Marianne Richmond founded Resonance Partnership, a St. Louis communications consultancy passionately advocating blogs and social media for business, non-profit, and consumer marketing and branding.

Holding Masters Degrees in both Business Administration and Social Work, Marianne's resume includes work with a wide range of organizations from Nabisco Brands to the St. Louis Arts and Education Council.

In the following interview, Marianne offers a frank look at the possibilities and perils of non profit use of blogs for promotion.

I began our interview by asking Marianne what roles a blog can play in the promotional activities of non profit organizations.

I think the role of blogs for non-profits is not all that different than for any business...engage, connect, have a conversation, tell a story, hear a story. A blog can have multiple targets for fund raising, individual donors as well as grantors. A blog can capture events in real time and have constantly "fresh" stories to tell.

A blog can serve as a content management resource...it can provide schedules, relevant web sites and general information. It can have dual targets, donors and participants. Finally, a small non profit with similar constituencies in different geographic locations can use the blog to link those people together, exchange information and ideas.

 

"We say it's easy - but it isn't that easy," she said. "After doing it for awhile, it seems easy to me now, but it isn't at first. Hire somebody to help you or get somebody to donate their time."

 How did she get to where she's at, so excited about blogging and comfortable doing it? Marianne says that "a light bulb just went off." She knew that Howard Dean was using blogs for his campaign, and through that knowledge she started noticing links to blogs on sites she visited. She started following those links, which lead to other links, and she realized that "they were having conversations." She became, as she puts it, "addicted to the links."

"For non profits to be able to connect to the social networks online is what it's all about," she says. "It opens up your socialnetwork to the people around the world." She says she has gone from blog reading to communicating by email with many people who she is now in regular contact with.

"These days when you meet someone you want their phone number, email and blog address or URL," she says. "You can't play the game unless you blog."

At the same time, Marianne recognizes that it's hard to write a quality blog while running an organization.

"As more people learn to use blog software, they'll be able to teach still more people. Anybody can write a blog, but to do what they are capable of you have to learn more than what you want to or have someone on call. One of the biggest needs we face is tech support for bloggers."

Many people believe that new bloggers should be trained to use only the simplest tools at first. Marianne is not one of those people. When she teaches people how to blog, she introduces them to the blogging software Typepad, the Firefox plug-in Performancing for blog posting, the full service blog search engine Technorati and the RSS publishing tool Feedburner. All of those tools make forming connections online much easier to do. She also teaches people how to find and read other peoples' blogs.

"That's how you get traffic," Marianne says. "Like a tree falling in the woods, if I write a blog post and nobody reads it, am I blogging?"

She also says it's important to leave comments on other people's blogs. "It's like if you don't know anybody at the party... you don't wait for people to come talk to you."

Marianne advises new bloggers to give themselves a time frame and plan how many blog posts they will write in that time. You have to give it your best shot, she says, and jump into the conversation. "There's so much information flying around online," she says. "It can feel like if you blink your eyes you're falling behind."

Marianne's blog and consultancy are at Resonancepartnership.com. 

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