The Sloan blog about blogs

Adding video to your blog can be really simple:

Easiest: Just link to a YouTube, or other, video you’ve found that might interest your audience. This one may or may not amuse you.

This is a link to a video

Easy: Copy the “embed” code from your favorite YouTube video and paste it into your blog post or page while you are in the HTML view.

Here’s the same video embedded


Still surprisingly easy: Shoot your own video with your web cam and post it to YouTube, then link from there.

Harder: Shoot and edit your own video and post to YouTube.

Hardest: Shoot and edit your own video and post it to a web host that handles streaming of video content (many of the more established hosts offer this free.) Here’s a video I did this way for Trust for Working Landscapes. It is a nearly 28 Mb Windows media file, so you’ll need to be patient. The nice thing about YouTube is that they compress the video, a lot of quality lost, but the videos load and play much more quickly… and it’s all free!

The big question

Is there anyone in your community who might enjoy adding video to your site? The power of the blogs is that the work can easily be distributed… so no one is burdened and many are empowered.

Here’s a simple technique to use in creating blog content, especially before you take your blog-based web site live.

Use the square brackets []

to mark any content you need to add, for example:

[more text on how we paint cars here]

[image of before repair here]

[video of after repair here]

Because these brackets are rarely used in actual writing, you can then search for them using your blog’s search tool.

As the list comes up, pick an post or page to work on and click edit (if you are logged in to your blog).

As you add the content, delete the bracketed reminders.

When your search on brackets brings up only a few items, you are ready to go!

I’ve created this entire blog, from set up with the host to producing 25 entries in about 4 hours.

What could you create for your customers in a few days? How does that compare with your last web design process?

The web is a fast, fun place. Is your current web site structure slowing you down?

For beginning organizational bloggers,  I usually suggest that comments be turned off.

You don’t need the distraction until you get your feet under you.

In the long run, they are one of the most powerful reasons to blog.  When you allow you customers to comment on what you are saying, your marketing power goes way, way up.  It proves you have dedicated customers who love you enough to take the time to interact with you via your blog and it proves you have nothing to hide.

The best benefits are that your customers feel heard and involved and that they can say great things about you that no one would believe if you said them about yourself.

Another great thing about blogs.

They act as buckets for your creative thoughts. So, just fire away as the inspiration strikes.

No design review committees, drafts, designers charging for the time it took them to understand what you were trying to tell them all along, etc.

You can always go back and edit it or delete it later.

Of course, do be careful as anything posted on the web can be cached by others and kept for a very long time.

You now have freedom to be spontaneous, just don’t go crazy!

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.

Syndication being the distribution of content, be it your latest post or an re-run of I Love Lucy.

What this means is that your customers and your community can very simply keep in touch with what you post to your blog, as you post it.

They can either pull the content, as in the Bookmarks tool bar in Firefox or use an RSS reader like GoogleReader.

Readers act like a custom-made newspaper on-line… all the latest entries from your favorite blogs are presented for your reading pleasure. Nice!

Wouldn’t you want your content presented to your customer base right along side the news from the BBC, their friends, etc, etc? Blog sites include this function free and automatically. There’s nothing for you to do… just let your clients subscribe and you’re on their A-list.

No and no.

Blog themes are created by good designers and are free. They can be massively customized, easily, and can be switched with a click of a couple buttons. Easy, really easy.

If you want customization, that can be as extensive and expensive as you want it to be, but I suggest that

All your energy, time and money go into creating meaningful content. That is what will:

Connect you with your audience in a meaningful way
Increase your visibility in search engines

So who do you want to be? The one who every ogles or the one who everyone wants to talk with?

Here are two blogs using the same theme, but simply customized.

The best news of all

Once you start building your blog, you’ll start rising in the search results.

Google has changed the way most of us use the Internet. Even if I know the web address I am looking for, I often use Google to search for the site so I don’t have to type the whole thing in.

Recently, the minds at Google realized that when you search for things, you want what’s real, current, and reliable. So, they have given priority to dated blog content in sorting out the search results they show you. That means, if your blog post title includes the key words of someone’s search, your post may end up very near the top of the search results.

So, each blog post becomes like a very specific bread crumb for your potential clients, customers, or donors to find. With a blog post, they see what they’ve searched for, and all your key information surrounds what they are reading. I recently wrote a post about understanding financial statements and drew a parallel to the Beatles song Let It Be. Within minutes of publishing that post, I searched on financial statements Beatles, and was amazed to find my blog entry #1 in the Google results. See where it is now.

The key is, clearly, writing very specific articles that include words your audience might be interested in seeing. Your current staff and volunteers are the perfect ones to help create this content as they ARE your audience. They share interests and use the same words.

Of course, your staff are probably not professional writers or photographers. I suggest forming an editorial committee that drafts and periodically enforces (by weekly review) standards for your organization. This will allow the rules to be generated by the people in charge and also by the creators of content, who may have a more nuanced sense of what will work and won’t.

If you really want to get wild, ask your customers or your wider community to create content for you!

Blogging is simply an easy way for non-technical people to create and manage web content (words, images, links, etc.)

It’s essentially a very simple word processing interface over a database that separates out the content from the presentation.

This means YOU can write and edit anything you want, any time for free, even over the phone.

This means you can change the look of your site with a couple of clicks…

Oops, there goes my designer with the tiny glasses, the funky shoes, and the bad attitude.

No more designers required. If you can type and download pictures from your camera, you can have a powerful web site. Some folks call it a Mashup. I call it using cool, free tools to let your staff, your volunteers, and your community make your web site unique, relevant, and a lot more visible.

The essential pieces of a web site:

Old way:

• Content
• Text
• Images
• Presentation
• HTML coded pages assembling

Web 2.0 way

• Content
• Text
• Comments
• Images
• Video
• Audio
• Presentation
• Blog software
• Mashup within the blog posts of images, video, and audio from other sites (like Flickr, YouTube, etc,)