Presentation on Social Media Usage by The Horizon Foundation

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I’m going to talk about some of the sites that I use often, sites that I have found to have application in my work. Web 2.0 is based on the concept of sharing and learning from a group, the wisdom of crowds, if you will. The first site that I’m going to talk about, delicious, is one that I’ve been using for at least four years now. When it launched, unlike some of Web 2.0, delicious made immediate sense to me. What it is – it is a social bookmarking site. What that means, is instead of bookmarking the sites that you want to save in your browser (in the ‘Bookmarks’) you bookmark them through your account on delicious. So instead of having your list of sites stored on your computer, the list is now web based, and you can access it from anywhere. It’s more than just a long list of bookmarks, because after a while, you’d have quite a list, and would want to search them. When you save a bookmark on delicious, you ‘tag’ it in order to find it later, or, to have others who are interested in that tag, have the ability to search under it. In addition to seeing your own list, you can see others (if they keep the privacy setting open.) For instance, you can share some of your tags, I for example, share all of my web development tags, and you can keep some private (some of the resources that I tag for my children I prefer to keep private and separate from the resources I’m tracking for work.) Since this is a community of sharing, there is a popularity ranking - if a link is being bookmarked or tagged by many others, it will go to the top of the ‘Popular’ list. I use this feature to see what’s new, up and coming, what I should be paying attention too – basically what is receiving the ‘buzz’. On this site, you can find users who have similar interests, create networks around those interests, as well as share the list of bookmarks that you are tagging with others – on the site, and off the site. Now, I use this feature, the ability to build a news feed or RSS feed, from a particular tag, and bring it onto another site that I manage. This allows me to keep a list of bookmarks around a topic, the topic in my case is emergency preparedness, and allows me to share what I’ve found with others on the delicious, as well as those that visit the CERN site, which is the Community Emergency Preparedness Network site that the Foundation hosts. {CLICK}

Here is a screenshot of the CERN site, and here is where I’ve brought the feed in from delicious. When I tag or bookmark a resource with the emergency preparedness tag, it gets fed into this News Feed that I’ve set up (you can see the little orange RSS icon after the headline indicating it can be republished on other websites as well.) Delicious makes it really easy to access their site to bookmark links. I’ve downloaded an extension in the Firefox browser [CLICK] seen here, where when I’m on a site that I’d like to bookmark, I just click this delicious icon and fill out the information in a box that pops up over the page – the icon captures the web link, so you don’t have to retype that, I tag it (delicious provides a list of suggested tags based on the page content) and I have the opportunity to write notes about the link if I choose. So that’s delicious, next up, I’m going to show you how I’ve used Widgets.

A widget is an application that displays the featured content directly on a webpage. Once embedded into a website, blog or social networking site (like facebook), thre is not technical maintenance necessary. The person or organization that originally created the widget can make an update, and everyone running the widget will automatically receive that update. Click Here is an example of a widget the FDA recently offered for distribution (through a direct email to their contact list, as well as on their website). This is a list of products associated with the recent peanut recall. If you wanted to implement or host this widget on your site you would (CLICK) copy this code, and put it within the code of your own website. Often widgets have a one-click option to add to your social networking site or blog, but pasting the actual html code does the trick as well. I have a widget for our HorizonHelp website, which is a database of health and human service providers that serve Howard County. I am using the widget to cross-promote HorizonHelp on the CERN website (the site that I used in my previous example.)

This is a screenshot from the lower portion of the CERN website that shows the Horizon Help widget. Just like the FDA widget, those who want to republish the widget can add it to (CLICK) any of these websites, or grab the HTML code and insert it into their own site. I created this widget in a tool called SproutBuilder – which is a web-based ‘WYSIWYG’ - what you see is what you get widget creator, created for non-technical users. It’s a tool you use completely from their website, as in design the widget right on the site, within the browser. There isn’t any special software to download, you can manage the widgets from any computer (since it’s web-based). It comes with some templates as well if you just want to modify rather than start from scratch. I’ve been using this for about a year and half, and at that time it was a free model so I’ve been grandfathered in. Now their plans start from $20/month, but there are definitely other tools to create widgets. I like this site’s tool because it’s easy to import my own graphics, and gives the ability to track how many times the widget has been republished.

Twitter – I’m sure you’ve heard of this as it’s in the news A LOT lately. Congress ‘twitters’, recently a juror got in trouble for using Twitter, it’s come up a lot on John Stewart’s show. It comes with a language and etiquette of it’s own, for example ‘twittering’ or ‘tweet’s – so here’s what it is. It’s a messaging service with a 140 character limit. This is also known as microblogging - a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging , instant messaging , email , digital audio or the web . So 140 characters isn’t a whole lot of space to get your message across. To combat that, some people use shorthand, some people just type out short messages, and many times links are posted in the form of an abbreviated URL, using a service called ‘tiny url – ( tinyurl .com) which will take a long web address and turn it into a short one, that still links to the same place. Twitter’s been around for about two years, and I think it’s taken that long for people to figure out how to use it, for there is certainly a lot of ‘clutter’ on twitter… like [CLICK]. But it definitely has some value. There are real nuggets out there too: [CLICK] This is from The Chronicle of Philanthropy, who has really utilized ‘Web 2.0’ across the board so to speak. You can see that this post is from a service called ‘TwitterFeed’. This tool allows the Chronicle to make an update to their blog, and it updates their Twitter account too. So most media outlets use it, which is great for them to get up-to-the-minute details on developing situations, as well as see what groups, organizations or individuals are posting. It allows them to post a ‘tweet’ about an expert they may be looking to connect with, which is an opportunity for large companies use it to support their customers (i.e. Apple has a huge following) – but you need to be careful to NOT be too self-promotional. Twitter stresses the ‘giving as much as you take’ idea of community, so if you are only out there pushing your own spam, or agenda, without regard to how others are going to use that information, you will start getting blocked by those on your ‘Follower’ list. The best way to get involved is to start an account, and choose some followers, and watch for a while, to get the hang of the slang (what @ someone means, which is replying to what someone else said, or what the hashtag means – it allows that word to be searchable, people use this for events.) How to find followers (Mr. Tweet) tweetdeck – whole host of Twitter tools (hundreds). How people have used it (finding a job through their network, grants community posts opportunities – give example) Examples of How Others Use it: Promote events, as mentioned in the hashtag example Live Blogging From Events Meeting up with others Sharing ideas, or asking for them Sharing information amongst your community Technology guru was laid off, conducted a public experiment on how quickly he could find a new job via his twitter network Grants community uses it to update opportunities

This is what the BePrepared page looks like, and you’ll see the icons for our followers, which include NASA, FEMA, Homeland Security, Red Cross, as well as other community groups such as ours. I’ve found it a great way to stay up to date on new developments as well as get content ideas for the CERN site. CLICK This is the second time I’ve shown you an icon like this – it’s the icon that indicates an RSS feed is available. If you wanted where you ‘grab’ the RSS feed of your update (or anyone elses) to follow either through your email program, feedreader or website.

I started off in Public Relations, scanning and clipping articles every day, so I still get a kick out of News Alert tools. With these tools, you can: monitor a developing news story keeping current on a competitor or industry getting the latest on a particular event Or the most interesting, keep tabs on your own name First, I’ve set up a Google Alert on our organization’s name and other categories that I’m interested in and it couldn’t be easier. You set up how often you want to be notified when this topic shows up in a search, if you want Google to search just blogs, just the web, or give you a ‘Comprehensive’ search. Yahoo isn’t as simple – they have an alerts section, but it’s more general. What I did on Yahoo is set up a feed on their “Pipes” section, which pulls in RSS feeds from news sources or blogs that I choose, and creates a Super Feed that gets emailed to me. I use Yahoo to keep up on Howard County news, and to manage articles on Pandemic Flu for the Community Emergency Response Network site. For that feed, I display it on the site, to keep the page ‘fresh’ with the latest articles. (NEXT)

You’ll see I set it up as a sidebar. What I did was grab the code for the RSS feed, and pasted it into this sidebar section. Next are some more tools to make managing external documents easier.

Online services – issuu Scribd SlideShare – document sharing, search-able, embeddable. No need for PDFs, can leave comments, document-sharing, putting things like factsheets on there with branding, connects you to like content semantically

Favorites, Groups & Events

Presentation on Social Media Usage by The Horizon Foundation - Presentation Transcript

- Bookmarking site – instead of storing on the desktop, access from anywhere
- Uses ‘tags’ to organize content; searchable
- Search bookmarks in ‘Popular’ or ‘Recent’ to see what’s new
- Bring your ‘tags’ into your site via a feed
A widget is an application that displays the featured content directly on your web page. You can embed content in personalized home pages, blogs, and other sites. Once you’ve added the widget, there’s no technical maintenance.
- “ Microblogging” – 140 character limit
- How I Use It:
- How Others Use it (Examples)
- Twitter Etiquette
Twitter.com Philanthropy : Give & Take: Should Aid Groups Have Spoken Up In Darfur? http://tinyurl.com/b4yjql 20 minutes ago from twitterfeed
Google is easy to set up: http://www.google.com/alerts Yahoo is more challenging, yet more comprehensive
- Issuu – For Newsletters, multi-page PDFs
- Simply upload your PDF and it creates a ‘Flip- able’ book
- Enters publication into site’s database, allowing it to be searched
- Customizable look with colors, logo
- Create PDF’s that are
- searchable via Scribd’s ‘iPaper’ format
- Others can embed your document into their site, add comments or tags
- Tracks views, connects you with similar groups
- Share PowerPoint
- presentations and other docs – publicly or privately
- Searchable, ability to embed in your site and others
- Mobile Presentations – Show from the web, rather than carrying laptop or memory stick
- Find and connect to related con tent