Teach a client to blog…

When I started off in the web world as more of a consultant than a teacher (my Glaxo days if you’re wondering), we worked by the old agency mindset of keeping the clients away from being able to update things themselves. Our premise was simple, we wanted our clients to be completely dependent on us. Learn HTML? Oh no, you don’t need to learn that, and it’s really hard too, Tris is always working on fixing bugs….

I kept this mindset for many years, then it finally hit me–I hate doing little text updates for clients. At the time I was kinda stuck, blog engines hadn’t really matured to a point that you could run a “website” with them. A really spiffy blog, sure, but a “website” with a static front page and such. Yeah that wasn’t working out so well (not that I didn’t try). Now things are different and for the better. Very much for the better.

One of my favourite examples of teaching the client to blog is YVR Connections:

The folks in the YVR Communications team had a problem. The Olympics were coming and they really wanted to not only tap into social media, but also be able to shorten the time it took to get a message out, and finally be able to do it all themselves. They didn’t want the world, they just wanted to tap into the latest technologies to make it easier for them (the Communications department) to communicate with people (seems like a good idea to me).

What we did for YVR was to build YVR Connections for them. After we seeded it with content and the latest social media goodies, we sat down and showed them how to use the site and …

We let them.

Yep, for the most part they run the site. Sure I do the server updates and such, that’s cool I’m usually in the servers anyway working on other administration, but that’s pretty much it. They write their own content, take their own pictures, and post everything up themselves.

And it’s fantastic.

When YVR calls us it isn’t for a “could you update these three words on this page…” it’s for something much cooler.

Honestly I think letting the client blog was one of the best business decisions we made.

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