In January, the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, launched their new website, www.AFT.org. Its more than 1.4 million members represent teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, higher education faculty and staff, local, state and federal employees, nurses and other healthcare professionals, early childhood educators and retirees.

Among other goals, AFT engaged Beaconfire to redesign their 5-year old site to balance the needs of multiple audiences with a more modern and inviting look and feel. Our redesign process involved stakeholder interviews, a creative visioning exercise, a review of peer organizations, a card sorting exercise to gather user input and developing personas representing AFT’s target audiences, in addition to our typical discovery process of defining goals, audiences and features. All these steps resulted in a new information architecture and visual design for the site. In addition to the design, Beaconfire re-engineered the AFT Voices feature on the web site that asks their members to share their voice on important questions and issues for their professions and their constituencies. The new design was implemented by OmniUpdate, AFT’s CMS software vendor.

The new Voices tool automates what was a very manual and time consuming process for posting questions to and comments by members on the website. The new tool has an administrative console where AFT editors can create and publish questions, receive email notifications, moderate and publish responses, and view statistics on questions and comments. It allows members to post their comments and a photo real time, and to vote and rate others’ responses; Editor’s picks and highly rated comments sort to the top. Previously, AFT manually inputted questions and comments from their print publications onto the website, which only enabled them to post a fraction of the number of actual comments received.

The new look and feel, and the Voices tool in particular, have helped to achieve two other key goals for the site – to engage and interact with members online, and allow more members to see themselves on the site and to understand they are part of a larger movement. It’s been a pleasure working with the nice folks at the AFT to make their goals come true!

The future is here, and its name is Wave.

Not really… but the much anticipated Google Wave has arrived in “preview” mode. When Google says “preview,” they mean “we can’t call it beta yet”, and it’s available through a limited number of invitations to people who are willing to deal with lots of bugs in order to get an early peek at this tool.

The idea behind Wave is that email has been around, mostly unchanged, for a long time – so Wave purports to be what email would have been if it were developed using today’s technology and for today’s web user. Not everyone feels that Google’s description of Wave is accurate, however. Daniel Tenner blogged recently that Wave is not communications 2.0 at all, saying:

“Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.. I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer.”

Confused yet? Check out a new collaborative user manual, read Lifehacker’s introduction, or Google’s hefty hour-long demo (below), and you’ll have a good idea of what it’s all about.

(more…)

A couple of months ago, I was frustrated with several academic journal websites which did not have the necessities of web 2.0 sharing features which can make their site useful to the new generation of scholars.  The suggestions I gave centered around adding “share this” or “add this” functionality that would allow site visitors to add a link to their delicious bookmarks, share it with their friends on facebook or twitter, or possibly send to a friend via email.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

The question one finds asking themselves before taking any task of considerable effort is  whether they really want to do it. This past weekend, I exerted some effort to get myself from Washington D.C. to Cambridge, MA to attend a conference. The topic of discussion was Elgg. What is Elgg and why did I go to Cambridge? Read on and discover why.

Last week, it was brought to my attention that Elgg–an open source Social Networking Platform–was holding a conference on Social Media for Education, and a more specific conference on Elgg. I know and understand the needs of Education that the promise of Social Media can bring. I was very glad someone decided to bring people together to talk about it. Since it was on Friday and I was at work that day, I couldn’t make it. Thankfully, I did make the second conference on Saturday.

At ElggCamp Boston 2009, I was able to see the need for the "Social Networking Platform".Speakers made it very clear that Elgg was not for the person that needed to put up a generic social network to link people together. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter do that just fine.

Online video has become an increasingly popular tool used by non-profits to raise awareness. If you’re using video online and need some inspiration, or just want to see what others are doing, take a look at these non-profits who are educating and getting people involved through the use of video.

Interactive Campaigns

These campaigns encourage visitors to get involved by recording and contributing their own videos or photos:

• 24 Hours for Darfur has collected over 900 personal video appeals from celebrities, politicians, Darfurians, and citizens around the world. The campaign aims to strengthen Darfur advocacy and enable individuals to send their appeals to political leaders.
• Witness.org – The Hub is an interactive community for human rights, where you can upload your own content or watch, comment on and share content from others. They also provide a great Video Advocacy Toolkit.
• Stand Up 2 Cancer asked visitors to “Submit your own picture or video and tell the world what you stand for! Cancer affects all of us, what are you standing for?” and used the submissions to create this video.

(more…)

Take a look down at the bottom of this post.  See all those little icons?  You may know what they are for, you may not, but they are a feature that now appear on most blogs and an increasing number of Web sites.  The idea is that you can click one of those icons and, by doing so, submit a link to this post to the associated social networking site.  Why would you want to do this?  If you don’t know the answer to that question then I would suggest that there is no reason at all to do so.  But if the question you are pondering on is whether you should add these kinds of links to your Web site or blog, then by all means read on.

These icons are not merely shortcuts to the sites that the represent, they actually perform an action associated with the function of that site.  As such, they are more like little applications than links, per se.  I’d say that there are three main reasons to put an application-like shortcut to anything, social network or otherwise, on your website:

1. To give your visitors a quicker way to accomplish something they already do
2. To demonstrate that you are the kind of site that does this sort of thing
3. To educate your users and try to get them to start doing something about which didn’t already know

(more…)

Editor’s note: Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors.

The internets have been besieged by 3 wolves – what started as a prank product review on Amazon.com became an online phenomenon when users marked it “helpful” and added their own ironic ratings to the mix (ex: Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather). Suddenly it was one of the most talked about items on the information superhighway, and the wolf skin site, which allows you to “wolfify” any website you choose, was born (similar to rickrolling, but with less surprise – users who look at the URL will know to expect something).

We asked the staff: What’s your favorite example of user-generated content that has been bum rushed by people who resist coloring inside the lines?

Rebecca, Functional Analyst: I read that Amazon’s Tuscan Whole Milk is the product that started the whole review trend about 3 years ago.

Featuring a very impressive Edgar Allen Poe spoof:

Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door -
Only this, and nothing more.’

Amadie, Client Manager: One of my favorite examples is the Playmobil Security Check Point toy

Review highlight:

My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).

Erika, Operations Manager: Amazon’s Fresh whole rabbit reviews

A review of the rabbit:

How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave.

Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins.

Other items viewed by the rabbit viewers: Uranium Ore

Miro, Software Engineer: I would have to say that Google-spamming to connect the word George Bush with “miserable failure”. That one is my favorite.

And of course, Colbert trying to get NASA to name the space station module after himself. Or the turtle. Oh well, I’ll admit it, I don’t think Colbert will ever get old for me.

Do you have a favorite? Add it to the comments!

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend of mine about “robots that tweet for you” when I mentioned that our company Beaconfire Consulting had successfully mastered the art of Tweeting without actually Tweeting. Please note that I didn’t say “robots that sweep for you”, but then again, someone is probably working on that in Japan or the MIT Media Lab.

For better or for worse, since the global tipping point of Twitter was reached, everyone wants to be part of the action. If Twitter hasn’t come across your online radar, it’s probably because you are living under the proverbial rock and are a Luddite battling online reality. On second thought, if you are on the internet reading this blog post, then you probably aren’t a Luddite, just a Twitter Luddite. That’s ok. The Twitter sphere of knowledge is small and can be transferred from one person to another in usually a few sentences similar to the 140 character tweets.

Below, I’ve elaborated substantially to show you that there is a way that individuals and organizations can use this tool to keep their relationships better informed. I recognize that the audience for our blog here at Beaconfire  mostly consists of individuals in the non-profit industry. This knowledge however can be used by most anyone in any industry which uses the internet to interact with their customers, clients, constituents, or partners. Businesses and Governments, please utilize this knowledge wisely and don’t be evil. (That means you Google!)

(more…)

According to Roll Call (subscription req’d), the Senate recently revised their rules to allow Members to make use of YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and other free web applications on their sites, as long as they otherwise comply with franking rules:

Senators can now legally post YouTube videos on their Web sites, thanks to a long-awaited update to the chamber’s rules.

Until now, any Senator who embedded a YouTube video or linked to a Flickr album was in violation of outdated rules that required them to keep within the senate.gov domain. Some posted such links anyway, and few were reprimanded.

But last week, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee voted to allow Senators to use third-party sites.

This is pretty much indisputably a good thing. Not only does it allow Senators to bring their websites into the 21st century, but many of these tools foster interactions between citizens and their representatives in Washington. In addition, Congress’s ability to use technology is directly related to their ability to understand and regulate it wisely.

No movement yet on the House side, but hopefully we’ll see some changes there with the next Congress once they see how effectively their Senate colleagues make use of user-generated content tools.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest that Senators celebrate their new freedom by embedding this video on their homepages:

Hundreds of Facebook friends.  Thousands of YouTube hits. Millions of dollars from community fundraising. Lively email groups and message boards. A veritable cyber-utopia of intellectual discourse.

A thriving online community, all centered on your cause.

You know you want it.

Or do you?

Many an online community project can be railroaded into the ground with one simple, seemingly innocuous sentence. “How can I stop ‘the bad people’ from?”

“The Bad People? ” Who are the bad people? There are different types of bad people. People who will use profanity. People who mean well, but egregiously write in online short-hand. Then, there’s the scariest people: those who don’t agree with your mission.

There are a series of filters you can use, depending on your application, to stop the profane. There’s even a stupid filter to prevent the low level of discourse online short-hand can create. But there’s only way to keep that third group in line: moderate.

But be careful. Once you decide to go down the path of moderating, you need to make sure you have a plan  and the man-hours to keep it up. Many non-profits just don’t have the resources. But you don’t need to toss that online community out yet.  You just need to prepare.

(more…)

For the second year, American Express is running an online program that gathers input from card members on who they should give $2.5 million in funding to.  Over the next 4 months, with the help of a Web site and online tools, they will solicit project ideas and collect votes on which 5 projects will receive the funding.  It was really easy to participate last year and I’m looking forward to again this year.  Check it out at www.membersproject.com

With the advent of Web 2.0, services such as YouTube.com made the idea of video publishing and hosting a commonplace activity for amateurs, hosting its videos for free, and carrying advertisements on its pages.

With the online video frenzy, ad agencies have capitalized on this burgeoning industry of amateur producers, and in a couple of instances, even commissioned to the populace to make Superbowl ads. Now, there are specialized online hosting services in niche markets serving the needs of advertising agencies, businesses, and political campaigns to serve video content.
Now, more than ever, the popularity of an online video can directly translate into money and success, whether it is in the form of ad revenue, donations, or advocacy conversion. This makes the tracking of video statistics more important than ever.

There are several reasons someone could be interested in online video statistics. If you’re a cost-conscious webmaster paying for bandwidth, you will want to track the actual transfer of bytes over the internet, and not necessarily  how many times a video is viewed. In paying for advertising,  it is more important to measure how many unique people watched a video, or how many times these people watched the video all the way through.  TubeMogul is helping organizations answer these and other important questions. TubeMogul’s name has been coming up at Web 2.0 and Social Networking events. While their authority on the topic has yet to be fully proven, their research looks impressive.

In May of 2008, the company published an updated “What Counts as a View?” which “discusses the findings of an experiment to test which actions result in a ’view‘ as measured on 14 online video websites. There are other interesting pieces about how online video views are driving donations to presidential candidates.

Looking through Tubemogul’s research, you can get the notion of how a video’s popularity impacts different social groups and different interested parties, seeking to benefit from the video’s popularity. As a service, TubeMogul provides a broadcast mechanism to push video content from one central location to multiple sites and then aggregate the video views from those different sites into one dashboard which lets users track video statistics from 12 video sites at once (Screen shot). You can get a more descriptive overview of their services at their site.
Also of interest is Compete.com’s blog.  This interesting blog offers the Video Market Share measured in April for the top 20 Video Hosting sites. With GooTube (Google Video/YouTube) at the top with 50% market share and with a steady growth month by month, it seems to be the Tiger Woods of the video world.

YouTube is one of the cornerstones of the modern web. It combines some of the best things about the internet – it’s participatory, uses rich media, and has a variety of entry levels. It’s also completely free, a key element of anything that’s going to be influential online today (as the Times learned last year).

But it’s also earned somewhat of a reputation for being everything negative about the modern web – it’s seen as a time-waster, and those who argue against user-generated content need point no further than the popularity of videos of cats playing the piano while skateboarding (okay – I can’t find one to combine these, but it must exist).

Enter DocStoc. I’ve described it to many of my collegues as “YouTube for business,” meaning you can find a memo about a cat playing a piano while skateboarding it’s a place where users can share and peruse documents they find useful. It’s not entertaining (Oooo… invoice templates!), but it is a great example of the power of a participatory internet. While once a brand-new non-profit would have to go to a small business incubator or book to find a sample NDA, this allows them to go online to browse 23 pages of options.

I bring this up because we so often are looking for an example of a site where user-generated content doesn’t turn into a flame war or endless string of banalities, but rather something that other users can really value. Wikipedia’s another great example here, but because of a few minor but much-trumpeted inaccuracies, some still look at it skeptically (even though it’s been shown to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica).

So if you’re looking to start a small non-profit or business, or want an official-looking document, or just need to point to a user-generated content site your boss will approve of, give DocStoc a try. I can’t promise that it’s be kitten-free, but I can say that it’s at least intended to be useful.

While most of the discussion of video used by the Presidential campaigns this cycle has focused on Obama and Clinton’s effective use of video to share speeches and ads with users (see this post on how Obama uses YouTube to bypass the culture of sound bytes while this post discusses how both he and Clinton make good use of their raw footage), there’s also been an undercurrent of parody videos that’s designerd to be forwarded, even if it’s less influential.

Prompting this post was a video combining two of the more well-known (at least online) figures in the battle for the Democratic nomination: Mike Gravel and Obama Girl. While one is an pre-packaged phenomenon nearly universally loathed by Democrats and Republicans alike (see this study – 51% of Democrats were irritated by the videos while 41% were embarrassed) and the other is a former senator who shared the stage for several early debates, they actually have a lot in common.

Both trade not on serious policy issues or even trivial gaffes, but on being different enough to break out from pack. Both also make use of pop culture as a segue to promote their own videos – while Gravel’s is often several decades removed (see this video), Obama Girl draws source material from other YouTube celebs.

Their latest video was a collaboration between the two – check it out:

Now, I don’t see videos like this really moving votes. Unlike relatively clever parodies done by the major campaigns (one of Hillary’s best videos pokes fun at herself, Bill and Tom Vilsack), Gravel’s videos are mostly just a way to get attention for a campaign that otherwise would have been forgotten, while Obama Girl is mostly there to sell stuff on her website.

But despite their similarities, I’m far more amicable to Gravel than to Obama Girl. It’s probably not because he’s a candidate – I don’t watch a ton of candidate videos, particularly from the minor candidates. Instead, it’s probably that they’re just plain fun to watch. As I commented to a colleague today, I really like Senator Gravel because he’ll do his own parodies. Whether it’s dumping a rock in the pond, remaking schoolhouse rock, or telling Obama that the election is now down to the two of them, he gets his message out while being entertaining.

Obama Girl, on the other hand, is a joke that may have been funny when she first came out, but now is just sorta creepy. She’s too slick, and her videos just try too hard, plus it’s the same basic premise every time – we get it: you have a crush on Obama. Her videos seem so commercial, while Gravel’s feel so grassrootsy. Plus she pushes the sex angle way too far for my taste – it’s just not something I’d really pass around the office.

So as the nomination contest wraps up, we’ll hopefully see a lot more user-generated parody video this election. While it may not be as vital as Obama’s full-length speeches or the DSCC’s web ads, it’s an important element to get the rank and file engaged and talking about the election. Plus it’s just fun to send around on a Friday afternoon.

Some of my favorite Gravel Ads below the fold, and to see more of Beaconfire staff favorite videos, check out this post.

(more…)

Most of us think of Twitter as a kind of silly application that lets people say things like “John Brian is preparing for the robot uprising” or “Brad thinks the refs blew it in the Caps/Flyers game 7.” It’s chief purpose, so far, is entertainment, with a dash of TMI thrown in.

But lately, I’ve been wondering.

A couple months ago, at South by Southwest, an interview with Mark Zuckerberg famously went awry when the Twitter-feuled audience first started heckling the interviewer, then eventually took over the microphones. (If you are interested, check out this particularly thoughtful account of the event, which includes an amazing video of the interview with a twitter overlay).

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a different conference (the IA Summit) where Twitter was again used by the crowd, but this time in a far more sanguine way, to share information amongst the audience and make insightful comments about the presentations. It probably helped that the audience and the speakers actually knew each other, even if only passingly in some cases.

I got enough value from following the Summit’s twitter feed that I left thinking, could this actually be of value in a corporate setting?

After all, I’ve been to plenty of all-staff meetings, or large team meetings, where people are already bringing their laptops. The larger and longer the meeting, the more likely people are trying to at least keep an eye on their email. So, the technology is already in place in many offices to try adopting a twitter feed. And what is the value of twitter here?

A second, quiet, channel of information.

The bigger the room, the less anyone wants to interrupt the presenter’s flow to ask a question. The more likely the group is to simply go with the flow. If information they need isn’t provided, they might (if they are lucky) get a chance to ask a question afterwards, or they have to spend extra time cornering the presenter. Having a quiet alternate channel of communication is incredibly helpful. In particular, here are a few of the things that you might use twitter for:

1. Request a resource: “Can someone tell me where to find the .pdf that Michael is talking about?”
2. Expand on the content: “In addition to the companies listed, Arlene and I have started talking to Widget Co about this”
3. Gauge interest: “I was hoping to hear more about the bonus program. Anyone else?”
4. Brief side conversations: “Alan, should we be using this tool for Project Z? Looks like it might be helpful.”

In this way, having a second, quiet channel of information might increase the usefulness of a large meeting, or even help positively shape the direction of conversation without grinding things to a halt.

What do you think?

When MoveOn launched their “Bush in thirty seconds” user generated video contest, they received more than a little flak. Most of this was a function of a media that didn’t quite yet understand that an organization shouldn’t be held accountable for everything their supporters say. Since then, more organizations have opened up to user-generated content, though there are still a few goofy stories of using online supporters against an organization, by and large, the press has come to accept that there’s a difference between an organization hosting content and endorsing it.

That might be one of the reasons that MoveOn’s new user-generated video contest, “Obama in thirty seconds” has been more popular than its predecessor. As of last Tuesday, MoveOn brought in more than 1100 submissions for the contest (that’s almost 8 hours of total video!), and had more than 2 million votes in less than 24 hours (compared to 2.9 million total in 2004). Since then, votes continued to cascade in – when voting closed, more than 4.7 million votes were cast for the first round.

Why was this contest so much more popular than its predecessor? And what can non-profits learn from MoveOn’s success in this arena? The answers to these, and other questions, plus my favorite videos, below the fold…

(more…)

Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved maps. Maybe I’m a little travel deprived, or maybe it’s from reading too much National Geographic, but I could spend hours pouring over them. Google Maps now lets us all take our map fascination to the next level: over the past few years they’ve given us multiple views, fantastic (and sometimes astonishing) detail, driving directions, and even the ability to create custom content. This last feature let us build a cool mashup for the National Parks Conservation Association, resulting in a visualization of places where development threatens our national parks.

There are two ways to create custom Google maps. The first and most common is using the API, a code library released by Google that allows anyone who knows a little code to build their own map, with a high degree of customization. The catch is the code; if you don’t know Javascript, the API is pretty much off limits. But don’t despair! Google also offers a user-friendly My Maps interface. All you need is a free Google account, and you can create maps with placemarks, paths, and text bubbles. You add content through the click-and-drag interface. You can even insert pictures, if you upload them to a web photo service. My Maps is the interface we chose for creating maps for NPCA, due to the speed and ease of adding elements.

My Maps has some nice features: (more…)

Since the advent of YouTube, we’ve been advising people that the average user attention span is about 4 minutes, and that making anything longer just means that people will click away.

But this political season has been challenging that assumption, when some of the most viewed videos have been extended speechs of thirty minutes or more.

Are we reaching the turning point for web video where users are willing to watch longer content? Are people willing to reach the Illiad in addition to a haiku? And how do you test the proposition of a long form piece of content versus a shorter one.

I explore these questions below the fold…

(more…)

I reneged on my promise to deliver my NTC presentation while juggling chainsaws and swallowing flaming swords. But I did have a PowerPoint! And here it is: The User Generators: What Makes Them Tick.

Thanks for the great questions.

I was perusing the Presidential candidates’ blogs a couple weeks back, looking to see where they were headed in my old stomping grounds in Wisconsin, when I came across this item, at the bottom of a post about a supporter-created video:

You can create your own video ‘mashups’ too — feel free to download high resolution footage from our resource library today

Though I was annoyed that they put mashups in quotes (putting web 2.0 terms in quote marks, as if you’re not quite sure it’s a term yet, is almost up there with saying "online blogs"), I was fascinated by how open they were to releasing raw video footage to their supporters.

Looking around the internets, it looks like Obama’s campaign isn’t alone in releasing semi-raw video footage to supporters, but it’s a practice that hasn’t trickled down to non-profits yet. Below the jump, I explore the how this has paid off for some candidates, and why NPOs should join them.

(more…)