The OERC Blog – Moving Forward

Posted by nnlmneo on January 8th, 2016 Posted in: Blog

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Since last week’s message the OERC has been looking at some additional data about the blog in order to update our online communications plan going forward. The earlier OERC strategy had been to use social media to increase the use of evaluation resources, the OERC’s educational services, and the OERC’s coaching services. These continue to be the goals of the OERC’s plan. However, due to the following pieces of information, a new strategy has emerged.

• The OERC Blog is increasing in popularity. As reported last week, more people find it, share it with their regions, and engage with it by clicking on the links than ever before.
• The blog always has new content and is time-intensive to create: it takes approximately 6 person-hours each week to write and publish new content.
• Although the OERC does not have a Facebook page, and the OERC Twitter account @nnlmOERC has been used primarily promote the blog, still Facebook refers more people to the blog than come from Twitter (this was kind of a shocker for us!)

We feel that that the OERC Blog, based on the results described in last week’s post, has become one of the most successful products of the OERC. The blog has become a source of educational content, and is itself an evaluation resource in need of promotion. Because of this, our Online Communications Plan going forward has a special focus on promoting the blog. Here are some of the new process goals for this purpose.

• Facebook: The OERC will create a Facebook page that will promote the blog, link to other online evaluation resources, and show photos of what the OERC team is up to.
• Twitter: Karen and Cindy will post at least one additional post per week on Twitter to increase the Twitter presence. Included will be retweets to build social capital which may lead to more retweets of our blog tweets (here is an interesting dissertation by Thomas Plotkowiak explaining this).
• Training: We will make a point of promoting the blog during our in-person classes and webinars. For example, we may refer people to articles in our blog that supplement the content in the training sessions.
• Email: The blog URL will be added to Karen and Cindy’s email signatures

So, what kinds of things will we measure? Naturally we want process measurements (showing that things are working the way they should along the way) and outcome measurements (showing that we are meeting our goals).

Here are our process goals, which are the activities we are committing to this year:

• 52 blog posts a year
• 3 tweets a week
• Minimum of 1 Facebook post a week
• Blog information added to class resource information and email signatures

In the short-term, we hope to see people interacting with our social media posts. So we are hoping to see increases on the following measures of our short-term outcomes:

• # of Twitter retweets, likes and messages
• # of Facebook likes, comments, and shares
• # of new followers on Twitter and Facebook

We hope that the increased interaction with our Facebook and Twitter posts will lead more readers to our blog. So we will be monitoring increases on the following long-term outcome measures:

• # of blog visitors per month
• # of blog average views per day
• # of blog link “click-throughs” to measure engagement with the blog articles
• # of people who register for weekly blog updates and add the OERC Blog to their blog feeds
• # of times blog posts are re-posted in Regional Medical Library blogs and newsletters.

This is our strategy for increasing use of our blog content. We will keep you updated and share tools that we develop to track these outcomes.

References

Plotkowiak, Thomas. “The Influence of Social Capital on Information Diffusion in Twitter’s Interest-Based Social Networks.” Diss. University of St.Gallen, 2014. Web. 8 Jan. 2016.