Ned Potter | Newcastle, December 2015
THE PLAN This is roughly what we’re aiming to do today, and when. With hands-on workshops like this things can easily shuffle around, but our order and timings will be along these lines:
10:00 – 11:30 Sources, Sway)
(including Issuu, Image
[Tea break: 11:30 to 11:45] 11:45 – 13:00 (including Twitter video) [Lunch 13:00 – 14:00] 14:00 – 15:30 Vimeo, Animation Tools); (Tumblr and Blogs)
(including YouTube, Part 1
[Coffee break: 15:30 – 15:45] 15:45 – 16:30
Part 2 (Twitter)
EXERCISE 1: CREATING AN ISSUU ACCOUNT Issuu helps you communicate by making written documents more engaging. It’s also vital for getting people to read PDFs at all. For this exercise you’re going to set up an Issuu account and convert a PDF of this handout to a page-turning Issuu document (making it easier to access the various links for the rest of the workshop). The account can always be deleted after the session if you decide Issuu is not for you. First go to www.issuu.com – and choose ‘Create new account’. Put in some details as prompted (or log-in with Facebook / Google+), and choose Upload rather than Read when presented with this screen: Choose the FREE option when the different packages are offered – you do not need to pay to use Issuu for the kinds of purposes we need it for. Once you’ve completed a ‘publisher’s profile’ (where you’d put in the name and website of your library – or you can skip this step for now) you’ll have a chance to select a file to convert to Issuu. In order to do this, you’ll first need to locate the PDF, which, if everything has gone to plan, has been emailed to you… Save it to your desktop or somewhere quick and easy to find.
Back on Issuu, press Select a file to get started (or Upload, and then Select a file to get started) and navigate to the PDF On your Desktops should be a file called ‘Digital Marketing Toolkit – online’. Double click on the file, and it will begin to convert it, which takes a couple of minutes. A screen will eventually appear giving you the opportunity to name and describe your document. You don’t need to worry about this now – but it will be important if you come to use Issuu with your Library. Click Publish then Open Document. Your page-turning version of the handout should now appear on screen.
EXERCISE 2: PLAYING WITH SWAY The idea here is to create a Sway now, which you’ll update as we move through the day – it will serve as a virtual scrap-book for your ideas about how the tools we discuss today could apply to your own organisation. If you feel comfortable doing so you could potentially share this Sway with your organisation at a later date, to cascade useful ideas. Here’s a step-by-step guide to starting off: 1. Go to sway.com. Click Sign-in in the top right hand corner. You can use a Microsoft account to sign in here – so if you ever sign into a home Windows PC, tablet, or phone, Xbox Live, Outlook.com, or OneDrive, it’s the email address and password you use for that, [If anyone doesn’t already have a Microsoft account you will need one for this exercise I’m afraid: go to https://signup.live.com to create one. You can always delete it after today if you decide Sway isn’t for you!] 2. You can view existing Sways and adapt them if you wish, but it may be easier today to bypass all the examples and go to Create New, which is an option near the top right of the screen. 3. From now on, remember there’s an Undo button top-centre of the screen if you need it! Give your Sway a title as indicated, Click the Background image icon to add a picture behind your title. You can then choose Flickr from the Sources drop-down:
For now type ‘Newcastle’ into the search box and choose anything you want. Notice when you click on a picture it displays the licensing information at the bottom of the screen, which you’ll need for attribution when you’re making Sways for public use.
Drag your chosen picture onto the Background thumbnail. You’ve now created your first ‘Card’ – which is how Sway describes each slide or page. 4. Click the little diamond shaped + icon below your title card and choose Text – this will add text without a picture behind it, so will take up less space. Add in a little explanation here for what the Sway is. 5. We’re now going to add a new section of Cards to cover the Publishing Online session from this morning. Click Cards from the taskbar at the top of the screen, and you’ll see various options down the left side of the screen:
The one we want is Heading – drag that into place below your existing cards. Write ‘Publishing Online’ in the appropriate space. We’re now going to create related content in a cluster below this. Sway likes to group content together until you next use a Heading – this is normally very useful but can sometimes be frustrating if you want to do something different!
Drag a Picture Card to below your heading. Type some notes about Issuu into the ‘Caption’ section – can you think of a use for Issuu at Newcastle, and if so what? Then choose the Add Picture thumbnail this time we’re going to choose Bing from the drop-down menu, and type ‘Issuu’ into the search box as shown on the left. Choose any of the pictures of the Issuu logo and drag it into position.
Now go back to the Cards menu, and once more drag Picture across so it sits below the Issuu picture card you just added. In this one write ‘Pixabay.com contains useful public domain pictures’ for the caption. We’re now going to try out uploading content from our harddrives to Sway – for this we’ll need to download a picture from Pixabay. Go to www.pixabay.com, type ‘iPad’ or ‘Computer’ or anything else you fancy into the search box, and find a nice image. Left-click on a suitable one, then right-click and choose ‘Save Image As…’ to download a small version of the pic to your PC. Save it somewhere easy to find, like the Desktop. Back on Sway, click the Add a picture thumbnail on your Pixabay card, and this time choose Upload from the sources menu. Find your Pixabay image, upload and select it. 6. We’re now ready to have a look at our Sway so far! Click the Play button near the top right of the screen. Scroll-down to view what you’ve done so far. Keep in mind it doesn’t need to look good at this stage! This is all about learning how Sway works rather than producing a slick piece of work… 7. Click the little pencil icon in the top-right to go back into Edit mode. Choose Design from the menu along the top and click on any of the thumbnails to change the theme of your Sway. Experiment as much as you like – you can always press Undo. Finally for now, click Navigation from the menu. Here you get to choose from the default vertical-scrolling format, or a horizontal scrolling format, or a more traditional slides format. Again, view your Sway in each of these to see which you prefer, then settle on one to use for the rest of the session. We’ll come back to Sway later on so keep the tab open!
EXERCISE 3: FINDING REAL-WORLD USES FOR BEACONS, AUGMENTED REALITY, OR QR CODES The point of this is to shift from abstract discussion to potential real-world applications of the various geolocation technologies. We’re doing to post any ideas you have onto a Padlet wall (a sort of virtual notice board which I understand you’ve used at Newcastle before) so you can see everyone’s ideas in one place and potentially learn from them. If you see no use for QR Codes, Beacons, Augmented Reality etc in your area library, that’s absolutely fine – don’t feel like you have to find a reason to use them! To post to the Padlet wall, go to padlet.com/nedpotter/newcastle (case sensitive). Double click to add a note with your idea.
If you come up with or read an idea you think might work for your Department, add a Card to your Sway with the details.
EXERCISE 4: CREATING TWITTER VIDEO For this exercise you’ll be working in threes – or if that doesn’t work for any reason feel free to make a four! At least one person in each group needs a twitter account. Using either a tablet or smartphone, download Twitter’s own app – it works like Vine in that it will record while you hold your finger down on the screen. You can stitch together any number of clips, but the maximum length is 30 seconds. Your task is to create a looping video that answers one of the following sample questions users might pose on Twitter: Where’s the new site going to be? What’s it going to be like? How do I get onto the wifi..? Can’t find my books! Where is the History section? What sort of study spaces can I find in the library? If you have any queries about using the app, let me know.
EXERCISE 5: VIDEO EXAMPLES For this exercise we’re returning to our Padlet wall at padlet.com/nedpotter/newcastle (case sensitive). Post examples to the wall of library videos – either good ones, or bad ones, for us to watch. First find a video or two on YouTube / Vimeo, and copy their URL.
To post a video double click on the wall (below all the earlier notes!), and click any of the little picture icons as indicated by the arrow above – a screen will appear allowing you to paste in a YouTube or Vimeo video link, which will then embed the video on the board. If between us we find a video you think your organisation might learn from, add it to your Sway. Copy the URL, then add a Video card. When you click the Add a video thumbnail you can choose YouTube from the source drop-down, and then paste the URL into the search box. Select the video to add it to your Sway. You can add a caption explaining its relevance if you wish.
EXERCISE 6: PITCH A TUMBLR Tumblr.com is far and away the most popular form of blogging at the moment – could your organisations have a reason to be there too? Try and think of an idea for a tumblr, something different to what you might put on a regular blog. Perhaps showcasing something visual on an on-going basis, or providing ‘hacks’ for your library, or behind the scenes peeks, or quick tips. In your tables use the 6-8-5 method to pitch a new Tumblr idea that one or more of your organisations could adopt. You have 5 minutes to write down 6 – 8 different ideas for a Tumblr – there’s no bad ideas, just put down anything that comes into your head. Then go round the table and each give a quick explanation of your ideas. Put your post-its in the middle of the table. Where the ideas are similar, group the post-its together. Once all the post-its are in the middle, you should see some kind of consensus emerging for a great Tumblr idea. If you think your idea (or anybody else’s you hear) could work in your section, make a note of it here or in your Sway!
EXERCISE 7: TWITTER ANALYSIS There are various useful statistical tools which can help you understand your twitter activity, and find out what engages your followers and what doesn’t.
1) Firstly, go to Twitter Analytics at analytics.twitter.com. This will only start collecting information after you first visit it, so there almost certainly won’t be any useful information on there. But from today it will start keeping detailed statistics, which you can check back on at any time. Log-in with your organisational account to start collecting stats. 2) Next go to Twitonomy at www.twitonomy.com/. You can sign in with Twitter, again using your organisational account. It gives you a LOT of information but the bit we’re interested in for now is the Profile screen.
Have a look at the percentages of ReTweets and replies. If they’re really low, you may want to consider consciously trying to become more interactive as this will almost certainly see your network on Twitter grow. Take a print-screen now and email it to yourself. You can check back in on your profile at regular intervals (once a month, say) and see if the level of interactivity is changing.
3) Finally, we’ll look at Followerwonk at followerwonk.com/ - click Sign in with Twitter once more. Choose the Anaylse tab, and put your org’s username in. Change the drop-down menu to Analyze their followers.
Then click Do it. Follow the instructions on screen – your report may appear right away, or you may be asked to go to Followerwonk Reports (a link at the top right of the screen) and select the report to view from there. Once in the report, you’ll see a map of where your folllowers are based, but the really useful info is just below that.
Compare the graph of when your followers are online with the one of when you tweet. How well do they match up? If you have key info to tweet, it’s well worth waiting until a critical mass of your audience is online and ready to engage before tweeting it.
BONUS EXERCISE A: FINISHING YOUR SWAY There may not be time for this in the workshop, but if we do have a chance at the end try adding some more info to your Sway. It’s worth looking at the Options for each Card as they allow you to have control over how important the Card is in the overall presentation. For example in the screenshot below I’ve gone into my Video Card anc clicked Options near the top right of it – here I can change it from the default ‘Subtle’ level to the ‘Intense’ level. This means the video will take up a full-screen rather than just a small section of one.
Another interesting Card to explore is the Stack Card. This allows you to choose several emails and then pile them up on top of one another in the presentation, then the viewer can click on them to cycle through the images with a nice animation. Like the embedding this is useful for allowing different levels of detail - for those who want to see / know more they can easily sort through the stack of images to view all of them, but for those uninterested it only takes up a small amount of space and can be easily scrolled past. Also try out the Comparison Card to slide between two images: it’s a really nice effect. Of all the Cards I’ve found Tweet the least useful but it’s worth having a play with. It displays Tweets very nicely, but the difficulty is in locating them in the first place via the Search box. If you can find what you’re looking for it works fine, but the search is often sketchy in my (so far only limited) experience.
We don’t time to explore Embed now but it’s so useful, it’s worth looking at when you’re back at your own desk. You can put Word docs, spreadsheets, PDFs and whole PowerPoint presentations, into your Sway.
BONUS EXERCISE B: OPTIMISING IMAGES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA This a very brief exercise to do if you finish everything else today in record time! Tweeting images can add some variety to your timeline (and apparently increase engagement by 17%, but I’m always slightly weary of stats like that!) and when they work best they don’t require the viewer to ‘expand’ the image to see all of it. If it’s exactly the right size then all of it will appear in your tweet by default. This is quite fiddly to do manually but thankfully there’s a great free tool which does it for you – and in fact it will optmisie any image to fit virtually every possible social media scenario. It’s called Social Image Resizer Tool and it’s available at www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seotools/favicon-generator-crop-images/ - although it might be quicker just to Google ‘Social Image Resizer Tool’ and follow the link… Go back to Pixabay to find a fabulous image to tweet just to try this out – pick one you like and press the Download button below it to get it onto your PC. Then go to the Social Media Resizer Tool and click Browse, find and select your image, and click Upload.
Once you have your image uploaded, select Twitter Image Display from the drop-down menu, then drag the corners of the crop-box around (which will retain the correct proportions as you do so) until you have a nice section of the image highlighted. Click Done Editing. Then right-click and choose Save As… to download the newly sized image to your PC. Finally, go to Twitter and write a new tweet, selecting the image icon and finding and selecting your optimised image. You don’t have to send the tweet if you don’t want to! Or you can tweet it, have a look at the image in your tweet and then delete it right away…
Online Publishing: www.issuu.com and www.scribd.com for making PDFs into browseable documents; www.flickr.com/search, http://unsplash.com and www.pixabay.com for useful images you can legally use; and www.fontsquirrel.com for non-standard fonts. www.slideshare.net for uploading PowerPoints, and www.prezi.com for zooming presentations like the one used in the workshop. www.sway.com for ‘dynamic storytelling’. QR Codes: http://snap.vu to create QR Codes with built in statistics tracking. Padlet: www.padlet.com for the online noticeboard. Geolocation: www.foursquare.com to find and claim your location (see the Bodleian’s nicely done example at foursquare.com/v/bodleian-library/4b7aae05f964a520ed362fe3); www.estimote.com for commercially available beacons and software; www.aurasma.com/ for Augmented Reality software. Mobile and Apps: http://finecitizens.com/defineResponsive/ to see Responsive Design in action. Video: www.youtube.com/user/YorkInformation for the Library and IT YouTube Channel at the University of York; http://getvoice.adobe.com/ for Adobe Voice, the slides / video hybrid; http://www.powtoon.com/ for the animation tool; www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html for Camtasia, the paid for Screen-Capture tool; http://tinytake.com/ for a free alternative; www.vimeo.com for another place to host videos apart from www.youtube.com. Blogs: www.tumblr.com for a short-form blogging alternative to the traditional www.wordpress.com or www.blogger.com longer format blogs - see http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/ for the British Library’s Mechanical Curator tumblr. Reasons to set up an institutional blog: http://www.ned-potter.com/blog/why-have-aninsitutional-blog Twitter: analytics.twitter.com is Twitter’s own analytics tool and will tell you a wealth of information. www.twitonomy.com/ is good for analysing your own org’s tweets, and is excellent for knowing when to tweet key information. followerwonk.com/ is excellent for knowing when to tweet key information. On using Twitter Analytics: http://www.ned-potter.com/blog/twitter-analytics-is-now-freefor-all-so-what-can-libraries-get-out-of-it. And the Social Media Image Resizer: http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/favicon-generator-crop-images/
The Prezi we used today is available at bit.ly/newcastlelib (case sensitive). Please feel free to share it with colleagues within your organisation. Got any follow up questions? nedpotter@ymail.com or @ned_potter on Twitter. There’s loads more guides to social media and emerging technologies at www.ned-potter.com too. Good luck!