And the Beat Goes On…

I’m not gonna lie, I feel the last couple chapters have a lot of overlapping information and now looking back, I’ve probably made some statements that would have been a better fit on a different blog.  Regardless, it’s all coming from the same book and ending on the same blog so I will continue my thoughts and audio and podcasts in this one!

This chapter talks about itunes and audio sharing. I will confess that I had once been a user of Limewire until I knew all the problems and implications it encountered. From that point forward, I have switched to itunes and must say the increase from 99 cents to $1.29 has made quite a significant impact on my purchasing decisions. I know, what’s 30 cents right? But I am one of those people who only gets on about once a month to download new music all at once and those extra cents add up. I seriously made a conscience decision if I really think I’ll listen to the song before purchasing it opposed to the click-happy-fingers I had in the 99 cent days! I really hope this is not like the gas world and prices will continue to rise over the years… Errrrrr 😦

I also use my phone as an MP3 player. I find this extremely beneficial when going on runs outside. Yes, I have an ipod but by using my cell phone, I also have a phone to make an emergency call if needed so I view it as the best of both (safe) worlds!

Along with my iTunes and audio sharing, I’m also a big user of the iMovie application on my MacBook Pro. I’ve never taken a class outside of the couple days we spent in Avid, but being a huge fan of photography, adding pictures to music brings the experience to a whole new dimension due to the addition of another sense (hearing). I’ve even offered to make my brother’s wedding video to be shown at the reception.  (What was I thinking being the perfectionist that I am, knowing this will take hours and it has to be perfect because everyone will know I did it!?) Well, not only will it be one of the most personal projects I’ve done and the most time consuming, but it’ll be great to add in my portfolio that might lead Graphic Fruition with the opportunity of doing more wedding videos in the years ahead.  Here is an iMovie that I did for Scarlet Guard’s End-of-the-Year party last Spring.  I will warn you it’s 12 minutes long, but a great showcase and recruiting piece of what our student organization is all about. Plus, I think it turned out pretty cool!  Enjoy!

Can You Hear Me Now?

At first, I think that I’m not too familiar with Podcasts but when I stop to break it down, podcasts are everywhere. They’re short videos with personal or informational interviews, they’re books on tape that i can listen to in the car or they can be my personal favorite –  a single song in MP3 mode that’s one of the 10 billionth song downloaded from iTunes. It’s amazing how fast those $1.29 songs can add up, just ask my bank account!

Although I’ve never wrote or produces a song, the closest thing to a podcast would be when I worked with former radio reporter Jeff Sheldon to write and record the script for this short video about the Cornhusker Compass, a personalized yearbook and campus guide that’s exclusive to Scarlet Guard members. We visited our ala mater at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and sat in a sound booth to record his voice over. We then used software to edit his tone and sounds, added pictures, videos and put it all together to come up with this informational piece:

Another cool application is Jing where a person can record their movements/actions on their computer and sharing instantly with anyone around the world. For example, lets say you want to show your mother (who’s not as technologically advanced as you are) how to download pictures from a digital camera and upload them to a online photo album. You would press “capture” on Jing to start recording your actions and then send this file to your mom and she can see exactly what you were doing step by step like she was here with you in person! Going along with podcasts, you can also plug in a microphone and talk through any presentation or demonstration that you record. This is great tool for teachers with online classes all the way to business who take pride in their customer service!

As Safko mentions on page 194, “If your podcasts contains valuable takeaways, your listeners will continue to come back for more.”  So make it entertaining, informational and don’t forget to be real!

Think Before You Post

I had to laugh when I read the “Back to the Beginning” in Chapter 9 on page 176 when they talked about the tedious process of getting pictures from a camera to the computer and here’s why:  Back in 7th grade, my best friend and I lived on Yahoo Chat and at that time we also created homepages and although I don’t remember what website it was through but we were the FIRST two of our friends who had access to a scanner! I remember when I opened the flatbed scanner at my birthday party and everyone gasped. We thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread and spent the next hours scanning prints and uploading them to our site!  Little did we know then how easy a we’d have it one day with a digital camera and USB cord!

I have grown up around photography as my both my grandfather and mother were professional photographers. This past Christmas, my mother received the EOS Rebel T2i by Canon with a 18 mega pixels and it’s AMAZING! Not only can you tell the difference in quality of photos but there are numerous settings, focus points, lighting options and the ability to shoot HD movies which capture 3.7 frames a second. If you’re the photographer for a company where images are important to showcase what you have to offer, it’s definitely worth the extra money for the next step up in cameras.

A major concern I have with this chapter is the lack of information about the con’s of geotagging and something that everyone should be aware of. The book does a great job of discussing meta tags and tracking your photos but a lot of people are unaware that every phone made after 2005 is required to have geotagging on (normally by longitude and latitude). What’s the big deal?  If you are posting photos from your phone to a social media site, people can track your exact location and find where you live, if you’re home or not and your every move.  This online article from NBC talks more about the con’s of geotagging and not to be a debbie downer, I just believe everyone should be aware in case they’d choose to disable this function. (You can remove metadata with free software from BatchPurify LITE.)

Overall, having a presence on the web is huge and I agree positive photographs that display your company in a good light should take every advantage of this free marketing opportunity but make sure each photograph has a purpose!

Wiki-Wiki

Being introduced to wikipedia.org while I was in college, gave me a negative connotation about the website; only because most teacher’s stated they would not accept a sourcing from wikipedia as a credited web site and not to waste our time researching there when writing a paper. What I’ve learned from reading chapter eight is wiki’s

I also didn’t realize the number of wiki websites. I thought wiki was short for wikipedia and there was only one. What I’ve learned is wiki stands for “fast” or “quick” and it’s a type of website where the audience (regulated or freely) can create new pages, input data, change statements or update new information using SML language or “wikitext.”  My one question is with the thousands if not millions of wiki websites out there, who regulates the changes and even in an open forum does someone still have to process them? I’m thinking specifically of wikipedia which hosts more information than an encyclopedia!

More thoughts on wikipedia… Having only used this sight as a quick search reference, I spent some time exploring the other tabs and things offered and came across some interesting findings. Located on the left hand side under the main page, there’s a current events tab where daily information is uploaded along with any breaking news and links to the story. There’s also a random article tab where a new discovery or random item is thrown out there and wiki is looking for people to expand and add information. I would assume this is how a lot of the unique entries are created. There’s also a toolbox to upload your own files and a place to print off sections to create a book if you’re a teacher or maybe presenting at a conference. Overall, wikipedia is way more detailed and developed site than I ever thought!

Another site from the book that caught my attention was MyGad.com After watching the demo video (below), I honestly might sign up and create an account. Items that I might include are my frequent flyer miles, license plate number, license number, birthdays, passwords, deadlines and any other information I’m often asked for once or twice a year that I tend to forget.  I could see our company using it for scheduling events; especially who’s working what football games on what weekend. Intern schedule would be great as well to give them a place to check their schedule if they’re out of the office and don’t have access to our system. How cool! 

Thank you chapter eight for expanding my knowledge and giving me new websites to try out and incorporate into my daily living!

 

I Learned Something New in the Social Media World!

I now can justify spending my time and money spent on this class as I have set up my “reader” account within google.  This means I can now start subscribing to websites, blogs and anything that contains an RSS – Real Simple Syndication.  This is something I have always wanted to do, and although it only took a few seconds, reading chapter six inspired me to expand my knowledge and actually do it!

I also learned what that crazy little box is with funny words that I often have to verify before submitting a post or created an I.D. The CAPTCHA code stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.  (Now that is an acronym!) I understand now, why it’s important to able it on blogs and registration sites to help from being automatically spammed and will use them from this point moving forward.

Forums are a great way to create the sense of community and build a trusting resource that people can go to for information and know they’ll receive honest opinions.  Chapter six talks about the community of a forum being centered around a theme or common interest. There are forums for everything you can image from video games and special codes to pets, sporting teams and thousands for cooking recipes and tricks. Although I believe my company is too small, I like the idea of having forums within a company’s intranet. For a large corporation with many offices worldwide like Pepsi or Honda, this would provide a great place for workers to be open and honest, ask what’s worked and share what hasn’t without letting the outside world/public know something didn’t necessarily go as planne. I know I’ve sent an e-mail to my closest 5 friends to throw a question out there and hope someone has an answer for me! This is exactly what forums can be used for on a personal and professional level.

I checked out www.yuku.com and watched the demo video. It seems like a great concept for someone to blog, post pictures and participate in forums but reminded me of just another social media network or community to belong to with a profile, pictures and updates. The book talks about having up to 5 different profiles on the page but only one account. Are these accounts interest specific?  Would I have one profile for cooking and one for sports?  I’d be interested to hear from someone who has used yuku and what they think!

A Good Starting Point with a Long Ways to Go…

I found chapter five very intriguing as we (my generation) forget there was a time with no world wide web. If you wanted to correspond with someone, you wrote a hand written letter and put it in the mail with a stamp.  If you wanted to drive across the country for a summer vacation, you mapped it out in an atlas. I remember my mother buying an atlas every year and then ripping the states out that we were going to travel through and high lighting the roads, exits and turns.  This was all before there was mapquest.com and garmins that could be updated annually via the web.

Three things I was surprised to learn within this chapter were:

1. The breakdown of users worldwide for the web and North America falling third to Asia and Europe. I admit that I often forget how populated other countries are compared to the United States and that we’re not always the leader of technology and innovation.
2. The term “surf the web” came from the cocreator Vinton Cerf’s contributions.
3. The first screenshot of the web’s address was displayed in gray scale . The link listed in our book was no longer available but I found one which I believe is similar (image below)

Last summer, I took New Media Design with Adam Wagnor where we learned code and html (which was a completely foreign language to me at the time) and went on to develop our own website for our final project. Safkos’ ideas to incorporate into a website was a good refresher course when thinking strategically about the design of a website as he states, “It’s not about your home page; it’s about everything that comes after.”  I would say the most important thing he touched upon was number four:  Signal you’re still there – often.  Refreshing the content on your homepage or within the website is a great reason for people to come back; especially if your organization works in reporting news, results or events.

A few more ideas that I learned from Adam’s class which weren’t mentioned in the book are:

• Never use the words or phrase:  “Welcome to my sight…” or “This website is about Jenny Green….” Even if you’re a one person show, let the audience think you’re a whole projection team and company.
• Adam suggested not having a lot of text on your homepage or intro/landing page. Although it needs to follow the same theme, look and feel, the first page the audience sees needs to be eye catching and designed well to have an immediate impact and make it a “sticky” site.
• Not to use flash as the audience might not have the same technology or connection that you designed it for so this could take a lot longer to load which in return could annoy the audience as a waste of their time and then loose them to a different site.
• Agreeing with what was stated on page 97 about the tendency of the eye to scan across a webpage in a “Z” path, always place your logo or an important image in the upper left corner on EVERY page and always have that logo linked back to the homepage if clicked.

The website I create and wrote the code for is www.graphicfruition.com  This is my side small business that I hope to one day expand more. The website is a starting point and ok for now but I definitely look forwade to the day when I have time to add lightboxes to the graphic page, an order online form for the letter art and maybe even my personal blog. As the book suggested, I use google analytics to track visitors, pages views and find out what people are most interested. My only frustration is the fact there’s just not enough time in a day to do everything I wish to do with my website.

Who Knew?

Who knew you could do so much with an e-mail?  With today’s technology you can now personalize an e-mail with their name (merged from an excel list), track the open rate, the click through number, the pass-alongs and even which e-mails bounce back from a wrong address or domain name. All of this is essential because it helps a company communicate efficiently  by saving time, energy and the ability to target their audience which in returns increases the ROI and lessens the chance of an opt-out from a customer.

As the adviser of Scarlet Guard and overseeing 500 college students with 25 events each school year, it’s imperative that I communicate with my students efficiently and make sure they open each e-mail I send them and pay attention to my facebook posts so they know the latest news, schedule of events and participate in our online contests. In chapter 4, I could really relate to Safko when he spoke about the importance of day parting.  I have spent the past year figuring out the best timing to send e-mails and reach my students on facebook. Here is what I’ve found:

Scarlet Guard students:

• average a 40% open rate on e-mails blasts (which is extremely high) compared to the national e-mail open rate average.
• after a segmenting test, open an e-mail from the sender “Scarlet Guard” verse “Adviser Jenny Green”.
• have a very low click through rate.
• 95% are on facebook (I do know students who are making a statement by not joining facebook).
• spend the most leisure time on FB from 7 p.m. – midnight.
• respond to my posts and comment, “like” and post pictures in response the most from 7 p.m. – midnight verse 8 a.m. to noon when it’s most convenient for me because I’m at work!
• EASILY respond to private facebook messages fast than e-mails (even if they’re in class!)
• live, breath and communicate daily (if not hourly) with their peers on facebook.

Last week, I created a second profile on facebook exclusive to Scarlet Guard members as a place for them to ask questions, contact me as well as keeping my personal profile (and life) separate. I was astonished to see that after I went through our membership list and added everyone I could find on facebook along with a message of who I was and why I was adding them, I had 140 students accept my friend request OVER NIGHT and another 60 students within 72 hours of adding them. This shows how much students are on facebook and it’s reassuring to see that I have a vehicle for reaching these students that work.

As I think about our papers and projects that are due in this class, I would like to focus on Scarlet Guard and find better and more efficient ways to communicate with my students by testing segmentation more and reaching out on a personal level to build relationships. If I can accomplish this, our mission to engage and creating lasting relationships with the university will be at an all time high!

A Snapshot of History

It’s a great thought to know that in a push of a button, you can publish something on the web and within seconds can be seen all over the world – or is it a scary one!? What did we ever do without the world wide web and how did we ever compile research for our papers? I remember a teacher telling me in middle school that our generation’s biggest problem with the latest technology advances was going to be sorting through what’s accredited and what’s garbage that someone just published to publish.  To a certain degree, I think she’s right but I would gladly take that as a problem over not have the internet at all.

I found it very interesting to read through the history of symbols, words and the way we communicated for the last thousands of years. My father had the opportunity to go to Egypt for work when I was a little girl and he brought me back a night gown with hieroglyphs all over it that told a story.  At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and with my knowledge now, I’m even more impressed that an entire civilization with such a simple form of commutation went on to build some of the largest and most intriguing modern day mavals, the egyptian pyrimids.

While surfing the web for images of mnemonic symbols and cuneiform scripts (I’m always interested to put a picture with a new word), I found this video which I thought did a good job of showcasing the history of communication and even included pigeons and the typewriter which our book did not mention.

Chapter 3’s “Expert Insight” was very intriguing to me as I’ve never heard of zimbio.com before;  What’s more interesting is they claim to be on of the top 10 online magazines above Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated and US Weekly Online! If his stats are true, this shows the importance of having customer generated content on your site; allowing people to have a voice and share their opinion.  I wasn’t overly impressed with their homepage as it’s all beauty, celebrities and fashion.  They do have sections for nutrition, sports, culture, travel, etc but those are all stuck under a “more” tab. If the CEO Tony Mamone wouldn’t have mentioned that in his article, I would have never known or probably stayed on the page (following the 1.54 & 5 second rules) to find it. If they’re going to claim to be a one-stop-site for all types of news and information, I would highly encourage a more balanced homepage.

Learning how far we have come from thousands of years ago with communication and technology and the rapid inventions that have been discovered since my lifetime, it’s hard to image what devices and how we will be communicating with the world in the next 5-10 short years… If blogging is still around, I’ll make an update to this post to let you know 🙂

Overwhelmed Anyone?

It seems in the past months I’ve heard the expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know” more than 100 times and rightfully so with today’s economy and everyone preaching the importance of networking. Reading chapter 2, one thing I guess I never thought of before was the major advantages this economic downfall had over the depression era; and that is social media and the countless networking sights, most of which are free and easy to use.

The list of providers on page 36-37 became overwhelming much like the graphic below that I’m sure most people have seen before of all the social networking sites now available on the web:

But as Safko mentioned in chapter one on page 9, it’s all about categorizing and knowing where to go and what social media outlet to use for what you want to accomplish.  By doing this, you take the above image which seems impossible navigate through and turn it into something like the following:

Now this doesn’t seem so scary and it helps to know what’s out there, if I want to reach people through gaming verse discussion boards or even live streams; there’s a social media sight for that! A person could realistically spend almost every minute of their day participating in hundreds of networks but as stressed on page 26, “…social networking is not about the number of your contacts, but rather about the value that each brings.”  To imagine, there are now entire blogs and website designated to pregnancy and motherhood (i.e. text4baby that we discussed on our facebook group page)!

One social media that is a very niche network that I participate in is www.polevaultpower.com. This is a website dedicated specifically to pole vaulters across the world where you can get results from high school track meets all the way up to the Olympics. I met Becca Gillepsy about 10 years ago in Reno, Nevada at the National Pole Vault Summit where her site predominately served as a blog at that time.  Becca’s passion for covering and reporting on the sport has now given her the title “Queen of Social Media” in the pole vault world; heck the woman has over 2,000 friends on facebook!  She now receives credentials to all major track meets and has access to interview some of the best athletes from across the world for her website.  Any athlete and every coach who is serious about the pole vault world knows who Becca is and I personally am grateful for her dedication and coverage via social media. She is a true testimony to someone who has created thousands of friendships via networking and I know Becca is someone I can trust as my go-to source!

A Whole New World

I can remember when facebook hit the University of Nebraska’s campus. It was my freshman year and I lived in 518 Harper Hall. It was the 2003-2004 school year and everyone had to have a university e-mail address to create an account.  This was back in the day when friends were sorted by their colleges and no high schools, companies, non-profits or “old” people were allowed to use it. I would accredit this as to why people my age have so many “friends” because at that time it was ONLY about socializing and a way to reach grade school and high school friends and catch up. It wasn’t about breaking news or learning where the best deals in town were that day. I would also say this has given my generation the biggest challenge of transition; now being in their mid to upper 20’s and entering the work force where now teachers, bosses and co-workers use facebook to network, communicate and do business on a daily basis. People my age (at least a large majority) have forgetten about the photos they’ve been tagged in or uploaded back in their freshman year. At that time, we never dreamed that our parents, grandparents or one day bosses would be on facebook!  And then came the social media era…

Chapter 1 does a great job of explaining what social media is considering 66.4% of people said they couldn’t define it. I completely agree on page 5 when Safko states that “social media is only a new set of tools, new technology that allows us to more efficiently connect and build relationships with our customers and prospects.”  This set of tools in some businesses, has helped reduce the cost spent on marketing by reaching more people in a cheaper, if not free, way. For example this week at work, the Nebraska Alumni Association has decided to no longer offer the benefit of mailing postcards for our Alumni Chapters across the country. Instead of them (the chapter) sending us the information about an upcoming event in their area and us paying to design, print and mail those postcards out to their chapter members, we instead created a website and facebook template for each chapter to use that efficiently and cost effectively reaches their members. Not to mention that social media is now a faster vehicle and more accurate than some mailing addresses.

I believe the chapter was summed up by Safko’s sentence on page 6 stating, “By building relationships through social media, you build a more lasting trusted relationship that will result in more sales, fewer returns and great word of mouth.”  If you can connect and engage with someone and make them feel important and that their voice has been heard, they will be a customer for life. As the many stories depicted in this chapter, businesses can not hide from social media, they must embrace it and find  way to respond to the negative comments and turn those complaints into life time customers. All of the categories Safko previewed are about personalization and sharing with others. If a company wants to grow in this new world, it’s important to listen and then respond. After all, doesn’t the saying go, “God gave us two ears and one mouth!”

For the fun of it I did watch Dave Carroll’s video and 1) It definitely served it’s purpose with over 10 million views now and 2) LOVE that they mention Nebraska!