Guide to Civic Leadership Blogging (2005 U.K. edition)
How to use weblogs as an effective local leadership tool

What to Blog: Provide recognition to an employee, a colleague, an organisation or business in the community

Effective leaders typically have many ways to acknowledge the contributions of people in an organisation or organisations in the community. Formal types of recognition have some duration to them, i.e, they last beyond the moment of acknowledgement because others keep finding out about it. For example,

  • the employee of the month who gets written up in the organisation newsletter has their story seen by others over the course of an entire month;
  • a volunteer who receives a plaque at the annual meeting gets to hang it on a wall where others can comment on it in the months and years ahead;
  • the non-profit organisation who gets an official recognition at a city council meeting gets written up in the local newspaper and hears about it from others who weren’t at the meeting.

But good leaders know that these formal kinds of recognition are few and far between. Therefore the informal forms of recognition – the verbal pat on the back, the thanks on the phone, the email kudos – are often more important for acknowledging people and organisations. And the spontaneity of these makes the acknowledgement feel more authentic and more personal to the recipient. One of the most effective ways to acknowledge someone informally is to tell someone else a story about them. Why? Because it has a better chance to spread around, just like the formal recognitions described above. A positive remark directly to the person being acknowledged generally goes no further because to most people it would feel like bragging to tell someone else. But if the positive remark is made to someone else, then the recipient is very likely to repeat the story to others. A blog post recognising an employee, a colleague, an organisation or business in the community is an effective way to accomplish the informal form of recognition with the impact of the formal. Others see the post and mention it ; some pass around its URL/PermaLink via email to others, thereby widening its impact; and the search engines store the content of it indefinitely, thereby providing opportunities for serendipitous acknowledgement far into the future. Tech tips: include a recent photo; insert photos of people being recognised, preferably; insert the logos of organisations being recognised and link to their web sites.