Blogging

Most Popular Posts and Videos of 2011

by David Lee King on December 30, 2011

Here’s a list of some of my most popular content from 2011, including blog posts, videos, photos, and presentations. I hope you enjoy poking through this list, and more importantly, following along – reading, watching, viewing, etc – in 2012!

Most Popular Blog Posts of 2011:

Most Popular Videos of 2011:

  • i-microphone for the iphone – the Edutige EIM-001 (embedded below) – me testing out an iPhone microphone. Viewed 5574 times and counting, mainly because the US distributor put a link to my video on their website.
  • Testing out my RØDE VideoMic Pro – me testing out another microphone. Viewed 2617 times – proper use of keywords put my video in the first page of hits for “RØDE VideoMic Pro.”
  • Morphwiz – an iPad Music Creation App – me playing with an iPad synthesizer. Viewed 2134 times. Proper use of keywords and tags is the culprit again – this video appears in the first page of hits for “Morphwiz.”
  • OK, and my most popular video ever –  Learning Blues Harp – viewed 63,469 times since 2007. Embarrassingly enough, I’m pretty certain it gets hit so much (and then gets some nasty comments) is because of my poor use of keywords! When I titled the video “Learning Blues harp,” I really meant “I’m just starting to learn blues harp.” Everyone else apparently clicks on the video, thinking “I’m going to learn HOW TO PLAY blues harp from an expert!” Oops.

 

Most Popular Presentation of 2011:

Most popular photos of 2011:

From Flickr: viewed 289 times…

… and my personal favorite from 2011 in Flickr – my family. Viewed only 16 times, which is actually sorta amazing:

And my most popular pic in Instagram from 2011 (I’m davidleeking on instagram – Instagram is VERY COOL):

Here’s to a great 2011, and to an even better 2012!

 

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Blogging Process for Topeka

by David Lee King on June 28, 2011

Today, I met with some library staff where I work and talked about starting up another blog on my library’s website (look for a sports-related blog soon!). That reminded me that I said I’d write a post about our blogging process at tscpl.org … so here’s that post!

Our blogs are generally team-based, and are connected in some way to our collection or services:

Content Connections: For example, our Travel blog is connected to our Travel Neighborhood in the library (we have been pulling our collection out of traditional Dewey order, and are grouping them by topic – so for example, now all our travel books are grouped in one handy place, and labeled Travel). Our Art blog is connected to the art gallery in the library.

Team-Based: we generally have a team leader and 1-3 other staff who are team members. The team leader makes sure blog content matches the goals for the blog; makes sure content is actually getting posted; writes content; and can edit content as needed. Team members help write the blog posts, and do whatever else is needed for that blog.

When we create a new blog, our web team meets with the blog team (can you tell we like teams?), and we create some short-term goals and next-steps, including:

  • What’s the topic? Is it connected to the library’s collection?
  • Who’s the team leader? Who are the team members?
  • How often will you post? We have a posting schedule for our blogs. For example, the Travel blog has a new post every other Wednesday. We have a Google Calendar that serves as our content calendar.
  • During the meeting, we talk about content – mainly me talking about how every post needs to relate back to the library. Each post should focus in some way on our staff, our stuff, and our community – and it should always point back to the library.
  • They’re also reminded that photographs and videos are cool, too – as long as they relate back to the topic.
  • We ask the blog team to create a list of 25 things our customers should know about that neighborhood or collection, and use that list as ideas for the blog’s first 25 blog posts. This helps our bloggers (some of who are new at writing scheduled posts) some blog posting ideas.
  • I also ask each blog team to develop a persona or two to target with posts. We’re big on analytics and market segmentation data here, so generally we’re using a couple of target audiences that relate back to the library’s strategic plan.

That’s pretty much it. We have approximately 18 blogs on our public website right now, and are growing more as we need them.

image by Maria Reyes McDavis

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My Experiments with Ads

by David Lee King on May 5, 2011

Walt Crawford is thinking about clickthroughs and ads, and mentioned me as an example of someone using ads on my blog. And it’s true – I do! I’ve been meaning to write a post about my adspace experiments, and here’s a great opportunity to do it (ie., because I’m thinking about it again after posting a comment to Walt’s blog).

Why am I using ads on my blog? I started using ads as more of an experiment than anything – it was a part of the whole web thing that I wasn’t very familiar with. I held off for a long time, because I thought that putting ads on my blog would somehow water it down, or somehow feel like “selling out” … or some other nefarious deviant-like behavior.

Then I realized I was being silly, and curiosity just got the best of me. So I jumped in.

Here’s what I do right now:

  • I use Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliate ads.
  • I put google adsense in posts. I’m using a plugin for those. I use the WhyDoWork plugin for the in-post ads, because it does a really cool thing – it lets me turn on ads after a post is 7 days old. So you regular readers generally don’t see those, but visitors from a search engine might see them.
  • I also turned on adsense in my rss feed, using a link-up between adsense and feedburner (those, you might see once in awhile).
  • I sometimes us an Amazon Affiliate ad. I put those in my most popular posts, or when I’m talking about something that’s sold on Amazon, like a book or a microphone.
  • I also use pre- and mid-roll ads on my blip.tv videos.
  • Oh, and I have recently been playing with Google Adwords.

Combined, I’m making around $5-600 a year off those. Not much, but then again, it pays for my website and for my pro accounts on services like Flickr.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in my adspace experiments:

  • It’s a completely new language and set of tools. I still need to make time to figure it out more, but I’m learning about things like ad impressions, CTR (clickthrough rates), RPM (revenue per thousand impressions), CPC (cost per click), and CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
  • Amazon Affiliate ads can be funny. Some months I’ll make nothing, and other months … well, I think someone clicked the Amazon ad to read about the product, and then decided to do their monthly shopping – while still under my affiliate link. ‘Cause people are buying things that I haven’t mentioned!
  • Another thing with Amazon ads – their “link maker” includes a bunch of link wording that ends up making their ad … well … look really cheesy. So I just grab the underlying affiliate link, and make my own text or image link.
  • I rarely see a check from the blip.tv ads, but I turn those ads on primarily because I love the blip.tv service – I figure if they get a little bit of money from my silly videos, then yay! I’ve helped keep their service alive.
  • Adwords – that’s just weird. I received a couple of those “$100 free Google Adwords” cards and a nudge from someone using them, so I have very recently been playing with them. I made an ad for “Digital Experience” and pointed to my book. Possibly a couple of people have bought the book because of that… but otherwise, I don’t think adwords are for me.

So – that’s what I’m doing. Should more librarians be playing with online ads? Let me put it this way – any library out there a bit cash-strapped lately? If you have a well-visited site with good content, you can potentially supplement your library’s revenue streams. That is, if you know what you’re doing. And I know that some ILS systems include an option of a “buy it now” button that points to Amazon via an affiliate ad – why not use those?

If nothing else, ads are part of the modern web, and those of us building sites should at least experiment a bit – otherwise, we’re like a carpenter who refuses to experiment with a nail gun because it seems, somehow, likes it’s cheating.

pic by quickonlinetips

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Why Isn’t Your Stuff Getting Read?

by David Lee King on April 7, 2011

Are your library blog posts getting read? If not, here are some possibilities as to why:

Bad content. Simply put, your content might not be all that good to begin with. Maybe it’s stuff you’re interested in, but your patrons don’t share that interest. How to fix it – Why not find out what your patrons are interested in, then write about that?

Poorly written content. Maybe the topic is on-target, but your writing stinks. If your writing is hard to read, guess what? Your patrons probably won’t read it. How to fix it – Why not work on improving your writing skills? Go consult some of those “How to Write” books in your library’s collection. Let the good writers on staff write your blog posts. Use modern web-writing standards.

Your website looks bad. If your website site looks icky, people will assume the content is icky too. How to fix it – update that website. Use a modern CMS like Drupal or WordPress, and use a nice-looking visual template design (or find a talented graphic designer that understands how to design for the web). Make it look as professional as the rest of your library.

Your content is hidden. Is your content hidden under multiple links? Not pulled out in an obvious way so people can find it? If so, that could be the problem. Why? Because your customers aren’t going to hunt for it. How to fix it – pull that content out. Put obvious links on your library’s main page that lead to your great content. Make sure your site is easy to use.

You’re not promoting your content. Maybe your writing is good, the site looks inviting, and your content is easy enough to find – but you’re simply not telling your patrons about it. Instead, you’re playing that passive “oh, I hope How to fix it – promote your blog posts. Instead of making a nice mystery book display in the library, write some short, pithy book reviews. Post those. Then drop the link onto your library’s Facebook Wall, and ask for responses. Ask people to Like it, for their thoughts … which helps spread the joy of your writing into other people’s walls, potentially lead to other comments, etc. Then rinse and repeat.

What would you add?

pic by vial3tt3r

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Librarians were trained to Write the Wrong Way

by David Lee King on April 5, 2011

Just thinking about writing for the web. My writing developed this way: I went to school, and learned to write academic papers and speeches. Ok, I also took some poetry and creative writing type classes. And a couple of journalism classes so I learned the inverted pyramid thing.

But other than that, it was pretty much formal academic-type papers. I also learned highly useful stuff … like how to graph out a sentence to discover proper sentence structure. Yikes.

I learned to write in a way that required citations and quotations, which I refined in grad school (I even used one of my class papers as my first official published article). Then the web hit, and I had to learn to write in a new way.

So now, I work hard at writing like I speak. I try to “write it like I say it.” For some people, actually reading what they just wrote out loud can help develop that voice.

Why work at this? Because that type of writing is conversational, social writing. And that’s the type of writing we want on the web – especially in places we are looking for conversations (think blogs or social media spaces).

We are now writing out our conversations, and asking our patrons to respond. To continue the conversation.

How are you learning to write for the web? Have any resources to share?

pic by vial3tt3rs

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How We Post in Topeka

by David Lee King on September 7, 2010

I was recently asked how my library posts so frequently on our blogs. It’s a morphing process – here’s where we are now, and where we’re [probably] going.

Right now, here’s what we’re doing. Our digital branch is a huge priority for our library. We’re one big building and 17 bookmobile stops, and we have to reach a whole county. So we have prioritized reaching out digitally. In fact, our executive director often says “no one can opt out of the digital branch.” It’s that important to us.

How does everyone participate? Some blog, some take pictures or create/post videos. Some of us watch/add content to our outposts like Facebook or Twitter. Others answer texts/IMs/email reference questions.

For blog posting – right now, our guideline is two posts a week per blog/section of the site. Do we always make this? Nope – some areas do, some not so much. It’s a work in progress.

It also factors into our annual job performance reviews (more on this in a bit).

How will this be changing? Right now, we’re in the midst of a pretty major website redesign. We learned lots from our current design and the current way we operate on the back end, and are ready to put some improvements in place.

One improvement will be how we handle web content – here’s our thinking right now. We’ll probably align our blogs more closely with our physical library’s neighborhoods – we’re taking stuff out of Dewey Decimal order and putting them into content areas (i.e., all health-related books go in the Health neighborhood, etc).

Each of those neighborhoods has a team and a team leader … and each has a blog, too. So the blog is that team’s responsibility. We’ll figure out a posting schedule for them, and jointly create some goals/strategy for growing their little section of the digital branch (that’s a part of my job).

We’ll also probably figure out a way to more formally reward those teams for the digital branch work they do. Right now, it’s easy to say “no one can opt out” and “it’s part of our job performance” – but there’s no good, formal way to make that happen.

We’ll need to figure out a better way to say stuff like “yes, Joe wrote  24 posts this year, answered 200 text reference questions, and livestreamed an author event.” And have that somehow count for better scores on an annual review (alright – still need to talk to HR and other managers about this – it’s been mentioned that we need to improve in this area, just not exactly how yet).

The goal isn’t to punish people who don’t do the work (cause most of us already do it) – instead, the goal is to better recognize this great work.

And last – remember, I work in a pretty healthy organization. If our library decides to do something … we do it. If someone’s assigned to do something, that thing happens. Isn’t that how all libraries are [David quickly ducks]?

pic by pallotron

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Posting and Traffic

by David Lee King on September 2, 2010

Chris Brogan posts this simple observation – “the more you post, the more traffic you get.” Then he qualifies that a bit (ie., reasonably good content). Simple, yet powerful point.

Now – what about your organization? Think about your blog, or your Twitter feed, or your Facebook Page. Getting traffic there? If not … are you posting regularly?

My library’s website is a blog-based site, and we post quite a bit. Individually, it’s not regular, but it ends up looking like we post a lot (cause lots of us post). And over the year, our traffic HAS gone up.

But we can improve our process (which will probably look a bit like strategic planning, goal-setting, and putting our blog posts on more of a regular schedule). More on that next year.

How can you improve your organization’s blog post/content/social media process? Cause I bet, if you sit down and think about it for 10 minutes or so, that you CAN.

pic by Chris Brogan

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Why “Getting it” Matters

by David Lee King on April 6, 2009

OK… I’m a card-carrying member of the American Library Association, and it’s voting time again. Every year, we vote for a president (and a lot of other stuff). This year, there are two candidates for ALA President – Kent Oliver and Roberta Stevens. Both fine, highly qualified people, I’m sure (though I’ve never met either one).

As a web-centric, social media loving geekboy, here’s what I noticed when I visited their websites:

Roberta Stevens:

  • Cool. She has a website.
  • Dated design … looks like a fine site from the year 1999
  • big fat Donate button (actually the first thing I noticed)
  • where’s the RSS feed … hey, wait a minute … why isn’t this a blog-based site with commenting?
  • a mish-mash of text links that point to videos, photos, podcasts, webpages, and pdf files
  • a link to a Facebook Fan page
  • Ah – there’s her blog – one of the many text links points to it.
  • Oops – I clicked through to her blog. She has embedded a YouTube video there …  but it broke her blog template.

Kent Oliver:

  • Cool. He has a website too. A nicely designed site, looks a bit like Obama’s recent campaign site
  • it’s a blog – the RSS feed is right there, where it should be (subscribed)
  • two quick links to platform and qualifications
  • a Donate Now button that blends in with the rest of the site
  • an embedded video (used blip.tv – coolness)
  • Flickr images, embedded on the main page so I can see them…
  • a search box!
  • no one’s commented on his blog posts yet (currently displaying big 0′s beside each post)
  • Oops – just clicked on Platform. Instead of getting his actual platform, I got two more links… same with the Qualifications link.

Honestly, once I get past all that stuff and take a peek at their actual platforms, it’s all the usual stuff (diversity, more money, support privacy, etc) – nothing that stands out as remarkably interesting to me, a lover of all things web (which is a reflection of ME, not them :-) ).

But – looking at the two lists above … who do you think “gets it?” Who either understands new online media, or at least knows who to ask for help? Will that sway my vote (and the votes of many others)? Probably so.

Yes, understanding “the new stuff” is definitely important, and can make or break a campaign.

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SXSWi2009: Dad is the New Mom

by David Lee King on March 16, 2009

Panelists:

Bonin Bough, PepsiCo – the moderator
Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs … and has a dad blog
Brad Powell, IFC/Dadlabs, Inc.
Jory Des Jardins, BlogHer, LLC
Ann-Marie Nichols, This Mama Cooks

Introductions …

Powell – they post reviews – if it’s good or bad. They’ve gotten flack about that. They’ve actually had to say they’re not doing an infomercial

Chris says he gets a lot of mom readers instead of dad readers

Question – is blogging changing you as a parent?

They have to self-censor, make sure to not share some stuff without making it too personal

Powell – says blogging did change him. He’s now more reflective. Because he’s getting sort of a crowd-sourced conversation going about parenting ideas ie., he’ll throw something out, someone else will add to it and make him think.

Hee – Des Jardins said “momosphere” – just sounds funny to me …

Chris thinks brands want human reviewers who are honest.

Q&A has started

Is it bad to make money blogging? Of course not. You have to work hard, though…

It’s what you make of it…

Where do you draw the line between personal and business? So far, they’re not answering the question. Instead, they are talking about getting sponsorships ??? Uhm. Not. The. Question. Dude.

Thank you – someone actually brought the discussion back to the actual question! Yay!

She uses pseudonyms … someone wanted a sponsorship with a big photo of them and their kids – she talked to her husband, and they went ahead and did it – they figured they were already sorta out there anyway, and it would be ok.

Chris mentioned content marketing – instead of writing about a product, write about the type of people who would use the product

Q: A GM dude with a question – he’s had some bloggers come to him asking for a car for a year – when he turns them down, they say “well, I can go to a competitor …” what to do?

A: the cream of the crop rises …

[my answer. Sheesh. Both the company shelling out cars AND the famous bloggers need to get over themselves. At that point, the original focus of the blog has been lost. Probably the focus of the company, too]

[aside - guy asking a question has a Flip on a clip ... on his belt. Cool. And it rthymes, too]

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SXSWi2009: Video Blogging: Turning Wine into Gold

by David Lee King on March 15, 2009

Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), someone else who is interviewing him – can’t read the name…

Gary turned 30, realized there was alot more that he wanted to do. He watched ZeFrank’s videos and some others, and thought “I can do that.”

Claims it’s hard being an extreme extrovert. But you have to be who you are.

Gary has a new book coming out  it’s about “business.”

You can be an expert in social media marketing. But if your product’s terrible, it won’t help.

If you’re a jerk, your intern is flip-camming you

Don’t email Gary about camera or lighting. The content is king – not the tools.

When Gary started, he went to every single wine blog and left comments with links back to his blog.

You have to find your audience – not by pitching them, but by sharing & joining in the community

How funny – Gary grew up around wine tasting and wondered why people weren’t saying “this wine tastes like Big League Chew?” So he started doing that with his blog.

You can only live your life once. Gary wants to do it 100% happy. No reason not to make yourself as happy as possible.

None of this works if you live for weekends and vacations. He didn’t touch on this much, but – this is a HUGE point. Thanks for saying this!

(fyi – this is a Q&A session now). How do you deal with being “known?” Ask yourself “who am I” – if you don’t want people to know that, then you need to stop.

When did you start making money with video? He makes money becuase people know him. He got his book gig because people know him … etc.

Wow. he reads over 1000 emails a day! It’s his job.

Too many people don’t make decisions to survive – you have to decide to run your business like a business.

People who are unfocused – stay unfocused, but do that stuff really well.

Never wait for something to happen – go get it instead

Being successful – part of it is just keeping on doing it – outlast the competition

Delegate everything except what you love

Gary’s goal – owning the Jets.

Q – how do you “get in the zone?” Gary – “I’m there when I wake up every day.”

(aside – you REALLY have to be here – Gary is hilarious!)

Numbers/followers don’t mean anything. What matters are the people who CARE.

Puting out your content is only the FIRST thing to do – you have to do lots of work after that, too

And a couple other quotes/questions that I didn’t get…

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