Wigley and Associates

I’m heading to Mpls this morning for this panel, hosted by Business Wire. I may do some moblogging from there.

Navigating the Blogosphere: How Blogs Are Influencing the Media and Changing the PR Landscape

• How to use blogs to reach consumers, shareholders, media, and other key audiences
• How traditional media organizations are adapting to the rise of the blogosphere
• How to monitor and interact with blogs
• How blogs are impacting traditional public relations practices

Panelists:

• Steve Cohen, Senior Librarian, PubSub Concepts, Inc. — Co-manager of the Public Library Association weblog
• Jason DeRusha, General Assignment Reporter, WCCO �TV — One of the first local TV
• journalists to have a regularly updated weblog on his station’s website
• Andrew Eklund, Founder & CEO, Ciceron — A firm specializing in a variety of leading edge marketing strategies such as blogs
• Sarah Lutman, Minnesota Public Radio, Senior Vice President of Arts & Culture

A colleague, Bob Courchaine of Northfield Internetworking, sent me an E-Commerce Times article titled Bloggers Cautioned About Being Copy Cats. It’s an important issue to understand. I’ll take a stab at it, but this is a layman’s interpretation of the rules. I’ve not consulted a copyright attorney on this.

“… bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations… the courts ask four questions to determine if someone is making fair use of copyrighted material:

• What is the nature or purpose of the use?…
• What is the nature of the work being copied?…
• How much of the work was copied?…
• How did the copying affect the market for the copyrighted work?…”

Is the above fair use? I think so:

• I’ve used an ellipsis (three periods in a row) to indicate that there was more text to the sentence or paragraph that I’ve used.
• I’ve used only a small amount of text.
• I’ve indented the text I copied/pasted from the article (using the Blockquote tag) to make it clear that the words are not mine
• I’m using the content for additional commentary
• It’s unlikely that my doing this negatively affects the revenue for the website.

In yesterday’s Northfield News, this opinion piece by the paper’s editorial team: Officials extend thoughts to the Web. Some excerpts:

There are other elected officials around the state using the web as a communication tool, as well, but Northfield’s public officials on a large scale seem to have embraced the Web, and so-called blogging, a sort of interactive electronic journaling, as a way to actively reach out to their constituents.
…
Take a look around and you’ll find blogs from state Rep. Ray Cox, Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith, Rice County Commissioner Jessica Peterson, and many other elected and appointed city officials and non-profit organizations.
… Northfield’s “civic blogosphere,” as it’s called, opens new lines of communication for many savvy computer users.

I applaud the paper for acknowledging what’s happening. It’s curious, though, that they don’t name the organization and website that’s behind all this civic blogging, Northfield Citizens Online’s Northfield.org.

Also curious: the newspaper’s articles are off-limits to non-subscribers, though the URLs of the articles don’t prevent non-subscribers from reading them. So I could link to the article and anyone could read it.

This role as a civic leader weblog coach (my Wigley and Associates weblog consulting practice) is picking up steam:

• I’ve proposals in the works to be the blog coach for two high profile political campaigns.

• I have a second city manager weblog client, Pete Auger, Davison, Michigan; the other is Scott Neal, City Manager of Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I have a blog coaching proposal in the works for another midwest city, for both the city manager and assistant city manager.
• I have two weblog coaching proposals for state legislators in states outside of Minnesota. Ray Cox, MN House of Representatives, has been a client since December, 2002. (He’s been blogging longer than any elected official in the United States, as far as I know… and quite likely longer than any elected official in the world.)
• I’m the weblog coach for two police chiefs and one fire chief.
• With my volunteer hat on, I’m doing occasional blog coaching of several civic leaders for Northfield Minnesota’s civic blogosphere project: a city councilor, a planning commissioner, a school board member, a county commissioner, an EDA member.
• I have a ReadMyDay Phase II proposal in the works for the U.K., continuing my civic leader blogging project with them.

Who wouda’ thunk? Next time I get business cards made, I’m going to put Griff Wigley, Weblog Coach on them.

The Campus in Community blogsite has launched. Their mission: Online Dialogues about Civic Engagement in Higher Education.

JoAnn Campbell, Senior Program Director at Minnesota Campus Compact, will be the initial blogger.

I’ll be doing some blog coaching as well as helping the moderators behind-the-scenes.

A St. Paul-based company named Avenet has a web site creation and content management system called CampaignOffice. I got a call last week from a mayoral campaign inquiring about my weblog coaching services for their candidate who’s using the platform. A weblog feature is not built into the system.

I checked around and noticed that Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak’s using it for his re-election campaign website. He started a campaign blog using Blogger, hosted at Blogspot but bailed on that and moved to a Typepad weblog, probably so that it could be customized to look like the main campaign blog. Wise move.

I’ve contacted Avenet to see if they plan to incorporate a weblog tool into their platform. I did suggest it to their CEO Michael Norton about two years ago.

Stephen Sheppard has hired me to be his blog coach for his weblog, temporarily called Sheppard’s Blog. He plans to use it for other interests beyond his work as CEO of Foldcraft where he launched a weblog last fall.

Here are two videoclip thank-yous to four colleagues who visited Northfield last week during the Int’l Symposium on Local Edemocracy.

This one goes out to a couple of ReadMyDay bloggers, Mary Reid and Isobel Harding.

And this one to Dylan Jeffrey and Julian Bowrey, local e-Gov honchos at the ODPM who, along with Steve Clift, made the whole Symposium happen.

I’m trying to learn my way into how videoblogging (vlogging) can be an effective leadership tool. The idea in these clips:

- verbal tone, gestures, and facial expressions can sometimes convey emotional impact more easily and effectively than plain text

- posting a personal thanks to a public blog like the clip above to Dylan and Julian is somewhat equivalent to saying thanks to an individual in a roomful of people. It widens the impact.

Note to self: next time, move the camera away from my noisy computer fan.

I was interviewed for a piece that appears in today’s Chicago Tribune: Blogs giving firms a human voice by Ann Meyer.

My clients The Contented Cow and Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith got mentioned.

Here are some paragraphs from that interview.

(And kudos to Meyer for getting both the quotes and content right from her phone interview with me… that’s a rarity.)

Many small businesses, from neighborhood restaurants to construction companies, understand the merits of getting to know their customers on a first-name basis. But they don’t necessarily know how to reach out in a personal way on the Internet, said Griff Wigley, principal of Wigley & Associates, a Web log coaching firm in Northfield, Minn.

“Your Web site can extend that personal touch in a way that’s not easily done” through other media, he said. “It doesn’t have to be dead boring press releases or canned Web sites.”

Instead, Wigley, who has encouraged dozens of small businesses and professionals–including the Northfield police chief–to start blogs, encourages his clients to tell stories online.

“Storytelling is the crux of it. The better people are at telling stories, the more people want to read it,” he said.

Tell the story of your business, how it started or where it’s going in the next six months. Talk about your employees. “Blog about an employee that’s done something important that you want to leverage. Get the word out there,” he said.

While you can talk about coming events, new products or services, avoid making the blog look purely self-serving or promotional. “You’re trying to set a tone that makes it more likely people are going say, `This is a guy I can relate to,’” Wigley said.

If you don’t like to write, tell your story through pictures, Wigley said. For example, Contented Cow, a pub in Northfield, Minn., uses pictures to communicate the ambiance and conviviality of the place on its blog, Wigley said. He recently posted a photo album of the pub’s Harry Potter festivities. He also posts video clips.

Audio blogging is another innovation that works well for people who can’t write or type. “If they can talk, they can blog,” Wigley said.

While Wigley acknowledges that maintaining a blog may feel like busywork initially, that attitude changes once the business owner starts getting feedback, he said. “It’s almost a gleam in their eye–`I’m going to blog this because I know the ripple effect it will have,’” he said.