The Art of Influence for the Arts Council

We were invited down by Sarah Gee from Indigo to talk about blogging and how it can be used as a tool/platform/method for arts organisations to ‘reach new audiences and internal communication’.

Sarah neatly compacted our quite rambling response to the brief into a session called simply “Setting up a blog in an hour”.

We’d not done a double-act before on this stuff so we’d met up in advance and had planned out some subject matter to cover. Of course the way it goes on the day is often completely different to what you expect, and what we actually did was structured like this:

Intro on us and a bit about our blogging backgrounds

Talking about Created in Birmingham

Setting up a Wordpress.com blog in a couple of minutes

Adding a first post

Changing the template

Adding video and photos (live via the iPhone and Viddler)

Open discussion about developing a voice, getting visitors, and so on

Lots of questions and answers

It seemed to go pretty well for a first attempt and we had some good feedback, so I think we may be doing a few more of these in future…