Archive for August, 2007

Twitter and Facebook, will they change the way we connect and communicate?

It’s now been around six weeks since I began with Facebook and Twitter to see how it can be used to connect and share with others.

I wasn’t really over aware of the full variety of social media available and how it can support and benefit non profit organisations until I played the Social Media Game earlier this year. We played the game at a a workshop at the UK Circuit Rider Conference back in January. The session was led by David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, and I also met Nick Booth who runs the excellent Podnosh.

Since that event, I’ve used the game myself in several instances with working with groups that want to venture into different ways of connecting and communicating using social media, it’s a great tool to use.

So it was another one of those “practice what you preach” times. It felt high time for me to venture into Facebook and Twitter.
I didn’t really get the purpose of Twitter at first before signing up and starting to get involved more. In the beginning I followed a random set of people, seeing how they used it. It was abit like SMS overload, then bit by bit I began to see how others were using it to connect with their supporters or regular readers. Even one charity sent a daily reminder to remind people of their campaign to prevent breast cancer. Some users use it as a promotional tool, announcing when their organisation had some new news to share.

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Adding an Audio Feed

To help enable my blog to become more accessible to a wider audience, I’ve added an audio feed.
I’ll share with you how I’ve gone about it and why.

I’ve been looking into audio feeds and podcasting recently, trying to see how I can use them in my site. I discovered a nice free tool to enable easy feeds and podcasts which I’ve now implemented on my site.

I used the ReadSpeaker AudioFeed which is powered by Readspeaker.

It’s really easy to set up and all you need is a normal RSS feed to enable this to work.
ReadSpeaker AudioFeed uses the latest in automatic speech conversion to create the voice from the text. (hence why if you have a listen, it is not my voice!).

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 15: Stickify your blog!

Following on the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge, the task today was to ’stickify’ your blog.

Darren at Problogger says:

“It revolves around identifying key points where traffic is entering your blog and then optimizing those points for stickiness either by providing means for subscribing via RSS or email or by driving people deeper into your blog.”

A few days a go, the task was to analyse your statistics (see my post here on day 11 of the challenge on how I use Google Analytics), so by using your new knowledge of how people are accessing and using your site you can target key areas of your site or blog which you can add some extra features to enable new readers to want to stay or sign up for feeds to keep connected with your news.

Darren is using video in his post to convey his ideas and messages, which is well worth a look, as an idea.
I’m going to try a few future posts as videoposts, although don’t want to compromise accessibility too much for those that cannot use the technology, so am currently looking in to and testing some ideas tools to provide captions to video’s (such as MAGpie) and also looking into podcasting my RSS feeds too (such as the Readspeaker podcast feed).

There’s a useful article on the ICT Hub website about Web 2.0 and accessibility if you are interested in some of the barriers that blogging and interactive websites can cause.

(If you use or know of any of the tools mentioned to enable captions to video, or podcasting rss, please do contact, as I’m compiling a list of applications to test and report on! Thanks)

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 14: Analyse your blogs competition

Todays task in the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge is to analyse your blogs competition. Darren of Prologger did use the term ‘competition’ hesitantly, as your competitors or those blogging in a similar theme are also your biggest allies, connect and share with them.

Since this challenge began, I’ve connected lots with other participants, some who have similar goals to some of mine, and we’ve began to build relationships, connect and discuss

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 12 & 13, and an update on progress…

The 31 days to a Better Blog Challenge continues…

The task for Day 12 is to Introduce Yourself to another Blogger.

“Email another blogger in your niche to introduce yourself and your blog. You don’t need to ask them to link to you or anything - the point isn’t to get any specific outcome other than to touch base and hopefully build a relationship.”

Since this challenge began, I’ve been alot more confident in a making contact with other bloggers, not only in my ‘niche’ but in other areas too. I really recommend this tip, relationship building is definately a key part of communicating via the internet. It’s a little harder than the traditional face to face route, and does require abit more time and commitment, but the results are very worthwhile. I now communicate with a wide range of people regularly across the world that I wouldn’t have formed any connections with, if it had not been for blogging and reading others blogs.

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Staying Creative and Motivated

Great article by Jeffrey Zeldman on Staying Creative. Includes links to some useful A List Apart Articles to keep designers and web writers creative and motivated.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 11: Dig into your Site Statistics

The task for day 13, of 31 Days to a Better Blog is to dig into your blog’s metrics or statistics package.
(for further information on the challenge I’m taking part in, see the background page to the project)

“Take some time out today to do a little analysis of your blog’s statistics. There is a wealth of information in them that can be incredibly useful.”

Many of use use different forms of finding ways to analyze our users and traffic on our sites. A few years ago, the traditional ‘hit counter’ was common place on the home page of many sites, but these do not really give useful information about the users and type of users visiting your site. You don’t see them as often these days, but many sites are still tracking information about their site visitors, just doing it all behind the scenes.
(see my past post on retro websites if you want a reminder of the good old days of websites…)

Even though this challenge is aimed at blogs, I’d highly recommend any one or organisation who has a website or blog, to use analytical software so that they can really begin to look beneath the surface at how their site is used. It will help you shape the way your site is written and also help you to find the areas which aren’t used and the ones that are.
It doesn’t need to cost anything either, just some of your time and some curiousity, as the more you begin to analyse your site statistics, the more you will be entertained by the data on where your visitors come from, what browsers they use (does your website work perfectly in all browsers? When did you last check?), how long they spent on your site, who referred them, what keywords did the use on a search to find you and much, much more…

A couple of months ago, Beth Kanter put a shout out asking if any non profit organisations in the UK were using Google Analytics. She was doing a screencast primer for the Non-Profit Technology Empowerment Network (known often as NTEN) for a forthcoming webinar, and I responded saying that the organisation I manage as my day job, uses Google Analytics in a basic way for our site.

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Resources on blogs, social networks and tags for non-profits

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) have collated a brilliant list of resources on Blogs, Social Networks, and Tags for Nonprofits on a Google doc. Check it out here!

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 10: Declutter your sidebar

I’m still there and up to day 10 of the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge. The challenge set by Problogger Darren was something that I had already begun thinking about whilst stuck in a bad traffic jam earlier today. Yes, de-clutter your side bar. Read my thoughts below on how I will be approaching this and why.

Darren helps us with todays task by giving us some suggestions to help us to see what we do and don’t need on our sidebar/info areas on our sites. I feel we could all use these tips, by regularly doing a check of your blog or website, especially the homepage (doesn’t have to just be a blog) where in many cases people come to first, or if they entered your site elsewhere will return to to understand the context of your site. Is your homepage overloaded with unnecessary information? Well, these sidebar tips may help your website too.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 9: Advertising on your site…how can this work for non-profits?

Today’s challenge by Prologger Darren Rowse was to run an advertising audit on your blog. Like many of the rest of us taking part in the challenge (see here for background information as to what it is about), it possibly isn’t relevant to the types of blogs involved in this challenge and to our aimed readership.

Saying that though, I have had two requests for support from non-profits this week alone, about advertising on their websites to help bring in some extra income. One wanted to explore the idea of ’sympathetic’ advertising using other national organisations with helplines that may help some of the users of their youth orientated website. Another just wanted to understand how advertising worked and could they have a go at it. I personally don’t want advertising on my own site, and I know that on one of the forums I connect with, that advertising was frowned upon at first by the users and it did create some great debate, but it did lever extra monies to enable it to keep afloat in it’s early days, and now their project is being supported enough not to rely on advertising. So instead of totally discounting it, how can we explore if it does have any relevance for non profits and charities?

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