TechIntersect

I signed up on Edublogs last spring after attending SXSW because I wanted to join in a global conversation with other educators and to keep a sort of e-journal. I was excited to find one repository of educators using blogging in education. I was so impressed that I quickly offered my $25 to become an edublogs supporter. I figured that it was more than reasonable for what I was receiving. I was recently surprised to learn how few people bother to pay the $25.

Recently, Edublogs began to include advertising on blogs that are not paid supporters. People were caught off guard and some embarassing situations arose like this one:

My blog (msmichetti.edublogs.org) is one that was “hit” with ads today, and it was rather embarrassing. I was showing, via digital projector, my blog to a group of students and educators, and navigated to my blog by entering the direct URL into Internet Explorer. The *first* thing to come up on the screen, both at the top of the page (beneath the header) and on the right (right sidebar) were Google Ads, many of which had nothing to do with education. A couple of clicks around and they were still there.

Although there was a discussion of the potentiality of advertising on the forums several months ago, busy edublogs educators who do not frequent the forums (I admit guilt myself) might not have realized what was coming. They felt blindsided when the advertising was rolled out and it has subsequently been the subject of much discussion and dismay.

Seth Godin has something to say on all of this in his free eBook Tribes Q&A.

Characteristics and actions in a leader that can lead to the death of the tribe include:

•Inability to learn from a mistake
•Pitting members against one another
•Forgetting that a tribe has a life of its own rather than existing as an extension of the leader
•Making decisions based on personal agenda rather than on tribal agenda
•Thinking they cannot learn from their members and worse, thinking they know everything
•Taking a command-and-control approach by:
•Limiting or moderating communication within the tribe
•Exercising hierarchical authority
•Conversely, being too passive and standing by as factions form and turf wars take place
•Allowing drama to exist by:
•Listening to and responding to gossip
•Allowing rumors to circulate and grow
•Devoting time, energy, and resources to deal with personal issues or conflicts
•Passively allowing these activities to exist even if they don’t take part

Edublogs administrators would do well to follow Godin’s sage advice and quickly apologize for this. Dale Carnegie in “How to win friends and influence people” recommends apologizing and accepting blame, even if you feel in the right. I’ve tried it and it works.

Personally, I don’t think Edublogs is blameless in all of this. Perhaps there were issues of communication that prevented notification of each and every Edublogs user, but I think that additional steps could have been taken. I get little notifications and promos at the top of every “Write Post” page. They could have made a big deal on that little widget about the coming advertising, but I don’t ever recollect any such announcement there. Posting it on the forums simply isn’t enough in the eyes of most users, and trying to excuse their actions instead of apologizing will only make it worse.

So what’s going to happen Edublogs? Will you lose your tribe by ignoring the errors that Seth Godin points out? I hope not, because I have no plans of leaving the platform any time soon. It’s really been a great experience to date and I’ve met a lot of great people using Edublogs.

Apologize and fix this!

I fully understand that it costs money to run services like these, and the free lunch has ended. I have no problems with that. You just need to really involve your tribe in a conversation about how to approach this, rather than just rolling it out to see what will happen. Maybe some suggestions will come of it that you haven’t considered. If you must have advertising, you must have absolute certainty that your ads are relevant and appropriate for the audience. It would be better if there were another way to address the issue.

Hopefully you haven’t already done irreparable damage with this move and it can be repaired because I really like using Edublogs.

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