haa wraps up workshops on social media & web 2.0

Published by AYN Brand | Filed under Branding

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From the Houston Arts Alliance newsletter:

The Houston Arts Alliance concluded a three part workshop series called "T3: Tech, Tools, and Tips on Social Media & Web 2.0" at the Houston Technology Center. The goal of these workshops was to teach non-profit organizations and individual artists about new technologies and how to use tools to maximize productivity, build capacity, and develop audiences. T3 Workshops covered three broad categories: Web 2.0 & Social Media Primer; Work Your Online Networks: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.; The Blogosphere & Micro-blogging.

Taught by Grace Rodriguez, President of Ayn Brand, the workshop attendees represented a cross section of Houston’s arts industry from the Alley Theatre, Association for Advancement of Mexican Americans (AAMA), Contemporary Arts Museum, Da Camera of Houston, Fresh Arts Coalition, Galveston Arts Center, Glasstire, Golden Cat Silk Company, Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, Houston Grand Opera, Houston Museum District, Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston Youth Symphony, Institute of Hispanic Culture, Jazz Education, Mercury Baroque, O’Michael Studios, Opera In The Heights, S.W.A.M.P., Samskriti, Spacetaker, The Ensemble Theatre, The Heritage Society, The River Performing & Visual Arts, Virtuosi of Houston, Voices Breaking Boundaries, and Writers In The Schools.

Blogging 101 : RSS Feeds

Published by AYN Brand | Filed under Internet Marketing, Strategies

To leverage social media, you must engage in the conversation. This applies to blogging as well: while people tend to think of it as a “post only” medium, it should be considered another opportunity for dialogue and community building. You should listen and respond to what people say in relation to your posts; and pay attention to what others are blogging about regarding your organization and industry.

With so many voices in the blogosphere and so many sources of information, one of the best ways to pull it all together and organize your sources in one place is to use a reader to subscribe to RSS feeds.

CommonCraft explains it this way:

For our Social Media/Web 2.0 Workshops (hosted by the Houston Arts Alliance at the Houston Technology Center), we use 43marks.com to organize and share both relevant links and RSS feeds. You can also use RSS feeds to bring valuable information into your blog, as we do on this blog in the sidebar widgets.

Microblogging 101 : What Are You Doing?

Published by AYN Brand | Filed under Internet Marketing, Public Relations, Twitter

If blogs are composed of short stories, microblogs are haiku collections. Where a blog post may contain a few hundred words, a microblog post is usually restricted to only a few hundred characters. (In Twitter’s case, the maximum length of a “tweet” is only 140 characters.)

Microblogging refers to the posting of brief updates about what a person is doing, observing, thinking, feeling, tasting, working on, railing against, irritated about, …and so on. Microblogging tools allow you to answer, “What are you doing?” RIGHT NOW. Because of its emphasis on the immediate experience, microblog posts tend to be more personal. So how does this help you and your organization or business?

The answer to that question depends on which microblogging service you use. Here are the top three:

Blogging 101 : Quick Guide to Blogging for Non-Profits

Published by AYN Brand | Filed under Internet Marketing, Public Relations, Strategies

Blogs are one of the easiest ways to provide regularly updated information to online audiences. Because blog set-up and maintenance is much more simple and inexpensive than website development or print design and production, blogs enable non-profits to quickly and efficiently share organizational updates, news, human interest stories, photos, videos, podcasts, event invitations, volunteer calls-to-action, and fundraising requests.

General Blog Features :

• Brief entries running one to three paragraphs in length.
• Two to three columns per page, with new content added to the largest column - the “main” or “body” column.
• Sidebars featuring blog navigation (often via categories, archives, or tag clouds), links to other blogs and/or sites, previous posts, or readers’ comments.
• Many links within blog entries to other blogs, websites, press releases, articles, photos, and audio and video files.
• Frequent updates, with updating schedules from several times daily to two-three times each week.

Examples of Effective, Well-Designed Non-Profit Blogs :

Microblogging 101 : Twitter in Plain English

Published by AYN Brand | Filed under Twitter

Yet another great video tutorial from CommonCraft - this one’s on Twitter and how it answers the question, “What are you doing?”:

In answering that question, Twitter users have a great opportunity to share - and thereby promote - what projects they’re working on, what events they’re attending, etc. Just as important, they are able to find topic experts and like-minded people to “follow” to learn about new trends, ideas, and opportunities.

Twitter allows people to select their own community, then determine whether they’d like to participate in it actively through information sharing, replies, and direct messages, or passively through reading “what everyone else is doing.”