Day 3: Lessons Learned
Learning on the fly. That is what this week has been about for me. I have never edited anything on the scale of this tremendous gathering of knowledge and personalities. Not to mention doing it in real time! I have a vast new respect for online editors everywhere.
I started writing these "Lessons Learned" posts at the encouragement of my other two partners in crime, Anthony and Constantin, with whom I have been triangulating all week via IM as we tried to keep up with the flow of information and deal with all of the little things that came up that we didn't anticipate. While they gave me some input on the content, the posts should be read as one woman's reflection on her experience, not as the "voice of the event."
My post on Tuesday was, well, a little testy. It was a reflection of approximately 14 hours spent online, virtually non-stop, doing something which is rather new to me! I truly think that the content we have produced here is really terrific.
When we started planning this event, I couldn't help but think: herding approximately 30 PR/marketing types, all of whom are leaders and experts in this field, is going to be interesting, to say the least! Yet, on the whole, it has gone rather well.
Todd remarked on the seemingly endless emails that followed the planning process of this event. Yes, there were many! But for those of us who wanted to have an active role in planning this (not everyone did, which was fine), we needed to thrash out the sometimes endless details in order to gain consensus. We are a group of people with strong opinions, and none of us wanted someone else dictating the decisions.
Yet, even with all of the discussion of details that took place, we missed some stuff.
Looking back, our guidelines for posting were too vague. For example, we never really reached consensus on how many posts people could put up per day, or if people should only post on the day of their topic or if they could post every day. We didn't finalize a look-feel for each post, including the length of the titles and whether biographical information should be put a the end of them or kept only in the biographies section. This vagueness led to us, the editors, having to make some decisions on the fly without reaching consensus with the group.
We have been guided in our decisions by one main concern: keeping the balance among authors as egalitarian as possible. Therefore, we asked people not to post every day, but rather to share their thoughts via the comments, so more great discussions could get started. We consolidated some posts. We deleted biographical information from the bottom of posts and edited headlines so that the posts' look-feel were more consistent.
Not everyone is happy with these decisions, but I think they were right ones. I wanted to share our thought process behind them with all of you, so you can correct us if you think we were wrong. Comment away!
I only have one question to throw out to the group today: is there some etiquette to trackbacking without attribution? I.e., if someone sends a ping back to a post here, but doesn't acknowledge it in any way on their own post, is that OK?
Author: Elizabeth Albrycht | Jul 14, 04 | Permalink
| 3 comments
Category: Announcements
I get and send inadvertent trackbacks every week. That suggests the practise of unnannounced trackbacks is an established one. If you wish to reverse the flow, you need to consider moderated trackbacks.
Normally people mention a synergy of points, often naming the web site and related author, before tracking back into the related space.
Trackbacks sent as scattershots into the fray often come from a mass-mailing mindset which we hope to transcend in a group blog.
Posted by: Bernie Goldbach at July 15, 2004 03:08 AM
I think the achievement of herding 30 people with 'strong opinions' has been considerable - well done. That said, I was (belatedly) aware of the mindset underlying a couple of my own emails to you editors. I thought I was making constructive comments about the impression multiple posts from one individual would make on first time visitors and then realised this reflected my own 'corporate' vision for the message the site was sending out. Put another way, while some people were evangelising the death of PR, or at least welcoming greater transparency, I, the author of a post on ethics, wanted to focus (and close down) the thrust in a particular direction.
So too, I suspect, did many others...
Posted by: Philip Young at July 15, 2004 03:32 AM
Philip - we are all new at this stuff. I certainly find myself reverting to dictatorial mode, and have to back off and chant "openness is good, chaos is good"! Or something like that.
Maybe we have tried to keep too corporate a vision for this blog. We wanted to make sure it was easy to navigate and find things, especially for first-time blog visitors. But....
Did we go too far on command/control here? Would it have been better for this to be more free-flowing and bloggy? I'd love your comments so we can make this better for the next time.
Posted by: Elizabeth Albrycht at July 15, 2004 04:19 AM
- About
- The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.
- Links
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- Looking forward to 2.0
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- Traditional PR is dead - Long Live DIY PR
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- Recent Comments
- Rick Barry on A Very Brief Look at Blogging for the Uninitiated Executive
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- Kevin O'Keefe on How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization
- William Luu on Site Statistics and Trends
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