Blogging lessons from Hurricane Dolly
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
After a busy week with the hurricane I am finally getting a chance to pick up some of the information from my RSS feeds and am working through them in reverse chronological order. A couple that I regularly follow have some topics that seem relevant to some of my experiences in blogging in the past couple days:
- Brian Clark, on Copyblogger.com, wrote an article called “The Secret to Captivating Content? More Cowbell!” Brian suggests that the best way to gain traffic to a blog is to either get the scoop or provide a unique spin to the situation. This past week, as I blogged about my experiences during Hurricane Dolly I saw a very distinct “blip” in traffic to those posts. Based on my experience, there are few bloggers in my region giving a “play by play” and I was providing coverage about the preparation before traditional media was following the story. While I suspect this will be a unique surge it has provided an important lesson as a blogger.
- Robert Scoble of Fast Company released a commentary on his personal blog called “The blog editing system” that answers the criticism that “bloggers aren’t as good as ‘real journalists’ because bloggers don’t get it right.” While bloggers may not have the same checks and balances as “real journalists” it is interesting to note that bloggers, like myself, have the ability to break real news stories faster than local journalists. During Hurricane Dolly I was micro-blogging with twitter on my cell phone even after I lost traditional internet service, which provided readers a play-by-play of the action.
Over the upcoming days I hope to provide additional comments about personal lessons I learned from Hurricane Dolly as well as photographs of the region. I would be remiss if I don’t mention that there are still people in the region suffering the effects of the destruction. The Rio Grande Valley is one of the most impoverished regions in the United States making recovery especially difficult. I encourage my readers to provide support to the region, Salvation Army has been actively distributing water and supplies to the region and the American Red Cross can accept donations that will directly support the recovery efforts. While the winds have ceased there is still flooding risk in some regions so the true impact of the damage won’t be known for quite some time.
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I wasn’t on South Padre Island during Hurricane Dolly since I have not yet moved, but in following the conversation on the SpiForum.org it quickly became obvious that the desire for photos and information on specific properties was shared by many who had evacuated for the storm. It was a wonderful opportunity for my blog to actually serve a need of the community–I asked for anyone to email me photos and I would post them to the blog. We actually became organized enough that anyone seeking information on a property would post a question at the forum, photos would be sent to me and I posted them to the blog, thus providing the information to a broader audience then just the initial questioner. This helped get word out to many, before power was restored on a widespread basis. So, I agree, blogs can often fill a niche in the information chain. Joni @ Paragraphs