The nuclear energy industry is not the first place you would think of when it comes to new social media like blogs. That perception was shattered this week when four of the nation's most prolific bloggers about nuclear energy met in person for the first time in Atlanta, GA, at the annual conference of the American Nuclear Society. The stars must have aligned in the skies over Georgia to bring this group together this week!
Rod Adams, Atomic Insights; John Wheeler, ThisWeekinNuclear, Kirk Sorensen, Energy from Thorium; and Dan Yurman, Idaho Samizdat; spent three hours on Wednesday June 17 talking to a group of about 100 people who wanted to know how blogs tell the nuclear energy story.
You can read all about it in an exclusvie report at the Energy Collective where it is now online.
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4 comments:
You guys should be careful with those critical masses. Not OK to turn the conference center Cherenkov blue. What was the blog posts' fluence out of that criticality event?
:)
Was this a moderated gathering of blogger? I'm just wondering because I'd assume if there was a moderator, the critical mass would be substantially lower.
:-P
I have to say that you hit the nail right on the head when you identified why Generation Y is getting into engineering. I am for sure studing nuclear engineering not really because I am overly fascinated with the technology and just in awe of it, but because I want to make some kind of impact in the world. I think if more of my genertion understood how much nuclear really will help the world there would be an even bigger push from Generation Y.
twitter.com/nuclearbrunette
Dan, thank you for posting about this on LinkedIn. Being a local in Atlanta, I had the opportunity to attend.
I started reading the blogs to get an update on new nuclear construction in order to prepare two blog posts, a consolidated status for the surety bond industry and to focus the nuclear construction industry on cost-control using surety bonds. I have worked in both fields, and feel I can write something that will contribute substantively to each. That’s later.
Self-promotional reasons aside, I am pro-nuclear generally and genuinely, and would like to use my web skills to do something about it.
I built my company website personally, and gained a bit of search engine optimization (SEO) knowledge in the process. SEO determines results of a search engine, e.g., Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc . The blog I write for in the surety bond area is owned by someone who has the top-ranking website in a very competitive commercial field on a very tough keyphrase, which is a remarkable accomplishment. We share a mutual interest in the both surety and SEO, and I learned quite a bit from him. As a result, my own site also ranks first, though its keyphrases are far less competitive.
Reading the nuclear blogs, I began thinking about quick and easy, SEO’d "calls to action" for nuclear energy. Inspired by the bloggers and the ANS meeting, I came up with this:
http://www.suretyinsider.com/american-energy-act-hr2828.html
aka
http://tinyurl.com/ljesvp
That page is now live, linked and submitted to the search engines. It uses the Luntz language discussed at ANS and (tip to Atomic Rod) stresses "energy" not "power." Any other advice like that is most-welcomed.
The page is most definitely not a blog, as it does not tell a story. This is mainly for people that have their minds made up, strongly leaning or mildly interested. They are looking at their search results, notice the page and possibly act.
This is where the blogs come in. The "link juice" from blogs that allow
crawlable links would help greatly. It drastically increases the Google rankings. The higher that page floats up, the more pro-nuke clicks may go through to Congress. Call it "cyber-activism," or something.
I'd like to see how this little experiment works first, but I have also been thinking getting about a separate domain name which could be dedicated to this. Once a few updated graphics are available (as discussed at ANS), pages could be tailored quickly for specific purposes, e.g., political campaigns, communities and the like.
I'm thinking about a template of Luntz-like language and very simple graphics, say, comparing an acorn to the Empire State Building, as well as {insert politician’s name, bill, issue, etc. here}, that can be easily customized, optimized and put one the web.
There’s my two cents. Nice meeting you all.
Bryan Kelly
bk@suretyinsider.com
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