Category Archives ⇒ Tech

Media: Sometimes I feel like I’ve been reinventing the wheel since I started my first zine back in college. Here’s some highlights from this category:

* The Ear­ly Blog­ging Days (2005)

Nonprofits and Social Media

May 5, 2009
· Martin Kelley

I’d like to talk today about social media and non­prof­its. I’ve had a cou­ple of inter­est­ing projects late­ly help­ing non­prof­its put togeth­er Face­book Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twit­ter sites. I think this is an excit­ing way to reach out to audi­ence members. 

Today: Email Lists

Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists – tens of thou­sands of users, seg­ment­ed all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seem­ing not spam.

Face­book Pages

A new era is com­ing with social media. A big change is Face­book Pages. These are geared toward adver­tis­ers although you don’t need to have a Face­book adver­tis­ing cam­paign to use them. In March 2009, Face­book redesigned Pages to act much more like typ­i­cal user pro­files: there’s a wall, there’s an activ­i­ty stream, and you can asso­ciate dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions with them. 

Two things about Pages are excit­ing. One is the activ­i­ty stream. Peo­ple who sign up as “fans” of your Page see what you’re putting out in their indi­vid­ual stream. They’ll log into Face­book and see that mes­sages like “Jen just got engaged!” or “Joe is hav­ing a bad hair day” and that your orga­ni­za­tion is hav­ing some great event com­ing up this week­end. You’re seen in the asso­ci­a­tion of hap­py news from their friends. It’s dif­fer­ent from a spam­mish email because it’s com­ing in with the con­text of their friends, which is very pow­er­ful for publicity.

The oth­er nice thing about Face­book Pages is that they’re pub­lic. A lot of por­tions of Face­book aren’t but mak­ing Pages pub­lic means you can point to them from your web­site or oth­er social media campaigns.

I think Face­book fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we’ll be able to reach out to peo­ple. I’m very excit­ed about this because there’s all sorts of easy mul­ti­me­dia pos­si­bil­i­ties. You can inte­grate with Youtube, with Twit­ter, with pod­casts, etc., embed­ded for fans of your Face­book page to see as it’s hap­pen­ing. This is much more excit­ing than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more inter­ac­tive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have con­ver­sa­tions on your sites.

Inti­mate, imme­di­ate, engaging

What the smart non­prof­its are going to be doing is a lot of post­ing in a style that’s authen­tic and inti­mate and less wor­ried about being slick than we’ve typ­i­cal­ly been.

What I would love to see non­prof­its doing is to get seri­ous about video. I’m not talk­ing about fan­cy video, haul­ing in video­g­ra­phers for six months shoot­ing a three minute slick com­mer­cial. Get an inex­pen­sitve video recorder and start doing five minute inter­views with the peo­ple your orga­ni­za­tion serves. This will dif­fer depend­ing on your orga­ni­za­tion’s focus. One advan­tage to sim­ple videos is that you can con­vince even the busiest of your inter­vie­wees to take out a few min­utes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or direct­ly to Face­book video. It does­n’t mat­ter where they host­ed but you’ll have to make sure they’re embed­ded on your Face­book fan page. 

Build­ing our Face­book Fan Page

How to direct? You can direct in the emails you’re send­ing out or through oth­er sources. Twit­ter is a great way of direct­ing peo­ple to what’s hap­pen­ing: you send out a 140-character “tweet” with an inter­est­ing tease about the video you’ve pro­duced and a link to the Face­book fan page.

The whole goal is to get Face­book fans. Once you’re in as a fan, you show up in their activ­i­ty streams. All the fans get to see the events you’re orga­niz­ing, the videos. If you have extra tick­ets to an upcom­ing event, post about it because peo­ple will see it imme­di­ate­ly. It’s a won­der­ful way to reach peo­ple quick­ly in a way that’s not as intru­sive as email (I sus­pect a lot of younger users are actu­al­ly check­ing their Face­book home­page more often than their emails!).

The New Non­prof­it Outreach

I’d love to see a lot more of these inti­mate, almost home-made videos going up on Face­book fan pages and using fan pages as a way of con­nect­ing with peo­ple. We can think of these as the new email list.

I would strong­ly encour­age non­prof­its to use all of these these media to rein­force their mes­sage and to find new ways to reach their audi­ences in a much more engag­ing, inti­mate way. 

— —  —  — –

Mar­tin Kel­ley is a web devel­op­er and social media con­sul­tant spe­cial­iz­ing in non­prof­its. This post is a loose tran­scrip­tion of his video, Non­prof­its and Social Media. This essay is also avail­able on the Mar​tinKel​ley​.com Face­book fan page.

Extending customer relationships through social media

April 8, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Over on my O’Reil­ly Media blog, I’ve writ­ten “Will Face­book (all but) replace cor­po­rate web­sites?,” a look at where I think the third-party social media web­sites are going. Here’s a taste:

The goal of most web­sites is to extend­ed the inter­ac­tion with the vis­i­tor beyond this one vis­it: we seek to sell them a prod­uct, join our mail­ing list, buy tick­ets to our event or sub­scribe to us in a news read­er. Face­book is quick­ly becom­ing the most impor­tant email list and news read­er. If it con­tin­ues to inno­vate (and bor­row ideas from inno­v­a­tive com­peti­tors) it could quick­ly become a major com­mer­cial por­tal as well. As its adop­tion rate climbs with­in the ranks of our tar­get audi­ences, it becomes an effec­tive way to extend vis­i­tor rela­tion­ship and build more inti­mate brand identities.

This will change com­pa­ny’s inter­ac­tions with cus­tomers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time inter­ac­tion. This can take many forms – sta­tus updates, cal­en­dars, videos – but the empha­sis will be on imme­di­a­cy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass mar­ket­ing to a one-on-one respon­sive back and forth. Smart mar­keters will think less in terms of sell­ing and more in terms of rela­tion­ship build­ing. Ana­lyt­ics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to mea­sure the suc­cess of these rela­tion­ships. The reces­sion is bring­ing a new urgency for mea­sur­able results and might actu­al­ly help shift cor­po­rate and non-profit bud­gets away from high-price opin­ions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how orga­ni­za­tions adapt to social medi­a’s evolv­ing role.

Haverford Friends Meeting

March 25, 2009
· Martin Kelley

This Quak­er meet­ing sits along Philadel­phi­a’s Main Line sub­urbs and is mak­ing spe­cial efforts at out­reach. They want­ed a design refresh that would allow the heads of com­mit­tees direct access to their sec­tion of the web­sites. With mul­ti­ple log-ins and high con­tent needs, we went with the Dru­pal con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, which has become the CMS of choice for many non-profits.

The design is built from scratch with obvi­ous nods to the Face­book look-and-feel: we want­ed some­thing that would seem both famil­iar and fresh to the young pro­fes­sion­al crowd that is this meet­ing’s most obvi­ous tar­get audi­ence.

Vis­it: Haver​ford​friendsmeet​ing​.org

Quaker video outreach, a talk with Raye Hodgson

March 21, 2009
· Martin Kelley

An inter­view with Raye, a mem­ber of Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive who serves on their Elec­tron­ic Out­reach Com­mit­tee. You can also watch it on Quak­erQuak­er: Quak­er Video and Elec­tron­ic Out­reach.

Raye: Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing holds our year­ly meet­ing in Bar­nesville Ohio – some peo­ple know us as those Bar­nesville folks. We have an elec­tron­ic Out­reach Com­mit­tee and that includes the over­sight and min­istry asso­ci­at­ed with our web­site. We spend time think­ing about how to open up to peo­ple who might be inter­est­ed in Friends’ ways and might want to know more about us whether or not they’ve ever read the Jour­nal of George Fox. We’re try­ing to expand our wit­ness, if you will.

One of the ques­tions that has come up in this elec­tron­ic out­reach group is: what types of com­mu­ni­ca­tion or video are use­ful for some­one to get to know us but also respect­ful of the fact that we do wor­ship and that wor­ship is a spir­i­tu­al­ly inti­mate time. We’re try­ing to bridge and deal with respect­ing the wor­ship­pers, the Friends them­selves, to not put on a per­for­mance and yet to try to com­mu­ni­cate what it is that is edi­fy­ing in prac­tice and worship.

Mar­tin: How do you give new­com­ers a taste of Quak­ers with­out direct­ing it too much? If you just have that silent emp­ty box it’s hard for new­com­ers to know what should be fill­ing that box.

Raye: One of the things Friends have done for hun­dreds of years is to pub­lish, to keep jour­nals and to share that. But that’s not all there is to the Friends expe­ri­ence. There are those qui­et times and those moments of min­istry that we believe are Spirit-inspired. Many of us wish we could give peo­ple a lit­tle taste of that because that does­n’t show up in a lot of pub­lished writ­ings. That spon­ta­neous and time­ly, and at times prophet­ic, wit­ness that we see in our Meet­ings. We have con­sid­ered dig­i­tal video as a way to do that.

Mar­tin: I love the video pos­si­bil­i­ties here. Video can be a way of reach­ing out to more people.

Raye: It’s not just any­thing that can be writ­ten. Cer­tain­ly the writ­ings that have been pub­lished are very help­ful in get­ting some sort of a glim­mer of where we have been, or in some cas­es where we are head­ed or where we are. But there is noth­ing like that expe­ri­ence of being with Friends in meet­ing. It does­n’t always hap­pen but there are these moments called a cov­ered meet­ing or a gath­ered meet­ing where every­body seems to be in the same place spir­i­tu­al­ly and when seems to be mes­sages and gifts com­ing through peo­ple. That’s dif­fi­cult to get across.

We’re hop­ing that with video we can dis­cuss these kinds of things after the fact. We don’t want to turn it into a spec­ta­tor sport or performance.

Mar­tin: Authen­tic­i­ty is a key part of the Quak­er mes­sage. You’re not prac­tic­ing what you’re going to say for First Day or Sun­day. You’re sit­ting there and wait­ing for that imme­di­ate spir­it to come upon you.

Raye: We don’t know when that will hap­pen. There are meet­ings where every­body is very qui­et, where there’s a sense of that spir­it and uni­ty but it may be an out­ward­ly qui­et meet­ing. I have been in meet­ings where some­one stood up and began to sing their mes­sage or a psalm or some­one had a won­der­ful ser­mon that was per­fect for the moment. These things hap­pen but we don’t know when they will.

How and why we gather as Friends (in the 21st Century)

February 15, 2009
· Martin Kelley

On a recent evening I met up with Gath­er­ing in Light Wess, who was in Philadel­phia for a Quaker-sponsored peace con­fer­ence. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great din­ner, Wess and I test­ed some tes­ti­monies,
and a revolv­ing group of Friends end­ed up around a table in the
con­fer­ence’s hotel lob­by talk­ing late into the night (the links are
Wess’ reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp
account). 

Of all of the many peo­ple I spoke with, only one had any kind of
fea­tured role at the con­fer­ence. With­out excep­tion my conversation
part­ners were fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful about the issues that had
brought them to Philadel­phia, yet I sensed a per­vad­ing sense of missed
oppor­tu­ni­ty: hun­dreds of lives rearranged and thou­sands of air miles
flown most­ly to lis­ten to oth­ers talk. I spent my long com­mute home
won­der­ing what it would have been like to have spent the week­end in the
hotel lob­by record­ing ten minute Youtube inter­views with as many
con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants as I could. We would have end­ed up with a
snap­shot of faith-based peace orga­niz­ing cir­ca 2009.

Next week­end I’ll be burn­ing up more of the ozone lay­er by fly­ing to Cal­i­for­nia to co-lead a work­shop with Wess and Robin M. (details at Con​ver​gent​Friends​.org,
I’m sure we can squeeze more peo­ple in!) The par­tic­i­pant list looks
fab­u­lous. I don’t know every­one but there’s at least half a dozen
peo­ple com­ing who I would be thrilled to take work­shops from. I really
don’t want to spend the week­end hear­ing myself talk! I also know there
are plen­ty of peo­ple who can’t come because of com­mit­ments and costs.

So we’re going to try some exper­i­ments – they might work, they might not. On Quak­erQuak­er, there’s a new group for the event and a dis­cus­sion thread open to all QQ mem­bers (sign up is quick and pain­less). For those of you com­fort­able with the QQ tag­ging sys­tem, the Deli­cious tag for the event is “quaker.reclaiming2009”. Robin M has pro­posed using #con­ver­gent­friends as our Twit­ter hashtag. 

There’s all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live
blog­ging via Twit­ter, any­one?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract
us from what­ev­er mes­sage the Inward Christ might be try­ing to give us.
But behind all this is a real ques­tions about why and how we should
gath­er togeth­er as Friends. As the bank­ing sys­tem tanks, as the environment
strains, as com­mu­ni­ca­tions costs drop and we find our­selves in a curi­ous new econ­o­my, what chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties open up?

Mind​ful​walk​er​.com

October 30, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Mindful WalkerNew York City Jour­nal­ist Susan DeMark looks for the sto­ries behind the archi­tec­ture, build­ings, his­to­ry, and nature of NYC and beyond. She and a graph­ic design­er put togeth­er the look of the site and I per­formed the CSS mag­ic to trans­late their vision into a Word­Press blog.

Vis­it: Mind­ful Walker


Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Talk to the Future Video Magazine

October 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Talk to the FutureThese ‘pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions with today’s bold­est voic­es’ are the brain­child of San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia-based activist jour­nal­ist Anne-christine d’Adesky. She’s trav­el­ing the world inter­view­ing pol­i­cy mak­ers and on-the-ground orga­niz­ers on issues of glob­al health and AIDS. The site uses Google Video and Mov­able Type to cre­ate an online video mag­a­zine.

Vis­it: Talk​tothe​fu​ture​.org and Acdadesky​.org

A first look at the Google Chrome browser

September 2, 2008
· Martin Kelley

screen-shotMy Twit­ter fol­low­ers will know I’ve been slight­ly obsessed by Google’s new brows­er, Chrome, since word leaked that it was going to be released today (Tues, Sept 2). I’ve been hit­ting reload on the down­load site fair­ly obses­sive­ly. A few min­utes ago my per­sis­tence was reward­ed and I’m writ­ing to you all from the new brows­er (here’s the offi­cial release announce­ment).

Why a New Browser?!?
Before I begin, let me rec­om­mend the Google Chrome online com­ic book for those with tech inter­ests. Google does a good job explain­ing why they’ve joined the brows­er wars. At first glance it seems a need­less move: they already fund much of the devel­op­ment on the open source Fire­fox brows­er. But Fire­fox, like Microsoft Inter­net Explor­er and every oth­er brows­er, is built around cer­tain assump­tions about how browsers process appli­ca­tions. Google is start­ing from scratch and think­ing about the brows­er as an oper­at­ing sys­tem run­ning increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed appli­ca­tions (like Gmail). Chrome sep­a­rates mem­o­ry process and inter­net per­mis­sions in new ways.
Obvi­ous­ly, Google is going after Microsoft (the ini­tial release of Chrome is Win­dows only) – not just its brows­er but its Vista oper­at­ing sys­tem as well. With the expan­sion of high speed inter­net access and so-called “cloud com­put­ing,” func­tions that used to require stand-alone clients can now be han­dled inside the brows­er. Email has prob­a­bly become the most wide­ly adopt­ed brows­er appli­ca­tions but you can also do things pho­to edit­ing and video record­ing through the brows­er. Google knows that once an appli­ca­tion is run­ning inside a brows­er, the oper­at­ing sys­tem does­n’t mat­ter. Gmail works equal­ly fine from Vista, Mac OS X, or Lin­ux.
It is in Google’s strate­gic inter­est to advance the state of brows­er tech­nol­o­gy and they do that with Chrome. But it is in the inter­est that every­one have access to these lat­est inno­va­tions and that all browsers can run the most sophis­ti­cat­ed appli­ca­tions Google engi­neers can put togeth­er. So Chrome is open source and Google invites oth­er browsers to incor­po­rate many of its features. 
First Thoughts on the Product:
The down­load was quick and easy (of course).
I was sur­prised that when installing it only offered to import my MS Inter­net Explor­er book­marks. My most com­plete and up-to-date book­mark list is in Fire­fox (synced among my oper­at­ing sys­tems by the excel­lent Fox­marks exten­sion).
I went pret­ty imme­di­ate­ly to Gmail. Google says they’ve rewrit­ten a lot of the back­ground ren­der­ing code from scratch and I was expect­ing to see instan­ta­neous load­ing. Frankly, it seemed to load as quick­ly as it does in Fire­fox. Any appar­ent speed increase isn’t imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous (this is a tes­ta­ment to how fast they’ve man­aged to get it to load in all browsers).
speed-dialThe inter­face is very sim­pli­fied: few but­tons, tabs up top, no sta­tus bar. There’s a lot of sur­pris­es here, like an auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed page with thumb­nails of your most fre­quent­ly vis­it­ed sites (see image, right), an idea bor­rowed from Opera browser’s “Speed Dial” fea­ture (avail­able through to Fire­fox users through the Speed Dial exten­sion).
gmail-as-app
You can also “Cre­ate appli­ca­tion short­cuts” which turn ser­vices such as Gmail into client-like appli­ca­tions that sit on your desk­top (screen­shot right). Open them up from here and the nor­mal loca­tion bar and brows­er but­tons are gone.
There’s a lot more to explore here. It’s obvi­ous that Google has put a lot of thought into this. I’m not going to dis­miss any fea­ture or odd­i­ty too quick­ly. They helped a lot of us rethink how we orga­nize email using a sin­gle “Archive” fold­er instead of the elaborately-maintained fold­er hier­ar­chy. Google actu­al­ly have put out a num­ber of half-baked and under-supported ser­vices (Froogle and Google Check­out come most imme­di­ate­ly to mind) but it’s clear that the Google Chrome brows­er is a very seri­ous ini­tia­tive by the company.
Will I Use It?
The big ques­tion, right? Actu­al­ly, I won’t use it much for now. For one thing, I’m a Mac user. I have a Win­dows XP vir­tu­al machine run­ning most of the time cour­tesy of VMWare’s Fusion. I’m sure Google has set a high pri­or­i­ty to make Mac OS X and Lin­ux ver­sions of Chrome – they’re whole strat­e­gy rests on this being woven into the brows­er lin­gua fran­ca that keeps Microsoft­’s Vista at bay, remem­ber?, but until that time Chrome won’t be my nat­ur­al first choice.
But I’m also going to miss my Fire­fox exten­sions. I for­got that the web has lots of ads (Adblock Plus). And I don’t like the extra clut­ter of Gmail with­out Bet­ter Gmail 2 (just the “Folders4Gmail” fea­ture of the lat­ter saves my eye more scan­ning time than any speed tweak Chrome deliv­ers). And these days the Web Devel­op­ers Tool­bar, Last­pass, FireFTP exten­sions are pret­ty essen­tial to my work day.
But if a native Mac ver­sion was released? And if Fire­fox exten­sions start­ed being rewrit­ten for Chrome? I just flipped back to my reg­u­lar brows­er to check some­thing and even after an hour with Chrome, Fire­fox felt so heavy and clunky. It is pos­si­ble to see Chrome could a seri­ous con­tender for my attention.