New Hope Media: Amy Gahran's Online Media Workshop
August 6, 2007
Boulder, CO
Amy Gahran's main weblog: Contentious -- news and musings on how we communicate in the online age.
- Amy's bio
E-mail Amy
Amy's other blogs:
- Poynter's E-Media Tidbits
- The Right Conversation (soon to be folded back into Contentious)
- Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker
- Carless in Boulder
Amy's June 2007 Organic Summit presentation notes
PARTICIPANTS' BURNING QUESTIONS TODAY:
- How to drive traffic to our site, make it easy for people to do what they want on the site, not just present it our way.
- How can we integrate the content development and production process.
- How do we create content for the web first?
- How do we as editors interact with our readers in a way that actually works.
- How do you engage and grow our online community
- How to make existing web exclusives more successful?
- How to make blogs better connected to the rest of the web
- Do blogs matter?
- How to create links
- What tools are out there for blogging, etc.
- How do you engage people in a public conversation.
- Search engine optimization
- How can you be competitors in print and collaborators online?
- How much time does it take to keep up a good blog.
Amy's top 10 tips to wrap your brain around today’s online media:
- Be findable, relevant, engaging, and connected.
- Conversation works better than publication (alone). Participate in your communities.
- Go where your communities are, and join them on their terms. (It’s not just about your site or brand.)
- Participate in other communities. All competitors are potential collaborators.
- Think like a kid! Play! Experiment, explore, and be flexible (media, formats, communities, distribution, partners, tools, etc.)
- Never create something that you haven’t already tried for a while, gotten used to, and genuinely like.
- Never build any tool or site you don’t have to. (Use existing tools and services)
- Great content (including from your communities) is the best search engine optimization strategy.
- Be transparent: Whatever you try to hide or introduce by surprise is exactly what will bite you.
- Stay human: It’s really about people and communities -- not technology, not markets, not audiences, not numbers, not brands.
Alfresco - open source CMS
Blogs
Key features:
- Reverse-chronological publishing (most recent post at top)
- Every post has a unique, permanent URL (web address)
- Categories
- Can be any kind of content or style
Optional & highly desirable features:
- Feed (RSS)
- Comments (whether moderated or not)
- E-mail alerts
- Multiple authors
- Tagging
- Trackbacks
- Social bookmarking links (Digg, etc.)
Advantages:
- Easy to post and update – allows timeliness
- Easy to link to: Aids search engine ranks
- Builds loyalty among opinion leaders
- Can be ongoing or event-related
- Very good way to make your content findable, linkable, and distributed
- If comments are allowed, can be the basis of a strong conversation and community
- Can be a great way to get more mileage out of content, community, events, etc.
- Can be a great way to reach new communities or leverage existing ones.
Disadvantages:
- Can be a time sink and burden if you’re not smart about it
- Can be confusing to online newcomers
- Layout often isn’t as elegant as print people might like
Common problems:
- Writers making it more work than it needs to be
- Publishers trying to control the conversation too much, or not participating in it
- Requiring registration just to post comments
- No author response to comments
- No comment spam filtering
- Not including comments in site search
- No comment feed
Example:
- Cooking with Amy - fairly simple blog, hosted on blogspot.
How to comment on a blog: Try it on my blog, first.
A blog can be a part of a site
- 100-mile diet. Combines blog with community, local resources e-mail newsletters, contributed content more. Supports book sales. Started by two professional writers. Problem: no comments
- Treehugger: Very popular environmental blog and community site, just bought by Discovery Communications. Video, photos, lively community, forums, much more. Problem: too busy.
Workload advice:
Feeds & Feed Readers
Very, very, very important! Both for publishing/syndicating your content and keeping on top of online media.
A feed is a way for people or online services to instantly find out about your latest content, without having to visit your site or check their e-mail.
Key skill: Subscribing to a feed
- I'll demo using MyYahoo and Newsfire.
OK free feed readers to start with:
- My Yahoo
- Google Reader (here's a video tutorial I did on Google Reader)
- Newsgator Online
My favorite: NewsFire (for Mac, cheap)
Feeds are good for:
- Ego surfing
- Topic monitoring
- Distributing your content (to aggregators like Technorati, and more), all kinds of media
- Allowing subscriptions (keeps your audience connected to you)
- Advertising venue ($$$)
Burn your feeds through feedburner to get good stats on usage and lots of simple, useful services.
- total stats pro - paid option is worth it
- Yes, your feed can bear your domain
Forums
Message-board-style site for ongoing discussion where participants get to raise topics.
Key features
- Sections (broad general topics)
- Threads
- Posts
Optional and highly desirable features:
- User registration (confirm process, not onerous, aids accountability)
- E-mail distribution
- Privacy and search engine indexing options
- Feeds (for public forums_
- Some HTML allowed (links)
- Flagging
- User profiles
- Initial post moderation
Advantages
- Allows community creativity (great for editorial R&D)
- Builds loyalty among opinion leaders
- Great source of content that you can repurpose (depending on terms of use)
Disadvantages
- Can be time-consuming to manage and moderate
- Can be hard to cultivate a lively, constructive community
- Layout is often confusing
- Can be difficult to find the good stuff
Common problems
- Flame wars
- Off-topic threads
- Repetition
- Doldrums
- Bad interface
Examples:
Wanna play with a forum? Google groups
Social media
Social bookmarking - tools for recommending links
- Digg (here's my video tutorial on that. Look what I just found at the top of newly popular on Digg.)
- Hugg (like Digg, but for the environment, from Treehugger)
- del.icio.us
Adding social bookmarking buttons can drive traffic to your site. The Food Channel does this.
Media-sharing services
- Blip.tv (video, very good quality and user inteface)
- YouTube (video, very popular, but tech problems due to its popularity)
- Flickr (photo sharing)
Tagging: Popular aspect of social media (and blogging) -- community members get to categorize content on the fly. Helps make your content findable.
- Try searching for tags in many popular social media services via keotag
Advantages
- Makes you very, very findable.
- Boost search engine ranking
- Ahead-of-the-curve leads
- Versatile, customizeable feeds make it easy to follow very specific topics
- Easy way to draw attention to your content (teasers)
- Allows people to carry your brand for you by embedding
- Allows discussion through comments
- Increasingly popular in US
- Great way to find blogs, communities
Disadvantages
- Requires more production skills (media, and online prep) and time to prepare
- You give up a lot of control and context.
- Not user-friendly to newbies
Podcasting
Downloadable media delivered by feed. Can be video or audio.
I'll demo in iTunes
Advantages
- Human voice is powerful and compelling
- People subscribe and then get your content regularly
- Tends to be remarkably “viral” – people recommend podcasts a lot
Disadvantages
- Requires production and online prep skills
- Right now, requires a somewhat tech-savvy audience. They need to know how to use a podcatcher (even itunes) and have an mp3 player.
- Commenting/feedback is not easy
Tips:
- Include your URL and e-mail at beginning/end of each episode
- Keep episodes short
- Get it listed in iTunes
- Listen to podcasts!
- Have a blog to support the podcast. Post “show notes” there. Allow comments.
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