Archive for June, 2011
Written by Corrie Scott, June 29th, 2011
Wikipedia has introduced their ‘love’ button, called WikiLove. This new feature will help users and editors of the crowdsourced 
web encyclopedia show their appreciation for one another. It can be tough to be accepted by the inner circle of experienced Wikipedia editors, and many editors feel looked down upon and discouraged from contributing to articles. Wikipedia is hoping that WikiLove will change this, and make it easy and fun for users to demonstrate their positive feelings towards one another.
How It Works
Starting today, WikiLove will be available for all English Wikipedia users. If you don’t see it yet, you can still test out the prototype by following the instructions and creating a test account.
To get started, login and visit any user, or user talk, page. In the upper right hand corner, between the search bar and the watchlist icon, you will see a new red heart icon.
Clicking this button will bring up a screen that looks like the following:
From here, users can show their appreciation with a Barnstar, Food and drink, Kittens, or they can make their own gift. There are also further subcategories within the Barnstar group, in order to give someone a gift that more closely resembles what you appreciate about them. For example, under the ‘Barnstar’ tab, users can choose the ‘Real Life Barnstar’ which is awarded to editors who make contributions both online and offline, by organizing wiki-related real-life events.
After you’ve chosen the gift you would like to give, enter a personal message and click to preview your selection. If you’re satisfied with your choice, hit ‘send WikiLove’, and you’re WikiLove will appear on the user’s user talk page.
Benefits of WikiLove
WikiLove has built-in analytics that allows Wikipedia to see how often it is used, and whether or not its usage affects new editors’ activity on the site. WikiLove will be a first step in making Wikipedia more inviting and friendly towards the new user. Futhermore, Wiki administrators can modify the user interface using the instructions for customization. This enables different cultures around the world to award culturally significant gifts – such as matryoshka dolls in Russia, or coffee in Brazil.
If you’re not interested in WikiLove, you can disable it by going to ‘My Preferences’ in the top right-hand corner by the log-out button. Next, click the ‘editing’ tab, and scroll down to the bottom where you will need to uncheck the box titled ‘enable showing appreciation for other users with the WikiLove tab (experimental)’. Remember to save your changes when you are done.
In the spirit of the collaborative nature of Wikipedia, once you’ve tested out WikiLove, let them know your thoughts and comments on the WikiLove talk page.
Written by Corrie Scott, June 16th, 2011
Twitter is rolling out some new features on their site. If you don’t yet see the following changes, you will soon!
The biggest changes are to the ‘following’ link, under the profile tab. Now, instead of seeing a list of everyone a person is following, you will see their Twitter stream as they see it. The exception is that you will not be able to see the tweets of people they follow that have protected their tweets. This is what users will see when they click the “following” link on Out-Smarts’ Twitter page.
To see the old following list, click on the ‘people’ tab as shown in the above image. This will enable you to see all of the people that person is following in the old format. From the people tab you can also see a list of people you are both following by clicking the ‘you both follow’ link.
You can also access the old following list by clicking ‘view all’ beside the ‘following’ heading on the lower right hand panel.
Finally, Twitter has introduced a new ‘shuffle’ feature. When you have clicked to see who a person is following, and are viewing their Twitter stream as they see it, you’ll find the shuffle button in the upper right corner of your screen.
Hovering over this button tells you that you can ‘jump to someone you follow’. This option takes you to the Twitter account of someone you both follow, and shows you their Twitter stream.
What do you think of these new features?
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, June 09th, 2011
Is social media one of the things on your to do list that never gets addressed because you don’t know where to start, or how to use it 
effectively? Perhaps you have embarked on a social media implementation that has fizzled out because you have other more pressing priorities and don’t have the time to manage it effectively. For many small to medium sized businesses, social media is a conundrum and the solution is invariably to bring in a social media expert to assist.
Hiring an expert in social media can be a great solution to these problems because it enables you to cut to the chase without having to worry about the steep learning curve social media can entail. It also increases the likelihood of your organisation achieving its social media goals more quickly, but only if you choose the right organisation or individual to work with. Beware, if your chosen partner in this area turns out to be inept, you could end up throwing money down the drain, or worse, damaging your online reputation.
Here are ten tips that will help you determine how to hire the right social media help.
- Do a little research up front. Google the person or company to see whether the results are related to social media.
- Find them on LinkedIn; check their referrals, experience and how long they have been doing social media related work. If they don’t have a LinkedIn presence then maybe they are simply social media power users, and not social media for business experts.
- Facebook and Twitter – check out their feeds – do they add value? Are they social media related? Avoid companies that have generic posts or worse, simply spout famous quotes. Also on Twitter, consider their follower counts, and remember that quality is always better than quantity when it comes to those.
- How long have they been doing social media? – social media is a relatively new principle but generally if someone has been doing this less than a year then they are still wet behind the ears. Best to work with an organisation that has been doing social media for upwards of 2 years (we’ve been doing it for 5!).
- Do they ask the right questions? I am often asked which questions to ask a social media expert from a hiring perspective (and I will get to those momentarily) but more importantly, you can determine whether a social media expert knows his or her stuff by the questions she asks you. If she asks how many followers you want but doesn’t ask about your target audience, or about your business, then that should be a red flag. Social media is not simply about being on Twitter or Facebook. It is about using these tools strategically to build your business given your audience, marketplace, goals and resources, and a good social media strategist will take these into account.
- Do they have a business background? Social media should be a component of your overall marketing and business strategy, and should complement your missions and goals. As such, a good social media expert should have a strong back ground in business systems whether it be through their education or experience. Working with someone with no business background that has many followers can be a mistake.
- A good question to ask a social media expert is how do they monitor and measure social media success. If they are flummoxed and don’t have a good answer then avoid them. If their answer includes mentions, interactions, web traffic analysis, community, insights and your goals then they are more likely to be on the right track.
- Ask them why you should use social media. If they answer that everyone is doing it then turn tail and run. However if they ask if your competitors, clients and prospects are online, and if you want to attract the next generation of customers, then move on to number 9.
- Social media professionals often get asked about the ROI of social media. Again, if an expert has no answer to this then they probably won’t be the right partner for you. It is much easier to track the ROI of a social media campaign than it is to track the effectiveness of some tradition marketing approaches such as billboard and newspaper ads. A good SM person will know this and will point out that your ROI will be dependent on what you want to achieve using these tools. They might give examples of projects they have worked on and how ROI was measured.
- Ask yourself if this is an individual or organisation that you can work closely with. When considering outsourcing your social media effort, it is extremely important that you chose a partner that you can work well with. Your social media will be a team effort and will likely involve lots of back and forth when maintaining your online presence, so work with someone you like and trust.
As with any partnership decision, often the best place to start when looking for a social media expert to work with is to ask people in your own business network who they work with, and whether they would recommend them. Unfortunately, there are a a lot of cowboys and snake oil salesmen claiming to be social media gurus right now, but if you follow the guidance outlined above you will be more likely to identify the right social media partner for you. Or you could just contact Out-Smarts, we do come highly recommended!
Written by Corrie Scott, June 02nd, 2011
The following is a blog post written by Lauren Bacon, a partner of Raised Eyebrow Web Studio. With her permission, we’ve reprinted it on our blog. If you’d like to see the original, click here.
If you’re a registered nonprofit and you’re not using Google’s Grants program, you might want to get on board. I’ve got lots to say about the benefits of this program, but let’s start with these two very appealing benefits:
Free Google Ads worth up to $10,000 per month.
A designated “nonprofit” channel on YouTube, also free.
For a long time, these benefits have been available to U.S.-based charities but not up here in Canada. That’s changed, and Canadian nonprofits are eligible too.
If this is enough to convince you, and you’re ready to go apply right this instant, I won’t stop you – here’s the link to the application form. But if you want more details first, read on.
Let’s start with the free advertising. Google sells the text-based ads that appear alongside their search results (brand name: AdWords) via an auction-like system: you select the keywords you want to advertise on (e.g. if you’re Covenant House Vancouver, you might want to show up on search results pages for searches like “homeless youth”, “homelessness Vancouver”, “at-risk youth Vancouver”, and so on), and you tell Google how much you’re willing to pay per click – perhaps 5 cents, maybe a dollar, maybe more. The more you’re willing to spend, the more likely it is that your ad will appear at (or near) the top of the ads, and on the first page of search results.
There’s an art to choosing the right keywords, of course, and Google has some tools to help you here. You’ll benefit greatly from taking a trial-and-error approach, and by crafting the text of your ad very carefully to be a) relevant to the search results on which it appears and b) enticing enough to attract traffic.
In any case, the premise of the Google Grants program (more details here) is that they will allow you to bid up to $1.00 per click, and they won’t charge you a penny – and you can “spend” up to $10,000 a month for your free ads. It’s a great deal, with no financial risk to you that I can see. (If you know of any, please leave them in the comments.)
OK, on to benefit #2: your own branded “channel” page on YouTube. YouTube (which is owned by Google) has their own nonprofit program aimed at helping charitable organizations improve their reach & support online activism and fundraising. The primary benefits of their program are:
Your own “channel” page (like this one from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), which can be branded to coordinate with your other online communications channels.
The option to drive fundraising through a Google Checkout “Donate” button (this isn’t for everyone, as you may have your own online donation software you want to use to ensure that your contacts are kept in one place);
You’ll be included on YouTube’s nonprofit channels and nonprofit videos pages
And perhaps most interestingly, they provide you with the option to add a call-to-action overlay on your videos, to drive traffic to your online campaigns.
If you’re using YouTube at all, this is well worth pursing. Full details on the YouTube Nonprofit Program are available here. And you can apply with the same Google for Nonprofits account you use for AdWords.
And if you’re not using YouTube yet, here’s a great post from Socialbrite on why you should be.
There’s more, too – Google Earth for nonprofits, Google Apps for nonprofits… the list goes on.
Here’s that application form once again. Highly recommended.
