2-23-13
Led by Clay Leander
Sponsored by the Unpaid Staff Organization
Led by Clay Leander
Sponsored by the Unpaid Staff Organization
"Twitter is the ultimate collaborative sport."
(Workshop conversation: Jan, Adrienne, Clay, Steve, Kazmi, Jayshree & Ann)
Contents:
Overview (thinking)
KPFA-Specific
Overview (tools)
Your Website
Facebook
Twitter
Miscellaneous
Contents:
Overview (thinking)
KPFA-Specific
Overview (tools)
Your Website
Miscellaneous
-----------------OVERVIEW (Thinking)----------------------
What is Social Media? Why is it important?
it’s about joining your work with the work of
others to create something more powerful and useful than is possible alone;
it’s not about simply telling people about what you are doing. People once talked about “interacting” with
communities, now it’s about “engaging” with communities. In other words the communication is best when
it is 2-way. When we use social media,
we should be conscious of taking other producers and programs into the
discussion with us. We do this by, among
other things, cross-promotion.
Clay told a story of a radio station shut down by
the FCC which moved to an internet format and strengthened its audience through
social media. When it returned to the
air, it was better off than when it left.
You can tell the entire world about your program,
like the example someone gave of a friend with 100,000 facebook followers. Or you can cultivate a specific audience,
like KPFA’s Radio Cuba Canta which parlayed its once-a-month broadcast into a
world-wide community of Cuban music lovers.
They have just over a thousand facebook followers, over 10,000 down
loads and a reputation that extends to musicians in Cuba.
When you are doing really important work on life or
death issues, people are more apt come to you.
It’s good to have a facebook presence but it’s just as important to post
on other people’s pages and be part of the larger discussion. This will generate people you want to
interview and become a self-generating loop.
Social media is often about “listen now” and we try
to get our information out in a way that connects immediately. “The program starts in five minutes”
etc. But, what we do also has value over
time in adding to the knowledge base and long-term discussions. It’s important to make the archives clear and
available.
Make
access a routine part of your social media work. It often takes only a minute of thought
and/or a minute of effort. For many of
us, assess is not a choice, it’s how we live.
Many people who are visually impaired use a screen reader with a
mechanical voice that “reads” the internet, e-mail, Word documents, etc. Read on to find out more on how to make your work
accessible to those who use screen reader technology.
Use
and promote sites and tools that are accessible and don’t use the ones that
aren't.
----------------KPFA-SPECIFIC----------------------
Log in for KPFA’s WiFi: Areai941, no password
We should all be labeling, promoting and tagging
our KPFA archives. Many are labeled only
with a date, which makes them useless for searching. There is an easy interface to do all this for
your program’s archives. You can do it
from home. Contact Miguel Guerrero at
Promos@kpfa.org or ex. 252 for instructions and a password to log in.
We need a way for google to “find” discrete KPFA
news stories. This may be happening for
the stories posted on KPFA’s Sound Cloud.
https://soundcloud.com/kpfa-fm-94-1-berkeley/
This option is free for KPFA producers. Contact adrienne@sonic.net or John Hamilton
news@kpfa.org for directions.
KPFA has a streaming channel. Watch for it on KPFA’s website March 9, 10-3
pm when a conference on Nuclear Whistle Blowers, Health & Safety, Workers
& our Communities will stream live.
Talk with Andrew about streaming yr next event. Andrew@kpfa.org ex 203. The process uses ustream and a smart phone.
http://www.ustream.tv/new
---------------OVERVIEW (TOOLS)-------------
IN GENERAL
Captchas
are the bane of blind and sight-impaired folks!
KPFA has one where one answers a math problem (like 2+2 =: and you type
4 in the edit box.) That is the only foolproof version. The audio on others is
purposefully difficult to understand and the visual is hard for even the
sighted to see. Beware of captchas on Google
Docs, Yahoo Groups, and other sharing sites.
Signing up for Yahoo Groups can be done via email.
Don’t
judge anyone’s character or work habits by their facebook profile, aesthetics
of their website, or other kinds of detailed work. A blind person’s profile may not look top
notch but may have taken more work than one created by a sighted person.
FACEBOOK & TWITTER
Before you delve into the details of these two
services, you might want to read this popular article:
How to sustain a social media presence in 3 hours a
week by Alexandra Samuel
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/career-work/how-to-sustain-a-social-media-presence-in-3-hours-a-week
One major purpose of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc
is to get people to come to your own or your program’s website. (not to drive people to their advertisers)
Facebook and Twitter are a lot of people's
connection to the Internet in Africa and other poor communities around the
world. They may not have a laptop, but
if they can possibly afford it, they'll have a smart phone that connects to FB
and Twitter.
MANAGEMENT TOOLS (Hootsuite)
Hootswuite is a free management tool for your
social media. It provides a dashboard
where you can see details of all your social media, twitter, facebook,
wordpress, tumblr and many others. It
provides analytics so you can see what effect you are having. And, it allows you to schedule your basic
postings. The scheduling saves
time. Using HootSuite (or something like
it) simplifies the confusion of social media.
The "pro" version, for an extra $10 a month, gives good value.
You can use Google doc spreadsheet to schedule yr
tweets through HootSuite.
-------------YOUR WEBSITE--------------
BEST WIDGET TO ADD TWEETS TO YR WORDPRESS WEBPAGE
(Incoming)
Wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cbnet-twitter-widget/
Some word press themes include an automatic twitter
feed.
BEST WIDGET TO SEND YOUR ARTICLES OUT (outgoing)
Automatically reposts your website article to
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Blogger, Tumblr, Delicious, Plurk,
etc:
Nextscripts
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/
ADD SHARE BUTTONS TO YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE
ARTICLES
This gives your readers the ability to share your
article on their favorite social media site with a few clicks.
These are equally good:
Sociable:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/
Share bar:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sharebar/
Share this:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/
ADD A LINK TO KPFA’S ARCHIVE OF YR PROGRAM
Clay has written a particular script for this. See what it does by scrolling to the bottom
of this article on his blog for Radio Cuba Canta:
http://radiocubacanta.blogspot.com/2013/01/26-jan-2013-radio-cuba-canta.html
If this would be useful to you, contact
adrienne@sonic.net or Clay ctoneradio@gmail.com for the script and directions
in how to use it.
Audio
and video should be captioned for the deaf.
Let’s get a system and start transcribing our radio programs.
HELP THE WORLD FIND YR ARTICLE
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means making your article or message
something that google and other search engines will find and move to a higher
ranking. Google changes its criteria
regularly so we don’t know everything they look at but they do pay attention to
how many people are reading your article and the ads.
Google also looks most directly at the first
sentences of the article. If you use a
celebrity name, that will get you bumped in the rankings. For instance: “Helen Hunt is all about people
with disabilities in the movie, The Sessions” will get more attention than
“Mark O’Brien’s life comes alive in this popular new movie.” Your first sentence should mirror the main
content of the article. Don’t use a sentence like “The iron lung wheezes and,
as you enter the room, a man smiles from his place at the end of this large
yellow machine.” (This focus on first
sentences leads to some awkward sentences but at the moment it can’t be
helped.)
ACCESSIBLE
WEBSITES AND YOU TUBE:
MS
Word docs, flash, shockwaves and .pdf's ONLY work if created accessibly. Don’t use text boxes in Word. Don’t slap a picture of a flier into a .pdf
and expect it to be read. It's still
only a picture of the page, not the words themselves, and optical character
recognition must be used to make the translation worth the trouble. Many people don’t have that capability. Formatting matters, too. Text is your best
friend and most likely to be understood by various people living with
disabilities. Adobe has an accessibility
link from which one may learn how to make an accessible .pdf and an accessible
website with Flash. http://adobe.ly/aQOzld
Audio
description of videos is important. A
video with various voices can be mystifying if there is nothing non-visual to
explain which character is speaking.
Unless captions, lyrics or other text is given, Youtube videos cannot be
seen with a screen reader.
A website picture is a big blank for folks who use screen readers. Caption your photos and describe them. Wordpress has a fill in-the-blank area to do this in “Add Media” section.
A website picture is a big blank for folks who use screen readers. Caption your photos and describe them. Wordpress has a fill in-the-blank area to do this in “Add Media” section.
----------------FACEBOOK---------------
There are three ways to have a facebook presence. As an individual, a page, a group or an
event. Individuals are limited to 1,000
friends. Pages & groups are allowed
unlimited followers/fans. Pages have
metrics to track how many people are looking at your posts and how many are
sending them out to others. You can also
find information about what countries people are living in if you look closely
at the analytics section.
People will spam Facebook personal pages so be
prepared to spend some time moderating.
Facebook ads.
Facebook gives you more attention when you are paying for an ad. They use some kind of formula for which posts
go to the top of the page and how long they stay there. One of the criteria is how many people are
commenting on the post, another is whether the poster has bought an ad. The cost of an ad is based on the number of
“likes” the ad brings you. Last year,
one of our participants agreed to pay facebook 75 cents per “like” for a month
and got 5000 new likes. This year, she
paid 10 cents per “like” for a month and got 1000. The minute the ad ended, her posts
disappeared from the top of people’s feeds.
Tagging on Facebook. This is a fairly new practice. You “tag” names of friends who you hope will
be interested in your post. This can be annoying
to your friends but it can also create a group conversation. Anyone who comments on any of the facebook
pages which holds your post (all the pages of you and your tagged friends) is
added to the comments on all the pages.
It’s not clear how screen readers can be used to tag.
The
main facebook site is nigh impossible to navigate with a screen reader, so the
blind and sight impaired use http://m.facebook.com/
instead. It used to be that one could replace www.facebook.com/
with http://m.facebook.com/ and simply
copy what came after the trailing slash, but that is not axiomatic. Check our m.facebook, to “see” what facebook
looks like for folks whose eyes don’t see like yours.
----------------TWITTER--------------------
Twitter is the ultimate collaborative sport. You are joining a constant ongoing
conversation. Participate. People follow
you for 1) original content, 2) the quality of what you pass on (curate). Everything is short and quick.
Your success depends on how you chose and respect
your followers.
To begin:
Don’t use the “Egg” for yr profile.
It identifies you as a novice.
Invite people to follow you. Look up people you respect and invite their
followers. Check out the followers of
their followers & invite those you find interesting. Take an afternoon and find 30 people you
respect. Follow them. Their tweets will arrive on your twitter
feed.
Watch these tweets and retweet 3-4 of each group.
It used to be that everyone followed everyone who
followed them. But that became
overwhelming. Now, you can 1) follow a
small group you chose, 2) make your followers into “lists” so you can post and
review selectively or 3) follow everyone who follows you. Use a list for spammers so you never have to
see them again.
Use Hootsuite to schedule when your tweets go out
so you can tweet regularly without thinking about it too often. Schedule some to go out in the night to reach
international folks.
Keep the message shorter than the absolute
maximum. It will be read and retweeted
more often.
When you are tweeting a long link, shrink it at
https://bitly.com/ to make more room for words. (There are other free services
for this: Ow.ly is one.)
Use hashtags.
Hashtags are a word or phrase that begins with #. It helps people find your tweet when they are
looking for topics or events. If I tweet
about Pushing Limits, I would likely use #disability since that is the main
topic of the program. I would also
include @kpfa so that my tweet will show up on KPFA’s twitter account. Try to include your hashtags in the tweet
itself to save on words.
Here’s two recent examples:
- From Davey D: “RT @jasiri_x: RT @DJDSCOTT Django better not win with Mrs. Obama introducing the nominees lol #FLOTUS #OScars2013
- from Democracy Now: Today Marks 1st Anniversary of #Trayvon Martin Killing http://owl.li/i4yIy See all of our reports: http://owl.li/i4yPt
Use photos. People like photos. Take a photo of something beautiful in your
life and tweet it now and then. However,
a picture
produces no words for a screen reader to read. If a picture doesn't have a
caption, it might as well not be there for a person with a visual impairment. If you take a picture of a piece of paper,
it makes the words invisible to someone using a screen reader.
VINE: Allows
you to tweet 6 sec of video. It’s a
twitter smart phone app that looks promising.
To jumpstart a twitter discussion, one of our
participants created two identities and had a discussion with himself.
When you ask people to tweet about an article
you’ve written, give them the actual phrase and words. They aren’t likely to do that part
themselves. Make it easy for them.
-------------MISCELLANEOUS--------------------
CELL PHONES
To tether a cell phone and a computer, use a data
cable and software downloaded from your cell phone carrier. In Windows XP, the trick is to use Active Sync, a free
program from Microsoft. In Win Vista and
higher, the hub is the Sync Center (part of the OS). The necessary cables generally come with the
phones, but can be purchased separately from phone stores or favorite
electronics stores. Talk to your
carriers' tech depts if confused. This process could be used to upload video,
pics and/or audio to computer for addition to feeds, sites, etc
RSS FEED
We didn’t get into this (yet) except to mention it
as a way KPFA could have ongoing scrolling “headlines” on the front page of the
website. It would be nice to do it with
Pacifica programs and news stories from around the network.
WEB BROWSING
Web browsing in “incognito” or in “private” mode
may give you data unaffected by your previous browsing history – as well as
allowing you to browse the Internet without saving any information about which
sites and pages you’ve visited.
Directions for Firefox:
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-browse-web-without-saving-info#w_how-do-i-turn-on-private-browsing
BASIC
ACCESS
The most important thing is that NOTHING may be taken for granted. Not the keyboard, not the mouse, not the monitor, not a particular operating platform or piece of software. Nothing! Because of this, we want as many doors to this cyber-building as can be contrived without driving everyone nuts. Studying the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines would be helpful as well as the Telecommunications Act of '96 Sect. 508 federal guidelines. That's where the meat is.
The most important thing is that NOTHING may be taken for granted. Not the keyboard, not the mouse, not the monitor, not a particular operating platform or piece of software. Nothing! Because of this, we want as many doors to this cyber-building as can be contrived without driving everyone nuts. Studying the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines would be helpful as well as the Telecommunications Act of '96 Sect. 508 federal guidelines. That's where the meat is.
TUMBLR
A microblogging platform and social networking
website used by younger folks, half the users are under 25. Likes photos- A Lot.
PINTEREST
This article echoes some of the themes of the
workshop.
"How My Site Gets Tons of Traffic From
Pinterest"
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/gets-tons-traffic-pinterest-193000565.html
This link was sent to me by Jan Gurley
(http://www.docgurley.com/ Check out her
articles on tobacco and the Alameda health department's work in Oakland.):
REAL WORLD EXAMPLE
As we were sitting in the New World Center talking
about social media, UPSO Council members David Gans and Tim Lynch were rocking
the KPFA Fund drive with social media support for their Grateful Dead day-long
program.
Notes by Adrienne
----------------------------------------
Unpaid Staff Organization Council Members
Shahram Aghamir: shahrama2004@yahoo.com
David Gans: david@trufun.com
Ann Garrison: anniegarrison@gmail.com
Adrienne Lauby: adrienne@sonic.net
Tim Lynch: tlynch@socrates.berkeley.edu
Bylaws and grievance procedure:
http://www.kpfa.org/staff/unpaid
Notes and other stuff:
http://kpfaupso.blogspot.com/
