The statistics are rock solid on the fact that photos/images engage much greater audience participation on social media platforms. I will write a more analytical post about the subject matter later this week, but in the meantime, here are the slides from the talk I gave on monday.

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In my seminars for all the social media platforms, I basically take the participants through the following path: You can view my Prezi on Twitter below.

• Why Twitter? What do you hope to achieve with Twitter?
• Twitter stats and terminology
• Twitter Mechanics – Optimizing your Profile
• Content – Content – Content! What to tweet, how often and when…
• Measuring impact - Quantitatively and Qualitatively

While this presentation was prepared with nonprofits in mind, most of the elements pertain to for-profits as well. I hope this will help shed some light on Twitter for you all. Given that the social media landscape is constantly evolving, I can safely guarantee that I will be updating this presentation within the the next couple of months.

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It was a rather poignant return to the Province for Greg as he used to cover The Troubles back in the day for ABC News as he was London based. He found Belfast to have greatly changed in the last twenty years and was suitably impressed. I am only glad that they didn’t come to film the segment two months ago when we were knee deep in flag protests.

We were lucky to have captured Belfast with mostly sunny patches and we were able to fit in some great interviews with the First Minister, Peter Robinson, Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, journalist, Eamonn Mallie, and Deputy Chief Constable Judith Gillespie. The standout star of the show though was Belfast’s best know taxi driver, Billy Scott.

The segment below is not the fully produced final piece, but close enough.

The post We have come a long way Belfast, let’s keep moving forward! appeared first on Kathleen Holmlund - Digital Communications Strategy.

I was asked to share stories of my Camino to Santiago in the summer of 2011. Seeing as I have been in the process of setting up my own business over the past year or so, it only seemed right that I share the lessons that I learned as they relate to taking on the journey of self-employment and entrepreneurship. I must give special thanks to my fellow Camino walker, Belinda Chiu, and her 5 post series on her site www.hummingbirdrcc.com, which essentially go into more depth on the points I covered in my talk and presentation. Mention also needs to be given of my other Camino companion, Zitta Rezvani, our fearless eye doctor from Washington, DC. We did keep a blog along the Camino, so if you feel inclined and want to hear more about our journey, do visit www.elcaminoylacomida.com. Keep your eyes out also for a book in the New Year!

So, without further ado, here is the talk. If you are a fellow Camino pilgrim, I would be very interested in getting your thoughts on the points I highlighted. Agree, disagree, have any additions? Please do comment and buen Camino to all!

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I have heard stories from a number of small businesses who have had a terrible time trying to retrieve access to their site to update it because the freelancer or designer they hired no longer answers their calls, or the company that set up their website is no longer in business. They are generally able to finally retrieve access to their domain, but that is after a lot of hassle and often with additional costs incurred. I have also heard of cowboy web designers often charging the client $200+ to release the domain to them. Legally, the the customer does not have a foot to stand on as the domain was bought on the designer’s credit card and the admin details are in their name.

The worst scenarios I have seen have taken place in business partnerships, because when things go wrong there, it gets very messy and almost impossible to amend.  If there is a fall-out there, domain-hijacking is a big risk, particularly if the business domain name was originally purchased by the disgruntled partner. Legal action generally kicks in at this point, and this turns into a time-consuming and expensive process which often does not have a happy ending.

Moral of the story: NEVER LET SOMEONE ELSE REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN NAME. When you are doing this, you are essentially giving that person full rights to your domain name. ALWAYS ensure that the domain is purchased with by yourself or in the business context, in the name of the business/business owner.

Registering your own domain is very simple. GoDaddy and Register.com are generally regarded as the main ports of call.  I would encourage people to buy a hosting plan with the likes of Hostgator or Bluehost separately.  You should take note that many host providers also offer domain registration, I would discourage people from signing on for that. In my work with websites over the past 5 years or so, I have moved away from a couple of host providers as I they weren’t quite meeting all my needs and their customer service wasn’t always top notch.  In moving away from them, I was able to easily re-direct my domain to the new hosting plans from my GoDaddy account.

So please, please, please everyone, register your domain yourself.  Then go and hand over your website development.

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This is a project that I helped produce that aired on HDNet’s World Report program last month. The segment looks at the challenges the Irish economy has faced in recent times, and how the Irish people are looking at fresh new ways to help boost the economy.  If there is one thing that the Irish really do well it is making you feel welcome in their country.  This is a beautiful country, especially when blessed with sunshine, and the tourism industry plays a big role in its economy.  The Gathering 2013 is a big call out to everyone around the world who has Irish blood, some link to the country, or even just a desire to come and visit it in 2013 when there will be a plenty of amazing and diverse events throughout the country.

Enjoy! For photos from the production, visit Scenes from Ireland  
 

The post Coming to Ireland next year? The Gathering 2013 appeared first on Kathleen Holmlund - Digital Communications Strategy.

I have written this post for all those people out there who little if anything at all about maintaining their WordPress sites and who cannot afford to pay someone a monthly fee to manage their site.

Depending on the amount of fresh content that goes up on your site, the following steps that will take you 10 minutes at the very most can be applied on either a weekly or monthly basis. If you are posting every day, you will want to tidy up shop at least once a week. If you are only posting once or twice a week or hardly ever, then you should really carry out these steps on a monthly basis.

1. Always backup your database

It is absolutely essential that you backup your WordPress database on a regular basis, especially if you are posting regularly on your site. There are a number of WordPress database backup plugins out there. I use the aptly titled “WordPress Database Backup” plugin and in the settings you can automate it to schedule your database backup within a range of twice-daily to monthly.

2. Check to see if there is a new WordPress update

The people at WordPress are always actively working away on improving and expanding the scope and user experience of the platform so you need to check whether they have made any updates that you need to implement.  This is always a very straight-forward process as when you login in to your Dashboard you will generally see a prompt to update your WordPress software as pictured below. To be on the safe side though, ALWAYS make sure you have a fresh backup of your database before clicking on the “Update Now” button as you never know if there could be a problem with software update and your site.

There are times that a WordPress update can interfere with your site. WordPress is an open source platform with options for different themes and plugins developed by other parties, it is not surprising that some of the coding may clash. You should always check your site after an update to make sure that all is well. Quite often is there is an issue, an error message will tell you whether the clash of coding is with the theme or a particular plugin. If not, then I suggest troubleshooting by deactivating one plugin at a time to see if the issue is there. If nothing comes up there, then the next step would be to check with theme developers.

3. Update your plugins

Just like WordPress, many plugin providers are constantly updating and improving the features of their plugins. They are also having to keep up with WordPress updates so you will often find that many plugins will go through an upgrade soon after a WordPress update.

Quick tip on selecting plugins: check on when they were last updated as ones that haven’t been updated in months are likely to experience some issues.

As in the case with the WordPress update, you will want to make sure that the plugin update has not affected your site. If so, then you will need to go through the same steps of troubleshooting the plugin and also the theme.

4. Empty your website page cache

Just like you regularly need to clear the cache on your web browsers, website caches need a tidy up. All good cache plugins will clear the cache when a post, page, or comment is published.  Cleaning your cache regularly helps your site load faster. I use W3 Total Cache, which is free and  very comprehensive.

5. Use WP-Optimize

The WP-Optimize plugin helps to clean up and optimize your database and allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments with some simple clicks. This plugin is particularly helpful for blogs and sites that update regularly and have a number of user accounts contributing.

6. Fix Broken Links

All of your links should be actively checked if there are any dead or broken hyperlinks. It is just part of regular website housekeeping. Broken links bring many negative effects to your site as people coming to your site become frustrated with clicking on dead links that bring them to error pages. In addition, search engine bots are stopped dead by broken links because they would think that it is the end of the line and this damages your reputation with them. Broken Link Checker plugin checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.

The post 6 Basic Housekeeping Steps for your WordPress Blog/Site appeared first on Kathleen Holmlund - Digital Communications Strategy.

Before I go into talking about plugins, there are a few things that you can do with your general settings to get the ball rolling on optimizing your site.

1. Edit your general settings

First things first, go to your Dashboard => Settings => General:

• Site Title & Site Tagline: make sure you keep this to the point and use your keywords
• WordPress Address (URL) & Site Address (URL): you will want to ensure that the “www” part is added in here after the “http://” (search engines like to see the “www” in your main URL)

Secondly, you will want to sort out your permalinks. The default on WordPress sites is usually the page ID code.  This is not terribly helpful for optimizing your site as it wont include words in the url.  This time, you will go to Dashboard => Settings => Permalinks. You will then select which permalink structure best suits your site. If you are publishing a lot, you may wish to include the date in your links, but either way, you will wish to ensure that the “post name” is included.

2. Upload suitable SEO plugins

I have tried many different SEO plugins in my day, moved away from some, returned to some and taken on new ones along the way.  SEO and WordPress experts will no doubt argue about which ones are best so I am going to just focus on the two main plugins I use at the moment for my sites which seem to be doing the job quite nicely. These are:

• SEO Smart Links Professional: http://www.prelovac.com/products/seo-smart-links/. This is a premium plugin which means it comes with a $ sign. It is a good plugin though that is constantly updated and supported.
• All-in-one SEO: http://semperfiwebdesign.com/. This plug in comes in a premium and non-premium version. The non-premium version gives you many features and is just donation based.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

I use both of these plugins on my sites and make sure that keyword selection corresponds on both.

On the subject of keywords, the ones you choose for your website are crucial to the site’s success in  allowing the search engines to find and index it. Try to keep these to a minimum and do your homework about your target audience and relevant content on your site. If you overdo it on the keyword front, search engines will not like that and they will penalize you for it.

3. Enhance your site’s performance

Other aspects to keep in mind for optimal SEO is the load up speed of your website and its overall general performance. Over time, websites that have regular content published on them start to get sluggish.  Also, various plugins or themes can affect the load up time of the website so it is useful to do a bit of an evaluation of your site’s overall performance to see how it fairs. Useful plugins that every WordPress site should have are:

• W3 Total Cache: Just like you regularly need to clear the cache on your web browsers, website caches need a tidy up. This plugin is free and is really one of those essential plugins every WordPress site should have.
• WP-Optimize: This plugin helps you to keep your database clean by removing post revisions and spams in no time.  I run a very busy rich content website, www.zomppa.com, that has many contributors. A good clean up every week makes a huge difference.
• Amazon S3 for WordPress with CloudFront: this plugin uploads your wordpress media attachements to Amazon S3 with an option CloudFront distribution. Using CloudFront distribution helps with speeding up the loading up time of your website as it relies on Amazon servers all over the world to deliver the content of your site more expeditiously.

4. Build your backlinks

Backlinks to your site are a huge boost for legitimizing your site in the eyes of search engines. The more you have the better, the better quality you have, the even better.  Be careful in the quality of the types of banklinks you are getting as if these are coming from negatively rated spam type websites, it will not fair well on you.  The more highly ranked a site is, the more reputable it is, and this will reflect favourably for your site in the eyes of the search engines.

One tool that I recently started using to help with creating backlinks to my sites is the Premium WordPress Plugin CommentLuv.  I wrote a piece about this for Zomppa a couple of months ago, Sharing the Love with CommentLuv.

This plugin is really 8 plugins in one so if you know anything about WordPress sites, you know that the fewer the plugins you install on your website, the lesser the chances of miscommunications between plugins and also with WordPress itself. This plugin also eradicates spam on comments, and allows fellow bloggers who comment on an article of yours to include a link back to a recent post of theirs.  This helps build-up their list of backlinks to theis site also.  Likewise, when you comment on other CommentLuv enabled sites, you get to provide a link to your site. The plugin also has features which are integrated with social media platforms like Twitter.

5. Give your images SEO friendly names

Lastly, I wish to emphasize the need for properly named images can attract a lot of traffic your site from image focused search engines like Google image and more recently with Pinterest. If you want more of this traffic, you must learn how to optimize your images to score some of this traffic. Before you upload your image, make sure that you give the image file a name that includes keywords. You will then want to make sure that those same keywords are included in the image title once you have loaded up the image.

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I am often dismayed by how many organizations fumble basic crisis communications, especially in today’s digital age. Consequently, when something goes wrong, things tend to snowball.

The latest example … a rural Scottish council yesterday decided to close down the food blog of a nine-year old girl, Martha Payne, and their action has attracted not only international headlines but has gotten angry denunciations.

Young Martha decided to become an advocate for healthier school lunches and to raise funds for Mary’s Meals, a charity that funds school food in Africa. Nonsense! cried the Council. Seems the Council was concerned that local press coverage of the blog would lead to a change in food catering staff. Such a bother.

Martha, who lives with her family in Argyll, Scotland, started publishing photographs of her school lunches on NeverSeconds back in April. Her father helped her set up the simple blog, and her school welcomed this initiative and supported her fully.

When you go to her blog, you will see Martha gave each meal a ‘food-o-meter’ and health rating, and counted the number of mouthfuls it took her to eat it. (Clever girl!) Here is an example for the meal she was served on June 12:

Food-o-meter- 10/10

• Mouthfuls- 37
• Courses- main/dessert
• Health Rating- 5/10
• Price- £2
• Pieces of hair- 0
• Ease of eating with wrist in stookie- 9/10
• Wristband- Yellow

As the blog’s popularity began to grow, she decided she wanted to help raise money for the Mary’s Meals charity that funds school food in Africa. She set a target of £7,000 (about $11,000) and encouraged her readers to donate to the charity. As of June 14, she had helped raise some £2,000 (about $3,200).

On June 14, however, Martha was informed by her head teacher that the Argyll and Bute Council had decided she could no longer post pictures of her school lunches on her blog. She was forbidden from bringing her camera to school.

Martha then put up a post on her blog under the headline “Goodbye” informing her readers that she would no longer be blogging.

Within hours, media and public response on social media channels went through the roof. Her story went global. In the space of 24 hours, the response to the council’s decision led to:

• over 250 articles around the world,
• more than four (4) million views of her blog
• almost 2,000 comments on her “Goodbye” post
• celebrity support over Twitter by the likes of Jamie Oliver
• the £7,000 target for Mary’s Meals exceeding the £30,000 mark

After all this media and public outcry, the Argyll and Bute Council felt compelled and shamed into immediately lift the ban. Martha is now free to photograph her school meals again and maintain her blog.

All I can say is that I am glad I wasn’t in the room when the Argyll and Bute Council made the decision to ban Martha from taking photos of her school dinners as I would have strongly advocated to the contrary foreseeing the kind of backlash this would bring about with the media and over the internet. As an advocate for healthy food though with the non-profit Zomppa – Food Good, Social Good, I am delighted how this incident has brought the subject of healthy school lunches to the forefront of internet, print and broadcast news here in the UK.

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