There have been a few developments since I wrote yesterday about the articles on Scribd. Both articles made the hotlist – but I’ll concentrate on Desktop Videoconferencing Goes Mobile. It’s now had over 800 readers & made the hotlist – see below.
This means that it’s featured on the ‘Explore’ page of Scribd & also is shown on the home page of every member – see below.
I’m happy with this amount of exposure for the few minutes it took to upload to Scribd. One lesson to be learned is to post just one article at a time. I posted two yesterday & they both had heaps of exposure, but I think the effect would have been better if I’d posted just one & released the second one a week later.
PPS: As at 1 October this article had 1,533 reads and I’ve picked up about a dozen new subscirbers 
At my WNA lunch presentation last week someone asked me about measuring the effect of social networking/media tools. It was a good question & I don’t have a quantifiable answer – all I could say at the time was that I see peaks in sign-ups, page views etc after I’ve shared one of my own articles, blog posts etc. However, just the day after & again today, something interesting happened that is not quantifiable, but a good example to share. Both were Twitter posts.
Being retweeted by BIG players
There’s a convention amongst Twitter users that if you ‘retweet’ something someone else in your network has tweeted, you post it with RT attached. For example if I shared something, you thought it was good & wanted to share it further, you’d write ‘RT @caroldaunt’ followed by the message.
Last week one of my blog posts was picked up by a couple of big players in my industry & retweeted. (My blog posts are automatically sent to Twitter – easy to set up.) One of these players has 607 followers & the other has 1,161 followers. So suddenly my blog post was promoted to 1768 extra people. Did I see an upsurge of over 1000 readers? No – but there was small spike in reads of that post. And I believe being promoted to 1768 people can’t be a bad thing.
Driving people to read your articles
The second interesting thing happened this morning. I decided to upload a couple of recent articles to Scribd. Naturally I tweeted that they were available to read online. Within minutes one of them had 24 reads ! Also – an email just arrived – see below.
Being promoted to 50 million users can’t be a bad thing either! Here I am on the front page of Scribd – and in the time it’s taken to post this picture, the number of readers has increased to 67 (Why not go check how many reads it’s had now? Click here – it’s the article on the top right.)
So….. no quantifiable sales – but an example of the power of social networking & the new age of promoting yourself & your business.
Now that you know about Creative Commons (see previous post), here’s a little tool that will help you find fabulous photos on flickr. (If you’re not sure what flickr is – I’ll write about that in the next post.)
Thanks to Dan Coulter for something he calls Simple CC flickr Search. Here’s how it works…..
When you go to the Simple CC flickr Search webpage you can type a tag and then search on it. After a few moments you’ll be given a whole page of photos that you can use according to their CC license. Not only that – by clicking on the thumbnail of the photo you’ll see a pop up box which gives you some code & shows you what the picture will look like when you put it on your webpage – with the attribution to the photographer. BEWARE – make sure you understand CC licenses before you start using these photos all over the place. Some have restrictions on them.
Who are these photographers? Mostly people just like us who are happy to share their work with the world. (Actually they’re a bit more creative than I am!!!)
Just copy the code and paste it onto your web page. For example – to do that on this blog I simply click on the HTML edit button & copy it in. Then I return to ‘visual’ editing ie what you see is what you get – and there it is. Just think how some of these photos could liven up your website, blog or emails. Here are some to tempt you:
Soy distinto ¿y qué? / I’m different, so what? by Claudio.Ar
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
If you’re putting a lot of your work online, you’ll want to be sure you’re protecting it so that others don’t copy, use or just plain steal it! One way to do this is to license it under Creative Commons – which has become the standard in the online world.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.
If you look in the bottom of the right-hand column of this blog you’ll see a symbol like this:
This tells the world that I have licensed this blog under the conditions that it can be shared for non-commercial use provided it is attributed to me. You get this information by clicking on the symbol – which takes you to this page.
Getting a license is simple and it’s FREE . Here’s a quick overview…..
Go to the Creative Commons website & choose ‘License’ which will take you here. Just fill in the blanks.
For this license I chose the following (which is the license I usually use for anything I do on the Web):
And the information for this site was:
Creative Commons is a fabulous service – read more about it and start getting your own licenses.
Below are links from the Sydney lunch presentation Social Networking – How to Build Your Business Using FREE Online Tools.
You can join the on-going discussion by clicking the ‘Reply to topic’ button on the WNA Facebook page.
My videoconference blog that I referred to is here. I’ve included links below to my online presences so you can see what these spaces look like.
Set up your own Facebook profile and link to others as well as join groups and start your own groups. My Facebook page is here.
LinkedIn is similar to Facebook – but a little more business oriented. My LinkedIn profile is here.
If you want to reach the teen/early twenties market then go to MySpace and Bebo (I don’t play in these spaces).
Why not set up your own social networking site using Ning? Here’s a Ning site I set up for Web 2 tools in business.
With Twitter you have 140 characters to speak to the world. See my tweets here.
Slideshare is a free website where you can upload your slide presentations. My Slideshare space is here.
You can upload your own videos to YouTube and also use it to collect good videos about your industry and share with others. My YouTube channel is here.
Ustream allows you to broadcast your own TV show via the Internet.
At Flickr you can upload & store photos. You can refer people to your photo stream and/or link to the photos from other websites. Here’s a flickr page I set up for conference photos.
Store your favourite websites at delicious and share them with the world – or keep them private. Here’s my delicious links – you’ll see a lot in the tag eLearning.
Scribd is a place to share your articles. You can see mine here.
Netvibes will organise your life for you. Use it to go and check all the blogs & websites you want to keep track of. Here’s a tour of Netvibes that explains how it all works.
Google provides many great free tools. We use Google Docs to work on shared documents. See the whole range of Google tools here.
I’ve written about Blogs in a previous post. If you want a simple blog use Blogger – or WordPress for more sophistication. This blog operates on WordPress.
I’ve written about Wikis in a previous post. My favourite wiki tool is PBWorks but also good are Wikispaces, Wetpaint and Google Sites.
Enjoy!
Collagr is a neat little online app that will turn a bunch of photos into a collage. All you do is give it a URL (on flickr or photobucket) to the photos you want to use & it will mix them into a collage. You can change a few settings like background & colour. From what I can see all creations become publicly viewable.
Here’s one I made from some photos of Canada:
Here are a few examples from some more creative souls:
With some creativity you could use this app to showcase your products in a new & different way. If you try it out, let everyone know through the comments box & give us a link to your collage. (Great publicity )
This is an interesting article from WIRED about the many and varied uses for Twitter – thanks to numerous apps that have been developed. It begins:
Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms.
Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.
And along the same lines, Search Engine Marketing Group lists 10 Examples of Creative Twitter Uses. These range from checking your laundry to wine tasting!
A blog (short for web log) is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs give information on a particular subject and allow readers to leave comments. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. A blog can be private, public or have restricted access.
You can write your blog without any web programming skills. It’s just a matter of choosing a template, start writing, and then hit the ‘publish’ button to make your thoughts public.
This video explains blogs in simple terms.
Why use a blog?
Though blogs are typically thought of as personal journals, there is no limit to what topics may be covered in a blog. You can use a blog for your business. A blog gives you a voice to the world and raises your profile to a broad market. Become an expert in your industry by posting relevant and useful information. If you keep giving something that is seen as being useful, people will keep reading.
I helped a colleague set up a blog two years ago and she now has over 25,000 readers. Imagine having that audience to market your products and services to! The trick to capitalising on this is having your blog linked back to your other web presences – think of it as cross promoting. Plan your blog as part of your overall marketing and promotions strategy.
Some blogging tips
Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful for maintaining a dynamic business blog:
- Blog at least once a week – but not more than three times a week. Less than one post a week and people may lose interest – more than three can be too much information.
- If you can’t blog for a while, post a message on your blog to say you’re away and when you’ll start blogging again. If people arrive on your blog and find you haven’t posted for a few weeks they’ll probably dismiss you and won’t come back.
- Share ideas and resources from a variety of places – don’t just push your own barrow. It carries more weight if you write a post about your own products and services intermittently.
- Link to other blogs – this raises your profile and usually brings return links from those blogs.
- Make sure you have some way of tracking the visitors to your blog. There are a variety of free services you can add to your blog to do this.
Get started with blogging
The best news of all is that blogs are free to set up. It’s easy to get started, just register for an account, follow the prompts and you’ll be blogging in about three steps. Two services that I recommend are Blogger (quick and easy to set up) and WordPress (more complex but with many more features in it). This blog uses WordPress.
Phew – life is a bit hectic at the moment & I can’t keep up my blogging.
I’ll return soon from overseas.
In the meantime you can keep track and find lots of resources at my other web presences – see the sidebar.
