How to Manage Virtual Contributors for Team Blog Success
By definition, a
team blog
is written by a team of contributors. Often those contributors are
located in different places and might even be in different time zones.
That means team meetings can be very challenging to coordinate. To make
things more challenging, contributors are often freelancers or
volunteers who work regular jobs in addition to writing for the blog. As
a result, it can be difficult to instill a feeling of camaraderie and
teamwork among contributors. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools
you can use to manage team blog contributors online and on a looser
schedule than traditional meetings require.
Many team blog communications and collaborations are conducted using traditional
forum tools.
Both free and affordable forum tools are available. Typically, a team
blog forum is private with folders dedicated to news, story ideas,
questions, and so on. This is where contributors can privately discuss
issues, collaborate on stories, and learn. The team blog editor can
require contributors to subscribe to specific folders via email, so
critical information is easily shared and viewed by the entire team.
Some forum tools can integrate directly with the
blogging application used to publish the actual blog.
You can create a private group using
Google Groups,
Facebook, or
LinkedIn
and invite your team blog contributors to join and participate in
discussions. Some tools even allow you to create subgroups for more
focused conversations and collaborations. Considering that most people
already have a Google or Facebook account, it often requires no
additional knowledge or learning on contributors' parts to join and use
your team blog group on one of these sites. Furthermore, since many of
these tools offer mobile sites and applications, it's easy for
contributors to view messages and participate in team discussions from
their mobile devices and at their convenience.
Teambox
is a social project management and collaboration tool. The Teambox goal
is to make online collaboration and project management easy and fun.
The tool focuses on ease-of-use and offers features similar to
social networks such as activity streams, threaded conversations and commenting, inbox management and alerts,
RSS
feeds and more. A free version is offered to users with only a few
projects to manage and a tiered pricing structure is available to people
who need more features.
Backpack
provides online team collaboration so contributors can share documents,
have discussions, create schedules, and manage archives in a single
place. Users create and edit writeboards and messages boards, and they
can create specific pages to manage projects. You can share pages with
other users, allow other users to edit those pages, and keep everyone
who is involved in specific projects notified of updates to those
projects. Pricing starts at $24 per month for small groups and goes up
in a tiered pricing structure as you add additional users, pages, and
storage space.
Basecamp
is one of the most popular online collaboration tools, and it works
very well for managing a team blog. You can upload and share documents,
have discussions, create calendars, and more. Basecamp is offered by the
same company that offers Backpack, but Basecamp is considered to be the
next step up from Backpack offering more powerful features and
functionality. Pricing starts at $49 per month and goes up from there in
a tiered pricing structure depending on the features, number of users,
pages, and space you need. Before you invest in Basecamp, you should
definitely try the free trial of both Backpack and Basecamp to determine
which tool is better for your team blog.
