Our company's first blog, Guided By History^SM, just celebrated its one-year anniversary! As a fellow company blogger, I was curious to know how things are going and what we can expect, so I had a quick chat with Ed Terpening for the skinny—Ed manages our Social Media team and was one of our first bloggers. Although this post doesn't have much to do with financing college and managing debt, it's a good opportunity to let us know what you think about the general direction of our blog.

Ed: Staci, welcome back from BlogHer ! It must have been fun to speak there. How'd it go?

Staci: BlogHer was a phenomenal experience. I met so many smart, talented women, and the audience was really receptive to Wells Fargo's blogging efforts. Plus, people were surprised to learn that our company has been blogging for a whole year now. Speaking of that, Happy Anniversary!

Ed: Yes, wow, it's amazing. We've now launched four blogs, so it's been a bit hectic. It's nice to stop a moment and just grin. For a one-year anniversary, we're supposed to get paper—next year, cotton!

Staci: You already know how obsessed I am with paper—but cotton's good, too. :-) So how's it going?

Ed: Well, our first blog, GBH, we thought of as an experiment. Our customers are in the blogosphere, so let's join them and learn how to have one-to-one conversations online. We'd only planned on it being up for a short time, but the readership continues to exceed our expectations and take on a life of its own.

Staci: Exactly … and that's the goal, right? To be a good host and see where the community leads things?

Ed: Yes. This is a two-way channel. Blogging is about the art of public dialogue. We've learned a lot from each of the blogs we've launched, and we continue to get great feedback from users and the industry, including the Online Banking Report  (OBR)'s NetBanker blog .

Staci: Yup, we received an "A-" grade from them, and later Wells Fargo received OBR's "Best of the Web" award for introducing four blogs. That was a big day for our team.

Ed: Ours, too. We were really happy about it. In their original review of your blog, they had some great feedback, too, most of which we've implemented. Here's a list … if your readers have additional ideas, they should chime in:

• Feedback. We've made it easier for readers to give us feedback, such as the new "Contact" icons/links at the end of every post, the new embedded  "Send a comment" box at the top of the most recent post, and links in the author's About Us page entry. We made it easier for readers to find posts by their favorite bloggers by clicking the blogger's name.
  
  
• Usability. To make things more readable, we made the blog headlines black rather than red. We cleaned up the search function, too, removing features people didn't use. For links that leave the blog, we're removing the warning page indicating you're leaving Wells Fargo and instead including an icon by the link. We're also implementing improvements that make our blogs easier for disabled persons to read.

Staci.  Great stuff. We'll probably look back at our first attempts and laugh one day, but what can we expect going forward?

Ed: Hard to predict. Look at the rapid rise of YouTube  and MySpace , and you realize that things can change quickly. I think it's fair to say we're going to continue to be where our customers are—which is why we just launched a MySpace profile  as well. Having a dialogue with customers via blogs is more than being a good host—it's also about being a participant across social networks, like MySpace and who knows, perhaps Twitter  someday.

Staci: Twitter was all the rage at BlogHer, but it's new to me. I'm still just trying to manage my Dogster profile ! Anyway, thanks for the update—and we should do this again when the Student LoanDown celebrates its one-year anniversary.

Ed: Absolutely!