Articles

By Jens Thomsen, Impact Brussels

Sometimes it takes inspiration to create the right messages. Whether you are writing articles for newsletters, your organisation's website or content for social media your organisation may not generate enough news for all your communications.

So where can you find relevant topics to write about when you don't have news of your own? An easy way to find inspiration is to read what other people write about your organisation's field of activity. You can start gathering material by subscribing to blogs that members of your audience might be interested in. This way you'll automatically receive blog posts that may be of interest to your target audience.

You can use the content of these blog posts when you create the messages that you want to with regard to your own organisation. Whenever you need it you can dig into your 'pile' of material to look for inspiration. 

Here's how you can do this:

Fire up your internet browser. I recommend that you use Firefox as it works very well for this purpose. Open Google and choose the Google Reader software. You may have to open a Google account but it'll only take a few minutes.

When your Google Reader is up and running, open Google in a new tab. Now perform a Google search using a relevant key word covering your organisation's activities. When the search results show up on your screen refine the search by clicking on “blogs” so only blog posts containing your key word show up.

Now you can go through the blog posts one by one to find out if they are useful to you. If they are, look for a grey RSS signature at the upper right on the Firefox screen (the RSS signature is a button with a grey dot and two grey curved lines on it). RSS means Really Simple Syndication and it's used for subscribing to blogs and other material on the web.

If the blog you've found has an RSS button you can click on it in order to subscribe to future blog posts. You will be asked to confirm your subscription a couple of times and finally the blog shows up on your Google Reader in the left hand the side of your screen.

Find as many relevant blogs as you wish and subscribe to them using the RSS function (you can only subscribe via RSS if the RSS signature is visible in your browser). All blogs that you subscribe to will show up on the left hand side of your Google Reader screen and if you wish you can create a folder for them.

Whenever you want to use the blogs for inspiration open your Google Reader and click on the folder and Google Reader will now show you all the most recent blog posts from the blogs that you subscribe to.

You can use other people's blogs as input for your own articles and you can also comment on them and link to them on your Facebook page or in your Twitter messages. However, remember you are using these blogs as means to identify topics of interest that may also serve as a gateway for communicating your messages.