8 tips for campaign blogging success (and sanity)

Blogging is hard work. We all know that — if it weren’t, we’d blog more often. But the sustained, focused production of content around an event over more than a week takes considerable commitment.

I’ve just come back from two weeks on the road with Land Rover and the Loeries, blogging and tweeting the event as a social media brand ambassador. Focused on generating content and building up a following for a brand around a specific, relatively niche event, it was a fascinating experiment. (You can read about the thinking behind it here.) These are some of the most important things I learned from it:

1. You’ll need support. Campaigns like this rely on an agile client able to approve things quickly. The Loeries Go Beyond would not have happened without Land Rover’s Lesego Phiri, who organised all the vehicles, fuel and accommodation and drove down with me. CKNet developed the Loeries Go Beyond site as well as the mobile element; Pam Lourenco and Jenny Olivier pulled it off in an amazingly short space of time.

I’m very grateful to all of them for being so good at just getting things done.

2. Things will always take longer than planned: Whether it’s writing material or uploading it, or just getting from A to B. Allow for delays in your schedule.

3. You will have tech problems, so you’ll need backup. My laptop was stolen ten days before the campaign kicked off, and this ended up having a knock-on effect on everything. Making a hash of copying material across to my replacement MacBook made things even worse, as I ended up having to generate two presentations from scratch. (Yes, I’ve learned my lesson about backing up.) Then there was my disastrous 3G connection, which worked sporadically if at all. It took me twice as long to get anything done — not funny when you’re squeezing every available moment for as much productivity as you possibly can.

4. Start soon enough to build momentum. It takes time for campaigns to take off, especially if they’re not incentivized or advertised and you’re relying purely on word of mouth. As I’ve always maintained, social media campaigns work best in conjunction with other forms of brand presence.

5. Covering an event is not the same as attending it. As any reporter knows, it is not possible to both experience an event and tweet it equally well; you’re either working or you’re not. I missed out on a lot of things because I was too busy tweeting about them. If you simply want to have a good time, don’t build a campaign around it.

6. Find the balance between sourcing inspiration for your content and actually generating it. Bloggers in particular face this challenge because many of us are not used to filing copy in the face of terrifying deadlines; if you’re anything like me, you have a day job that involves something other than writing. During the Loeries weekend, I spent too much time trying to track down material and not enough time writing it up. This meant not getting enough sleep, which meant not functioning with all neurons firing, which slowed me down and stressed me out.

7. Start with a strategy and after that, chill. Not everything will go according to plan. The whole point about managing social media is the ability to be flexible.

8. Finally, this might not be an obvious one, but one of the most important things you can do when you’re covering an event on social media is get enough sleep. I’m a chronic insomniac, and the hours I needed to put in – driving, writing, uploading, updating, generating presentations, giving talks, attending lunches, responding to emails (just because you’re on campaign doesn’t mean you can forget your day job) as well as reporting on the event for a national newspaper – rapidly turned me into a refugee from the set of Zombieland. I nearly collapsed from exhaustion two days before the Loeries even started. Which would have been a great pity, because that’s the whole reason we were there.

Having run with this campaign, I’m now looking at how to leverage the properties we developed for future activities, including the Johannesburg International Motor Show. I’m planning my next blogging road trip already. And yes, sleep will be written into the strategy.