Ben Foley surveys web services

1. A survey of ways to publish your content online
Ben Foley Two Galahs pty ltd
In this session we will review some of the free and paid services that may be useful for you in publishing your content
online, including shopping systems, blogs, microblogs, Facebook pages, and web services for sharing and collecting
inspirations.
Assess your purpose. Ask yourself what you want to do and why.
There are many ways to get online and promote your needs. Many services are free or affordable, more and more the
services can be set up and maintained without any specialist knowledge of design or coding. Knowledge of human
behaviour and an ability to relate to your customers and audiences is still highly valued. There are so many options for
making your online presence that the choice itself can now be an impediment to achieving success. We can fall into the
trap of spending so much time setting up many online properties that we don’t have time to grow them. Start with few and
add over time as the need arises.
What are the options?
An online property can be as simple as a single photograph of a product, with a means of getting in contact.
A site could be a custom-built immersive game with a sole purpose of getting to a ‘buy now’ button, to buy a book.
Sites can be simple markers describing your product/service/event. We are here. Brochure-ware.
A site might contain detailed information, perhaps technical for a specialist audience, about your products and services.
Your site could be a product catalogue with eCommerce.
Your activities might be heavily associated with audience development and engagement (rewarding play and curiosity).
Knowing what you need helps narrow down the choices.
Get to know your audiences early on.
You may be able to learn about an audience before you get online, or you may need to begin with something simple to
get to know them before you grow. Try not to assume who your audiences are. It’s a bit of a catch-22 situation, but
recognise that your audiences for online activities will differ depending on the platform you are using and the methods you
use to engage with them.
Identify the audiences’ needs.
Ask your audiences questions.. use surveys or ask by email, Twitter or Facebook. Engage with your audience and try to
find out what will enrich their online experience.
Match services to needs
Identify what is achievable within your available resources (budget, skills, time).
Do you have budget for paid services, for paying someone to work with you, for developing content for specific
audiences? Knowing your budget will help focus the options.
What skills can you make the most of? Are you a good writer? Do you relate well with people? Are you great at raising
funding? What can you do yourself, when can you involve others (professional, amateur or user-generated)?
Know how much time you can allocate to creating new content, to building relationships with your audience on social
platforms, to moderating spam comments on a forum. If you start an newsletter, will you be able to maintain a regular
supply of engaging content? A blog summarising industry news could be a great way to build a community and enhance
your cultural capital, but it could easily take over your life. Be careful of committing resources to activities that aren’t close
to your core business. Be authentic. Does your personality best suit interaction on Facebook, Twitter, blogging, enews,
web forums, or would your niece be better suited to it?
The options are narrowing. With a basic needs map you can begin to match services to needs. Identify the services which
will be relevant to you.
Participation
Work out how you will measure your activities’ success. Most services now support Google Analytics for measuring
numbers. Facebook can provide very rich data about the people who engage with your content. Decide what you want to
know about your audience’s engagement, and how it will help you grow your presence.
Sharing
With a service set up and content added, now it all comes down to getting the word out ! Cross promote your activities–
talk about your enews on your Facebook page, talk about your Pinterest collection on Twitter, email your audience a code
for a discount at your store.
© 2012 Ben Foley, Two Galahs pty ltd. ben@twogalahs.com.au 0404 838 891

2. Some services. There are many, many more...
Tumblr
www.tumblr.com
Tumblr is a great site for quickly and easily publishing content online. You
can publish text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video,
slideshows. You can publish by emailing your posts directly to the site,
using one of the Tumblr apps, or just login and start posting. Tumblr can
use your own domain name and there are hundreds of themes from which
to choose your style, or you can build your own.
Here are two tumblr sites being used for documentation of Central
Australian song and language projects:
iltyemiltyem.tumblr.com
songpeoples.tumblr.com
Weebly
www.weebly.com
Weebly is an online website builder. Create a site by adding building
blocks of content such as maps, slideshows, text, and video to one of their
templates.
There’s an education version that enables teachers to make public or
private classroom websites that students can edit. Great for moderated
classroom blogs.
Pozible
www.pozible.com.au
Pozible is a crowdfunding platform. It enables you to raise funds for a
project by publishing project information and facilitating payments.
People’s pledges are only processed if the total amount is reached.
People have used this to raise funds for making films, books, getting funds
to travel and perform, record albums.. The ‘Kinds of Blue’ project made
$6000 in two and a half days to print a book of short comics on depression
www.pozible.com.au/index.php/archive/index/1092
You can set rewards for people’s pledges. Spread the word yourself, enlist
your friends, family and colleagues. Build a fanbase early, collect people’s
email addresses (legitimately) whenever anyone shows an interest in your
project. The success will depend on people hearing about it. Get out
there, spread the word and make it happen.
Pinterest
www.pinterest.com
Pinterest is an online pinboard, a social catalog, a place to collect and
source ideas and inspirations. A great way to develop a mood board for a
creative concept, or save design inspirations for a project. The best
pinboards mix products, art and images from all across the web. Try not to
pin everything from a single source! Here’s MadMimi’s pinboard–a handy
collection of references and inspiration relating to email marketing:
www.pinterest.com/madmimimeeps
© 2012 Ben Foley, Two Galahs pty ltd. ben@twogalahs.com.au 0404 838 891

3. Vimeo
www.vimeo.com
Vimeo is a platform that publishes video online at high quality. While
YouTube has more viewers, Vimeo’s users are in general more artistic and
mature. They are two different concepts in video sharing: quality and focus
vs massive viewing potential and breadth of content. Assess the benefits
of each and publish accordingly. In some cases I’ll publish a video on
YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook for maximum exposure.
Blogger
www.blogger.com
Blogger is Google’s platform for blogging. As they say: “a blog is a
personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A
breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts.
Memos to the world”. A blog is a great way to engage with your audience.
If you already have a Google account, this is an easy way to get your
content online.
Wordpress
www.wordpress.com
www.wordpress.org
Wordpress is an open-source platform for publishing content online. It
made its mark as a blogging tool, but has matured to now be the
publishing platform of choice for 22% of all new websites! There are two
flavours: one is self-hosted, the other is an online service. The self-hosted
software must be installed on your own web hosting account (i.e. requires
buying or using a free hosting account) and can be extended to your
heart’s content with plugins and themes. The service is based on the
same software, but is restricted in the plugins available to extend what
your site can do. Wordpress’ strengths are the community of people who
build themes and plugins for the platform, extending it’s abilities beyond
the basic features of platforms like Weebly, Tumblr and Blogger.
Shopify
www.shopify.com
Shopify is an online eCommerce service, ranging in pricing from $26/
month to $160/month. You can brand the store as your own, manage the
store’s other pages (such as contact and about information and blog
posts) and includes hosting and payment gateway integration, including
support for manual payments (which many other shop platforms don’t
support).
© 2012 Ben Foley, Two Galahs pty ltd. ben@twogalahs.com.au 0404 838 891

4. BigCartel
www.bigcartel.com
Customisable shop targeted to artists, clothing designers, makers,
crafters. Set up a custom domain and sell on Facebook. Pricing is based
on the number of products and number of images per product. It is free for
5 products, $10/month for 25 products, $20/month for 200 products.
Wufoo
www.wufoo.com
Sometimes you need a form on a site to catch information from people via
a contact form, a survey, a submission form for a competition, a donations
form for a charitable cause or an event registration form. Handy too for
conducting market research, Wufoo is a form builder that makes it easy to
create web forms and collect data from your audience. Wufoo also has
good reporting features and visualisations of the data.
SurveyMonkey
www.surveymonkey.com
An alternative to Wufoo, SurveyMonkey has a range of plans from free to
$65/month.
MadMimi
www.madmimi.com
For connecting with audiences, email marketing is a very powerful tool.
MadMimi is a fabulously fun and powerful way to send your newsletters,
invitations, promotions and email updates. It features an easy-to-use
interface to write your campaigns, great stats and reporting, list
management, drip campaigning, integrated surveys and more.. Pricing is
free for small lists (up to 100 contacts), then steps up as the number of
contacts grow ($8/month for 500 contacts, $36/month for 10,000
contacts).
Facebook pages
www.facebook.com/pages
Facebook pages are a great way to engage with your audience/customers
online. Pages are simple to update–you can post video, images, audio
and text (note that you will need to verify your page before before
uploading videos over 100mb and 2mins duration). You can add apps to
pages that can really enhance your audience engagement. The trick with
pages is that you can’t ‘like’ or ‘friend’ someone the way a profile can.
People still need to know about your page to be able to engage with it, so
you still need to spread word about the page as you would other online
properties.
© 2012 Ben Foley, Two Galahs pty ltd. ben@twogalahs.com.au 0404 838 891