I finished my leadership blogging tour for Northern Community Internet on Friday with a presentation to a full-house of 30-40 people at the Grand Rapids Area Library, a very cool-looking library with a giant red chair outside. (Click any of the photo thumbnails to enlarge and the scroll through the images.)
Afterwards, I had lunch next door with the staff at KAXE, Northern Community Radio, and lucked out to be there for volunteer chef Charlie Lano’s catered home-made lunch. (That’s Charlie standing to the right of Maggie Montgomery, KAXE General Manager.)
I’ll be in the northern Minnesota cities of Bemidji, Brainerd, and Grand Rapids later this week, doing presentations on leadership blogging for the Northern Community Internet, “a network of northern Minnesota communities using the internet to connect to our neighbors and with one another.” It’s a project of KAXE Northern Community Radio and funded by the Blandin Foundation. My invitation came from Ross Williams who I first met two years ago during an all-day visit to Blandin when the project was just being conceived.
My presentation is based on my 2005 U.K. Civic Leadership Blogging Guide (25-page PDF). Last fall, I collaborated with Gallomanor, colleagues in the U.K.. to produce an updated version of that, a 32-page booklet (PDF) called CivicSurf. It’s primarily oriented towards elected councilors but applicable for anyone in a leadership position.
If you’re looking for something that’ll give you a taste of what I’ll be covering in the presentation, the CivicSurf booklet would be your best bet.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a generic leadership blogging presentation, so I’m in the middle of updating it to include new examples from a variety of bloggers, many based here in Minnesota and a few from afar.
CivicSurf aims to inspire and inform civic leadersabout the benefits of blogging. We’ve filmed 3 Norfolk County Councillors as they’ve learnt the basics of blogging and used their sites to initiate conversations in and around their communities. The eight minute film also includes the views from expert bloggers such as Tom Watson MP, Steve Webb MP and Cllr Mary Reid. It will be distributed on DVD to 1,000 public bodies including councils, emergency services and NHS Trusts along with copies of a 32pp booklet that informs readers of the basics of blogging.
I coached the three councilors over several months and wrote much of the documentation for the booklet.
The staff at Himle Horner, a Twin Cities-based public relations/public affairs group, had a little inservice training this morning about blogging. (Click photo to enlarge.)
One topic I don’t ordinarily cover when first talking about leadership blogging is the role it can play in crisis management. I did today, however, since A) it’s one of the services that Himle Horner offers to its clients; and B) I heard the news reports on the drive to their offices about the shootings at Delaware State University, wondering if the school’s administration would be using a blog as part of the crisis response. (Not. Press release only.)
The Global PR Blog Week (now defunct?) had a post back in July, 2004 on blogging in a crisis that, along with the attached comments, seems to hit all the reasons for using a blog as a complementary crisis management tool.
I did a video tele-conference presentation on community/citizen journalism this morning for the Blandin Foundation’s Broadband Initiative program. Audience members were primarily coordinators in rural Minnesota whose communities had recently gotten broadband internet access with Blandin’s help.
A handful of people gathered at the Northern Dakota County Chambers of Commerce office in Eagan where I did the presentation. Another two dozen or so were scattered about the state in a half-dozen locations. Click photos above to enlarge. The photos were taken by Gregg Scott, CTO for InfraSupport, who handled the tech setup for the video conference.
A tip-of-the-blogger hat to Ross Williams, one of the planners/project managers for Northern Community Internet, who handled all the arrangements for my visit. (Photo is from the MN Voices UnConference, courtesy of Marc Osten, original here.)
The city of Northfield’s civic blogosphere
