Elisabeth is joined by author Stacy N. Sergent this week (Merianna is out for family leave) to talk about great pups, NaNoWriMo, writing as a lonesome experience and also a communal experience, the role of editing, and the psychological flow of being a writer.
Spotify Is the Best Streaming Music Service: “As countless Rdio fans sit back helplessly as their accounts go dark, it’s time to be blunt. Spotify continues to outpace its growing army of competitors, and if you’re going to spend money on a streaming music service, you should sign up for Spotify Premium. Or save a few bucks and get the free version, because it’s pretty damn great, too!”
HOWEVER! I will include the caveat that I love Google Music’s ability to upload my own music and my wife and I (and our newborn and kids) make great use of the uploaded music on Amazon that powers our family’s Echo. Don’t get me started on my 10 year old (heavily) curated Pandora station which makes me pay for Pandora One every year.
Earlier this year, my good friend Thomas (a PhD candidate and officiant of my marriage) wrote a very timely post about his decision to blog despite some who advised otherwise…
Why I Blog — Thomas J. Whitley: “Though many academics have resisted the move toward ‘branding,’ it has long been a part of academia. One’s credentials, what they’ve written, and where they’ve taught make up their brand and determine, to a large extent, who reads them, who assigns them, and who thinks of them for panel invitations and professional society nominations. Branding has only become more important with the ubiquity of information readily available on the internet.”
Whether you’re a teacher, preacher, business, nonprofit, politician, or insurance salesperson… you should blog.
“Giving away” your knowledge results in so many worthwhile returns.
Fusion’s got a 12-person distributed news team: “The digital news site and cable network for millennials on Monday announced a new team to create stories and videos meant to be read and watched exclusively on social platforms. The social newsroom of 12 people includes eight who are focused on Snapchat alone. Others work on Instagram and Vine. Fusion hired Laura Feinstein, a former editor in chief of Vice’s Intel-backed Creator’s Project, to lead the group.”
“News” as we know it in its commodified post-industrial state is changing its delivery mechanism on an increasing pace from newspaper to newspaper delivery to radio to television to cable to the web to social networks to messaging…
I am often asked by Harrelson Agency clients and potential clients if they should use a WordPress.com site or have us build and host a WordPress site for them. Money is often a main concern, as you can pay $100 – 120 a year for a pretty solid WordPress.com site without much fuss. A hosted WordPress site can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars in building costs, and more for hosting and programming. As with anything, discuss the costs upfront with the agency or company building your site if you go the self-hosted route.
There are advantages to the “set it and forget it” style of a WordPress.com website financially, but there are also a few other variables to consider if you’re looking to have a serous presence on the web and translate that into bigger goals for your company. Remember, WordPress started off as a blogging platform. While you can manipulate a WordPress.com site into a more “professional” looking business or church or group site, it’s not always easy depending on your needs and skill level.
If you do self host, you can use custom / commercial themes, plus all other free themes that exist. You can modify, customize, or do anything that you’d like with your site. With WordPress hosting, you’re limited to a set of free themes that exist in the theme repository. Also, you can’t modify the CSS or other codes within the theme. If you’re looking to customize the site with scripts and customizations (as an author / speaker / consultant / business etc) it’s definitely advantageous to be on your own server. This includes everything from being able to do custom embeds of media to accepting payments to contact forms etc.
Simply put, there are (often mission-critical) things you can’t do with WordPress hosted sites that you can do with a self-hosted site.
Plugins are also a big deal, especially as the web matures. You can upload any free, paid, or custom plugin that you want with a hosted site. This allows you to really maximize WordPress’ potential as a content management system and expand that functionality. With a WordPress.com site, you’re not allowed to upload any free, paid, or custom plugins. Everything from search engine optimization (especially needed in 2015) to handling social media sharing to newsletter delivery to some really cool media handling plugins to how your site displays posts etc are covered. Here are a few popular plugins, but I have a standard 10-15 that I typically install on a new site and highly recommend for flexibility and security and making WordPress more than just a blogging platform.
Of course, spending $99 once a year is a nice idea and provides a sense of regular expense if you’re looking into a WordPress.com site with ads turned off and a custom domain (and a little extra storage). There is a higher initial cost for a WordPress hosted site (typically anywhere from $2,000 to $35,000 for most group, church or business sites depending on many variables). However, the cost of a self-hosted WordPress site over the span of a few years evens out and you get a much “nicer” custom experience that is built around your own brand. This also frees you up from being shackled to whatever changes WordPress.com might or might not make as it evolves as a commercial arm of the larger WordPress ecosystem, as we’ve seen just this week … although the changes are all very positive this time. I’ve never had a client want to go back to something like a hosted service after they realize the options available and how the site “pays for itself” over time.
Maintenance is a very big concern for security and speed reasons these days, or at least it should be an absolute top priority. That does require that you keep your site updated, have backups, keep SPAM controlled and keeping your site optimized. That’s something we do for clients, of course. WordPress.com frees you up from that worry or need for maintenance, so that’s a plus for that side of things. However, like everything else, it’s a tradeoff between convenience and the ability to make something truly “your own” in terms of appearance and functionality.
The biggest point I always make when comparing what we can do with what WordPress.com hosting offers is that I believe you really cannot maximize the potential of your site / blog / online presence / long term branding unless you have access to the additional functionality of plugins and the ability to maintain custom modifications (and get down to the nitty gritty code based level allowing for you to make the site look and act like you’d like for it to). Being able to take payments, offer audio / video / text media downloads etc are all big benefits of what we offer with a self-hosted site, but the biggest benefit is that it’s “your” site and belongs to you, whatever may come down the road.
Dropbox just killed a cottage industry of PDF editing apps for me (and I’ve spent lots of money on iOS apps trying to find the right PDF editor for commenting and signing that connect to Dropbox):
Now you can edit PDFs stored in Dropbox from your iPhone and iPad | Dropbox Blog: “With the latest versions of the Dropbox and Acrobat Reader iOS apps, you’ll be able to annotate and comment on PDFs stored in Dropbox, right from your iPhone or iPad. Just open a PDF from the Dropbox app and tap the ‘Edit’ icon, then edit or electronically sign the PDF in the Acrobat Reader app. All your changes will save back to Dropbox, so you and any collaborators will have the latest version.”
You have to have the Adobe Acrobat app installed on your device as well, but that’s not a big hinderance.
I noticed the desktop integration between Dropbox and Adobe while working on a PDF in Acrobat earlier this week, so it’s nice to see that carry over to the mobile experience.
For all the “Dropbox is doomed!” blog posts a few weeks ago, it’s still a critical part of our agency workflow. This only helps reinforce that.
Good thoughts from Om here about the place of having your own website (whether it’s at WordPress.com or a self hosted WordPress installation for more flexibility) and feeding the beast:
Some Thoughts on the New WordPress.com and Mac App – Om Malik: “Most of those platforms are built to be silos, Facebook and Instagram being the worst offenders. Their approach is a threat to the open web as much as the rise of the app-centric internet. As someone who feeds the monster, I should have the ability to keep a copy of what I create. To stay relevant, WordPress.com has to become not only a publishing tool but also a means for me to route my sharing. Its role is that of an information router. I am looking forward to what talented developers do with the new capabilities of WordPress.com.”
We like to think pictures that we take (of ourselves and other things) digitally are eternal and won’t disappear into the digital abyss.
However, is that true it will our JPGs and PNGs (not to mention associated metadata) slip into the digital dark age canyon we’re construction for our ancestors?
“If only they had used more permanent materials” our archaeologists lament about the past. I imagine that will be a similar lament in the future.
I frequently talk with clients or perspective clients about the differences between having a site on WordPress.com and having a self-hosted site on WordPress (I’ll write more about that soon). The biggest difference being that if you have your site on WordPress.com, you’re trading off some functionality and customization for a more “set it and forget it” approach to having a site or blog. Of course, both options have their advantages and disadvantages (again, more soon on that).
I’m glad to see WordPress.com code being opened up and the switch from PHP and MySQL to Javascript and an API for backend power, but I’m a little cautious about what that means for the self-hosted sites (WordPress 4.4 is coming) in terms of the amount of work I’ll be doing in December to update our clients’ sites 🙂
Regardless, glad to see the open web taking on the likes of Medium and Facebook.
It’s an opportunity for visual storytelling that you won’t find anywhere else on the web.
Vox’s email announcing their arrival on Snapchat included this:
We’re using it to create a new form of deep, visually-driven information-rich explainers that we’re really proud of, and we think you’ll really like. What’s more, they’ll only exist on Snapchat, and they’ll only last for 24 hours each.
I read lots of tech jargon and buzzword filled studies and announcements everyday, but “visually-driven information-rich explainers” is a new one. I’ll have to use that myself in a meeting sometime soon.
Explainers aside, it’s definitely interesting to see how Vox, Vice, Buzzfeed, The Verge, Gawker’s sites etc are pivoting. Their once advertising and story heavy front page sites, that more resembled a traditional print newspaper than something like a “blog” or “news website” (I think of boing boing), are being put on the back burner to the flow outward of their news.
There are very good reasons for this that we can all take something from despite our business goals. Advertising revenue on that mode of website is drying up as ad technology gets smarter, marketing directors get wiser, and viewers start going elsewhere for their information binges or check-ins. That shift of advertising revenue probably doesn’t concern your business or group etc.
Those elswewheres, however, do. And for the time being, those elsewheres are social networks.
You probably arrived here from seeing this post on Twitter or Facebook or Google+ (hey, some do). “Social” traffic on this blog and many of the client sites we manage has proven to be “stickier” than traffic coming straight from a Google search, unless the search was for a highly targeted keyword (say “visually-driven information-rich explainers”).
However, reaching people on social networks and getting their attention is not as easy as it was just four or five years ago. That’s obvious if you have tried to put up a Facebook post on your company’s page and waited for the highly qualified traffic to come rolling in without any further effort (hint: it won’t).
Vox gets this as do many of the news / destination sites in their genre of web writing. Companies and groups successfully leveraging (to use another buzz term) social media networks for traffic, engagement, or leads are also aware of the challenge.
To be honest, the ability to tap into social networks is only going to get more difficult and … bizarre in the coming years. Again, Vox etc understand that their their websites are transitioning into “dumb pipes.” It’s the same thing we all want from our cable companies or internet providers… don’t fancy up the service, just give us fast access to the web. We’ll find all the entertainment we need without Comcast throwing in a package deal.
Except websites are dealing with content and information, rather than bandwidth, for their flow outward. Why does Vox etc care about having their “explainers” going out to Snapchat? Because that’s where we’re increasingly going to find the news and content and opinion that we want to have when we want to have it. I’d venture to bet that Vox.com’s traffic coming in from mobile Safari on iPhones isn’t as stimulating to their bottom line as the traffic coming in from social sites.
How do social media users discover news? Facebook is an important source of website referrals for many news outlets, but the users who arrive via Facebook spend far less time and consume far fewer pages than those who arrive directly. The same is true of users arriving by search. Our analysis of comScore data found visitors who go to a news media website directly spend roughly three times as long as those who wind up there through search or Facebook, and they view roughly five times as many pages per month. This higher level of engagement from direct visitors is evident whether a site’s traffic is driven by search or social sharing and it has big implications for news organizations who are experimenting with digital subscriptions while endeavoring to build a loyal audience.
Interestingly, we’re running into a unique situation in that social networks as we know them are morphing into something else just as news, content sites, and companies are figuring out how to use them for traffic back to their own sites.
In the last year, we’ve seen the rise of Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Google Now, Snapchat Discover etc. “News” is blending in with editorial content and the method of delivery based on a person’s preferences is where the money is going to flow.
If you haven’t already, check out Nuzzel and you’ll see why.
That’s because our social preferences and our media consumption preferences are coalescing in this third generation of the web. “Going to” Facebook to check our newsfeed will seem as antiquated as picking up a newspaper from a newsstand to check the day’s news. However, once newspapers started being delivered to our homes, we started viewing the news differently. The same thing is happening here with social. The news / content /info we want (and the algorithms think we need based on our bank balance, location, heart rate, travel speed, or upcoming schedule) is going to be coming to us, via messengers and notifications on our mobile devices.
Messengers are the next wave that is quickly coming to the US (already happened in much of the world outside North America just as texting, video chat etc took a while for Americans to catch on). These initiatives by Google, Facebook, Apple, Snapchat etc are a very real signal that they want to be the distributor of the content that we’ll inevitably be receiving via Facebook’s Messenger or WeChat or Whatsapp or whatever we all network shift to for our social spaces in the next 3 or so years.
What does that mean to your small business selling widgets or your nonprofit?
Everything if you’re doing any marketing on the web in 2015.
