Smarter Strategies for Talent Blogs

If you take a look at a typical blog on a television news web site, you'll find a familiar pattern to the posts.  The anchor or reporter starts out with a flurry of posts where she dutifully chronicles all the exciting exploits of her day.  A few viewers might weigh in with supporting comments and little mini-discussions can ensue.  Then, things start getting busy around the newsroom and the posts become less frequent.  Before you know it, the posts get shorter until they dwindle to a once-a-month entry with just a few sentences. 

This problem is not the reporter's fault.  She is a busy person with a crazy schedule and blogs like these take time.  The problem lies with how the blog is set up and run.  Far too many stations implement a flawed plan that dooms talent blogs to failure.

Don't build blogs around personalities

A lot of television blogs are built around the day-to-day activities of an anchor or reporter.  When you think about it, this is a pretty self-absorbed strategy because it portrays the anchor more as a Hollywood celebrity with adoring fans, than as a journalist working to serve her audience.

Often times there is little depth or real information provided in these blogs, and most of the posts feature a "here's what I'm working on" sort of message.  Other posts will often include scintillating topics like lunch plans,  personal ailments, and frustrations with the assignment desk.

Basing the blog on the daily activities of a single person means the topic of each post will vary wildly.  Most TV news reporters are assigned radically different stories each day.  For example, take a look at this station blog.  The September 26th topic deals with beach erosion.  September 29th deals with politics, a local murder, the gas shortage and dogs for prison inmates.  The topics of the posts are so meandering that few people will be compelled to return.  The reporter's experience is the only recurring theme.  Unless the reader is smitten with this reporter's personality, she will probably move on.

The commenting on this blog would bear this out.  In the two months of blog posts I looked at, there was not a single viewer comment.  This was a one-way conversation about random events in a local community.  This anchor dutifully did his blog posts, but I'm willing to bet almost no one bothered to look at all his hard work.  It was just too random.  Far too many of these personality-centered blogs tend to be a bit self-absorbed and have little relevance to the viewers.

Build blogs around passions

It is not important that you have a lot of blogs. It is important that you have blogs with large communities of impassioned people who participate and interact.  Achieving critical mass should be the sole objective.  We create blogs to invite participation and that should be the lone criteria for their success.

This means not building blogs around people but around passions. Don't build a blog about your political reporter. Build a blog around the community's love of local politics. You don't build a blog about your weatherman. Build a blog about the love of outdoors and storm chasing. The local weatherperson may run the blog, but he is not the primary focus.

If you take a look at this station blog you'll see a wide variety of different topics all lumped together in one blog: weather, sports, parenting.  Now check out the commenting.  While a few have a smattering of posts, most have none.

Far too many stations build their blogs around the station's marketing agenda,  not the viewer's passions.  They will have blogs for weather, investigations, breaking news and all the other topics straight out of the promos.  That's the station's marketing objectives, not what the audience wants to talk about.  Take a look at your commenting numbers.  If they stink it means the public has voted and your blog topic stinks.  Time to move on to another topic that people actually care about.

Merge your Blogs and your Forums

One of the biggest criticisms of television blogs is that they tend to follow the antiquated broadcasting paradigm of the last fifty years.  The reporter or anchor talks and the reader's job is to dutifully listen without comment.  Blogs can be the ultimate conversation vehicle, but many stations still treat them like a TV sitting in the living room.  Those of us in TV are just not accustomed to having viewers talk back.  Check out reporter and anchor blogs and you'll find many readers are not allowed to comment.  Many TV station web sites are still case studies in one-way communication.  They are not a conversation - they are pontificating.  Here is the news as I see it.  You just shut up and watch.

For those stations that do have reader forums, they can be some of the most heavily trafficked areas on the site, having thousands of posts and acres of page views.  But on most TV station forums, the anchor team is strangely absent.  Why wouldn't you invite your anchor team to participate in the places with the most traffic?

Take a look at Meteorologist Tom Skilling's blog over at WGN.  Tom does a great job providing daily interesting comments and fun facts about the weather.  But this site is designed to be one-way communication.  There is no way viewers can comment.  There isn't even a link for viewers to submit their own question to Tom.  Imagine how much more rich the experience would be if others were allowed to participate.  Tom is doing a fantastic job on his blog.  There is lots of content, his topics are current and relevant, but the site architecture is setting him up for failure. 

These one-way blogs send a tacit message to viewers that smacks of arrogance.  I will allow you to silently read my blog, but you won't be allowed to clutter up my page with your bourgeois commenting.  Also, I won't be lowering myself to associate with the rabble who hang out on the forums.  I'm an important journalist and you're just some dullard with a half-witted opinion.

Take a look at Gene Norman's weather blog at KHOU.  During hurricane Gustav, Gene posted plenty of good information, but you'll notice the commenting was rather sparse.  Now take a look at KHOU's weather forums for the same time period.  The forums abound with hundreds and hundreds of pages of comments.  They were abuzz as viewers swapped predictions about Gustav's path and shared preparation stories.

Several of KHOU's weather team participated in the discussion, but some of the best information came from the community.  Local weather enthusiasts found new maps of the storm that the station didn't show.  As the storm crawled towards Houston, an entire army of weather lovers came together and ferreted out fresh information from all over the net.  In effect, KHOU had its own private army of weather researchers who were incredibly jazzed to show off their own knowledge of the storm.  KHOU's Dan Meador helped lead the discussion and provided context.  During the storm, this was the place to be for the latest information on this deadly storm.

Because the focus was firmly centered on the storm and not on Dan Meador's personal take on the storm, the forums came to life while the blogs moldered.  This community's passion was about the weather, not the people who report the weather.

Turn your talent bloggers into forum moderators

TV people are just too busy to carry the load of a personal blog alone.  They just don't have time.  Sure, we can browbeat them into regularly posting for a few weeks, but most of them slip back into rushed sporadic posting once the heat is off.  Plain and simple, personal blogs are a bad use of their time.

Creating fresh content is very time consuming and that time would be better spent leading and facilitating on-line discussion rather than pounding out lines of copy that few people will read anyway.  Blogs and forums must reach critical mass to work and one person's opinion, no matter how famous they are, is rarely enough to transfix an audience for long.  Without participation from an entire community, most blogs will fail.

Vibrant blogs require many hands to make them work.  Fans want to share their views and aren't satisfied to merely read someone else's opinion.  So turn your bloggers into moderators.

Here is a perfect example.  Podcaster Adam Christianson hosts a weekly podcast about Macintosh computers.  His forums are vibrant and active.  But you'll notice that he does very little of the writing.  Most of the heavy lifting and question answering is done by the community.  Adam has recruited a whole army of unpaid volunteer experts who are anxious to show off their smarts to this eager community.  Adam is the primary engine behind the site, but he doesn't have a personal blog.  Adam fosters the discussion, but doesn't dominate it.  This has made the forums vibrant and interesting, but Adam isn't required to spend a lot of time writing a personal blog.

Convert your station blogs to hybrid blog/forums that focus on community passions and not anchor personalities.  Assign each reporter or anchor a section - gardening, local politics, fishing, schools, or any bizarre topic your audience can't seem to stop posting about.  The talent's job is to foster discussion, ask questions, and post their own views on the topics the community has chosen.  Invite trusted volunteers to assume a larger role in managing and posting content.  The important thing is that the discussion is not about the reporter.  It is about the audience's passion.  The talent still play a pivotal role in the forum/blog, but it doesn't require them to be the sole reservoir of content.

Graeme Newell is a broadcast and web marketing specialist.  His teasing seminars immediately increase audience retention.  He guarantees you will get an immediate ratings increase or his workshop is free.  Find out more here.