their blogrolls and link to local blogs, will look for keywords such as “North Carolina,” “conservative,” and “politics” in an about section of your blog before they will take the time to read through your blog posts to try to decipher your point of view.

3. Make Sharing Easy. Whether you are on social networks yourself, you should assume and hope that your readers are and make sharing your blog content an easy and inviting task for them. If your blog is hosted on Wordpress, there are easy plugins that will integrate a share bar, the Facebook Like button, and Tweetmeme button directly into your blog with little work from you. If your blog is hosted on another site, Facebook will generate the Like button for you and you should still have options for sharing and Tweeting. These easy plugins allow your readers to share your blog posts with their social networks with very few clicks.

You will also want to include an RSS feed button on your website. This button allows readers who use tools such as Google Reader to aggregate all of their blog feeds into one place to easily subscribe to your blog. Many readers may subscribe to your blog without the RSS button, but the icon is a nice visual reminder to do so.

4. Consider Your Readers. Every once in a while you should step back and take a look at your blog from a reader’s point of view. Is the font too small? Do the colors make it hard to read? Are the pictures in your recent posts bigger than your post column? All of these things make your blog unpleasant to look at and, while your mother and wife may stick around to read it, very few others will.

There are two important points to remember when it comes to blog design: 1) Less is definitely more (this includes columns, pictures, dancing elephants, ads, links, and other general distractions) and 2) Our internet attention spans are very short. If your blog is hard to read or I have to constantly scroll or click to actually find your content, I won’t stick around and, worse, I will think you aren’t serious about blogging.

If you are unsure about your blog design, ask for feedback from members of your local tea party or other conservative groups. Members of your target audience are the best people to ask for feedback!

5. Focus Local. This last point is more about our movement than blog formatting in general and I am by no means the first to write about it. What you have to offer the blogosphere and conservative movement is your unique perspective about what is happening in your town, county, and even state. There are many, many bloggers here in North Carolina, but very few covering the General Assembly and even fewer covering local town councils. If you shift your focus from Obamacare and other national issues and become one of a few bloggers focusing locally, the impact on your local community and the conservative movement could be huge.

Take these 5 tips back to your blog or pass them on to your favorite blogger! And, as always, please let me know if you have any questions!

Happy blogging!

As you begin to assess your own website, it’s important to keep in mind the two goals we set in the introduction:

1. Goal 1: Provide good and timely information
2. Goal 2: Create easy methods for engagement

I mentioned in the introduction to this series that it is important to think of your website as your central information portal and your social networking accounts as the avenues leading people to and from your website. The above goals are for your overall media strategy, but key to a successful online presence is making sure your website realizes both. Put simply, it does not matter how many fans your Facebook Page has if fans coming to your website are not immediately engaged and encouraged to become more than just your Facebook fan.

We have been conditioned by Google to be able to find information readily and spoiled by Twitter’s never-ending stream of information. Because of this, when I come to your website, I expect to be able to find the exact information I am looking for fairly easily.  This is especially true if the information pertains to a recent event, ongoing policy debate, or a campaign schedule. You can rest assured that, in general, supporters won’t spend a lot of time on your website looking for the information you think is important. This isn’t because they don’t support what you are doing or even because they don’t want to help, but because our internet attention spans are very, very short.

There are three main questions that I ask myself when I review websites for clients. Begin assessing your website with these questions in mind.

(1) From the main page, how easily can visitors learn your major positions, your short and long term policy or political goals, what your group is working on currently, and, most importantly, how they can help you reach your goal?

Achieving this goal for your website could be as simple as incorporating a blog or rethinking your site navigation. Many smaller organizations shy away from blogs because they feel they don’t have enough information to sustain a blog.  If your group is in this position, stop and think about all the political and policy-related discussions you are having behind the scenes of your static site. If you are trying to get your supporters more involved, then this is the exact type of information you should be providing.  The purpose of your website’s blog is to inform in a timely manner, whether that means weekly, monthly, or just when something happens.

Blogs could also provide an important opportunity for activist engagement. Many small organizations are volunteer-based, meaning committing to a weekly or even monthly blog may not be feasible. Want to transition your supporters into activists? Get them involved by asking them to write a guest article for your site. Not only will this take the responsibility off the shoulders of your core group, but it will give your supporters ownership in the group.

It is important to note that while some sites may have a lack of information, there are also sites where the front page is information overload. I want to be clear that I am not advocating you put all your information on the front page (please don’t).  This is where rethinking your site’s navigation could also come in handy. Find a happy medium that makes navigating your site both easy and informative.

(2) Is your website dynamic? This is to say, does your website provide updates about the information mentioned in question 1?

This question seems a little like the first in that it asks about information on the site, but here the difference is updates. If I was on the site a few months ago and learned you were watching a bill in the state legislature, can I come back to your site today to learn more about that bill and what’s happened over the last few months?  The point of your website is not to provide yourself information, but to provide your supporters with information. In your quest to turn your supporters into activists, updating your information and providing new goals is key to engagement. This is where a blog for your site will be useful. Supporters who feel they are in the loop are much more likely to stick with the organization.

(3) How easily can site visitors act on the information you’ve provided and encourage their friends to act?

Key to grassroots activism is eliminating as many barriers as possible for your activists, and this is just as true for online activism. There are two components to successfully engaging supporters online: (1) Encouraging supporters to share your information on their accounts and (2) Encouraging supporters to share your information by joining your social networking accounts.

To encourage your supporters to share your information, make sharing as convenient as possible. Is it hard to shorten a link then paste it into Twitter? No, but it becomes that much easier when you use a ReTweet application, Facebook Connect, and a share bar. I use ReTweet and Share Any on my accounts because using both reinforces the sharing message and helps to eliminate the barriers for sharing.

As for encouraging supporters to share by joining your accounts, it is my recommendation that you completely incorporate social networks into your overall website plan rather than adding links to your sites as an after-thought. I encourage you to use the Facebook Connect widget that you see on my site and a Twitter application that uploads your tweet stream.  The icons linking to your social network accounts are great, but everyone has them now, which has really decreased their effectiveness. Providing a glimpse of your Facebook Page content and your Twitter stream both stands out and gives your supporters more of a reason to act because they already know what they are getting into. This goes back to removing all barriers to acting.

A Final Note.

Remember that the goal of this series is to help you turn your casual supporters into engaged activists. Embracing Web 2.0 does not mean that you need to pay thousands of dollars for a fancy new website, though it may mean it’s time for an upgrade.  If you are in a position to upgrade your website, I recommend Wordpress.org. Wordpress offers a multitude of options and the best part is it will cost you next to nothing. If you want more information about how Wordpress can help you achieve these goals, please contact me.  If you aren’t looking to change your website up, I still encourage you to incorporate a blog, Facebook, and Twitter into your site.

In the next part of the series, we will discuss Facebook and how it can help take your member engagement to the next level.  Thanks for sticking with me and, as always, if you have any questions, just ask!

Help me get the word out about this series- practice using the ReTweet button and the Share Any bar!

One of the most frequent comments I hear from activists is that they don’t understand why they need Facebook, Twitter, Ning, or any other social networking site and yet they can’t seem to get their groups off the ground. A similar lament is that while finding supporters isn’t a problem, getting them to stick around and become part of the organization is. When the success of your group depends on member engagement, fundraising, and spreading a certain message, it’s important that your internet presence give members and potential activists as many avenues for acting as possible.

If you find that your organization has plenty of support, but you’re having trouble transforming your support into action, there’s a good chance your group hasn’t fully embraced Web 2.0. Embracing Web 2.0 means not just creating dynamic websites where information is readily available, but creating campaigns where your activist base can easily interact with the provided information.

You should approach your new media strategy with two overall goals in mind:

• Goal 1: Provide good and timely information
• Goal 2: Create easy methods for engagement

To reach your broad goals of providing good information and making it easy to share that information, your web strategy has to begin with your website and branch out from there. Think of your website as your central information portal and each of your social network accounts as the avenues that get people to and from your site (and your message). This series will begin with websites and go on to discuss keys for social networks, reputation management, and specific ways to engage your activists. The purpose of this series is not to give you the mechanics for installing Wordpress themes or creating custom Facebook tabs, but to explain why you might do these things and how they will benefit your movement.

Before we can truly realize a conservative revolution in this country, conservatives will have to learn to make the internet work for them. We’ve already made great strides in this area as a movement, but as with most great teams, we are only as strong as our weakest link. I hope you’ll stick around for the entire series and possibly share this information with other conservatives or your own groups. My goal with Majority Connections is to help conservatives learn to embrace new media and understand that with a good plan, a little bit of work, and very little money, a strong new media strategy will pave the way to success. At the end of this series, I will be launching a new consulting service specifically for groups looking to assess their existing sites and move forward with a new strategy. Stay tuned for more information!

Part 1:  Websites

Part 2:  Facebook

Part 3:  Twitter

Part 4:  Rethinking Social Networks

Part 5:  Reputation Management

Part 6:  Helping Them Help You