I know there's no cut and dry way to define "best practices" because every community is different, but here's my scenario: Our community has 55 blogs 51 of them are "product newsrooms" (release information, tips and tricks, roadmap things, etc.) 4 of them are more "general purpose" (things happening around the community, marketing messaging, team updates, etc.) Right now we have specific people set up as authors in their respective places, and that's fine, it works, but.... These 'authors' are not web people - they are technical resources and they don't seem to understand the benefits of post images, tags, titles, headings, links, and all the other things that make the content a) searchable and b) ranked in SEO. I was toying with the idea of setting up blog approval for some blogs and basically denying their requests if they don't meet our minimum requirements. I feel like the ideal (in our scenario) would be something like this: SEO Review (have it notify the SEO team for a final review) Formatting Review (have it meet the community mods' best practices) Final Review (have it meet the company's content review guidelines) My questions are thus: If you use approvals, do you have only a single stage, or multi-phase? Has this evolved and is it different for different blogs? Who (what types of roles) do you have for said phases? If you can share a screenshot of your phases, but redacted for privacy, that would be incredibly helpful. Do you feel like you needed to include a whole bunch of cross-training for the approvers? Many of our potential approvers aren't going to be experts on the community platform, so I worry about them learning (read: "complaining about" ) one more thing. How do you make people accountable for their particular stage? Is there an OOTB report? Do you just rely on the toaster pops, emails, and other notifications? I ask because we are a small team responsible for the community (only 4 of us globally) and we can't possibly check up on every blog if we don't know it's happening.

Blog Approval Best Practices?

I know there's no cut and dry way to define "best practices" because every community is different, but here's my scenario:

Our community has 55 blogs

51 of them are "product newsrooms" (release information, tips and tricks, roadmap things, etc.)
4 of them are more "general purpose" (things happening around the community, marketing messaging, team updates, etc.)

Right now we have specific people set up as authors in their respective places, and that's fine, it works, but....

These 'authors' are not web people - they are technical resources and they don't seem to understand the benefits of post images, tags, titles, headings, links, and all the other things that make the content a) searchable and b) ranked in SEO.

I was toying with the idea of setting up blog approval for some blogs and basically denying their requests if they don't meet our minimum requirements.

I feel like the ideal (in our scenario) would be something like this:

SEO Review (have it notify the SEO team for a final review)
Formatting Review (have it meet the community mods' best practices)
Final Review (have it meet the company's content review guidelines)

My questions are thus:

If you use approvals, do you have only a single stage, or multi-phase?
- Has this evolved and is it different for different blogs?
Who (what types of roles) do you have for said phases?
- If you can share a screenshot of your phases, but redacted for privacy, that would be incredibly helpful.
Do you feel like you needed to include a whole bunch of cross-training for the approvers?
- Many of our potential approvers aren't going to be experts on the community platform, so I worry about them learning (read: "complaining about") one more thing.
How do you make people accountable for their particular stage?
- Is there an OOTB report?
- Do you just rely on the toaster pops, emails, and other notifications?

I ask because we are a small team responsible for the community (only 4 of us globally) and we can't possibly check up on every blog if we don't know it's happening.

Top Replies

LisaM over 1 year ago +1

Hi there! I'm following this topic as I'd also like to learn more about the blog review process but as you say, our needs are probably different to yours so there's no 'one size fits all' solution. However…

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0 LisaM over 1 year ago

Hi there!

I'm following this topic as I'd also like to learn more about the blog review process but as you say, our needs are probably different to yours so there's no 'one size fits all' solution. However I do like to take inspiration from how others do things and see how they can be applied in some way for our requirements.

We're looking at creating one community blog that any community member can submit a post to for publishing. This will need to go through a review process to firstly eliminate any spammers that may get through our controls and secondly to ensure it's the right type of content for our community. There's also an element of editorial/formatting review needed but I guess we're kinda lucky that all that can be done by myself as the Community Manager or my colleagues Liz and Evanna in the online team, so we'll only need a single stage review process and probably not need to involve anyone else.

You say you have 55 blogs but are they all necessary? Could you merge some into one blog but have multiple authors on that blog so that the review workload is more manageable?

For a multi-phase review I'd probably go with a suitability review first (is this content suitable for your community as if not then why bother going through the rest of the process anyway) followed by a formatting/editorial review (i.e. the opportunity to offer guidance on the best way to write or present the content which should probably also include SEO too perhaps) and then if anyone has to do a final sign off then that's the 3rd and final step. But again, it depends on the level of 'authority' of the reviewers as to how many or how few you need to involve.

As I say, we've not really delved into the processes yet but I'm interested to know more if anyone has any other experiences to share!
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0 LisaM over 1 year ago

Hi there!

I'm following this topic as I'd also like to learn more about the blog review process but as you say, our needs are probably different to yours so there's no 'one size fits all' solution. However I do like to take inspiration from how others do things and see how they can be applied in some way for our requirements.

We're looking at creating one community blog that any community member can submit a post to for publishing. This will need to go through a review process to firstly eliminate any spammers that may get through our controls and secondly to ensure it's the right type of content for our community. There's also an element of editorial/formatting review needed but I guess we're kinda lucky that all that can be done by myself as the Community Manager or my colleagues Liz and Evanna in the online team, so we'll only need a single stage review process and probably not need to involve anyone else.

You say you have 55 blogs but are they all necessary? Could you merge some into one blog but have multiple authors on that blog so that the review workload is more manageable?

For a multi-phase review I'd probably go with a suitability review first (is this content suitable for your community as if not then why bother going through the rest of the process anyway) followed by a formatting/editorial review (i.e. the opportunity to offer guidance on the best way to write or present the content which should probably also include SEO too perhaps) and then if anyone has to do a final sign off then that's the 3rd and final step. But again, it depends on the level of 'authority' of the reviewers as to how many or how few you need to involve.

As I say, we've not really delved into the processes yet but I'm interested to know more if anyone has any other experiences to share!
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