Technorati claim code

JQDPJAFQYKS2

Making social media manageable: One click posting to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious and more

Social media takes a time. A lot of time if you want to do it well, and on a range of platforms.

So how helpful would it be if you could get one-click posting that sent your multimedia content to a wide range of platforms?

Over the past week I’ve been trying out Posterous, http://posterous.com a tool that promises to do just that.

Posterous acts as a distribution centre. Post once to it via an email and your content is sent on to all the other platforms you have indicated you want to post to: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, blogs on networks including Blogger and WordPress, Delicious, FriendFeed and more.

So you send Posterous an email and, depending on what platform it is posting your content on to, the subject line becomes your heading, the body of the email your text, links are converted into Posterous’s own post.ly shortform, and video -- via links or html – is embed on each appropriate platform. They say you can attach any type of file and they'll post it along with the text of your email: photos, MP3s, documents and video as either links or files.

You also get, at the heart of all this, your own Posterous blog, which might be more appropriate for individual bloggers within a company than for presenting the overall title or brand. That blog also presents your profile and offers links to your content on all the other platforms Posterous is distributing to on your behalf.

So how well does it work? Mostly, pretty well. The tweets are fine. The Facebook content brings heading, short text and image together smoothly.

I found it didn’t always file seamlessly to YouTube, and not all my posts went to Delicious for some reason, or to Flickr. Also, it doesn’t seem to like html code for embedding video into my Blogger blog; it prefers a link. Oh, and the promised post.ly url shortforms don’t seem to appear for me.

But, to be fair, I haven’t been exhaustive in my exploration of how to fine-tune Posterous, so there may well be quick fixes for these glitches.

You don’t have to file to all platforms all of the time. You can use tailored email addresses to specify to Posterous what platforms you want to post to, and you can always go into your Posterous blog and edit the content you have posted if something has gone wrong. Here’s mine: http://andybull.posterous.com/

Mashable did a comparison of Posterous and Tumblr http://mashable.com/2009/06/29/posterous-vs-tumblr/ and Posterous came out well. Mashable concluded: “We’re so much in love with the anytime, everywhere model that Posterous supports for blogging, lifestreaming, photo sharing, and video and audio posting. There’s just too much good stuff there to ignore.”

I’d agree with that. Certainly journalists and publishers are going to need tools like this if we are to make social media work for us.

Now, to see how things go, I shall file this post via email, with screen grabs as attachments, and see how it is rendered. There should be grabs with thsi post of my Posterous blog plus posts sent via Posterous to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and Friendfeed. If you follow the link to my Posterous  http://andybull.posterous.com/ you can follow on to the other platforms and see how things look.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Forrester on how consumers might pay for online content

No surprise that Forrester finds 80 per cent won't pay for online conent, but interesting results when they ask the other 20 per cent what payment model might work for them.

That throws up a wide range of pereferences

Forrester's blog says the data suggests two things:

1. Publishers should continue to offer free, ad-supported products to the 80% of consumers who won't pay for content online; and
2. Publishers should offer consumers a choice of multichannel subscriptions, single-channel subscriptions, and micropayments for premium product access.

Forester concludes: "There's no one delivery platform, and no one pricing model, that will satisfy all consumers. Consumer willingness to pay is so modest — and, in general, we find it tends to over-report in surveys — that publishers need to be extremely flexible to accommodate the needs of these precious customers.

Full report here: http://blogs.forrester.com/consumer_product_strategy/2009/11/new-forrester-report-consumers-weigh-in-on-paying-for-content.html

Posted via web from Andy's posterous

100 greatest quotes from The Wire

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Agencies not using social media well

The Gordon's Republic blog at BrandRepublic says: The ad agency world is not shining when it comes to using social media to market itself, according to new research, but is pretty good at setting things up blogs and Twitter accounts and then infrequently updating them. http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/gordons_republic/archive/2009/11/16/agencies-not-using-social-media-well.aspx

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

How do you get to study at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Stanford? Google it

Great thoughts from Jeff Jarvis on the scope for online universities

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

How Ford does social media

Zero'>http://vimeo.com/6799644">Zero to 60: Ford’s Social Media Story, by Scott Monty; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal'>http://vimeo.com/gaspedal">GasPedal on Vimeo'>http://vimeo.com">Vimeo.

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

How McDonalds does social media

Collaboration'>http://vimeo.com/6677308">Collaboration 2.0, by Heather Oldani and Steve Wilson; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal'>http://vimeo.com/gaspedal">GasPedal on Vimeo'>http://vimeo.com">Vimeo.

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Social media success stories

Social Media Business Council members share case study presentations on how they’re implementing social media at their organisations. There is a list of live case study presentations here http://bit.ly/wZJeO

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Penn Olson: Facebook keeps on rising

With tons of addictive games, quizzes and news feeds to keep its users entertained, Facebook has surely created a state-of-the-art site. http://www.penn-olson.com/2009/11/15/social-sites-while-everyone-falls-facebook-rises/

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Top 5 Must-Read Social Media Books

via mashable.com

Posted via web from Andy's posterous

Here's how the web will look in five years according to Google

http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/DigitalPM/News/966897/Heres-web-will-look-five-years-according-Google/?DCMP=EMC-Media-PM-Bulletin

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Jeff Jarvis video on a Googlier you

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Jeff Jarvis video on a Googlier you

Posted via email from Andy's posterous

Social media careers talk

This is the text of a talk I gave today to the University of London's Careers in the Media conference

Social media: A fad, or the biggest thing since the industrial revolution?

That video clip started by asking if social media was a fad, or the biggest thing since the industrial revolution.

Well, it’s definitely not the first.

What about the second?

Social media is part of a transformation in the way we communicate that is pretty revolutionary.

Social networking sites are fast becoming the way most people interact with friends when they can’t be with them.

Social networking sites are also becoming a very significant way for us to consume media: news, information, entertainment.

We pass on interesting things we’ve read or seen to our social circle

And if audiences are beginning to consume media in this new way, then publishers and journalists need to get in step with that.

This talk is about what social media means for publishers, journalists and journalism.

We’ve known for a while that the web was an opportunity, a challenge and a threat.

We see the fallout from the threat part in the dire state of local and national newspapers, as well as in other media such as commercial television

Let’s go back a bit to the old media world: the olden days.

Journalists created and controlled the content – in rigidly separated silos of print – newspapers and magazines – television and radio.

The means of production – the printing presses, the TV stations, the radio transmitters -- were very expensive, so only a few organisations had access to the means of production

Then along came the web.

We – journalists and publishers -- took our valuable content, which was easy to charge for in print, and we gave it away on the web.

We did that because we couldn’t work out a way to make people pay for it – with a few exceptions.

But we did create our own websites and a lot of people came to them to consume our news, information and entertainment.

Who got rich?

Number one: The search engines

They got very rich. But they’d have nothing without our content.

Number two: Those who exploited the commercial opportunities on the web

The big early web successes were Commercial – eBay and Amazon, for example.

They could make money because the web is a very convenient way to shop and buy.

Next came social networks – Facebook and Twitter are the ones everyone talks about at present.

As the video showed, many people are using social networks, and many more will do so in the near future.

I guess either Facebook or Twitter might prove to be fads, just as Friends Reunited has proved to be, but social media in general is not a fad.

If someone invents a network that is better than Facebook or Twitter, we’ll all go to that latest best thing.

So here’s the big question: Will social media get rich at our expense?

It might, but we need to do all we can to get a slice of the pie

To avoid losing out to social media we need to know how it works, and to use it to our advantage – because I believe it does offer journalists a great opportunity. Here’s why:

People share things on social networking sites. If I see something on a website that I think my friends or colleagues will like, I can share it with them.

Increasingly, websites – whether news, entertainment or pure commercial ones – are getting on the social media bandwagon

They are making it easy for those who visit them to take bits of their content and share it on Facebook, to Tweet it, or put it on a whole range of other networks.

So some in the media fear that what will now happen is that, having been robbed blind by the search engines, we are about to be robbed blind by the social networks

That’s a head in the sand way of looking at it.

Social media offers a great opportunity for journalists and publishers

It also transforms the way we work.

There is a view of news and information among those who like social networks: “If the news is that important, it will find me”

That means we can’t expect people anymore to come to our sites. We have to get our news and information in front of them.

And as they are on social networks so much of the time, the best way of getting our content in front of them is to get it onto those social networks.

So we must use social networks as a new publishing platform.

That’s why you see so many organisations starting their own Facebook pages, which they hope you’ll become a fan of.

Here’s something that is revolutionary: The audience are the new distributors

The press has to distribute its product in trucks.

With social networks, it is the readers who are the distributors. They pick up the things they like and share them – they distribute them for us.

This is revolutionary for newspapers but well known in book publishing. They’ve known for a long time that the best advert for a book is a personal recommendation.

Now all sorts of marketing, advertising, news, entertainment and information is being passed on by personal recommendation.

We call it ‘viral marketing’

That’s how phenomena such as Cadbury’s drumming gorilla became so successful.

Coca Cola has a massive social networking campaign on the theme of happiness.

Journalists and publishers must be as creative in their use of social media as a marketing opportunity as the big corporations are showing they can be.

We must enter into a conversation with the people who find us, who become fans of our pages and who retweet our news stories.

We must listen to what they say.

We must take what they tell us and use it to create information and entertainment that better suits their information needs and interests.

If we don’t do that we won’t reach them

The opportunities social media provide for journalists and publishers are enormous.

I work with a publisher called Haymarket which produces a wide range of fantastically good magazines: Stuff, FourFourTwo, Pistonheads, What Car, Autocar.

Most people like glossy magazines at certain times – they like to sit with them when they have time and read in depth.

It’s the same for a lot of people, still, with the Sunday papers.

But in the age of social networks, how will we get new readers for our print products?

How will they hear of us? Well, they won’t, unless we are present in the places they go. So we need to be on social networks

There is a phrase – fish where the fish are

If the fish (our future readers, viewers – those who will one day buy our product) are on social networks, that’s where we must fish for them.

That’s just the start of a relationship with our audience that will draw them to our websites and print products.

Because, while it’s easy to share a quick video clip or a short snippet of information on social networks, you can’t go into a subject in any depth. When it comes to dense, detailed information – when you really want to know something in depth -- then you are better off with a hard copy.

Most people, if you ask them what they do when they are on the web and they find something they really want to read in detail, they’ll tell you they print it out.

So what’s a newspaper or a magazine? It’s a print out.

And what about if you want to make a big purchase – a new car for example.

You’ll want to do a lot of checking and comparing.

You’ll ask your friends what they think

And if a magazine such as What Car? has been mentioned by one of your friends, or known to you on the social network you use, then there is a reasonable chance you’ll think of that title when you decide where you will go for the really detailed information you need in order to make an informed choice.

Journalists have lost a lot of confidence recently.

Because their material has been given away free, they’ve lost faith in its value. And those who take it, who pick up Metro or whatever, don’t really value it very highly either. Actually, a lot of free stuff isn’t worth much.

But what journalists used to do, do now and will always do, is create material that is of value.

A reader values high quality, accurate information when they need it. They also value a magazine that really entertains them.

What journalists must do with social media is use it to become well known and liked by a new audience. They have to show that audience that they have valuable stuff to offer.

So what about those of you who are thinking of becoming journalists now?

You probably know instinctively how social media works, and use it extensively

If you can add to that good training in the fundamentals of journalism – they never change, however our material is distributed -- then you will have a winning combination, and you’ll be equipped to become a truly effective 21^st century journalist