I have always been convinced there are four steps – or call them challenges – in the life cycle of a blog:
1. the “WHY” moment: getting convinced a blog will contribute to “get your message out”, to create discussions around your project, engage with your audience,…
2. the “HOW” moment: how to set up a blog, the choices of self-hosting or using an existing blogplatform, the choice of blog software,..
3. the “WHAT” moment: getting the hang of writing good blog content, realizing that writing blogposts is different from a mere one way publications on a corporate website.
4. the “AND NEXT?” moment: After a while, you do need to take the time and see if you are on the right track. This is the point in a blog’s life cycle where you take a step back to evaluate what you have achieved with the blog so far: Take stock, and see how to take the blog to the next level. For a healthy blog, this step is recursive and needs to be repeated over time. It is the ideal opportunity to also relook at the “WHY” “HOW” and “WHAT”.
In the past years, the ICT-KM team has been taking the lead on social media for the CGIAR. They have duly passed these steps. Already last year, the team took a bold “AND NEXT” step by merging the old ICT-KM blog and website into one new blog.
The result of this merge was an appealing revamped blog, clearly appreciated by their audience, and passing good reviews.
We are now one year after this blog overhaul, and it was time to repeat the “AND NEXT?”: “What can we change to take our blog once again to the next level?
The ICT-KM team took the bold step to ask an outsider –me in this case- to work with them on the “AND NEXT” step. We agreed to take an interactive, pragmatic and heuristic approach to evaluate their blog and to define the areas that needed to improve. During the exercise we documented the evaluation process itself so it could be re-used by any blogger, or blogging team doing a similar exercise.
We came up with eight distinguished areas to consider during a blog evaluation (each link points to a more in depth article on my blog):
I had the privilege of going through the ICT-KM blog evaluation. The end result was a report specifying, for each of the eight evaluation areas:
We sat together as a team to go over the evaluation, to explain some of the tools and illustrate some of the observations and recommendations. But it was also an excellent opportunity for me, as “the evaluator” (oh gosh, what a word), to learn more about their blog, their intent, their set-up, and to fine-tune some of the recommendations.
As an end product of the evaluation, we agreed on a list of things to change on the ICT-KM blog, so we could take it up to the next level. The changes are being implemented right now, so watch this space!
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