Blogs are powerful tools when it comes to getting your message out there and stirring up a conversation about your cause. Recently,  The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) asked us to work with them to develop a social media initiative, and this included setting up a series of blogs.

What did they need a blog for?

One of their initiatives was aimed at empowering professionals who work with deaf children to blog about hot topics and contentious issues that NDCS are not able to comment on themselves, because they’re an impartial charity.

We worked with NDCS to develop a number of blogs on the community blogging site, wordpress.com.  Then we created a marketing campaign to attract professionals to come and use it.

How do you promote the power of blogs?

For the campaign, we needed to come up with a short and sweet definition of what a blog is. It went like this:

Short for “Web log”, a blog is a specialised website that allows an individual or a group to share a running log of news, personal insights, experiences and opinion with a wide audience.

With over 70 million in existence and 120,000 new blogs created every day, the reach and influence of blogging is growing rapidly. With their built-in system for readers to comment on articles, blogs are vibrant communal spaces for instant, global conversation.

(Inspiration taken from this definition and these statistics).

So you can see that blogging can be of huge benefit to organisations such as NDCS, not just as a marketing tool but also as means of sharing knowledge and building networks.

If you’re interested in the power of blogs as a tool for organisations, keep a look out for our other posts on the power of blogging.

Well, this one didn’t get blogged yet… Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental – and a little bit edgy.

We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content – from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: ‘HackHUD‘.

It’s a Greasemonkey userscript and it uses a number of Yahooey things (Pipes, YUI and Term Extraction), to display content from Flickr, Technorati and Newsvine.

We were clackety-clack on the keyboard, non-stop for over 24 hours. There were tears and laughter… and in the end, a prize.

» The HackHUD Project
» Install the script (quickly, before the BBC redesign their site ;)

Changelog

• 0.16 – Public release.
• 0.17 – Problem with Flickr photos fixed.
• 0.181 – Wikipedia and Twitter options added.
• 0.2 – Updated to accommodate changes to BBC site & to Greasemonkey.
• 0.21 – Better handling of multi-word tags.