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6 Ways To Make Life Easier With Del.icio.us

08.04.07

Since I started using it regularly about six months ago, del.icio.us has rapidly become one of my most-used tools.

If you haven’t started using the service seriously, I suggest you do so. Here’s a quick primer (skip to below if you’re already a pro):

Obviously, if you like, you can just use del.icio.us to save articles and sites for future reference. You won’t be using even half of its potential though.

Here are six more ways you can use del.icio.us to make life easier for you and the people around you.

Let other people do your surfing for you

This is my favourite use for del.icio.us, and it’s based on the ‘social’ side of the tool.

Del.icio.us lets you add people to your del.icio.us ‘network.’ Find out the usernames of people you respect (look on their other sites, or just ask them) and add them to your network. Then, use your RSS reader to subscribe to the links from your network.

Why?

Because if you only add people you know and trust, you can use them to do your reading for you.

No more trawling through hundreds of useless posts in the hope of finding one or two nuggets. No more mind-numbing sessions hitting ‘next’ on your RSS reader for what feels like forever. You only see the posts that your contacts have deemed worthy of saving.

I keep my network to a small number (about 20), but those 20 people provide between a third and a half of the posts I read every day, and a much higher proportion of the articles I bookmark myself.

Queue up blog topics

Some people are blogging machines who manage to churn out posts in advance of when they need them so they always have a bunch lined up.

Me? Not so much, and as much as I think most people would love to be sitting on a store of posts, I’d be surprised if they are.

You can make your life easier by bookmarking things you might want to write about. Just tag it with “toBlog” or something similar, then when you’re stuck for something to write about, flip to your list of “toBlog” articles.

Search engine

Del.icio.us can serve as an excellent backup if search engines fail you. Not only will a quick del.icio.us search throw up your own saves, it will show the top ones saved by other people too.

Power tip: You can search for tag combinations direct from your address bar – type http://del.icio.us/tag/[tag1]+[tag2] to pull up all the posts that are tagged with both.

Track coverage of you/your organization/your clients

This is fairly obvious for communications pros you can use del.icio.us to keep a record of media coverage related to your company or clients – bookmark articles with ‘coverage.’

Power tip: For bonus points, create a ‘coverage’ bundle, and group articles on different topics within it.

Non-communications folks can use this idea too. Want to keep track of articles where you’re mentioned? Want to remember who’s written about your site? Del.icio.us is a great way to keep it all organized in one place

Track topics

Del.icio.us lets you ‘subscribe’ to tags so you see everything that’s saved with that tag. Go to your del.icio.us settings and click ‘subscriptions,’ then enter the keywords you’re interested in.

Let’s say you’re interested in marathon running, and you want to keep up with the top posts on that subject. In this case, you might subscribe to ‘marathon’ or ‘running.’ You can view your subscriptions by clicking the ‘subscriptions’ link at the top of the page, or by going to http://del.icio.us/subscriptions/[username]

If you use an RSS reader, it’s even easier. Search for whatever you’re interested in, then scroll to the bottom of the page, click the ‘RSS’ button and let the subscriptions come to you.

Power tip: For slightly more advanced tracking features, try these:

Combined tags: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/[tag1]+[tag2]
Popular tags: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/[tag]
Users: http://del.icio.us/rss/[username]

Provide a resource for others

Del.icio.us is a powerful enough tool if you use it on your own, but it becomes even more useful when you remember that it is a social bookmarking tool and help others to benefit from your reading too.

Del.icio.us allows access to the articles you save using the address http://del.icio.us/[username]/[tag].

For example, I save useful case studies here: http://del.icio.us/davefleet/case_studies

If you read a lot on a work-related topic, why not provide a link to those articles to your co-workers?

Power Tip: Another powerful, although slightly more blunt, tool is the option to publish a daily blog post of articles you’ve bookmarked. Go to your del.icio.us settings, scroll to the bottom and select ‘daily blog posting’ for information on how to set this up.

If you decide to set up a daily blog post, be sure to enter a good description for every article you save from now on (you already did this though, right?). The description will be the only context readers are given about the links you save.

Conclusion

So there you have it – six more ways that del.icio.us can make life (both yours and others’) a little easier.

Do you use del.icio.us in a different way? How do you use it?

Posted in: 201, how to, social bookmarking, tagging

30Comments

8 Questions To Ask Before Using YouTube As A Communications Tool

08.03.16

As communications professionals, it’s very easy to get caught up in the hype and excitement about all the new online communications tactics we have available to us today. YouTube is a great example. It’s tempting to view tools like this as a silver bullet for our communications woes.

YouTube used to be primarily a great source for videos of music and kids hurting themselves on skateboards. No longer. It’s becoming a more common tool for corporate communications.

Your management may want to rush out, jump into the deep end and start using YouTube to communicate directly with people. If you can, you should get them to pause and consider several questions first:

What are your objectives?

What do you want to get out of this communications effort?

What do you want to achieve? Do you want to drive people to your website? Increase sales elsewhere? Raise awareness? Stimulate behaviour change? Generate discussion? Does video help you reach this objective?

Who’s your target audience?

A few interesting stats for YouTube’s U.S. audience:

51% male; 49% female
60% of users aged over 35 (18% under 18; 20% aged 18-34)
71% employed; 15% students
47% married
69% college educated

Not what you’d expect, is it?

Are you looking for sustained interest?

Is this a one-off, or part of a sustained campaign? Who will produce follow-up videos? What will they be about?

It may not be necessary to publish regular videos (the Dove Evolution video, for example, was highly successful without being part of a frequent series). However, if regular videos are the intention, consider how that process will work.

Do you have the resources to do this in-house? Do you have the budget to outsource it? You may be better off buying a decent video camera and editing suite and training your staff to produce and edit video. You’ll re-coup this cost quickly if you’re producing videos regularly.

How will you measure success?

Please, oh please, don’t use views as your only success criteria.

Yes, video views are a helpful indicator of your video’s reach. However, they don’t tell you whether people absorbed your message or whether they took any action based on it. I’m no measurement guru, but video views SUCK as a success criteria. It’s like citing TV audience as a success criteria for TV advertising.

Find a way to at least measure a proxy for your objectives.

Do you have a good visual for video?

Rigid, scripted talking heads make for boring video. Don’t expect great pick-up if your video is boring. Be interesting or be forgotten.

How will you handle comments?

Decide how you’re going to deal with comments on the video – both text and video.

First, are you ready to accept negative comments? Assuming you enable comments, how will you respond to them? And who will respond?

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article outlining five approaches that companies use to deal with "negative consumer- and employee-generated content on the Web."

Do nothing
Put the lawyers on it
Throw money at the problem
Invite and engage the critics
Stop it before it starts

If your company plans to do anything other than options four or five, consider whether you should enable comments. You may get criticized for not doing so, but it may be better than the criticism you’ll get if you allow them and don’t respond or respond inappropriately.

Will you allow ratings?

Are you going to let people rate your video?

I would suggest that if you’re not confident about the video, you shouldn’t upload it but we all know that sometimes these decisions are out of our hands.

Will you let people embed the video?

This may be a no-brainer, but the last thing you want is your boss calling you up and asking why your video is up on someone else’s website. You could argue that if people don’t like the possibility of this happening then maybe you should re-examine YouTube videos as a tactic for your campaign.

YouTube can be a great tactic but if you’re looking for a traditional one-way, controlled information flow, perhaps it isn’t the best tactic for you.

Conclusion

This is a basic list of fundamental questions you should answer before you launch into using videos on YouTube (or another video site) as a communications tactic. This is just a start, and some of these questions should already be part of your communications planning process.

Also, please remember, don’t have a YouTube strategy. This is just another tactic to add to your toolkit.

If you treat YouTube videos as a standalone piece, handled separately from the rest of your communications, they’re likely to fail. Throwing out random videos is about as likely to get you somewhere as throwing out random press releases (if a video is published and no-one views it, was it really published?). Think strategically. Think about this in conjunction with your other communications products.

If you’ve used YouTube as a communications tool, what lessons have you learned? What other questions should people ask before diving in?

Posted in: 201, how to, social media, youtube

7Comments

First Impressions of PRX Builder Social Media Release Plugin

08.03.10

There’s lots of interesting stuff going on with social media releases right now. First, we have the news from last week that IABC is sponsoring development of standards for this new format. Business Wire and PR Web have already jumped on-board.

Today, on a different scale, we have a new tool to help practitioners implement social media releases.

Shannon Whitley, a member of the existing social media release working group, today released a WordPress plugin to embed PRX Builder into your WordPress blog.

I’ve only had a short time to play around with this tool, but my first impressions are good.

(Note: this post is a little more down-in-the-reeds than most of my posts. If you aren’t familiar with the social media release, you may want to read The “Social Media Press Release” Debuts, Elements of the Social Media Release, and scan the Social Media Training Wiki page on social media releases)

The Basics

If you haven’t encountered it before, PRX Builder is a tool for creating social media releases. With their interactive multimedia content, social media releases can be daunting. PRX Builder takes that complication away and makes creating social media releases as simple as filling in a form (the only thing it doesn’t do for you is write the content – I’m afraid you still have to do that).

For all the simplicity of creating the actual release, PRX Builder is still intimidating when it comes to the original set-up. The homepage is full of enough talk of APIs and PHP to dissuade non-technical users. There was some integration with MS Office and with WordPress already, but it was somewhat confusing.

Good news: The new plugin removes even that barrier.

Setting up the plugin is no different to installing any other plugin in WordPress.

Using The Plugin

Once you’ve installed the plugin and set up an account (no personal information required), the plugin walks you through nine steps to creating your release.

Isn’t nine a lot? No, because each of those steps is broken down to its basics, making them easy to complete if you’ve done your preparation work for the release. What’s more, you can save and come back to the release at any point.

The icing on the cake: PRX Builder plugin lets you modify

The nine steps:

Start – set up the basic details for the release
Contact – input the contact details for your spokespeople
Text – enter the core content for your release
Categories – optimize the release for search engines (the plugin links to some useful articles) and select categories for it
Links – create links for the “Related Links” section of your release. Again very easy – you can event import them from del.icio.us
Multimedia – link to multimedia content that will be integrated into the release. You can easily import from YouTube and Flickr, but you can use other media forms too
Quotes – attributable quotes for the release
Boilerplate – standard text for the end of the release
Finish – select your release’s template, set a few last options and choose how to distribute your release (PRX Builder integrates with PR Newswire if you want to go that route)

With those nine steps done, you’re done! And you didn’t need to do anything except fill in text fields. Easy, huh?

Screenshots (click to zoom)

A Few Tweaks

I did notice a couple of things that could be tweaked to make the tool more accessible:

Plain language - in general the plugin explains things well, but there are a couple of places that it does fall short, notably the ‘Finish’ screen. The text assumes that users know exactly what’s going on in terms of technical details, which may not be the case. The experience could be improved somewhat by explaining some of the terms, options and processes better.
Support - this plugin is way more complex to use than most of the others I’ve encountered. This is fine, as it’s a complex process and the tool does an admirable job of simplifying it to the point it’s at. Still, more comprehensive support documentation would be useful throughout.
Other wire services - this is as much a call to the wire services as to Shannon Whitley. At present, PR Newswire (along with PRX Builder’s own distribution service) is the only wire service that works with PRX Builder. It would be great to see services like Marketwire and CNW get on board with this.

As I said at the beginning, I haven’t had a chance to play around too much with this tool yet, but it has great potential and I plan to use it more fully at my next opportunity. I’ll report back in at that point.

Have you explored this plugin, PRX Builder? What did you think? What do you think of social media releases in general?

Posted in: 301, how to, smnr, tools

4Comments

What Is RSS?

08.03.01

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be confusing if you know little about it. Other people blather on about “subscribing,” “feeds,” “readers” and the like, while you have no idea what they’re talking about.

If this describes you, you’re in the right place.

You can find definitions for “RSS” everywhere. Feedburner has a page on it; What Is RSS? is all about it; Wikipedia has a detailed page about it. The list goes on and on.

They’re all way too complicated.

You probably want to know more than just what RSS is. You also want to know why you should care, right? You’re busy enough already – you need a reason to add yet another thing to your life.

RSS, in really simple language

Here’s a great analogy for RSS, from Ed Lee (edited slightly):

Your web content is like water in a lake. Lots of people want it and you want them to have it.

But, to get it, they need to visit the lake, fill their buckets and then go back to their homes to use it.

RSS enables your audience to create a stream from your lake (where the content is) to their home (where they need the content).

I also like an explanation that Chris Anderson uses (paraphrased) (hat tip – Mitch Joel):

We used to have to go out and find stuff – news, sites, etc… RSS lets the web come to you.

For a slightly longer (3 minute) explanation, here’s a brilliant video from the Common Craft Show on what RSS is and how to use it:

Does this make sense to you?

(photo credit: photopia)

Posted in: 101, how to, tools

Tags: Common Craft Show, Ed Lee, RSS

4Comments

How To Use Twitter Packs — And Twitter — Successfully

08.01.28

Twitter can be pretty intimidating. To people just starting out following few people, and with few followers of their own, it can seem like their words are disappearing into the ether.

After a few days of broadcasting into silence, those people drift away having never realized the immense potential of this tool.

I recently wrote about how to find people to follow on Twitter. Chris Brogan has gone one better.

The idea? Twitter Packs.

If someone were joining Twitter today, who should they follow?

The idea behind Twitter Packs is simple – create lists of people with shared interests, geography, etc, so that new users can find a few good people to follow and help them get up to speed on Twitter. Chris decided to use a wiki to let the community contribute to the lists.

Great idea in my book.

Problems

However, there are a few problems with the result. They largely result from the tool that is being used – the wiki.

Why? Because people on these lists may, over time, gain a lot of followers. As a result, a lot of people want to be on those lists – just like Jeremiah Owyang‘s follow-fest a while back. In fact, the demand for the site has been so high that it was pretty hard to get access to edit the wiki for large parts of today.

Simply put, there’s a lot of chaff in amongst the wheat.

Another potential flaw – the possibility that these ‘packs’ lead to Twitter cliques and undermine the openness that is responsible for much of Twitter’s success. The potential is especially large with some of the race/sexual orientation/religion groups. However, that’s not the intention and I would hope there are equal benefits for people who may look for connections and support within those groups.

So, yes, there are flaws. Chris openly acknowledges the problems with Twitter Packs.

Still, it’s fundamentally a good idea. The question is:

How can you use Twitter Packs successfully?

I recommend four principles, which you can also apply to Twitter in general:

Open up

The sheer number of people who want to get involved requires Twitter Packs to split into narrowly-defined groups. Remember, though: they’re not intended to narrow your perspective.

If you live in Toronto (hello!) don’t just follow Torontonians. If you’re a marketer, consider following people in other professions. If you’re a runner, you’ll likely have things in common with cyclists too.

Be open with other people. Be careful, as you should always be online, but don’t define your own horizons as narrowly as these groups.

Recommendations as a guide, not as a rule book

Start with the lists and work from there. Don’t stop at the end of the list. Look at who those people are following. Who do you find interesting? Who says things that are relevant to you? Consider whether you want to follow them too.

Use your judgement

There’s a lot of “me too!” in the Twitter Packs. Don’t follow people blindly. Read what they say. Check out their blogs. Get a sense of who they are before you follow them.

Define “useful” as it applies to you. Don’t clutter your airwaves with people that have nothing useful to say.

Take Your Time

Ease in to your new-found community. Don’t rush in.

As you follow more and more people on Twitter, the way you use the tool will need to change. For example, you won’t be able to follow every message any more – you’ll have to be more selective. That’s a difficult enough transition without leaping head-first into it.

Furthermore, people will look at your follow/follower ration when they decide whether to follow you back (i.e. whether to listen to you) or not. Why? To avoid following the spammers who are starting to appear on Twitter. If you add a tonne of people at once it will skew your numbers, reduce the likelihood of people following you and lower the chance of you having a productive, positive experience.