Digital Media & The Haiti Appeal

The rise in usage of digital media technologies and increase in consumers being hyper-connected (Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, Skype) has lent a helping hand to the opportunities available to share ways to help with the Haiti Earthquake Appeal. Through New Media image, print and text it has also helped us all feel a lot more connected to the situation.

Along with the sense of feeling connected, digital media has allowed people to:

• Easily donate
• Family members to connect with one another
• Locals to share their eye witness accounts via image and video and text
• Send relief to the right parts
• Share stories on Haiti to spread the word and convince others to donate

There are a number of digital brands also helping spread the word of the appeal including:
Apple, which allows people to donate directly through their iTune stores. Google have helped by providing a one stop resource for all things connected to the Haiti relief, with links to major charity organisations via their Google Checkout. Google have also teamed up with GeoEye a satellite imaging company to make available the most recent satellite imagery of Haiti.

The BBC have produced an online interactive map to show the routes that aid is getting into Haiti, view the interactive map here (also shown in above image), which illustrates each of the main routes for aid, from sea to air together with a short explanation on what is involved with each supply.

For more information on how social media has played a key part in the news from Haiti, we suggest you read this article from the Guardian.

The important part of writing this blog post is to point out, how much everyone in the digital age can have a huge impact on historical world events, whether it is sending out a tweet of the latest article you just read; encouraging your friends on Facebook to donate or sharing real time images from Haiti. We are certain that as digital media technology adoption increases the impact for future world events can only be greater.

For information on donating from the UK, we recommend you visit the UK Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation for 13 humanitarian aid agencies.

Along with uniting agency efforts in times of disaster - such as flood, earthquake or famine - wherever it happens in the world and maximising funds raised to ensure they are spent in an effective and fully accountable way, we would also like to praise the DEC for their use of Social Media. The Haiti Earthquake was just a week ago and they are spreading their charitable good will via appeal on YouTube, images on Flickr and they are providing the charitable with the ability to connect with them on Facebook and Twitter.

We hope this blog post has helped spread the news further.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

Rocktime's XML Sitemap generation tool

Introducing XML sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional meta data about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is/priority in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines / robots can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers/robots to do a better job of crawling your site.

Manual submission versus automatic submission

Many choose to update their XML sitemaps manually (re-submission when new content added) which is OK if your site content rarely changes. The main advantage of an automatic sitemap is that you completely eliminate the need to create and submit your sitemap to the search engines and you can explain to the web crawlers the structure of your site (setting priority). The main pages on your site that will benefit from automatic sitemap are the pages which include last modified date eg: news stories and blog posts and articles.

The value of the automatic sitemaps

The value of automatic sitemaps to the site, is that spiders will crawl updated content areas readily and without prompt of a new manual submission freeing up the webmasters time to concentrate on adding new content and new features to the site. Automatic sitemaps inform “this page changes ie: weekly” as they can see the up to date last modified stamp (with manual: this will be the same date for all pages). As the web has moved to real time online posting, we believe that the addition of an automatic sitemap now has even more importance.

The supporting meta data we recommend as standard includes: Location, Priority, Last modified date, Change frequency. Note the Meta data used in the XML sitemap is dependent on your site and there may be more extensions or exclusions to add.

Rocktime Sitemap Manager

With upgrades to our CMS, you can adapt the sitemap directly from within our CMS system.

NB: In order to get the sitemap to be automatic some changes were made to our CMS, as some pages being physical pages and others being page managed a technical rule was established so that the computer could determine which is the most appropriate page (managed or physical) to choose the “last modified date” from.

Find out more

To learn more about our Automatic XML sitemap generation tool available within our CMS talk to the Rocktime sales team.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Google could be a secret fan of the favicon

We noticed today that Google have started to add our site favicon to our Google Webmaster Tools alongside our site name. See above screen shot.

(For those new to the term, a favicon AKA 'Favourite Icon' are small images of 16x16 pixels that are usually visable to the left of the the URL in a brower's address bar)

I was talking to someone the other day about Google's favicon design, maybe I have predicted the future of how search results are to be presented in coming months!!

Actually the glory can't just come to me as someone did post up in Google Blogoscoped Forums screenshots of Google experimenting with favicons in natural search some time last year. Find out more information here .

What this means to us and our clients is to consider that favicons may be / could be released in Google's search results in the very near future. So we need to start thinking whether we like our favicons and whether they integrate well with our other marketing communications.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Geek Video on the month

This video was submitted by our Technical Manager Andy Clarke. It is very geeky indeed and only true geeks or web developers will understand the awesomeness of it.

What the very geeky video is all about: A guy has written a program in .NET to be able to play tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) using his webcam and a laser pointer. The program looks at the webcam image and identifies the brightest red spot and then tracks the motion of it until it is in a valid space to place your move. The source code is available if anyone would like to try it out for themselves!

Rocktime's Book of the month: Seth Godin, Tribes

Famous author Seth Godin has written nine books, all bestsellers that changed the way we think about marketing, change and work. He is responsible for many words in the marketer's vocabulary, including permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cows, the dip and sneezers.

A few of us have recently been reading his new (Oct 09) book “TRIBES: We Need You to Lead Us,” which explains how the Internet has eliminated barriers and enabled new tribes to be born.

In less than 130 (A5) pages the book argues that lasting and substantive change can be best effected by a tribe: a group of people connected to each other, to a leader to an idea. Some of the chapter’s are quite repetitive as he drums home the principles of leadership and the importance of word of mouth marketing to create movements. However despite this repetition, we are all glad we took time out to read it as it relate to our passion of generating long lasting online relationships / communities for our clients.

Please find three of our favourite quotes, from the book below, also make sure you click on the True Fans link the article there is genius:

“a Tribe needs a shared interest and a way to communicate”

“creating a tighter tribe and/or "transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change" usually leads to much more impact than trying to make a tribe bigger. beyond public relations and awareness related benefits, measuring the breadth of spread of an idea is not as important as looking at the depth of commitment and interaction of true fans, who end up being the people who recruit most new members”

"It's clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them, and for the first time, it's also profitable, powerful, and productive to do just that."

For more information on why you may need a Tribe enjoy this conversation on YouTube with Seth Godin on Tribes and why we all (may) need one. And if you need help forming your Tribe please do get in touch with the Flashlight team, to discuss online community forming further.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

What’s the story with blogging

We often feel the need to explain to our clients the difference between having a news module on their site and a Blog which can be integrated within their site or located on a separate domain.

As real time content has now made its way into the Google search results, this conversation is happening more often. Read this article from the 7th of December 09 from The Official Google Blog, Relevance meets the real-time web.

Thus we thought to share you before the New Year, what we consider to be the top ten benefits of blogging. We will also share our thoughts on how to blog, what to write and how to measure ROI.

Sound good ? then read on...

Starter for ten on the benefits of blogging

1. Enables you to build your following into a community, your community.

2. Allows you to talk is a conversational manner – “One to One” rather than “One to Many” .

3. Increases your coverage in the search result pages.

4. Gives you an opportunity to be a thought leader / influencer.

5. You can submit your blog to separate blogging directories increasing reach further.

6. People may ask you to blog on their blog and vice versa – doesn’t generally happen with News content (One to many and no sharing or conversing opportunities).

7. Provides new opportunities to communicate with your target markets.

8. Allows your team to be involved with your online presence, inviting team members to join in with stories / blogs.

9. You can blog from your phone.

10. Encourage visitors to your site, increase sales, increase engagement etc etc.

The Barrier to blogging

The biggest barrier to most is “what do I write about” and “how do I blog”. So we thought to share with you some further tips, giving an example of a landscape gardener setting up a blog.

What would a landscape gardener write about on their blog?

About them – who they are (who is writing the blog), what they like (Classic Films, The Arts), what they blog about (Landscape Gardening, Design, Colour partners).

In general they would write Blog posts on information that will be useful to others examples below:

Show people with images what they have created (Landscaped gardens).

• Explain why they placed lavender in with sage during their latest project.


• Provide advice and invite questions to equip people to succeed with their own landscape garden plans.


• Promote local landscape gardening groups.


• Share their personal thoughts of recent visit to XY garden in the UK or design exhibition.


• Review events they attended, which they had attended.


• Discuss a new TV show you saw (Garden or Design related to keep focus), your opinions.


• Engage readers with an event happening at their company, or perhaps encourage conversation over at another blog.

To sum up the key conversation areas are:

Show, Explain, Advise, Promote others, Share, Review, Discuss, Engage.

How to write the blog?

This part is simple as you as you simply: “Write it as you say it” ie: in a conversational tone. No one is really going to come to your blog and critique your grammar, however if this is important to you then ask a copywriter to check each post (we partner with a copywriting service for larger contracts).

Many people forget with the web you are actually talking to ONE person not MANY people, write the blog as if you were conversing. This is more engaging for the reader and also saves time too as you don’t need to be formal. Where possible let the text flow. Also consider non professional gardeners visiting your blog if mentioning Latin terms, mention English too. Don’t expect everyone to know what MULCHING is? (See the Wiki Pedia Guide to Mulch here)

How will this impact my business?

This is the big question.

To help measure ROI it is important that before writing any post consider the post’s objective, ie: do you want to encourage sales (of new type of plant? or service?) or is it to engage with your audience (your thoughts for school garden landscape competition) or do you want to write something that will be shared with many/retweeted/bookmarked to improve the ranking of your blog and site.

• Reaching a sale on your site – write the post towards a call to action
  
• Engaging audience – ask the readers questions
  
• Bookmarking & Retweets – Write something compelling, funny, new that people will want to share.

Blog posts can simply be fun too eg: It was my birthday today, look at how many pieces of my cake are left, there are only 4 people working here! Let people know you are human.
You can throw in the odd bit of fun as long as you say to yourself, what is the goal of this? could you perhaps promote the local bakery in which the cake came from? With the goal of showing you care about / are involved in local community, maybe! What does this do? Well it builds trust with your consumer base as it shows you are open, honest and most importantly approachable.

Seeding out your content

Tip 1: Share blog post within your networks via RSS feeds, (find out more about RSS here)

• Send to Twitter
  
• Send to Your Site
  
• Send to other local business, perhaps place you information on their site and their news goes on yours.

Tip 2: Give consideration to the title of the blog post

When the RSS feed is fed out to the networks, the title needs to be engaging enough to make people want to click through. So please refrain from naming your blog titles: blog post 1, blog post 2, or January blog post etc.

Tip 3: Meet with us for help

We often help clients kick start their blogs (social media campaigns) by meeting with them, talking about their company aspirations, goals, events of the year etc, then we go away and write up some blog posts for them. We encourage that blog posts come direct from the company or even better the individual running the company, however 7/10 times the company we are talking to, will not have the resource in house or the time. It is I am afraid a similar situation at Rocktime.

It is only when the community starts to build and the Managing Director/s see the results, then the available time to take the blog over or add more content come into play.

If you have a blog, have lost focus or simply need guidance on how to build your community further then please come in and speak to the Flashlight Team to discuss your social media strategy.

Oh and the objective of this post, was to provide you with useful information and to encourage you to CONTACT US to discuss your social media plans for 2010. See you next year ;)

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Geek Video of the month

Together with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google is introducing an experimental way of presenting news online.

Using certain advantages of online publishing Living Stories (presented in above video) organizes information according to how stories are developing.

We've found it particularly interesting watching the stories coming in on Copenhagen Climate Summit (COP15), a great advantage is that that you can filter content by opinions, events, graphics, quotes. Which is a fantastic way (IMO) of receiving news.

Have a look, see what you think here: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/

If you are interested in real time news then Living Stories is one to keep an eye on.

Author: Sarah Griffiths