9. Sharing with Rich Media

The promise of social media lies in its very name: it’s social in nature, which means there has to be some sort of interaction going on.

Thus far, we have examined how to produce content that others will enjoy, so they will hopefully follow your words and become interested in your organization. We have also encouraged a level of engagement from the audience, looking to start and continue online conversations.

But what if you could go further and actually encourage users to contribute new and original content of their own? This next step is what we’ll review in this chapter.

Organic Content

Organic content refers to content that is contributed to a site by users, and not only is it a feature of social media sites, but it’s also a prerequisite.

An easy example of organic content can be found on Wikipedia, where factual information is “crowdsourced,” that is, contributed by anyone who believes he or she has knowledge to contribute, and peer-reviewed by anyone else reading the content.

All wikis benefit from the contributions of others. Indeed, they couldn’t exist without user participation. You can even take that statement and apply it to every other social media platform.

Social media, it can easily be argued, has built a technology based solely on the contributions of user content. If users didn’t provide their information, their updates, and their participation, there would be nothing upon which a social media platform could base itself.

On a practical level, this observation may not be so helpful. You’re likely not thinking about launching your own social media platform. But the principle behind the social success of these networks can still apply to your organization: the most successful social ventures have some form of active community participation, something that should be nurtured.

There are several ways to encourage users to contribute content to your social media channels. Rich multimedia content, which has become very easy to produce these days, is an easy way to get participation, as well as a social media twist on a perennial favorite: the person-on-the-street interview.

Taking a Poll

If you want to get people’s opinions, it’s very easy to do: just ask them.

Here in the U.S., it seems, everyone has an opinion about, well, just about anything. If you want to attract attention, just start asking people what they think, and off they’ll go. You can bring this to your social media channels easily by asking for your audience’s opinions. If they’re reading, they’ll answer.

On a blog, asking questions can be as informal as simply ending your entry on a particular topic with a line like “What do you think?” or “What’s your favorite/hated _________?”

You can also try something more formal. Blogging applications and services like WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger have poll and survey tools available that can be plugged into your blog page, which will let your users respond to a “poll of the week” or other related questions, while allowing users to see the results and perhaps even comment on them.

Facebook also enables you to add questions right on your Facebook business page, just like adding any other kind of content. Here’s how that’s done:

1. On your business’s Facebook page, click the Question link at the top of the Wall page. The Ask Something field will appear.

2. Enter your question in the Ask Something field.

3. Click the Add Poll Options link. The Poll Options fields will open.

4. Type the options for the question in the Add an Option fields. An option field will be added if you use all of the ones available.

5. If you want to make the question available to just a select group, click the Public button and select the Customize option in the drop-down control. The Choose Your Audience dialog will open.

6. Enter the appropriate information to establish the appropriate group. As you add options, new options will appear to further refine the choices.

7. Click Ask Question. The question will appear on your Wall.

Photos

Another way to create an interaction point with users is to invite them to submit photos to your company, while also publishing photos that are relevant to your organization.

Perhaps one of the best sites to accomplish this is to use the photo-sharing site Flickr, which lets your company not only upload photos and videos, but also any infographics you would care to share with your audience.

Since Flickr is a public photo-sharing site, you need to be careful of what you upload. Flickr is a useful resource for a lot of people and organizations, but as is true of many such sites, its community can be adverse to excessively commercial content. So if you think Flickr is going to be a good place to post your latest house ads, you’ll be sorely mistaken. In fact, the Community Guidelines forbid outright selling practices.

Instead, try to follow these best practices for organizations, which Flickr itself recommends:

• Share interesting and original photos and videos. Don’t make it about selling products. Make it about your history or your employees. Show those company picnic shots where Bob the CEO got nailed by that coconut cream pie. Or the disaster relief drive you organized for flood victims. As Flickr says, “Flickr is for photosharing—so use your account to share photos, not to sell things.”

• Create a transparent and authentic identity. Don’t put the company up as your face—be the face of the company.

Flickr is a great site for storing and displaying such imagery, as long as you abide by these rules. Flickr uses a “freemium” model, where photos and video storage is free up to a point, after which Flickr charges a nominal amount for their pro account with unlimited storage.

Posting a photo on Flickr is simple, as you can see in the following steps:

1. In Flickr, click the You menu and select the Upload Photos and Videos option. The Upload to Flickr page will appear.

2. Click the Choose Photos and Videos link. The Select Files dialog will open.

3. Navigate to the file(s) you want to upload and select them to upload.

4. Click Open. The files will be listed.

5. Click the appropriate privacy options.

6. Click Upload Photos and Videos. The files will be uploaded, notifying you with a Finished message when complete.

7. Click the Add a Description link. The Describe This Upload page will appear.

8. Add descriptions and tags to the images as needed. When complete, click Save at the bottom of the page. The images will be displayed in your account’s photostream page.

Tagging photos is the practice of assigning one or more categories to images, be it in your private collection on your computer or online in a social media platform like Flickr or Facebook. A “tag” can be assigned to one or more photos, and it enables you (or someone else) to find photos based on semantic searches. So, instead of renaming every photo from last Summer “SummerVacation_001.jpg,” “SummerVacation_002.jpg,” and so on, you can leave the filenames for the image alone and just assign a “Summer Vacation” tag. Tags can describe context, people, locations—anything you want.

Video

Video is another area where you can start a discussion and also start collecting organic content.

Thanks to sites like YouTube and Vimeo, uploading a video is very easy, making sharing this sort of content a very painless process.

Like Flickr and other social media sites, blatant commercial activity is not welcome on these video-sharing sites. The only exception seems to be the annual Super Bowl commercials and the occasional entertaining commercial that pops up during the year.

That doesn’t preclude you from getting your message out there. One of the best ways to utilize your profile on one of these services (referred to on YouTube, for instance, as a channel) is to record and upload informative videos, particularly how-to content. Your customers, and indeed the entire Internet, will appreciate useful information.

Video sites also lend themselves well to organic content. You can encourage users to upload video responses to your content, participate in video content, or post reviews of your business. Because of the instant narrative found in videos, users may actually prefer them to other forms of content, as some people can be more verbally oriented.

On YouTube, uploading a video is a snap:

1. In YouTube, click the Upload link at the top of the page. The Video File Upload page will appear.

2. Click the Upload Video button. A File Open dialog will appear.

3. Navigate to the video you want to upload and click Open. The video will be uploaded to the YouTube site.

4. Fill in the Title, Description, and Tags fields.

5. Select a Category for the video.

6. Set the Privacy and License options for the video.

7. Click Save Changes. The video will be posted to YouTube.

The Last Word

You have seen a few examples of how social media can be enhanced using multimedia content, as well as encouraging organic content provided by your own audience. Such methods are very useful for building the level of participation in your own social media channels.

In Chapter 10, “Using Promotions to Generate More Sales,” we’ll demonstrate how social media can be used in coordinated efforts to increase donations for your non-profit organization and sales for your commercial venture.