I've just been interviewed for an article about how blogging can be used to promote positive activities. Using blogging as part of promoting youth work was only one part of one of the 7 reasons why youth workers should be blogging - but in the interview I found that it can be usefully broken down into three parts.
Three aspects of blogging to promote positive activities

1. Blog for search - share information - many young people expect information from multiple sources - and they will expect information to be available online. If a young people have seen a poster or a flyer for your event then there is a good chance some will try and google search details of the event later on - either to check what it was all about, or to check the time/venue etc.

   A blog provides a very quick publishing platform to get information out there and to get it picked up by search engines. A dedicated blog for your youth club is going to be far easier to keep up-to-date than pages on a local authority website. And it's quite likely to perform better in search engines for particular queries about your events and activities.

   You can also take the headlines from a blog and get other websites and services to automatically 'pull in' that information - so that news from your blog is dispalyed in the places where young people are online (for example, you can pull the headlines into a Widget on MySpace, or to a Fan Page on Facebook, or you can set up a service to automatically text the latest headlines to young people who have subscribed...)

   
   

2. Blog for young people - share media - at just about any event with young people there will be photos taken and video clips recorded - and it is highly likely these will be shared online. Rather than ban photos and videos at an event because of safety concerns - youth services can take on the role of providing safe online photo and video galleries from events - where images are only displayed with consent and where any young people can ask for their images to be removed if they wish.

   By becoming the destination for photos and videos from an event two things are possible:
   
   

   1. A service can justifiably ask young people to limit their own sharing of photos and videos in ways which may not be safe;
      
      
   2. A service can build an audience who come to see the photos and videos, but then find out about other activities and opportunities to get involved. (Although - don't forget to make sure you tell people the web address where they can access the media on your blog)

      
      

3. Blog for you - consultation and conversation - once you've build a community around a blog with media and content attractive to young people - then you can start including blog posts that ask questions of young people, invite comments and help you to improve your services. You can share information about upcoming decisions that need to be made, or you can create blog posts that ask a question of young people - and you and they can use the comments feature on a blog to engage in conversation about the issues in question.
   
   

These three parts may even be seen as 'stages' of starting to blog to promote youth services - as whilst blogs provide an instant publishing platform, it does take time and intentional effort for them to build a regular readership and a community.

Perhaps we will have a session at the UK Youth Online unconference on the 27th September 2008 to explore blogging to promote positive activities. If you're interested then do come along. UK Youth Online is a free and co-created event - and you can find more details about it, or register to be part of it, here.