Napier University is developing blogging guidelines for festivals and events in Scotland, and is looking for a research assistant to help them do it. It's a 6 weeks (full-time) or 3 months (part-time) job, and you'll be working in the School of Marketing, Tourism and Languages (full details on Napier's vacancies page). Closing date 22/05/14.
I've actually just supervised a dissertation that investigated the use of apps by festivals in Scotland, and the student was very capable! I thought if only she had focused on the use of blogs instead of apps (which aren't used by that many festivals anyway), she would have been in a great position for this and use her research towards helping this knowledge transfer project to establish blogging guidelines.
One thing of note though - the job description for this role does not mention any requirement for digital marketing skills (such as SEO).
This is surprising, seeing that these skills are highly relevant, in my view, for a project that aims to establish blogging guidelines! Instead, the focus of the role appears to be on mapping the existing use of blogs and then do a narrative analysis of the content, perhaps to find out about tone of voice, style, and general copywriting best practice.
Fair enough, this will produce an overview over the use of blogs by festivals and events in Scotland, but it won't necessarily deliver best practice, let alone blogging guidelines - seeing that it appears to omit the crucial technical analysis - SEO (to achieve search engine visibility) and digital analytics (to evaluate and measure blogging success).
Blogging Guidelines - A Digital Perspective
Luckily, Rand Fishkin of Digital Marketing software firm and community Moz is here to help us out (again 🙂 ). Only last week he posted an excellent video (under the Whiteboard Friday series) that looks at blogging from a strategic digital marketing perspective, and I've included it below.
I'd suggest that this video is an excellent starting point for a project titled ‘Developing a framework/guidelines for organisations to use ‘blogs’ as an effective communication channel for festival and events in Scotland’!
I'll be keeping an eye on Napier's research project and its eventual publication and dissemination, to assess its value and usefulness not just for my own teaching but also for future project work with SMEs from the tourism / events industry in Scotland.
After all, most of these could do with blogging guidelines based on best practice (and by that I mean both technical and narrative!), to assess whether or not they should start a blog.