It's tempting to say the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) has a cool blog. But it wouldn't be true.

What ACCA, the trade association for 4,000 heating, ventilating and air conditioning companies, has created is a highly efficient way of communicating with its members.

Since VP for Member Services & Communications Kevin Holland launched ACCA's blog, dubbed ACCAbuzz, in January 2004, he and his staff have posted hundreds of entries to the Weblog or blog page on ACCA’s site.

The postings range from quick notices about local chapters' annual golf outings, bar-b-ques and horse races to dozens of entries about ACCA's annual blow-out conference & expo in New Orleans in February.

The conference entries include photos and a cleverly written "conference journal" by a first-time attendee.

Using the Web-based interface behind the blog, Kevin and his communications staff easily “post” this information to ACCAbuzz in minutes. No tech staff or Web designers are involved.

And in the case of this year’s annual expo, the new entries were posted from whatever computer Kevin had access to at their hotel. Real-time reporting, as it were.

Why a blog?

ACCA, an active national trade association, runs a content-rich Web site and publishes two weekly e-newsletters (one public and one for members only) as well as a quarterly print magazine.

But there was no venue to distribute the many snippets of news about the 60 state and local chapter members of ACCA. Kevin considered a daily e-newsletter but felt it would be too much trouble to produce. He decided to launch a blog “as an experiment” and “a place to distribute content we weren’t getting across to our readership.”

To create the blog, he used TypePad (see useful links below), a popular and inexpensive blog-hosting service. By tweaking one of TypePad's templates and putting links in the left and right-hand columns leading back to ACCA’s main site, he made ACCAbuzz look like just another page on the association’s site.

(Yes, Kevin is a bit of a techie in addition to being a marketer. He says it took him a couple of hours to set up and customize the blog.)

How Kevin introduced it to his readers

Many of them are not particularly Web savvy. They don’t know what a blog is and probably don’t care. So Kevin initially described it to members as a “daily newsletter on steroids.”

He posted the following to the ACCA site to introduce ACCAbuzz:

Where he gets ideas for content

In addition to using the blog as the “hub of communications” for ACCA’s annual conference and posting news submitted by local chapters, Kevin reads Google’s “HVAC” news every morning. He passes on industry articles and links to staff member Lucia Lodata. She types up a brief synopsis (what Kevin calls "a bite") with a link to the full article. She hits "publish" and the blog is instantly updated. The most recent post is always at the top.

He has also encouraged other staff members to post occasionally (see the category called "From the desk of... " with a nifty accompanying graphic). He plans to invite industry experts, on sales and marketing, for example, to contribute as guest bloggers. "The informal commentary is what makes a blog work," Kevin says. "That's the difference between a blog and regular Web site content."

Importance of "categories"

One of the neat things about most blogging software is that it enables you to create categories of information and assign each post you make to a “category.” ACCA’s blog has over a dozen categories (see useful links below). This way, Kevin says, members can visit the blog anytime and search for information useful to them.

Comments policy

Most blogs allow readers to post “comments” to any given entry. In theory this makes for a wonderfully interactive communications vehicle. In practice, spammers have discovered the “comments” function… and are adding “unrelated” or self-promotional commentary.

Kevin ran the potential problem of allowing Comments by ACCA’s lawyers and came up with the following policy, posted to his site:

He finds that most ACCA members don’t post Comments to the blog; instead they email him individually.

How he’s measuring the effectiveness of ACCA’s blog

Kevin describes ACCAbuzz as “not a primary communications vehicle yet. It’s more of a secondary channel.” But it’s a key part of his overall marketing and communications strategy. 15% of the 40,000 visitors per month to ACCA’s site click through to the blog page.

He’s taking development of the blog step by step. In addition to guest bloggers, he will eventually explain to his members how to subscribe to the blog via an RSS feed. For now, “they understand the writing and the usefulness of the blog. But I don’t want to bother them with the technology.”

His goal: to cross promote and re-purpose all the content he’s creating for the site, for his e-newsletters and for the quarterly print magazine.

Advice if you’re launching a business blog

Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve, Kevin advises. “If you’re looking for a way to provide regularly updated information to your membership there’s no easier way to do it,” he says.

”In a minimal amount of time you can create a very simple Web publishing system that non-techies can use.”

But, he cautions, don’t start a blog “if you’re going to leave it up there festering. You have to have a plan to keep it going. You have to know what you’re going to use it for.”

Useful Links

ACCA's main site

ACCAbuzz

Sample categories within ACCA's blog

Conference News

Conference Countdown

Chapter News

From the desk of...

Government Affairs

HVAC Industry News

"Comments Policy"


Other Association-related blogs ACCA's Kevin Holland recommends

www.associationforum.org

www.associationinnovation.com

www.highcontext.com

www.technoprophet.org


Blogging Tools & Software

TypePad

Movable Type (TypePad is a "junior," hosted version of MT)

Good explanation of RSS and newsreaders

About RSS



This article was originally published in the June 24, 2004 issue of WordBiz Report.