Conference blog replaced newsletter
For The Human Resources Professionals Organization of Ontario the annual conference is the organization's flagship and a culmination of everything they provide. When they planned the conference, Tara Hunt suggested they would replace the internal-resource heavy newsletter with a blog.
Tara writes about HRPAO's experiences in Conference & Corporate Blogging as a Marketing Tool.
A survey showed that "...a majority of the conference participants knew about the blog, almost 40% of them actually read the blog...". Great result, I think.
What they should have, and will, do differently is mainly related to the visibility of the blog, writes Tara: "I would start posting changes and announcements on the blog sooner than the actual conference days, so that delegates would get used to visiting this source for news early on."
Overall, HRPAO seems to be satisfied: "...the blog proved to be an economical way to report on the conference happenings."
Last week I used a course blog for a two-day course I was responsible for. I started blogging two weeks before the course, published quick tips and resources I thought the participants would find useful considering the course's content. During the course I published links and updated presentations, and after it I've answered some questions and followed up on our discussions.
The response wasn't huge in advance. A few comments but not more. But it didn't take more than half a day before the participants started talking about the "course blog" and by the end of the two days it seemed to be a perfectly natural part of the documentation.