1. WORDPRESS & VIDEO

The most basic question about video blogging might be: how do I get my video content into my blog? We recommend:

Video   —>   YouTube —>  WordPress

Upload your video to YouTube, grab the embed code and paste it into your blog. Make sure you paste it in “HTML” view in your WP blog.

Why not upload your video directly to WP? The answer is Search.

Search engines, and Google in particular, love video content. It is often returned above websites in a search result. Additionally, posting to YouTube gives a chance for a wider audience, better syndication and distribution.

Finally, don’t forget to use consistent tags when you upload your video to YouTube and WP.

2. EDITING IS GOOD

Editing is crucial to successful video production. Let’s start with available programs that are either free or under $150.

• PC - Pinnacle/Avid, MovieMaker
• Mac - iMovie, Final Cut

The key things you need to be able to do with video editing are:

• Edit sound and picture separately
• Decide the order of shots
• Decide the duration of shots

Those three are the biggies, but video editing has other key benefits as well:

• Ability to add music
• Add titles
• Add transitions (btw “Cuts” are 95% of all transitions)

3. PRODUCTION

Production (shooting) can be great fun. Here are a few tips and tricks to get a good result.

A. Composition

This is how you frame a shot in camera. Consider these four guideslines:

i. No need to move the camera

ii. Web video is a close-up medium

iii. Rule of Upper Thirds - place the subject’s eyes about a third down from the top of the frame.

iv. Keep it Square - pay attention to the horizon line.

B. Coverage

Make sure you get everything you need when you shoot.

i. B-roll and cutaways help illustrate the story

ii. Use different angles to provide variety

iii. Use the “short” end of the lens as much as possible (that is, stay wide and get close)

iv. Avoid zooms

C. Interview Technique

i. The person on camera should look at the interviewer, NEVER the camera.

ii. The interviewer needs to “hold the eyes” of the subject. Be nice, act interested, smile and nod. Don’t look down at your notes.

iii. Don’t talk over the talent. It generally ruins the take.

iv. Get the subject to restate your question in their answer (”statementize”)

D. Cheap Gear

• Tripod
• Low cost lighting - Home Depot aluminum reflector and high output CFLs
• Microphone

It’s also good to have a power strip, extension cord. some duct tape and a big plastic bin to keep your kit together.

E. Some Sage Advice

i. Plan your shoot in advance / develop a shot list

ii. Check your gear before you go

iii. You’re the Boss. Own it.

5. COMPARISON OF VIDEO CAMERAS

We also covered The Best Camera for Videoblogging, a reprise of an earlier post on this topic.

6. EXAMPLE

Here’s an example of a video blog we produced using the techniques outlined above. It took about an hour to shoot.

EXTRA

If you’d like a PDF of the slideshow that goes with “Intro to Video Blogging,” drop me a line.

* WordCamp photo by George Gumpert.

THE BACKGROUND

Reassuringly, Andrew pointed out that search engine optimization is:

• Not Rocket Science or Voodoo
• Not Free Traffic
• Not “Set It and Forget It”

Too true. Managing search is like caring for a useful pet, perhaps a sheep dog. You want to herd the audience to your content. Andrew called it a “funnel to capture intent.” His metaphor is probably better.

THE 3 PILLARS OF SEARCH

Many pundits try to explain the quantum mechanics of search, but Andrew’s summation seems as good as any. Ranking in search rests on three pillars:

1. Accessibility - Can the search engines find you?
2. Relevance - Who related is your content to a particular search?
3. Credibility - How can the search engines tell if you are an expert?

ACCESSIBILITY

Andrew touted the benefits of Sitemaps to create visibility for search engines. These are not the site maps that viewers may use to find pages on your website. Sitemaps (capital “S”) are code documents that index all your content and provide instructions for search engines.

Andrew noted that many tools exist online to help you generate Sitemaps including Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Sitemaps.org.

RELEVANCE

Want to boost relevance - take a look at the stats for your website or blog. What are the entry keywords - that is, what did people search for that led them to you?

Focus your content on the keywords and concepts most dear to your audience. Use your keywords liberally - in links, headlines, body copy and elsewhere.

Write for humans, not search robots, and you will also keep the audience you attract.

CREDIBILITY

Links from other websites to your content, also called incoming links, build cred with the search ‘bots. One sure fire method to build incoming links to to circulate your content widely.

For example, we’ll repost this blog on ActiveRain, the portal for real estate professionals. We also use Feedburner and other services to notify all the search engines when we post and distribute the content to blog aggregators everywhere.

Finally, Andrew mentioned another of our favorite things: deploying an AddThis button on web pages and blog posts. AddThis and other social buttons give your audience a wealth of ways to share and save your content, including bookmarks, email, Facebook and Twitter.

All this enables more sharing of your content and more external links back to you.

SLIDE SHOW PRESENTATION

Andrew conveniently included his slides in an online slideshow.

WordCamp is great for bloggers of all stripes. Thanks to Matt Walters for organizing WCRVA.

Look for more details soon about WordCamp RDU for folks in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

1. Is the original work being reused for commercial or non-commercial purposes?
2. What type of work is being copied (factual vs. creative). Classic example is the phone book.
3. How much of the work is used? There is no hard and fast rule, for example, like three lines or less.
4. Effect upon the potential market for the original work. Can be very subjective.

Of course, the solid gold way to use content from others is to get permission. Citing sources and using links boosts your cred and lowers your risks as well.

Good presentation on legal issues for bloggers. Thanks Chris!

• there are 2 billion Google searches a day (source)
• there are 78 million YouTube videos online (source)
• over 100 million YouTube videos are viewed per day
• 346 million people globally read Blogs daily (source)
• 77% of active internet users read Blogs
• Facebook has 175 million users from 170 countries (source)
• Facebook users have an average of 120 friends
• the fastest growing demographic of Facebook users are 35 years old & older

The old economy may be drying up, but the new economy is awash in opportunities. Need a lifeboat? Give us call.

Malls, mixed-use developments, shopping centers - call them what you will, they dot the landscape of America.

Many of the larger developments have websites. For the most part, they’re pretty awful. So, when we were asked to produce a new website for North Hills, a mixed-use development in Raleigh, NC, our goal was to help bring the category into a Web 2.0 world.

Two months after the launch, we have every reason to feel we’ve achieved. Stats are great, everything works, and best of all, a continuing content stream is beginning to bloom. It’s interesting stuff, too - stories, bios, pictures and video.

So here’s a checklist of things we think a contemporary mall or mixed-use website needs.

The Basics

1. A page for each merchant
2. A picture for each merchant
3. Descriptive text for each merchant (more than just a phone number and an outside link)

It is surprising how few big developments have reached this level of information. See our collection of links for malls and mixed-use developments on Delicious (and please feel free to add links to other sites in the category).

The Finer Points

1. Interactive Map
2. Continuing Content Stream
3. Ad Platform

(1) The interactive map is a challenging bit of engineering and UI. We’ll write more about it soon. (2) In most cases, developing a rich content stream requires cultural change for clients. Training and continued support are mandatory to advance evolutionary adoption of web 2.0 tools like blogs and twitter. (3) Big developments like North Hills have the potential to draw big traffic. Why settle for pennies on the dollar when you could have it all with your own ad platform? Tune in again for a discussion about implementing your own ad server.

Best Practices

To boost the performance of a site in this category as measured by key stats like Time On Site and Page Views, here are a few best practices we can recommend:

1. Minimize outside links
2. Run outside content in an iframe within your site
3. Drive traffic to niches with CPC advertising
4. Pay attention to what Analytics tells you about your audience

The Last, Most Important Point

Like all other advertising and marketing ventures, success is rooted in a good agency-client relationship. We are deeply grateful to Kane Realty Corporation for their vision and their patience throughout this project.

Special thanks to:

• Anna Smith
• Mike Smith
• Bonner Gaylord
• Jon Masterson
• Katherine Knott
• Angela Slater
• Paul Newcomer
• Walt Stewart
• North Hills Security

For Goodtree & Company:

• George Gumpert, master programmer
• David Holt, design
• John Dixon, flash
• Leslie Huffman, merchant database and blogging diva
• Hal Goodtree, precious little

Thanks also to Allen Weiss, Michael Kimsal, Lindsey Chester, Paul Harnett, Dorothea Bitler, Jill Harris, Fiquet, Kevin and Stacey Jennings, Wick Morgan and Jason Peck. And thanks to Jake St. Peter and Mike McTaggart for their generous time.

Please contact us for more information about mall, shopping center and mixed-use development websites.

Brilliant piece from McKinsey:

“Six ways to make Web 2.0 work”

http://tinyurl.com/afouxt

The term “social marketing” dates from the 1970’s and originally defined a concept of using marketing for social good. Today, social marketing means employing user-generated channels on the internet to achieve business goals like reaching a broader audience and motivating action.

Social Marketing Channels

Here’s a quick run down of some popular social networks and how businesses are using them as marketing channels:

Facebook - Businesses can create pages, groups and ads. The FB platform is 5 years old and boasts 1 in 5 internet users worldwide.

Twitter - Sometimes called “microblogging,” messages are no more than 140 characters in length and often contain links to more content. Great tool for a real-time interaction with your audience.

LinkedIn - This portal is all about business and networking. Its social tools are still pretty basic, but users can start groups, republish blogs, post status and employ several other useful features.

ActiveRain - A huge community of real estate professionals. Vibrant blogging community.

Flickr - Popular site for serious photographers (amateur and professional). Millions of users. Flickr is both a utility (a convenient way to serve pictures elsewhere on the web) and a social community.

Ning - Build your own social portal. Works well for niche categories.

YouTube - like, Flickr, YouTube is both a utility and a community. YouTube videos can have a profound effect on search results, catapulting your business to the top of page one.

Delicious - Social bookmarking is a way to share collections of links. See an example of how we use this for Julie Roland Realtor.

Blogs - A huge audience gets news and information from blogs, often without knowing it. Blogs provide businesses with a low-cost personal publishing platform that can accomodate text, pictures, video, links and comments. Blogs are easily shared and republished, making them a powerful social marketing platform.

Viral for the Masses

One of the key attributes of the new social media landscape is the opportunity to launch viral marketing initiatives. “Viral” simply means that you are relying upon your audience to circulate your message.

Where viral happened in the past, it was either carefully engineered or largely by accident. Viral marketing remained a small business.

But social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all contain built-in features that allow anyone, anytime to start something viral. Example:

• “Share a link” on Facebook
• Retweets on Twitter
• Status messages on LinkedIn

What’s better than getting your audience to circulate your message?

Promote Engagement

Social media, which include blogs, promote engagement between marketers and the audience. It’s important to open up all the potential avenues (while protecting yourself from spam, of course). Make it easy for people to comment, share or email your content.

When people take the opportunity to interact with your brand, they are more likely to return, remember and purchase.

The keys to promoting social engagement:

• Real people, real names - audiences respond best to real people using their real names. “info@…” doesn’t cut it in social media.
• Many channels - it’s easy to share your content across many social marketing channels. Enter it once, it appears everywhere. In social marketing, you have to go where your audience congregates, not expect them find you on your outpost in cyberspace.

Those are just a few of the most popular ways businesses are using social marketing. We’d love to hear how you use social marketing to advance your message. Comment here or drop us a note.

Tarski is first and foremost a very readable theme. Navigation, categories, comments, tags - Tarski is clean and makes sense throughout the entire layout.

Even better, Tarski is one of the most customizable themes we’ve experienced. You can easily add your own header and sidebar widgets plus many other theme options.

Check to make sure you get the right version of Tarski to run with your WordPress. Look for the release on the dashboard if you’re not sure.

Active Rain, of course, is the largest portal for real estate professionals in the U.S. with over 100,000 users.

I re-published my own content from this blog to my blog on Active Rain. Guess what? Lot more people saw it as evidenced by the comments.

Over the weekend, Mike Jaquish alerted me that the post had be re-blogged by someone in Florida. Is this legal? Heck, yeah! You can choose whether or not to allow your content to be re-blogged, but generally it is considered a means to a larger audience. What’s good for SNL and David Pogue is good for you and me too.

Result: a few hundred more people have seen my content (Pogue hates that word), some have commented, and maybe a couple will take the time to search our Goodtree & Company.

It’s quite simple really. Like art mashups, social mashes throw together two different things.

In this case, I’m mashing Last.fm with the posts in my blog. When I publish a post, the latest song I played on Last.fm is added to the Flare links under the headline.

This is a different thing than just resyndicating content. YouTube and Flickr republish my pictures and videos on Facebook. But those streams become part of the FB content river.

A true mash-up has an element of randomness. It can be jarring. Or illuminating.

We write a lot about WordPress and blogging. One important trick of the trade is installing a custom theme to give your blog a unique look. Here’s how it works:

1. When you install the WP blog engine, it loads up the default theme, a plain white page with a solid blue header.
2. To give your blog its own flavor, WP provides an ample tool set for using a custom theme.
3. Hundreds (if not thousands) of custom themes exist. Most themes are free or just involve a modest cost. One of the best places to search for themes is the WP Theme Viewer. You can narrow your search by selecting a color, number of columns and lots of other criteria.
4. Select the themes you like best, download them to your computer, then upload them to your server inside the WordPress directory, wp-content/themes subdirectory.
5. Surf up your blog and log in to the admin panel. In WP 2.5 or greater, navigate to the Design tab (in earlier versions, navigate to “presentation”). You’ll see thumbnails of all the themes you have uploaded. Click on the theme you fancy. Presto! Your blog has a new look.

Some themes include a picture in the header. To really jazz up your presentation, you can replace the header picture with one of your own design.

Find the header picture you want to replace. It’s usually in folder labeled “images” inside the theme directory. Sometimes the appropriate file is labeled “header,” other times not. Just have a quick look at the files in the images directory and the header picture should be self-evident.

Load up the header picture in any imaging program such as Photoshop or Fireworks. Design a new header to your own liking, but don’t change the overall dimensions of the picture.

Upload the new header to the appropriate directory on your server replacing the old header (use the same file name). Shazamm! Your new header is now active.

————————————–

For our pro bono client SmartGrowthGirl, we used a photo of the author and combined it with an illustration we purchased from iStockphoto. The resulting picture adds personality and uniqueness to the blog, plus tells the story of what the blog is all about. See it here.

We also re-themed our own blog to better match our new website.

For advanced blogging geeks, you can even change the color, typography and layout of the theme by editing the css file. But that’s fort another day.

Our theme for SmartGrowthGirl is adapted from a theme by Nathan Rice called RockinBizRed, available as a free download from Rockin Themes. For our own blog, we adapted a theme called Mushblue by Mukka-Mu.

Mike Jaquish is a Realtor® in Cary, NC (full disclosure - Mike’s also our client). Recently, Mike wrote about “Free Bonus Space? Buyers Beware!” in his blog:

Lately I have bumped into a couple of Cary homes with unpermitted, sub-code finished living areas. When it is mentioned, the Listing Agents’ responses have been, “Since it isn’t counted in the square footage, the Sellers consider it ‘free bonus space.”

It is NOT “free…” More often it is ”unaffordable.”

• Does that “free bonus space” carry any guarantees on the homeowners’ electrical work, uninspected and possibly performed with a buddy and a beer or two on some forgotten weekend?
• Is there a guarantee that the HVAC unit that was tapped to heat and cool that “free” area is properly sized for the additional burden? Or will the unit struggle, fail to keep the house comfortable and fail early?
• Will the unacceptably steep stairs, without a handrail, be “free” of easily avoidable hazards that are addressed in the North Carolina Residential Building Code and in Town of Cary Inspections?
• And will the new owners be “free” of liability if some aspect of the goofy work creates personal injury? Will a homeowners’ insurance policy always cover unpermitted space issues?
• What will it cost to bring the “free bonus space” up to code, to be permitted in arrears? How much of the home will need to be torn up to satisfy Cary Permits and Inspections?
• If your Seller can’t legitimize their home, why should a Buyer take on that “free” responsibility?

The list of “free” questions goes on.

But without a doubt, that space is not “free.” Nor is it a “bonus.” It’s what can ”freely” be accepted as a “potentially devastating liability risk.”

Mike illustrates the 2 Rules of Effective Business Blogging:

1. GIVE SOMETHING OF VALUE - Mike gives expert information without asking any quid pro quo from the reader.
2. GOOD WRITING - Mike’s taken the time to craft his post into a lively, informative read.

Bonus points for brevity. Read more from Mike’s blog here.

We’ll still talk about copywriting for the internet, web design, tools, trends and culture, but now we’ll do it here.

Thanks to George for the WordPress migration.

Here are the Top 4 Rules for writing blog headlines:

1. Be clear (not cute or obscure)

Generally, we’re talking about a noun, in this case “headlines.” An example of a far weaker headline would be “Top 4 Ingredients in My Secret Sauce.”

2. Use a question

Every headline can’t employ every rhetorical device, but a viable option in this case might have been “Want to Write Better Headlines?”

3. Numbers create interest

Tried and true attention-getter. Works in email subject lines, direct mail and good old television advertising, as in “99 44/100% Pure” for Ivory Soap.

4. Keep it brief - 50 characters or less including spaces

Work your headline down to it’s shortest possible length. For some great headline writing, check out the New York Daily News or this from todays New York Post:

Pray Ball

Yanks Honor VA Tech Victims

As the power of Web 2.0 percolates through the ranks of business, more and more people are interested in installing a CMS.

Content management systems allow users to update their websites in plain English - no coding or programming whatsoever. But open-source CMS prgrams like Joomla and Drupal are notoriously complicated.

WordPress offers an alternative. For our client Mike Jaquish, it was the perfect solution.

Mike’s a serious blogger - he’s been at it for a couple of years, understands blogging and has a dedicated readership. So choosing WP was a easy choice.

The hard part was making two blogs and a handful of html pages all look like one seamless site.

Thanks to Mike for his vision and trust. Kudo’s to contibuting artist George Gumpert for his ingenious php and html work.

BASIC WEB 2.0 FOR REALTORS

We’re always going on and on about Web 2.0 for Business. It sounds good in theory, but how does it translate for specific business needs?

Julie’s a Realtor®, so the first thing to tackle was pulling in the MLS listings for her area. No biggie. Basically, it’s a snippet of code you can include in a web page along with a unique ID. See it here.

Next, we bolted on a WordPress blog with an old-time theme by GetTemplate. Don’t forget Askimet for security and Google XML Site Map for search. Naturally enough, realtors have a lot to talk about and share, so we re-published the blog on the home page as html using Feedburner.

ADVANCED WEB 2.0 FOR REALTORS

Here’s where it gets interesting.

• Del.icio.us Feed

Julie’s all about knowing the area. The best restaurant - ask Julie. A place to hike? Julie. So how could we build a links page that would be easy for a busy realtor to update? The answer: set up a del.icio.us site for Julie, grab the feed and re-publish it as her Community Info page.

Kudos to George Gumpert for nailing this down. We really love this feature - Julie’s already using it to help differentiate herself from her competition.

• Web Video Testimonial

We used our favorite MiniDV camera for web video, shot outside and plugged in a mic we borrowed from the band. Video can be so much more persuasive than text on the page - see the video for yourself.

STUFF FOR EVERY BUSINESS

• Google Analytics - Every website for business should have Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s fascinating, it’s vital.

• SEO - it pays to get it right with Meta Tags when it comes to the relevancy with your page text. We like SEO Analysis Tool by SEO Workers.

There ya have it - the birth of a new empire. Thanks again Julie!

Cory wrote this post back in August of last year, but The First 5 Essential Tweaks is still a terrific checklist for anyone installing a WordPress blog:

1. Install the Google SiteMap plugin - helps search engines find you.
2. Activate Askimet - this is a security plugin pre-loaded in WP. Prevents blogspam.
3. Burn the feed with Feedburner - this distributes and syndicates your blog
4. Change the Permalinks - keep things organized the way you want
5. Use the Contact Form prominently - Cory recommends this plug-in.

We’d add two more:

1. Install a new theme - it’s easy to give your blog a custom look. We like Rockin Themes.
2. Get rid of the Login Meta Data box - this is info most viewers don’t want or need. Change the default in the WP theme editor section of the admin section.

Thanks again to Cory for some succinct advice and lots of great blog design.

Web-2.0-ness is many things - design, concept, functionality, inter-connectedness. Sometimes, just looking at a few links is worth a thousand words.

Therefore, I’ve updated my Web 2.0 links on del.icio.us so you can see it all in one place.

Blogsolid offers expert advice and tips on the full range of blogging culture - basics, growth and power blogging.

Even the design makes this blog worth visiting. It’s original and unusually easy to understand. Have a look at Blogsolid right now.

It’s called Sxipper. Sxipper is a free plug-in for use with the Firefox browser (please tell me you’re not still using Internet Explorer).

Sxipper is easy to install (takes less than five minutes, no special skills or hacking required). It’s secure, it’s smart and it’s a massive time-saver. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

• Always available - appears when needed, so you can log in or fill forms with a single click
• Trustworthy - encrypts your personal data and stores it on your computer
• Accurate form fill - learns from its own users how to complete forms with 100% accuracy with our unique training tool
• OpenID provider - provider of private and public identifiers. Sxipper.com is a secure, phishing-resistant OP, with support for PAPE. Identity 2.0 begins here.
• Easy to install - gathers data from your address book and web browser so that you have a running start

Basically, when you navigate to a site where you need a password (gmail, flickr, your blog), a little dialogue box pops up asking you to choose an identity. For most sites, there’s only one choice (the only time I see more than one is for blogging, but that’s because I write 6 or 7 blogs).

Select an ID and Sxipper logs you in. Simple!

Sxipper also features automatic form fills, a very handy feature. Never type your name and address again.

————————–

A brief word about Firefox. Here at OCDC, we’ve tried (and continue to test our web work) on all the major browsers - IE, Safari, Camino, even Navigator (yuck). Most people continue to use IE because they’re stuck with bad old Web 1.0 habits.

Give Firefox a shot - it’s endlessly customizable to your needs, has a small footprint, is constantly (and automatically) updated and is from the not-for-profit Mozilla org. What’s not to like? Say goodbye to IE and it’s endless pop-ups, hangs and crashes.

Download Firefox and give it a try. You’ll thank me.