Today we are going to start off by going back; back to last class to talk about Facebook and Twitter for business! I want to explore some use cases and discuss how you might use these social networks to further your own purposes. We are going to explore Facebook Ads first and foremost. I have published a number of stories about Facebook advertising in the past:
- Facebook Advertising: Beyond the Click
- Facebook's Ad Rates are the Cheapest here's why
- Facebook Advertising Undressed
Have a read of the above links while I collect everyone's blog address for our next session.
Now let's take a few minutes to check out each other's blog posts and comment on them. EXERCISE: Please leave a short comment on each of your classmate's the sites. Make the comment somewhat insightful. Please try to provide some constructive feedback about the blog or the post or the topic discussed. A lot of the insights that are presented by different students are of great value to others:
- Trevor's Blog
- Aldo's Blog
- Kevin's Blog
- David's Blog
- Tony's Blog
- Lou's Blog
- Gus' Blog
- Chase's blog
- Matthew's Blog
- Lesley's Blog
- Charlene's Blog
- Laura-Lee's Blog
The networked business or business professional today relies on more tools than ever before. Smartphones, online communications, web promotions and offline events are powerful ways to build your brand or business. Even with these tools there are important ways to continue events and utilize smartphones.
Online multimedia content will continue to grow in importance as a tool to enhance product and business experiences. Are you or your company currently leveraging the opportunities presented by video and photos? Flickr is the new "take my picture". Now you get more from that value add with the web.
Today we are going to explore publishing video, audio and pictures to the web as this is an important element of dynamic and well made content. In fact many of the web's foremost experts on content are calling video the future of the web.
Gawker Media Founder Nick Denton says, "People don't really want to read text. They want videos, they want images, bigger, more lavish." In other words, consumers are looking for online media products that more closely resemble TV and magazines.
Denton cited Gizmodo's notorious leak of the iPhone 4 as an example, which quadrupled traffic for the blog that week. "There is a huge kind of hunger for that image, for the video we produced," he said. "The core of that story was the image of the phone."
Text, he contended, is more useful for providing context and explanation for more visual kinds of media, rather than serving as the primary medium itself. Since video is generally expensive to produce, Gawker staff will concentrate on finding and curating available video to embed on the site. However, Denton noted it was considerably less expensive to produce video that captured gameplay or software run-throughs.
-Source Mashable.
When publishing photos for a client or yourself Flickr is the best option and one of the largest online database of photography available for use for free and/or with credit. Today I am going to describe Creative Commons in more detail. reative Commons is a way to license your photos or content online so that others may benefit from the use or derivative work based on inspiring content. If you work in a visual environment or your clients are in a visual industry Flickr is THE photo site to use.
Flickr (through our Cut & Paste coding method) can allow you to embed great photos (as below) or slideshows (as above) on your blog or website. Be sure to understand Creative Commons and the license used with photos to decide whether you can or can't use them for profit.
Let's check out my Flickr account to get an idea of the metrics that Flickr PRO provides. Next as an exercise I want you to head over to Flick.com and use the search box to look for photos to publish on your blog. Here is an example of searching for "awesome vancouver" regularly and looking for only Creative Commons shots. Sadly you'll notice that the amount of 'awesome' photos decreases drastically.
Photos are great especially when showing a product online but THE MOST IMPORTANT part of using both YouTube/Vimeo and Flickr is adding Titles, Descriptions and Tags that make your content easy to find online. Here are examples of great details, good details and bad details a Flickr photo. Your embedded photo, if it's a creative commons image should include two things in the description below the photo: a credit as requested by the photo's author (Usually found on their profile) and a link to the type of creative commons license they used on it. I will go through how those items are found now. EXERCISE: Please embed a flickr image into your blog and properly site both the photographer and the creative commons license as below.
photo by: Travis Nicholson. Licensed under Creative Commons.
Next let's transition over to YouTube, the second largest search engine in the world. Here are examples of great details (It's also a video on YouTube SEO marketing tips :), good details and bad details on a YouTube Video. BONUS: SEO for Flickr Video (it's slow moving but comprehensive).
The beauty of web video is that almost all of it is designed to be embedded or 'republished' anywhere online. The only faux pas is claiming someone else's video as your own. I love embedding TED Talks as this content benefits and educates others. This is a TED Talk from one of my personal 'heros' Clay Shirky. Clay describes how Social Technologies can make history.
Video is the future of web content and when looking to explain something quickly and keep people's attention video is the best way to do so. Although the topic of your content must be visual to be used that way. The next exercise is to embed a YouTube video in your blog. So get searching and let's have a look at what you find. Remember these blog posts are not for marks and can be deleted after you've embedded a video and a flickr photo in them.
One more video for today's class: Simon Sinek's TED Talk: How great leaders inspire action:
Final Class Next Week!
For our final class I will also be presenting a number of case studies about people who have utilized social media to get jobs, create business and connect for good.
Your final project due for next week is three social networking profiles that are as complete as possible. Feel free to create 'faux' profiles if you don't want to create one for your identity, but be sure to fill it out completely. The social networking sites that you can create profiles on for this project are:
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Blogger
- Wordpress
What do you want to learn more about? Choose a presentation that Kemp has delivered and the one with the most votes by tweets containing #MDIA1045 will be presented next week during our final class.
EXTRAS:
Learn more about HootSuite basics
3 steps to turn your blogger blog into a website
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