Wigley and Associates

While in the UK last week, I met Fiyaz Mughal, Director of Project 60-10 at Diverse Trust, “… an organisation concerned with social engineering and the development of social capital.”

“The 60-10 project aims to find about fifty individuals from a variety of backgrounds primarily, though not exclusively, from the Jewish and Muslim communities in the UK. The selected group will undertake a journey across Europe to Auschwitz in Poland and then to Bosnia. The journey will be physical, educational and emotional. The journey will be recorded and the process will help us better understand both the barriers to greater understanding and will help find pathways to establish a common constructive purpose.”

This photo from the 60:10 project home page shows a synagogue next to a mosque on Fieldgate Street, just off the Whitechapel Road in East London.

Fiyaz and colleague Jay Sharma are interested in how weblogs could be used for the project.

For more on the project, see this news article from last fall: Building Bridges.

In today’s Wall St. Journal Online: Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back: Small Firms Find Tool Useful for Recognition, Connecting With Buyers.

To build an audience, blogs don’t have to be edgy, provocative or funny, says blog coach Griff Wigley, of Wigley and Associates, Northfield, Minn., who has helped several dozen small companies start online journals. But they do have to be authentic and provide useful information. The personal touch helps build relationships with customers, something particularly important to small companies catering to local communities. The personal style blogs require may seem less believable, however, if it’s seen coming from a large corporation. “If you slip into PR lingo, Mr. Wigley says, “you will lose your visitors. They will know it’s not really you.”

I’m back home, still on GMT I think, but up and working at 6 am at my morning “office,” the Goodbye Blue Monday coffeehouse in downtown Northfield. Time to get working on my report. Scott’s blogged a photo narrative wrap-up of our trip: Final Thoughts on the United Kingdom. Not sure yet if I’ll do a trip wrap-up of my own.

I’ve added 4 photos from my trip home to p. 6 of the album. Later this week, I’ll get them all annotated and post a note here when I do.