The fresh start has allowed me to consider the challenges of social media with fresh eyes, to plan and prepare before I begin. In doing so, I’ve jotted down some questions which may be helpful to others in a similar situation – whether they’re starting a new channel or reviewing something established.

1. What do you want to say (and perhaps, do you have anything to say)?

While I don’t believe in scripting every tweet or having every blog update scheduled and approved months in advance, it can be worth having some sort of content plan. What are the themes you’ll be covering on your channel? Is it for your entire life (if you’re a person) or your entire organisation (if you’re setting up the channel on behalf of one of those), or for a particular interest or project? In the early days, it may help to plan out what kind of updates you’ll want to post and how regularly, and put these dates into a calendar as reminders.

2. Who is your audience?

Once you’ve decided what you want to say, it’s worth working out who (if anyone) wants to hear it. It’s all well and good tweeting your thoughts about what you had for breakfast into the internet void on a personal account, but if you’re doing this as a job, there are likely to be things like targets or KPIs for user interaction (and if there aren’t it might be worth nominating some – see point 5 below). So, who do you want to reach? Are they end-users of your product or service, or other organisations in your field? How old are they? How computer literate? How often do they get online – and when they do, what sites do they go to first?

3. How can you reach them?

One thing I’ve learnt over the past ten years is that, in most cases, it’s far easier to go where your audience are than to get them to come to you. So, thinking about the previous question, how do your audience behave online? Are they on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr? Are they asking questions on Yahoo! Answers? Do they belong to a particular online community? Sometimes it may be easy enough to set up your own profile in these spaces to interact with other users, but in other cases, you may need to get permission from a community moderator or website owner before you make your first post.

If you’re still keen to set up a blog or community on your own website – and there are lots of good reasons to do so – then it’s still worth doing research into how best to reach your audience. Do you see your potential audience members commenting on other blogs? If so, it’s worth noting what sort of posts they feel motivated to comment on, the regularity of the postings, etc. And of course, it’s worth remembering that for a lot of people the internet is still all about email, so building up a list and sending monthly updates remains a perfectly valid way of spreading a message and driving traffic to your website.

4. Who’s going to do the updates?

People say social media is great because it’s free. Technically, in many cases, this is true. However, it doesn’t account for the huge amount of staff time that needs to be spent to set up and maintain a channel. Social media is about conversation. If you go quiet, you’ll be ignored. So, who’s going to do your updates? And who’s going to do your updates when that person is on leave? And who’ll be the person who can provide sign-off on anything controversial or out of the ordinary? Because that’s another side-effect of having a conversation – you’re never 100% sure about what that other person might say.

5. What does success look like?

For some, the opportunity to broadcast a message will be enough. For others, the end goal will be the online conversation itself. There definitely is some reward in being part of a community, in being generous and interacting with your fans and followers, learning from their updates as you shape your own, passing on their messages, leaving comments on their blogs, following them back.

However, for most, there will be some form of measurable action that you want your friends or followers to undertake. This may be visiting your website, signing an online petition, volunteering or donating to your cause, registering for an event or a myriad other options. It is this conversion from conversation to action that, for me, indicates real social media success. It’s what can be monitored as you go along and, through regularly reviewing the answers to the earlier questions, what you can aim to improve.

There’s a real excitement in new beginnings, but what I guess I’m realising anew is that it doesn’t have to end there. I’m looking forward to seeing how this project grows.

Image courtesy of Matt Hamm.  Used under Creative Commons licence.

You might overwrite key files, for example, and then when you go to your admin screen to log on, you might get a blank white page – and when you go to your homepage, the same thing.  Trying to stay calm, you might then try to do a fresh install, knowing that you’ve exported all your blog entries to an .xml file earlier in the evening, only to find that the .xml file only contains the first and most recent entry.

By this time it’d be after midnight and you’d be coming to the realisation that you’d deleted your entire blog.  And while it didn’t contain the best literature ever, it did have a couple of entries on the excitement of first-time publication, which you would’ve preferred not to lose.  So you’ll find yourself searching the Way Back Machine for an archived copy of your entries which you can then bring into your ‘new’ blog.  And you’ll keep bringing in entries, one at a time, till about 1.30am, and then you’ll get up at 6.00am to finish the job (finish republishing those blog entries at least, though you’ll still need to deal with the sidebar, theme, plugins and comments).

Which means  by 11.30pm the next day, having just returned from Boffoonery, a comedy benefit for Bletchley Park aimed at the kind of people who work all day with computers and then enjoy going out in the evenings to hear jokes about code (so like you and your husband and your friends), you’ll be totally exhausted and reduced to amusing yourself by writing notes in the second person.

It won’t take the place of this blog, though.

It’s about writing.  And the web.  It’s called webstuff4writers.com.

Inspired by ‘Booking Through Thursday’, I’m going to post weekly writing topics that can be used in blogs about writing (like this one).  These topics will usually be posted on a Sunday, unless there’s another day people prefer.

Anyway, here’s the first one, and my answer.

Writing about writing: Week one

Do you think keeping a journal or blog is a useful practice for writers?  Why or why not?

webstuff4writers.com is my new attempt to keep a regular journal.  I’m not good at keeping a regular journal.  This blog in itself is evidence of this.  There’s more evidence of it in a wardrobe of my parents’ place, where there’s a pile of notebooks, each about one quarter to a half full.  In both 2006 and 2007, my New Year’s resolution was to keep a journal every day.  This year, I made it to March.

That said, I do think that journaling is a useful practice for those who want to write.  A lot of my short stories have come from journal and blog entries – both from those entries where I’ve recorded something that’s happened to me, and those entries that I recorded something I’ve observed happening in the world at large.  Some of the scene-setting in Lessons to Learn was based on my travel journal from my time in Korea, and from the emails I sent home which became almost like a travel blog.

The other advantage that I’ve found is that keeping a journal is a good way to start writing each day, and that when I’ve written one piece – whether it’s non-fiction, stream-of-consciousness, or a poem –  it’s easier to write something else.  If I had all the time in the world for writing then, this process would be ideal.  However, most days there’s only half an hour before work, a couple of hours after it.  And then, if I spend too much time blogging or writing about my day, then no novel writing gets done at all.

Still, I’ll give webstuff4writers.com a go, and see how long it lasts.  Hopefully others will find it useful.  Hopefully I’ll managed to keep it out of that virtual wardrobe, where abandoned blogs go to die, for a couple of months at least.

* Secondly, I miss L&P.

While doing a bit of web research (always a dangerous thing), I came across several articles on the hazards of ‘comment spam’. At the moment, I doubt it’s that easy to find this website, let alone spam it. But nonetheless, I’ve changed the settings so that everyone’s first comment needs to be moderated. Once that comment’s been approved that first time, you should be able to keep commenting, as long as you keep entering the same email address.

More soon…