Responses on how to improve our blogs

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 17

We got great responses to our post about our meeting in which we debated how to improve our blogs (and blog results) here at BW. I’m not going to bother summarizing them all. Better just to read the comments. But here are a few that I think we should act on.

1) We have to find a way to automatically approve comments by trusted readers. The lack of this function, I learned in comments, discouraged Jon Garfunkel, from returning to the site. He’s moved on. We have to change.

2) We BW bloggers should be seeing the daily data on the performance of our blogs, along with other metrics, such as the number of RSS subscribers and inbound links. Some of the tracking we can do by ourselves, looking for references to posts (are retweets) in Twitter and Backtype, for example. (And perhaps that type of data should be incorporated into the company’s analysis of how successful we are.)

3) Post more photos and videos, including on YouTube. One commenter notes that posting photos drives traffic, because they get picked up by Google images. Hadn’t thought of that one.

4) More coordination between our blogs and Business Exchange. I’m guilty on that one, rarely adding my posts to BizX. I’ll start, and at the risk of overpromotion, will start tweeting from there too.

5) Add a Twitter stream to the blogs. We did this with our short-lived Vox Stimuli (a blog we developed to analyze Obama’s stimulus plan.) There was talk then about adding Twitter to the rest of the blogs. We should get on it.

6) Putting commenters’ names in hyperlink, so that they bounce to their blogs. If spammers dominated our comments, I can see where we’d want to avoid that. But since we go to the trouble to moderate, why not let people link back?

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/