What About Those Blogs?
by Scott Neal
A blog is an electronically written and published series of narratives from a particular author on a variety of topics. You'll find blogs on the Internet. The word is a truncated version of the word "weblog," which is derived from "web," meaning the World Wide Web, and "log," a written recollection of a series of events, pieces of information, or opinions. 
"Blog" is most commonly used as a noun, but it can also be properly used as a verb, as in the sentence "I'm going to blog that." People who produce blogs are called bloggers, and the intangible place on the Internet where you find blogs is called the blogosphere. 
Bloggers are in the news practically every day. They are the newest antagonists for the mainstream media (MSM). Typically, they are the skeptics, the unsolicited fact checkers, the unabashedly opinionated pseudojournalists who took down Dan Rather and embarrassed CNN's Eason Jordan with his own poorly chosen words until he was forced to step down from his position earlier this year. 
I post something on my blog almost every workday. I try to do it first thing in the morning, before city hall opens to the public, because that's when it's quiet and I can collect my thoughts for the message I want to communicate that day. 
If you sample the blogosphere or the coverage of bloggers in the MSM, you may reach the conclusion that these people are the nasty NIMBY types who pester our elected officials and our staffs with gossip and misleading innuendo and force us to produce public treatises on local public policy issues to prove, beyond any doubt, what we already know is true. 
The bloggers you hear about most commonly in the evening news won't trust you or me, and they won't accept your facts as facts. They have the tenacity of your least favorite journalist, with none of the ethics or professionalism. There also are bloggers like me who use this online communication tool in a helpful and beneficial way. 
There's an old adage in the public relations field: "Tell your own story, or someone else will tell it for you." There is a 21st-century update to that old adage that has a more Darwinian flavor to it and serves as one of my primary motivations to blog: "Blog, or be blogged." 
I started my own blog in March 2003. You can see it at my city's Web site, at www.edenprairie.org. I got started through the persistent encouragement of my friend Griff Wigley of Wigley & Associates, Northfield, Minnesota. Griff is a blog coach. He still coaches and advises me, as well as a number of other state and local elected and appointed officials in Minnesota who are bloggers. Griff is the classic "early adopter." He had a hunch in the early 2000s that blogging was going to take off, and he was right. 
Blogging Guidelines 	
1. Why Keep a Weblog?
A Weblog allows you to:
•	Capture selected leadership interactions (face-to-face, phone, e-mail) with colleagues, staff, media, and members of the community, thus giving the interactions a longer "shelf life." 
•	Bring the same personal voice or conversational style to a Web site that you use in face-to-face, phone, and e-mail conversations-a voice of authenticity versus a brochure or collection of memos and press releases. 
•	Extend your presence with a selective window into your day. 
•	Provide another way for people to interact with you by using the blog's comment feature. 
•	Convey your message to citizens directly instead of depending on local print and broadcast media. 
•	Make public life more real to the public. 
2. What to Blog. 
•	Provide recognition to employees, colleagues, organizations or businesses in the community. Illustrate your values, mission, goals, and strategies with current stories. 
•	Leverage your media diet (the range of content one regularly consumes from a variety of media choices). Blogging about something you've seen, heard, or read extends its impact. 
•	Chronicle a decision or a current, unresolved problem in your locality. 
•	Teach about a service, program, or department. 
•	Point to changes and additions to your city's or county's Web site. 
•	Reveal aspects of your non-work life that humanize you in the eyes of the public; however, avoid discussing your personal problems and revealing personal reflections. 
•	Teach about the complexities of an issue. 
3. How to Blog Effectively.
•	Tell stories. Nearly every post to your Weblog can be framed as a story. Imagine yourself talking to a colleague or friend about what it is you're blogging and then bring that tone to your post. 
•	Add relevant links to your posts. It allows your readers to go deeper and find more information; search engine spiders come back more frequently and those you link to generally appreciate it and link back. 
•	Insert photos and images. The media culture that your readers live in is heavily visual. If your blog is text heavy, you'll have trouble getting them to be regular visitors. 
•	Beware thinking you always have to have long, substantive posts. It'll likely discourage you from posting frequently. Short, frequent posts help you maintain your audience. 
•	Answer e-mail with a blog. Your blog gives you the option to respond to an individual so that readers can see and understand the response. 
Source: Civic Leadership Blogging Report by Griffin Wigley, Wigley & Associates, Northfield, Minnesota (Weblog, http://wigleyandassociates.com). 	
It's easy to get a blog started by going to any number of commercial blogging services like Google's Blogger or SixApart's TypePad and Movable Type; I use Blogger. No fee is charged for the service, but Eden Prairie hosts its blogs on a separate Web server and for this service pays an annual fee of approximately $100. 
When I started my blog, my target audience was the citizens who live and work in Eden Prairie. As my blogging skills developed, I became aware of an audience for my blog that in some ways is even more important: the employees of the city of Eden Prairie. 
I post something on my blog almost every workday. I try to do it first thing in the morning, before city hall opens to the public, because that's when it's quiet and I can collect my thoughts for the message I want to communicate that day. A blog is like your other public communications tools in that it is strategic. It is not, as some will tell you, an "online diary." I have a strategic outcome that I want to accomplish with every "post" that I put on my blog: 
1. Educate. I want to educate city employees, councilmembers, and citizens about what local government can and cannot do in the community. I use my blog to explain what the city is doing and why it is doing it. The blog is an especially friendly path to young people, who don't giggle when they say the word "blog." They are techno-savvy and have a higher level of trust in online information and news sources than do people over the age of 30. 
2. Promote. The blog is a great place to promote not only my organization but other community organizations as well. If a local service club or youth sports association helps the city accomplish something, I plug it in my blog. 
3. Enhance. I use lots of photographs and other types of "behind the scenes" information in my blog. I use this information not only to inform but really to enhance the information that citizens get about city government from other sources. I help bring citizens inside city government. 
4. Praise. I hand out generous helpings of praise on my blog. It's an extremely public way of praising the outstanding work of city employees. It's an especially good venue for showcasing positive words and images about the city's elected officials, as well as members of citizen advisory boards and other volunteers who help make our community a great place to live. 
5. Inspire empathy. I have a theory: if citizens gain a better understanding of the difficult choices that elected and appointed officials need to make each week, they'll be more apt to engage in constructive dialogue with us about how and what we should be doing. I like to find stories and situations that I can relate on the blog that will help build a greater sense of empathy for our city government among our citizens. 
6. Personalize. One of the aspects of a blog that make it different from a newsletter is that it can be personalized. I call this "putting the face on the faceless bureaucrat." I throw in the occasional mention of my personal and family life, in the hope that it might show citizens that I have a life outside government, much like their own. I want them to believe that I am a human being who has interests and activities and foibles and faults, just like they do. By extension, this helps citizens see local government on a more human scale. 
If you want to be a blogger, here is what you need to get started: 
1. A computer with Internet service. I hope these two tools are present in local government offices everywhere, but I won't assume that. A blog is an online tool. If it's on paper, it's not a blog. 
2. Strategic outcomes that you'd like accomplish. I want citizens to think that the people who work in the city government of Eden Prairie are friendly, polite, customer-focused, results-oriented, flexible, good team members, able to take smart initiatives, and good public stewards. I want them to think of the city councilmembers in the same way. I share stories and information with them that I hope will reinforce these attributes. 
3. Time to invest in content. I am often asked how much time it takes me to prepare my blog. I write it four to five times each week. It takes me, on average, about 30 minutes each day. This includes the time to write and post it, at the third-party off-site blog hosting site, Blogger.com. 
4. Discipline to keep it going. Starting a blog is one thing; keeping it up is another. If you want to maintain a successful blog, you will have to discipline yourself to keep at it. It's slow at first, but the more you write, the more occasions there will be when someone will come up to you and say, "Hey, I really liked what you said in your blog today about . . ." The more of this positive feedback you get, the easier it will be to become a reliable blogger for your readers. 
As a veteran blogger with more than two years of experience and 300 individual posts to my name, I have been able to formulate what I like to call "Scott's 5 Iron Laws of Blogging." If you follow these five laws, you can be a successful blogger. But as with all things in government, of course, there are no guarantees. 
1. Blog for the right reason. Blog to help serve citizens better, not merely to reduce the per-unit cost of taking stabs at your political opponents. Hyperpoliticized speech is the most common content of blogs. Go against that grain. It will catch more attention, and readers will appreciate it more. If they want gnashing of teeth, they already know where to get that kind of content. Give them something they can't get anywhere else. 
2. Be honest. Depending on how you handle the hosting of your blog on the Internet, whatever you write in your blog might be out there in the blogosphere for a long time. Like forever. Be honest with your words. Choose them carefully. You might have to eat them someday. I have, twice, and it wasn't very tasty on either occasion. 
3. Write your blog yourself. I'm going to repeat this law. Write your blog yourself. Don't be lazy. No ghost writing. Your blog should sound like you, not like your public relations manager. Speaking of public relations or communications staff members, be prepared for them not to like the idea of your keeping a blog. It's risky, but do it anyway. High risk equals high return. This is definitely true in the blog world. 
4. Write what you know. This is solid advice given to all writers everywhere by professional writers and critics, and it is true for blogs as well. If you're reading this article, you are very likely a government employee of some kind. Write about government. There is precious little information in general circulation in your communities about what is really going on in local government. Do you want to depend on your local media to tell your story for you? Most of you would not. Write the truth. Share your stories. 
5. Keep your head up and your eyes open. Content for your blog is all around you. Why do you paint traffic-signal poles? Why do you drain the public swimming pool in the winter? Why do bike trails need to be eight feet wide? Why do we vote in November, as opposed to May? You might think that citizens aren't interested in the little stuff, but you'd be wrong. They are fascinated by it. Tell them about the little stuff, and they'll begin to trust you more and more on the big stuff. 
When I started my blog, my target audience was the citizens who live and work in Eden Prairie. As my blogging skills developed, I became aware of an audience for my blog that in some ways was even more important: the employees of the city of Eden Prairie. This was quite a revelation for me. I was looking outward and forgetting to look back in. 
My employees were reading the blog as fast I could write it. They see it as an opportunity to better understand what's going on in my mind. How I process events and information. What insights am I having about city government? Where is our organization headed? Who do I think is doing an exceptional job? 
My employees don't have to guess about how they think I might feel about a particular issue. By sharing my insights with them almost every day for two years, I have become much more predictable to them, and that can save everyone a lot of time and trouble in any organization. 
A police officer who works the night shift put it into the best perspective for me when he shared with me that he likes to read my blog because, for him, it is the rough equivalent of getting all city employees together first thing every morning to hear the boss give a 10-minute motivational message of the day. Most organizations could never justify the cost or weather the logistical challenges of doing this, but with the blog you can. 
Blog Status
So far, there are three employees in our organization who are bloggers: the fire chief, the police chief, and me. Our blogging activities are part of the communication efforts with community members, so it is an important part of our workday. 
I have not authorized additional blogs for city employees, but I'm considering it. As our three blogs are part of Eden Prairie's official public communications strategy, I would want to approve employee blogs before they could be considered representatives of the city. 
There are no established guidelines or rules on blogging for the three of us at this time. We talk about our respective blogs each week, and we try to expand the subject areas that we write about in order to provide citizens with as much interesting content on city government as possible. The one concern that I, as the manager and a blogger, would have with employee blogs is that the employees not spend enormous amounts of work-related time maintaining them. If blog creation is extended to all staff members, guidelines will be established. 
In February, I had the opportunity to tour the United Kingdom for nine days, lecturing and teaching local government officials about local government blogging as part of a national initiative from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. This initiative is called the National e-Democracy Project. The British government launched the project in response to nationwide concern over voter apathy and disinterest in local government. Government officials believe that blogging by local governments can help to reengage their public in civic affairs. 
I believe the British are on the right track. I also have found to be true what they believe to be true. Blogging can engage citizens back into civic affairs. And this is the most important reason why I blog. 
Scott Neal is city manager, Eden Prairie, Minnesota (SNeal@edenprairie.org). Visit his Weblog at http://edenprairieweblogs.org/html/scott_neal.html.