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.

Blogs, because even the creation tools are web-based, allow anyone you authorize to create, edit, and manage content for you from anywhere, anytime.

How might that relieve your marketing production bottle necks?

Now, you can even blog from anywhere you have cell phone service.

A great local company, Utilikilts is very hip in many ways, especially how they’ve unleashed their community’s creative energy.

Utilikilt’s customers made mockumentries on their behalf, just because they love their kilts and the company.

Free, fun publicity, just for asking. Now, not every organization has developed the rabid following among the media-creating generation as Utilikilts, but, today, most cellphone users can capture images and video.

How might simple content help make your site more alive AND deeply connect your clients to your organization?

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!

Basically, Web 2.0 is the internet as tool for unleashing people’s creativity and interconnectedness. Don’t take my word for it, check in with the great Web 2.0 success story, Wikipedia.

It’s actually harkening back to the internet before http:// To my first on-line community, The WELL in San Francisco. The WELL (The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) was a community of creative, social tech-types that started back in 1985 when you logged onto the internet and got a command line prompt.

In the intervening years, things have got a lot easier and richer.

Examples of Web 2.0 tools today:

Facebook and MySpace – the ability to comment and to connect with others (guilt or goodness by association)
Amazon - customer reviews and discussion groups
Craigslist - Suddenly newspaper classified ads seem cumbersome and expensive
YouTube – See what the world is videoing
Flickr or Google Picassa – post and share your images
Google Maps – link content and locations see: www.soundfood.org

Any or all of these can be integrated into your blog site.

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,)