Social Media 101: Tips to get started

Rotary PR Workshop Module 2: Social Media 101 Tips on using social media to raise the profile of your club, attract new members and start conversations By Julian Matthews, Trinetizen Media www.trinetizen.com

What’s next

7 Case studies

10 tips on Google search

23 tips on blogging

5 steps to post audio online

5 tips on photos

5 tips on posting videos on YouTube

10 tips on Facebook

5 tips on microblogging: Twitter

Social media and the banana leaf

Digital banana leaf

1 st Multimedia President

Case study 1: Using Flickr.com

Memories come alive in photos

The Star, Sept 19, 2007 : The 1957 Photo Album project organised by StarMetro together with Federal Hotel Kuala Lumpur received close to 150 photographs.

Launched in June ’07 it was held for over 12 weeks.

The photo album was available for viewing at the Federal Hotel Kuala Lumpur or by visiting www.flickr.com/photos/the1957album

Case study 2: http://www.chevroncarsblog.com/

Case study 3: http://www.adoptapilot.blogs.com

Case study 4: Southwest Airlines viral video contest

US airlines Southwest asked people to post a 20-second clip of something embarrassing or humiliating happening to them, with the winning video to be used in Southwest's official "Wanna Get Away" campaign.

Contestants signed up and posted video at http://www.youtube.com/group/Southwestcontest

Winning videos and honourable mentions were cross-posted at www.southwestwannagetaway.com.

Case study 5: Doritos chips

Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” contest encouraged wanna directors to produce an ad that would be aired during Super Bowl 2007.

More than 1,000 submissions were uploaded to Yahoo! Video and Jumpcut, and voted on by consumers at CrashTheSuperBowl.com

Two winners were aired: ‘Live The Flavor’ and ‘Check Out Girl’.

Dale Backus, 21, and Wes Phillips, 22, shot the 30-second spot, featuring Dale’s wife Cori, with borrowed equipment, a skateboard and total expenditure of 12 dollars. They were awarded a prize of $10,000 and a trip to the Super Bowl in Miami, where the winning entry was announced and aired during the game for est. US$1.25m. http://www.crashthesuperbowl.com/ Production cost: US$12

Google

10 Google Tips

Capitalization and quotation marks: Google searches are NOT case sensitive. Searches for abdullah badawi, Abdullah Badawi , and aBdUlLAh BaDaWi will all return the same results.

Use “quotes” or + or - sign to include/exclude words.

Eg: “rotary ampang”, rotary +ampang, rotary -ampang

2. Limit to .my sites

Example 1: rotary site:org.my

Example 2: “abdullah badawi” site: gov.my

Either OR. If you want to include either this or that in result list, use the OR operator ( must be upper-case ):

Example: "siti nurhaliza" OR "datuk khalid” site:my (Leave out the OR, Google returns pages that include both terms)

Try searching Groups, Images, Blogs

Finding specific Filetypes

Go to Google > Advanced Search.

Try finding Acrobat (pdf), Powerpoint (pps), Word (doc) Excel spreadsheet (xls) files.

Eg: grants filetype:pdf site:rotary.org

Older stuff

Try Google Cached, or www.archive.org

Alternate query types: info: link: related: (no space)

Tools: Calculator, Dictionary, Metric/Currency Conversion

Metric system.

Eg 1: 233 square feet in square meter OR

233 sq ft =? sq m

Eg 2: define: dodecagon

Eg 3: currency of Brazil in Malaysian money

Eg 4 :3.578 USD in MYR

Eg 5: 5.6 million British pounds in MYR

Eg 6: half a cup in teaspoons

Movie, music finder

Eg: movie: clooney OR music: “norah jones”

Phonebook

Eg: Brad, Pitt, LA OR rphonebook: Brad Pitt LA

#Bonus tip Monitor specific keyword with Alerts

Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts

Yahoo Alerts: http://alerts.yahoo.com

Eg: Yahoo sends pop-up alerts if you are on Messenger + email

RSS

Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication is a method to syndicate your web content out to users.

Using RSS files, you can create a feed that supplies headlines, news, blog posts, comments, forum threads, photos, audio files, and even video to your “subscribers”.

Subscribers can use a dedicated software called an RSS reader or aggregator to “pull in” all their favourite web content into one location and scan quickly. Current browsers come with integrated RSS readers.

Users can also use a web-based aggregator to pull-in feeds that are constantly updated and view a web page of feeds. Eg: Bloglines, Google Reader, Netvibes

FEED ME! Needs of website

Blogging

Create a free blog Set up your own blog

8 Blogging tips #1. Frequency: Once weekly Rule of thumb is to blog at least once a week. Do it tag team style, so you can keep it fresh and updated. #2. RSS: Make it easy to subscribe #3. Track visitors: Blogger: Use Google Analytics tracker to track number of blog visitors WordPress: Stats on Dashboard, or use independent tracker eg: http://extremetracking.com or Google: “free trackers”

8 Blogging tips

#4. Promote, promote, promote

Use Facebook My Blog app to automate blog post updates, use Twitter, heads-up to other bloggers.

#5. Link out

Link to related articles within, link to articles you are commenting about, link your pics to the article you refer, link to major news sites, A-list bloggers, update your blogroll.

#6. Track popular posts, subscribe to feeds

Use Digg, delicious, slashdot.org, Alltop, uClue.de

#7. Moderate comments, respond, thank visitors

Delete the nasties, banish trolls and spammers

#8. Blogging takes time and effort

Don’t give it up so easily. Be patient.

15 Blog post ideas

Archive weekly newsletter

Do profile on “Member of the Month”.

Do event promo on project of the month

List 5 or 10 ideas, trends, or thoughts

Link bait: Publish a list of links on a specific subject

Relate a recent experience, or anecdotal story

Answer questions you received recently

Comment on other blog posts

Turn a press release into a blog post, eg: the insider view of a project

Trade guest posts with other Rotary clubs

Post pictures or video of recent event

Record audio of speaker, or speech and post

Embed presentation

Embed Rotary video from YouTube

Post slideshow of recent project or event

Podcasting A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to download or subscribe.

HOW TO PODCAST: Five easy steps

Plug a headset with earphone and microphone into your computer.

Install the free Audacity MP3 recorder from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Download LAME from http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/

Unzip it and note where the file lame_enc.dll is on your computer.

Make a recording, then save it as an MP3 file

Create an RSS feed using a Podcast RSS Feed Generator* and upload to your website or post to a podcast host.

*http://podcastgen.sourceforge.net http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/podcast-generator.php

Podcast catchers

iTunes

http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Juice

http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/

Doppler

http://www.dopplerradio.net

Basic podcasting software

http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/13-basic-podcasting-software.htm

Podcast links

http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com

http://podcast.thestar.com.my

http://audio.weblogs.com

http://www.podcast.net

http://www.odeo.com

http://www.podcastingnews.com

http://www.itconversations.com

http://thisweekintech.com

http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts

http://penanghokkien.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/waystolisten/podcasts/guide

http://www.audblog.com

Case Study 6 : Robert Scoble

"He has succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years; he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world,“ The Economist

Case study 6: Scobleizer

Posted 700 videos of employees in 60,000-staff company

Videos shot with US$750 camera without any scripting, little preparation, editing

Posted at channel9.msdn.com

Case study 7: Viral videos http://www.willitblend.com

6 million views in 5 days

Was 3rd most viewed video on YouTube

2006 revenue up 43%

Blendtec, little-known blender company spends US$50 to make unusual video

Start a YouTube channel

http://www.youtube.com/t/ngo_tips

The Pope’s on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/rotaryinternational

Tips on posting video on YouTube

Keep it short: 3 minutes max.

Homemade is fine: be creative.

Title and tags must have descriptive keywords that pull-in viewers.

Resize to 640x480 res: QuickTime .mov, Windows .avi, .mpg, .3gp or mpeg4 (Divx, Xvid) with mp3 audio.

Try making slideshows using MS Photostory:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoStory/default.mspx

Useful YouTube links

General help

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/

YouTube Help videos

http://www.youtube.com/user/YouTubeHelp

Ten Ways You Can Use YouTube To Promote Your Online Content http://www.masternewmedia.org

YouTube Marketing

http://www.youtubemarketing.net

50 YouTube tricks and tips

http://chris.pirillo.com/50-youtube-and-online-video-tips-and-tricks

Tips on Photos

People like seeing people online.

Buy a decent digital camera

Always upload in smaller sizes: 800x600 or smaller, 150KB or smaller, unless you plan to allow users to print

Use Picasa to edit: http://picasa.google.com, picasaweb.google.com ( Caveat: Picasa automatically makes duplicates of your pics, so if you have many pics in hard-disk, empty My Pictures folder, and manually import)