Hi Everyone!

Next Quarterly Blogging Seminar:
Tuesday February 24th, 11am Eastern AND 5pm Eastern
DATE CHANGE: Friday, February 27th, 11am Eastern AND 5pm Eastern
You’ll all receive GoToWebinar invites soon - we’ll likely be walking through some of the tips below but if you have any special needs, let us know what you’d like to hear about!

We tried to give you some very useful juicy bits of information for February (not that we don’t always ! We hope all of you will be able to make use of the Facebook and YouTube tips below. As always if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Chris or Kristen with blogging needs.

Psst… We’re Twittering, take a look!
http://twitter.com/kveraldi
http://twitter.com/frerecks

Enjoy!

Chris and Kristen

Adding your Blog to Facebook

For anyone using Facebook, there is a nice feature that allows you to add your blog RSS feeds. This creates an update on your wall each time you blog. It’s really simple to use, here’s a step by step:

• The trick is to know that Facebook considers your external blog entries “notes”, so to add it you can’t just go to your profile and change a setting or two, you need to go to your “Notes” section in Facebook and modify it.
• Start on your home page in Facebook, then look on the right for “Notes” (sometimes this section will be hidden so you’ll have to hit the “more” button under Applications).
• Click on that and you’ll be on your Notes area. Look half-way down on the right side and you’ll see “Notes Settings”
• Click on “import a blog” and you’ll get to the necessary setup window
• Enter the URL of your blog (you don’t have to worry about the RSS/XML feed address, there is a self discovery mechanism), check the “it’s mine” box, and click on “Start Importing”.
• It will then show you a preview of the import
• Looks good? Scroll down to the bottom and click on “Confirm Import”.
• That’s it. You can only import one, good luck!

Making the BEST use of YouTube

We’ve recently had several clients ask us about YouTube widgets for their blog. So we put some research into it and discovered a wealth of information – YouTube offers several very powerful tools that you can use in conjunction with your blog. There are two gallery type widgets that can be of use. Kristen can drop these in for you but she will need the code (see below for code creation help). You must create a few video “playlists” in order for them to work (again see below). You can also create your own YouTube channel, which comes complete with RSS, subscription, and styling ability. Here’s an example of Kathy Toth’s channel which is full of information: http://www.youtube.com/user/kathytothteam

Here are a few tips:

- You must have a YouTube account to do any of the things listed above, just go to youtube.com and create a free account

- Once you create an account, you can of course add your own videos or fill your channel with other people’s videos you enjoy

- Adding your own videos is too in-depth for this newsletter, however you’ll find lots of help on the subject here: http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/ – I recommend getting a simple plug and play device such as the iFlip to get your video career started: http://www.theflip.com/

- To add other videos to your channel or to a playlist you must first flag them and add to your quicklist. To do this you must be logged in. Once logged in you can click the plus sign on any video you find via the search results (even your own) to add.

- To get gallery widgets you must have a playlist, favorites will simply be added to your channel page.

- If you’re going to create a playlist, you must do this first from your account homepage before you can put videos in the list. Just click on playlist from the account home page, then click on the “new” dropdown in the upper left top area. Then creating one is as easy as giving it a title.

- Once videos have been added to the quicklist and playlists created, access your quicklist from your account homepage. From there, you can select the video and use the “add to” dropdown at top to add to a playlist title you just created or flag as a favorite.

- Videos must always first get added to the quicklist before you can put them in as a favorite or onto a playlist.

- You can see your growing user channel by clicking on your account name at the top of the page or you can see it by typing in the following URL – http://www.youtube.com/user/acctname(substitute yours)

Creating Widgets:

Widget One – one YouTube player that allows users to scroll to find the video they want to play

To show a selection of videos that is easily editable, embed a playlist. When you update the playlist on YouTube, the playlist on your site will update as well. This is a good way of creating longer stories through a series of videos, or simply giving your readers more pre-selected content to watch.

1. To create a playlist, go to the My Playlists page, click ‘Create a Playlist’ and fill out the information.
2. As you find videos you like on YouTube, click ‘Add to Playlist’ under the player to add them to your list. You can change the order of the videos in your playlist by returning to the ‘My Playlist’ page.
3. The easiest way to embed a playlist is to create a custom player. Go to your YouTube account and click “Custom Video Players”, then “Create Custom Player”. Select a color and format for your player, and then choose what is going to play in it—you can choose a playlist, your own uploaded content, or your favorites—and then click the “Generate Code” button.
4. Send the code to Kristen for embedding on your blog

Widget Two – a long vertical gallery widget (see example on http://www.annarbortalks.com lower left)

Instructions here: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/wizards/videobar.html

1. Make sure you choose a “vertical” bar or this won’t fit in your navigation.
2. Uncheck any popular channels
3. Put your account name in for you tube channels, in Kathy’s case “kathytothteam” goes here
4. No search expressions are necessary
5. Click show code, paste to a notepad doc and send to Kristen for embedding

Related Articles:

http://kineticknowledge.com/blog/youtube/youtube-for-business/
http://kineticknowledge.com/blog/youtube/video-search-optimization-google/

Reminders about your blog editor

Quite a few people have been having some troubles with the blog editor. There are a few bugs that we’ve been working through – there is no final solution yet, but something will be coming down the pipes soon. In the interim, here are a few tips to help you avoid recurring issues:

Don’t cut and paste directly into the editor from MS Word or an email program. If you want to copy content, first “wash” it through Notepad (free with Windows, Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> Notepad) which means cut/paste to Notepad, then cut/paste from there to the blog editor. Or, try using the “paste from Word” or “paste as plain text” buttons in the bottom row of the editor. In both cases links will be stripped. I live to use Notepad as paragraph breaks are retained.

Don’t use captions under your images unless you have to. We’ve identified this as an “area of sensitivity” in the editor. Captions are equal to your alternate text which is important. To add alt text without using a caption, do the following

1. Add your photo with no caption text (do fill out title and desc)
2. One the photo shows in the editor, click on it and go back into edit mode
3. Click the advanced settings tab and enter your alt text in the appropriate field
4. If any of you are wondering how to get “blank space” between your photos and your wrapping text, you’ll also see the horizontal space field on this advanced settings page. Just enter the amount of pixels you want between your photo and text in the horizontal field. I typically use 8 or 10. Vertical space happens naturally and is not often needed, but you can enter pixels there too if you like.
5. Scroll down and click “update” for all these settings to take effect

If you ever notice a post “going south” on a formatting level (ie weird font sizes, troubles with spacing) it’s likely due to garbage code from a cut/paste or too many formatting trys. Instead of spending hours trying to delete and reformat in visual mode, do the following to save some time:

1. Once garbage code is introduced, you can’t always get rid of it just by deleting your whole post from the visual tab mode. Sometimes there is code leftover which you can’t see via visual mode but can always see via the HTML tab.
2. Many of you recognize what’s happening but are deleting from the wrong spot to “reset” the post and start over with a cut/paste from Notepad
3. If you want to “start-over” so to speak with a Notepad wash, instead of deleting your existing content from the visual tab – switch over to the HTML tab, select all (ctrl A) and delete the whole post from there. If you don’t have the post anywhere else, copy/paste the messed up content first from the visual tab into notepad so you have something to copy/paste back in when you delete the code. Then flip back to visual mode and paste back in from Notepad

While all of these things are a pain in the butt – they will save you frustrating bits of time while we are trying to figure out viable editor alternatives.

Don’t forget to take a look at our new “PIMP Your Blog” Packages! We now have a simple Kinetic Product Matrix that you can print out and peruse and anything can be ordered via our new online order form.