With less than a week behind us, the three Belmont University, overseas missions' blogs just passed the 1,000th (cumulative) visitor mark and have already accumulated 115+ comments. I am still tracking the referrals that are coming in from the Facebook Flyers that were launched immediately following the departure of two of the teams....but the results look promising.
One post from Community Matters, Dr. Darrell Gwaltney's team in South Africa, received 35+ comments. By newly-launched-blog standards (of which there really aren't any), receiving that many comments on a freshly launched blog is pretty phenomenal.
The Brazil team, via The Rio Journal 2007, is not gathering as many comments at the Community Matters blog, however, readership from a team that is one third the size of the team in South Africa is very close statistically in total visitors (and is gaining momentum). Personal reflections like Josey's post from last night will likely boost comments and readership from the Belmont family/community.
The Mission to Cambodia blog was launched hurriedly (as compared to the other two blogs) with considerably less time to gather email addresses for notification purposes and no Facebook Flyer ad. Internet access appears to be a challenge for this group and their posting frequency may make it difficult to gain readership over the next week or two. Still, the personal reflections by students, rather than more generic posts, garner the most comments.
Generally, blogs are intended for longer terms than shorter term mission trips and study abroad programs. Defining the success of a short-term blog may require a different definition than visitor counts, page views, and comments. Re-purposing the convenient publishing systems into more traditional, archived HTML web sites may be the way to reap the benefits of these blogs. In the meantime, I'll have my facebook.com flyer alert you to the latest, short-term blog promotion.