This past week I got an email that the Brooklyn Academy of Music had just launched a blog. I clicked over and found BAM’s new blog on blogspot in commemoration of their 150th anniversary, already pre-stocked with a bunch of posts by the staff, including one that hit close to home, about Paul Auster’s Park Slope.

Cooper Hewitt, too, has just launched an interesting new twist on the institutional blog, Cooper Hewitt Labs, which takes you inside the Digital and Emerging Media Department at the Museum:

Both blogs are interesting examples of the different ways institutions can tackle blogging, and it got me to thinking about some of the real challenges pioneering a “social” editorial presence for a major cultural institution.

A few years ago, when I joined the Film Society of Lincoln Center, building the institution’s first blog was one of the very first of several major projects that I tackled.

The reason was simple: I knew that we needed to build our profile in social, and the best way to do that would be to be pushing out content on our own real estate. I quickly found I was definitely onto something — as syndicated links that filtered out from our blog, to Facebook and Twitter doubled traffic to filmlinc.com within a matter of months.

We were in business, and working with zero budget and no resources, I had demonstrable proof what a dramatic positive impact a blog can have for an organization’s visibility.

The pitfalls I faced breaking that ground for the organization will be familiar ones to anyone pushing emerging strategies and forms to a traditional organization — if I wasn’t being criticized for all the risk I was exposing the organization to by opening it up to the conversational web, I was being told it wasn’t risqué enough, that I wasn’t capturing enough comments through posts promoting the organization’s events.

That both of these concerns are naive ones doesn’t mean that you won’t have to deal with them constantly while trying to mount an organization’s blog.

I don’t blame institutions for not trying — first, you’re going to have to get a lot of buy-in internally, appeasing those who have a lot of anxiety about social media with the kind of safeguards and protocols that hopefully won’t absolutely kill any chance you have to build some interesting content. Secondly, you’ll be dealing with the fact that blogs that are created to help promote and raise visibility for organizations don’t typically garner a lot of hot commentary or debate.

At the same time, the benefits outweigh the aggravations. There’s simply too much to gain.

So how do you do it? In my early enthusiasm for institutional blogging, I wrote an article called “How to Get Your Institution to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog.”

These days, looking back, I see things a little differently. What I learned about running an institutional blog can probably be boiled down into three lessons. I hope you’ll find they’re good guidelines for anyone who wants to get into this space, but specifically drawn out of my experience at the Film Society.

To wit:

You’ll get flack for taking risks — but it’s worth it

During New Directors/New Films 2009 (when I had the blog going about six months), I tried something that both got me into a lot of trouble and further convinced me I was onto something with this fledgling blog I had put together. I tapped into various connections I had in film schools and brought on board a group of young film enthusiasts to be the blog’s “New Voices.” The idea was not to build a blog of film criticism (which I felt was already being done by plenty of other people) but instead to get off the cuff takes from young people who were actively immersed in filmmaking that would hopefully point to why the mission of the Film Society was so important.

It was a risky move and one that I got a lot of flack for internally — mostly because the idea of turning over an official organ of the Film Society to a loose collection of opinions was so anathema to an organization that had been on a high pedestal for years. But it was also an opportunity to steer the Film Society toward a reality where the cultivation of young people became not just a goal, but part of standard outreach.

At the time, I organized a mixer where I could meet a few of the applicants. I was approached by a young man, Nicholas Feitel, who’s application questionnaire was among the worst I received. It didn’t matter, as his blog posts were completely engrossing (and I urge you to check out his riotously funny and sometimes profound current blog, Feitelogram). Nick turned in these absolutely fantastic, thought-provoking and gonzo piece where he stalked Whit Stilman, hung out with infamous critic Armond White and interviewed blogger Glenn Kenny about being asked to appear in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. [Here's a good example]

Nick’s pieces got noticed–picked up on aggregator sites like Movie City News, but more importantly, what I loved about Nick’s contributions is that they let us take a pretty interesting turn into the personal and idiosyncratic. Nick’s posts were full of the kind of enthusiasm that I thought really spoke to what we were trying to do by keeping up the cause of non-mainstream movies.

Look for intesting angles outside of the organization for inspiration

One morning, as I was taking the B train into work, an astonishing kinescope-like artwork flickered to life before my eyes. Masstransiscope, which literarily is a moving artwork that turns the subway rider into a camera lens, was originally created by Bill Brand in the 80s. Brand is an art professor at Hampshire College who happened to have shown work at New Directors/New Films, a co-presentation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

Of course there was no way of knowing that at the time — there has been no official announcement of the restoration by the MTA, no press release, nothing Google-able.

As soon as I saw it, I knew the story was perfect for our blog. Through a little detective work and calling around, I had an interview with the artist, and I was able to break a pretty cool story that was well-meshed with our mission as a film preservation organization. Six months later the story of the restoration finally made the Times — who knows if that writer stumbled upon our humble article in their quest for sources? [Here's the original article]

I think that by treating the intersection of tech and the arts, Cooper Hewitt blog has found a critical sweet spot that will resonate with an audience. People working in museums and institutions constantly face the problem of discoverability, how to connect a passionate audience to the myriad things they have in their collections. I’m excited to continue to read the Labs blog and see how the team at Cooper Hewitt handles these challenges through technology — and I expect it to be the prompt for a lively discussion.

So if you’re looking for an angle for your blog, look for something specific, something connected to the organization’s mission, but also something unexpected — the fact that your constituent audience isn’t going to get anywhere else will keep them coming back to see what’s new.

Get out there and make your own mistakes

Which brings me to BAM. They made a lot of decisions about the blog that don’t make a lot of sense to me–first and foremost the decision to go with blogspot, which neither affords the institution their own branding nor represents a forward-thinking stance in the digital space.

If I was advising them, I’d tell them to go one of two ways. Either they want to piggyback on a vibrant community and/or be seen as doing something edgy and interesting, and in that case, Tumblr would be the obvious choice. The good thing about Tumblr is that it’s already well-adopted among the community they want to target, young Brooklynites.

If it were my project — I would have made them a custom implementation of WordPress, something that lives on the bam.org domain, completely fits into their branding and is packed with social sharing tools to make their content more viral.

But the fact is, looking back to my early experiences with the filmlinc blog, I only came to know this through years of trial and error. Our first blog, like theirs, was hosted on a separate service (WordPress.com), before I learned enought to migrate it over to its own hosting setup.

It was the trying out of things — different voices, different kind of stories — that first put the community of NYC film enthusiasts on notice that we were on the map, and set the stage for the social media presence of the Film Society to grow to the point it has today.

The thing about your first move is that it’s unlikely you’re going to get it absolutely right.

The trick is to get out there, as quickly as you possibly can so that the learning curve can commence — and your fans can find you.