Presentation at the Workshop Social Reporting Apprenticeship Program on Innovative Procurement Reforms - Pretoria, October 2012

1. Working with blogs
WBI Social Reporting Apprenticeship
Program
October 2012

2. Intro/Definition
“A blog (or web log) is a website where
entries are commonly displayed in reverse
chronological order. "Blog" can also be
used as a verb, meaning to maintain or
add content to a blog.”
Source: Wikipedia

3. Key functions it supports
 Sharing „news‟, stories and opinions
 Communicate quickly
 Document /share lessons learnt in
projects and programmes
 Share results from meetings & events

4. Transparency International Blog
“Showing how you what people are doing to stop
corruption around the world”

5. Key features
 RSS and syndication
 Audience‟s engagement & interaction
 Combination of text, images, and links to
other blogs, web pages, and other related
media

6. How to blog
 Decide on type of content and what topics you
want to post about
 Think about who you want to write for
 Assign time and responsibilities for creating
quality content
 Create linkrolls (lists of your favorite links) and
tagrolls (links of your most commonly used
keywords).
 Make sure your blog is on local or thematic blog
directories
 Use RSS feeds
 Create a readership
Source: iMark - Web 2.0 and Social Media for
Development

7. M&E
 Most common platforms (Blogger; Wordpress) have
own analytics tools
– Blogger can be easily integrated with Google
Analytics
 Third party applications (ShareThis; AddThis) will
allow to monitor when content is shared
 Comments as proxy for user engagement
 Feedburner to monitor feed circulation and email
subscribers

8. Finding blogs
 Google blog search –
http://blogsearch.google.com/
 Technorati - http://technorati.com/
 Blog aggregators
– Global Voices -
http://globalvoicesonline.org/
– Afrigator - http://afrigator.com/

9. Hands on exercise
 Logon onto http://www.pro-act.org/
OR
 Set up a blog with one of the following
services
– http://blogger.com
– http://wordpress.com
 Post a new item, with title, text, links and
pictures

10. Blogging on Pro-Act
 Sign in on Pro-Act – http://pro-act.org/
– Create a new account if you don‟t have
one yet

11. Blogging on Pro-Act
 From the top navigation, click on „Share‟
then “Blogs”

12. Blogging on Pro-Act
 Click on “Add”

13. Blogging on Pro-Act
 Add
– Title
– Text (also
embedding
images and
videos)
– Tags

14. Blogging on Pro-Act
 Define
– Date
– Privacy
– Comments

15. Blogging on Pro-Act
 Decide if you want to save the post as
draft, preview or publish it

16. Blogging on Pro-Act
 Your blog will appear on the “All Blog
Posts” list and in the different network
activity streams

17. Working with blogs
WBI Social Reporting Apprenticeship
Program
October 2012