An interactive document to accompany a presentation given to ASPRA on March 30, 2007. The intent of this presentation is to inform people working in the field of public relations, specifically in schools and school districts, about new social media. In connection with the spread of social media, the topics of design and delivery of news, design and design expectations, new ways to present content and new ways content is being consumed will also be covered. Ginger Bidwell is an employee at Tucson Unified School District working in the Communications Department.
Mediascape 2.0 is a presentation by Ginger Bidwell of Tucson Unified School District to members of ASPRA on March 30, 2007. Covering new media such as social bookmarking, blogging and other ways of providing content, the intent is to inform people in the public relations professions about ways to use the new media to their advantage.
Mediascape 2.0 isn't really a term, it's just a mashup of "Mediascape" and "Web 2.0"
Flickr is a great example of the way visual images impact individual people and society! With people uploading their own photos, tagging photos, making groups and exploring to help define "interestingness" the way we see the world has really changed. The Machine is Us/ing Us is a video by a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas in response to Web 2.0 and the way it's changing culture.New technologies such as RSS and XML are allowing web content to become more fluid, more portable, more mobile and more classifiable. It's becoming easier to browse, create and participate in a dialogue with the content you receive than ever before. Consumers are now able to get content on their time and on thier terms. The most successful and many times the most useful websites create a conversation between the creator and the viewer about the content. Users responding to content creates more content creating a type of mini-ecosystem within a site.
But with all this content floating about on the web, how do we organize it all?
Tagging pages, pictures, videos, posts, entire blogs and virtually any other type of content makes it searchable and browsable by user interest. This attaches relevance to bits of content based on what the original user tagged and possibly what other users added as tags after that. This is one of the many ways people are able to get content on their terms.
Examples of tagging for browsing:
A popular trend in the field of Web 2.0 sites is to include a tag cloud for browsing. A tag cloud is a group of tags graphically showing the more popular tags by differentiating the font style (with size or weight) to show the more popular or current tags.
Tehnorati, Pete Frietag's blog, and Centripetal Notion are 3 examples of the use of a tag cloud. Even though they are popular, they don't always look nice, which is why many people don't like them.The ways that people get their media are changing at a fast rate. The package the media comes in is changing quickly too. For the newer generations, the internet is slowly balancing then overtaking the traditional media. Blogs are becoming more trusted sources, and many people are more critical of "what's news" to them.
PressEsc.com is an example of a community-based reporting site. *Edit* Here's another example: Associated Content. */Edit* Though these are not the trusted go-to for accurate information yet, this is the direction news has been heading for awhile.People are not even necessarily looking for "news" anymore, they are looking for interesting content.
This switch into the digital media changes a few things about current news.
Recognizing the growing credibility of online sources, traditional newspapers with websites are opening a dialogue with their users by allowing comments and discussion, as well as tracking back to blogs about an article on the same page.
In preparing for this presentation, I was asked how I get my news. I read RSS feeds and visit community and social bookmarking sites that have content that interests me. 9rules.com is a place I have been hanging out recently. Here's how I found myself at a news article: I went from here: http://9rules.com/music/notes/2666/, to http://consumerist.com/consumer/riaa/npr-vs-the-riaa-244318.php to http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2007/03/npr_may_lead_fi.html. Unless someone in the communities I frequent has made a post about a news article, chances are I haven't seen it.
To me, and probably to many other people as well, engaging content is what we're looking for on the web, not "News". In a way, word-of-mouth on the internet popularizes a story. That's how social bookmarking sifts content.
I also tried some different ways of finding news on the internet: StumbleUpon.com has a "news" filter that allows you to channel-surf news that other people thought was interesting. That content tended to be the odd, grotesque or off-beat news. I tried looking at news.google.com through a content aggregator called The Weblist but most of the time, the articles aren't interesting to me.
I get my news from aggregators like Google Reader, in which I subscribe to RSS feeds, and The Web List, which shows the top sites getting clickthroughs on a variety of social bookmarking and social news sites.
The most important thing you can do is to study, understand and get used to it! It's not going anywhere, so open a discussion with your users about the things that interest them.
Support the culture of discussion and feedback. Encourage people to give you feedback online by making it possible for users to leave comments on news stories.
Post your list of trackbacks, and structuring your web site with the ability for users to subscribe to an RSS feed of your news page. People will read good content if they have it in their own time and on their own terms. E-mail is out, RSS is in. Forget all the mailing lists, don't we all get enough e-mail every day anyway?
Use multimedia to enhance your communications. Video and images are easy to integrate or provide in addtion to event and news information.
See my page on viral advertising to see some good examples of video spreading around the net to promote a product, service or message.Keep your brand, the internet is a powerful marketing tool. With respect to design, there are so many possibilities for making your message known online. Your print media should reflect your online presence and vice-versa
Check my WordPress in about three weeks when I'll have an article about Web 2.0 design trends. Businesses that market mainly to younger groups usually have a MySpace profile. Though MySpace doesn't really promote good design, it can still be a valuable tool in the youth market especially.Learn to let go of the message. Once it's out there, it's going to be interpreted, re-interpreted, quoted, commented, parodied and maybe even criticised. After it's out there you can't control it any more, so respond and discuss.
When it comes to current issues, people are going to express thier opinions (many will do it online) whether you ask them to or not. We have a recent example in TUSD: this site has been floating around the internal e-mail system being passed from employee to employee. Some are concerned about the board's email addresses being posted (what? We're not supposed to e-mail the board?) Others say that the site should be taken down (what? You're going to call the parent (the customer) that he's wrong and that he should take his site down?). I thought maybe we should respond and open a discussion about the topic. This was our response. Rather than opening a dialogue about the topic online, we are "handling the situation" by allowing people to send us their questions and comments. Really it's a two-way discussion, then, involving us and a single customer. Who knows if we even have time to e-mail them back? Many people probably didn't see our response at all. I work here, and I didn't see it until two days after it was posted. I don't generally wake up in the morning and say to myself "self: let's see what's on the TUSD website this morning!"
I would recommend a forum structure or at least allowing comments per post for the news items. This way, people could post thier own thoughts, others could read and discuss. If we disagree, we post too and say that we disagree rather than trying to control what people say. I am also told there is a legal issue if we post a link to this parent's blog on our site. Huh?
Opening a discussion can build more trust and make people feel more valued. That's good for outsiders, people who work here and customers! A win-win-win. And working in the field of education, I think we can use all the trust we can gain.
My fictitious school called Spider Academy has a website. Our web developer doesn't have a lot of time to learn the latest techniques for coding the page to accept comments and he doesn't know how to output an RSS feed (and quite frankly, he doesn't have time to learn). We want a quick way to get our best news out there to keep our students and parents up to date with the happenings at our school. We decide to use WordPress to set up a blog. We set up a blog for central district news and send an e-mail to all our principals that we're doing so. If they would like to create a separate blog for their school news, we ask them to provide us with a link to theirs. Same goes for teachers. We can build an entire network of free blogs to keep people up to date on the news and allow them to view our posts via RSS readers.
We recently had a big party at the central office to celebrate the birthdays of three of our administrators. We've got tons of pictures from the event, but we don't want to have to spend time resizing all of them to display on the web. Instead we uploaded them to Flickr and tagged them with an event title, our school district name and descriptive keywords. We posted a link to our group of photos on the blog. If we had just a little bit more time, we could learn how to embed a constant Flickr slideshow in our blog. There is nothing the internet likes more than teaching.
Great news! We got a new student at our high school. His mom said that she was researching the town before she came and she came across our set of photos on Flickr. Just so happens that she has a soft spot for companies that have workers nice enough to throw a birthday party for one another. (She must have had a bad birthday at work sometime in the past).
We sent them a thank-you note for the feedback. At the new school, the student can catch up on news he missed by reading the archives of the school blog. The school uses it to post important announcements as well such as class field trip reminders and even snow days!
Of course, the best way to put this all together would be to use a content management system for our website so that the designs of all the school sites would have some similarity to the district site. It would be best if our server had the capability to host all these blogs and comments going from student to teacher to principal to district and from parents and community memebers. Most of us are short of two things: time and resources, so this example shows a quick fix that can look professional, be fully functional and also free.
