Update: At the Sitecore MVP Summit 2013, day 1, we were divided into seven teams and were each given a group challenge. Our team got the question “Present the best way to manage your Sitecore blog”. We had 45 minutes to come up with a presentation, so we decided on writing a blog post about it. Below are the result findings used during the presentation at The James Palm Beach Hotel, Miami, USA. This blog post was tweeted and commented during the presentation.

The presentation also included singing the Sitecore blogging song!

The MVP team members:

• Adam Najmanowicz, @adamnaj
• Ruud van Falier, @BrruuD
• Klaus Petersen
• Chris Williams
• Aren Cambre, @arencambre
• Roger Norlén, @norrlen
• Mikael Högberg, @mikaelnet
• Robbert Hock, @kayeeNL
• Nick Allen, @sitecoretweet

Challenge
Present the best way to manage your Sitecore blog. How to find the time, identify topics, how to get more visibility, how deal with comments, how to reduce the effort etc.

Here’s the solution from team 7:

How to find the time

• Spend 10% of your time blogging
• Convince management that’s advertising your company
• Blog during board meetings
• Take notes during development
• Create blog post skelettons
• Use bullet points, inline code and config in the blog (not a separate download unless it’s big), and numbered steps.
• Try to structure your toughts (outline) before you start writing, Summarize in the introduction and try to use section titles.
• MVP’s make time to blog 🙂

Identify topics

• Find topics on Stackoverflow
• If you couldn’t find it in a simple Google query, it’s probably worth blogging about
• Keep notes during development
• Use the extra information from Sitecore support on support cases
• Find ideas on SDN (and use for promotion)

Visibility

• Twitter #Sitecore
• Expose on as many channels as possible
• Link to it from Stackoverflow etc
• Yahoo Pipes RSS feed (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ZsFOz4a62xG9Py3Idbq02Q)
• Consider promoting on LinkedIn as well
• Stay active. Blog regularly
• Leverage from Sitecore User Groups
• Try to integrate Sitecore employees to your blogs/technical stuff so that they get ideas etc
• Also add to contact Lars Nielsen, to have your blog added to the pipe.

Deal with comments

• Stay polite and respond even when questions are basic, off-topic, show user hasn’t read your blog, let alone Sitecore documentation
• Interact with users
• Moderate to avoid spam
• Use WordPress app on your smart phone for faster moderation

Reduce effort

• Use Weblog
• Integrate with documentation process
• Less content, more frequently
• Have templates

Please feel free to leave comments, ask questions and suggest improvements!