[ insert blog here ]

Email me or post a comment if you have questions!

 

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE

In response to the “Everybody at GSW Emails” and in an effort to encourage people to share and explore various topics related to the health care advertising industry, GSW is creating an un-official blog.

 

This blog will not be directly associated by the agency but will be written by people at the agency. Audience includes: all employees at GSW Newtown, other advertising/marketing professionals (especially those in the health care field) who use social media to share information and communicate.

 

Here are examples of blogs that I read and follow. You’ll notice they aren’t updated daily, but when they do update, the information is very useful. Also, these are the types of blogs our audience is used to reading….

 

http://intouchsolutionsdigital.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-pharma-fears-social-networking.html – This is a post from the blog I showed yesterday. Here, she is linking to an article from Brandweek and explains in a few paragraphs what is good and bad about the article. Now I don’t even have to read the article. What is great about this blog is that it provides summaries of studies, articles, conferences, etc. that you don’t have access or time to research. It is a great overview of what is happening in the interactive world of pharma advertising. This is a good example of what our blog could be like.

 

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/- This blog is consistently ranked as one of the top 150 Ad blogs on AdAge.com. It’s updated about every other day with a lot of original content and commentary.

 

http://www.commcognition.com/blog/ – This blog has a lot of great info on social media and how to use it as an advertising professional and/or student (the writer is a professor). Another example of what our blog could be like, especially in terms of the design for the actual blog page. It’s nice how the most popular posts and most recent posts are easy to access, the tags are nicely organized at the top, and the various ways that you can follow the blog is organized nicely at the top too.

CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE/CORE MESSAGE

GSW Newtown has valuable and interesting thoughts/ideas related to health care advertising to share with their co-workers and other health care ad professionals.

STRATEGY

We plan to create a blog with valuable content to health care advertising professionals by:

 

·         Updating at least 2x per week

·         Content will in some way be unique – some ways to achieve this include…

o        If we want to share a link to an interesting article or current event, we’ll have some original commentary

o        Can provide recommended resources (such as other blogs, people to follow on twitter, etc)

o        You should be able to think of at least 5 people who would find your post original and useful

 

We want people to feel like they can easily add a post to the blog, but at the same time, we want to limit the ability to log in and post content to those who are interested in updating frequently. At first, we’ll start off giving 4-7 people access (people who come to the first two meetings and think they will write often) and as more people get involved and write frequently, they’ll gain access.

FORM AND CONTENT MANDATORIES

 

Blog Design/Programming Info

·         Will likely use wordpress

·         Should be unbranded (not associated w/ GSW)

·         Should try and use an existing template within wordpress (we want to spend as little time as possible on setting it up but still have it be optimized and look nice)

·         Will list out tags initially and once we have a handful of posts, we can add a “cloud”

·         Should be able to find via Technorati, Twitter (should have its own page), Linkedin (should it connect to a group or profile page?), Digg, and any others we feel are valuable…maybe Facebook?

o        Might be nice to have a feature where anybody can “tweet” or share post on Facebook

·         Will need “About Us” copy. This will be a summary paragraph that just explains that the blog is written by health care ad pros and explores various topics. Down the road, we may want to add individual info with links to our facebook or linkedin profiles

·         Overall design should be clean – content is king here

·         We will have a custom header but we need to make sure that title in header is optimized

 

Blog Content

·         We will discuss during our next meeting what kinds of topics we will write about. Anything related to advertising, pharma advertising, working at an ad agency is game

·         What we should avoid is posting about company events (no need to show pics of the next chili cook-off) and posting about work we are doing here (unless it is so groundbreaking that we think others would blog about it if we don’t)

·         Posts shouldn’t be mile-long essays. This blog is a good one to refer to for acceptable post lengths

·         Here are some links to learn more about blogging:

o        Click here to learn about blog tags.

o       Click on these links to read Top ten blogging tips for beginners and additional advice for first-time bloggers.

DELIVERABLES/DEADLINES

Timeline:

 

2/13 – Meeting to decide on blog name, first 3 posts, confirm OOP’s for creating blog (AJ – please provide)

w/o 2/16 & 2/23 – Dave/AJ to develop blog. First 3 posts will be written during this time so they are ready to be added to blog. During this time, job # will be sent out, along with info to access a shared calendar to view when people plan to post content

w/o 3/2 – Blog will go live

Inspired by the “Everybody at GSW” emails, John T. and I decided that we should start a blog at GSW. Just to clarify, we’re not talking about an “official GSW blog” that lives on the GSW site and is for clients only.

In fact, what we are talking about is the complete opposite.

What we’re proposing is that anybody who is interested at GSW join together to start an industry blog where we can share news and opinions on healthcare, advertising, social media, etc.

So why start a blog you ask? Here’s five very good reasons……

1. To stay informed.
2. Start a conversation.
3. Learn something new (about the industry, about each other, etc).
4. Free up space in your inbox.
5. Network with people outside of GSW.

Now that I have you sold on the idea, a million questions must be running through your mind – how often would I have to write, who would design the blog, what would we write about, how often would it be updated and who would update it?

All very good questions that John and I don’t have answers to. 

What we do know is that we don’t want to waste a lot of time developing/designing it. The blog will probably be a combination of longer articles and weekly “columns” (like ad of the week). We’d meet on a bi-weekly basis to come up with topics, figure out who’s writing what, and then one or two people would be responsible for uploading all posts.  

So how do you get involved (and yes, you should get involved)? Email me at mblickley@gsw-w.com by EOD Tuesday, February 3rd. I will invite everybody who is interested to a meeting, during which we will decide HOW we want to do this and what we want to write about. It’ll be super collaborative and lots of fun!

And if you have an aversion to email, you can stop by and tell me you want to participate (by 2/3).