Late last year I started up a niche blog on devolved politics with two like-minded individuals, Neil Pooran and Dave Baxter.
With a couple of months under our belts, and with 2011 up and running nicely, I thought this would be a good time to look back at what we’ve done, assess how it’s gone and ponder upon what we could have done better.
Devolved politics seemed like the natural choice at the time: all three of us are interested in politics, all three of us live in Wales, and one of us is even Scottish.
The Welsh Assembly
It’s also a fascinating area of politics that looks to be changing in the very near future. The impending Welsh referendum is a case in point.
Hopefully, we would be able to showcase some of our enthusiasm, our newly found online expertise and maybe get a few people reading our work as well.
To do this we thought long and hard about how our blog would work: We wanted to make the most of all sorts of different technologies, and – most importantly – we wanted to engage our audience as best as humanly possible.
We weren’t just showing of how tech-savvy we were.
Ultimately, we opted to use as much multimedia as possible: video, audio, pictures, mapping.
This would involve the use of Youtube, Flickr and Soundcloud.
We also wanted to engage with people beyond our blog. To this end we set up a Twitter account and a Facebook page. Hopefully our audience would get in touch with us.
Because a lack of frequent updating could lead to followers not coming back, we decided that we would have to post on our blog as often as possible – about three times a week minimum.
We were also very aware that politics in general – and devolved politics in particular – has a large and well developed internet community, and were therefore aware that we would have to engage with that community.
Some of the blogs we identified were Devolution Matters, the Syniadau blog, the BBC blogs on devolved politics, Whitehall 1212 and others.
Hopefully we would be able to engage and comment on them. After all, working a blog is just like working a beat.
We were enthusiastic about the blog’s possible success – though we weren’t going to get carried away: we were aware that any growth would have to be gradual and we would have to keep at it.
So what actually happened?
In terms of using multimedia, I think we did well.
We started on a good footing: our first real post consisted of a map laying out which constituencies the cabinet members represented – this was following claims by Carwyn Jones that Wales had got a raw deal in the Comprehensive Spending Review because it lacked clout around the cabinet table.
We’ve also had a number of video interviews – a particular favourite being the one with Betsan Powys.
We also did a few video vox-pops on some contentious issues such as the Spending Review.
I thought that we did this well, but could maybe have done this a bit more. In terms of sound, we did try but weren’t particularly successful – I think we preferred video.
Regardless of this I think we were – and are – a pretty multimedia blog.
With regards to social media, we had specific Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr accounts and would use them to let people know what we were doing by uploading and linking to our work.
We had intended to use all of them as much as possible, but we probably neglected our Flickr account a bit.
We linked to plenty of other blogs and expanded our knowledge of the devolved blogging scene considerably.
We listed and linked to our favourite blogs in certain areas – such as Scottish politics.
But one of our problems was that we didn’t link to our own blog on forums and other blogs as much as we had originally intended. This was a lesson in itself because when we did do this our hits went up considerably and the feedback we received was pretty good.
We are definitely keen to carry on using our blog for as long as possible, but there have been lessons learnt over the past couple of months.
Firstly, we need to be more consistent and continuous in our approach to other blogs and forums.
While we did do this on occasion, we allowed them to go too cold too often – maybe in the false expectation that followers gained would stay with us indefinitely.
Our site stats told the story: they always went up when we engaged in a more proactive manner with our potential public. What’s more, we received positive feedback from those who visited our site.
Other bloggers were also helpful and interested when we engaged with them.
Next, I think we needed to develop our use of social media more. While we did have a number of different accounts, we didn’t use all of them to the full extent of their capabilities and only really used some of them to publicise our work and that of other bloggers.
While I don’t think there were many problems with the look or the content of the blog, in an ideal world we would have used them to crowd-source and engage in longer and deeper conversations with our followers.
Nonetheless I personally found this niche blog and engaging and informative experience, and learnt a lot about how to work a blog in a structured and professional way – and build an audience in the mean time.
I will definitely be continuing it as long as possible.
Damian Fantato 
Posted on February 17, 2011
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