We wanted to share some more information on the choices one has with a Creative Commons license and also update a mistake we made in our previous post ‘IMAGES, COPYRIGHT LAW, PUBLIC DOMAIN & THE CREATIVE COMMONS’. The post said *incorrectly* that a common characteristic of the licenses is ‘no commercial use’ and that should have said a characteristic of the license CAN BE ‘no commercial use’. Our friend and top St Petersburg FL real estate broker Sharon Simms was kind enough to point this out and, while it has been corrected, this post may support those interested in understanding their choices… which certainly include ‘for commercial use’

The Creative Commons Licenses

Attribution

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-NoDerivs

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-ShareAlike

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NonCommercial

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

And then you can go here to choose a Creative Commons License for your work.

Good Luck!

We wrote on the subject of ‘Pictures, Copyright And Your Blog‘ back in 2008, but it’s probably useful to get into the subject again. For folks who enjoy adding pictures to their content this may be useful information on the subject of image copyright, the public domain and the creative commons.

We spend a lot of time here discussing ‘how to satisfy the search engines organically’, but we’re convinced that when people like your content … a whole heckuva’ lot more can happen. And images will help!

I Like Pictures. Don’t you?

The fact is, good images in your content are likely to appeal to people, therefor; it’s a great deal more likely people will not only like, but share it to Facebook, Google ⁺, LinkedIn, Twitter and the list goes on. It’s a networked web, nice images will certainly improve your chances of leveraging it!

Copyright Law

But if the law has anything to say about it you can’t just go out there, grab any image and use it. Copyright Law exists to prevent us from using anyone’s work. The possibility exists for civil suits with punitive damages, so best to be informed about your options.

Apparently, at least until 1976, creative works such as images were not protected by copyright law unless they had a published copyright logo. If the image did not have the official logo, it was ‘in the public domain’ for anyone to use. Changes in the law occurred in 1976 and again in ’88, effectively saying that all creative works were automatically copyrighted. The reason for this was based upon the belief that, if there was no ‘copyright by default’, the circumstances might lessen a creators’ or an artists’ interest in sharing their work. And if so, it would severely limit the public’s’ access to art. In effect, to protect art is to protect culture!

Copyright Law is pretty simple now. It says that any work or image you or anyone creates is automatically copyrighted. No one really needs to do anything at all to receive protection under Copyright Law. While one might go to such ends as ‘the Registrar of Copyrights’ in Washington DC, there isn’t much preventing an owner from exercising her rights when someone has used or copied their work.

Not to worry – there are exceptions and opportunities to use images you don’t own: there are those in the public domain and then those made available via the Creative Commons.

The Public Domain

The Public Domain describes any work that is not protected by copyright. Again, all images are copyrighted automatically unless they have given up protection. Explicit permission, from owner to user, is one example of giving up protection. Another includes when you have a photo on the web, you notice other folks have been using it and you don’t do anything to stop it. Eventually, in this scenario, the work is in the public domain. And then there’s the creative commons, which we’ll detail some more below.

Regardless, if the picture is not yours, you don’t have permission or you’re not abiding by the owners disclosed rules THEN the rule of thumb should be “don’t use it!” FAIR WARNING: sites that say they have free or public domain pictures may not be reputable… be careful to use good judgement. If the site you find the image at doesn’t reveal an owner or a means to communicate with one it’s likely not reputable. Better yet, it’s likely not a good idea!

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has delivered a widely accepted alternative, filling the gap between where no use is permitted without strict permission and the public domain. Creative Commons’ licenses allow folks to use and even distribute images under several specific sets of  ’owner disclosed conditions’. These Creative Commons licenses allow owners of works [including images] to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of the user. Restrictions may include whether an image can be used for personal or commercial purposes, and whether or not the photographer requires attribution or credit. 

Note that Creative Commons exists outside standard copyright law, or better yet is has no legal ground; however, it’s been widely accepted. One great example of its use is Flickr.com, where many people store their works and allow use via the Commons. Again, there are conditions for use and they are made available in Flickr based upon the Creative Commons permission standards. One example of a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows for image use is *if the owner receives credit.* You can explore what you need, including for commercial use, by going here to see the various Creative Commons Licenses and here to choose, including the proper logo, a Creative Commons License for your work.

Hope this helps you with images. Below are more resources. Good luck!

Public Domain

• http://karenswhimsy.com/public-domain-images/
• http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/
• http://www.pdphoto.org/

Creative Commons

• http://creativecommons.org/
• http://creativecommons.org/choose/
• http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

US Copyright & Other Useful Resources

• http://www.copyright.gov/
• http://www.stockphotorights.com/faq/

Video

• Adding & Optimizing Images In Your Content

“How do I bring a YouTube Video into my site?”

For those who aren’t up to speed, embedding video code can – at times – be a tricky process. So here’s a super layperson friendly look at how to do it:

And remember, once you lay that code in your HTML editor view avoid the urge to toggle back and forth between it and your Visual editor view prior to publishing your video post.

If you’d like to read up some more on YouTube’s value as a marketing tool, here are several things we’ve written up over the years:

Kinetic Knowledge YouTube Archive

And then, here’s more of our YouTube based video Education:

Kinetic Knowledge YouTube Video Education Channel

Lately folks have been asking about how to load new content, particularly about loading images, up to their sites from smart phones. I hadn’t actually used the application [=app'] myself yet so I thought I’d do a quick demo’ here while watching the game [NY Giants fan here, go GMen ]

Frankly, working with the mobile to WordPress site App’ is pretty simple. We recommend http://ios.wordpress.org for iphone/ipad AND / OR http://android.wordpress.org for android.

Here’s how: find the WP mobile app’ on your phone or in the apps’ market. On my HTC Incredible [Android Operating system] it was in the apps market, so I pulled onto my phone for regular use. Once you have done this, click register your account via the ‘self hosted’ option [this tip for clients, not on wp.com]; enter your site URL, your login creds’ and you’re ready to go.

Login, choose posts or pages, click the plus sign you see lower left, add  your post title, content, an image [ from your phone's gallery- the one you see here is the beach near where I live @ sunrise] and ‘publish’.

Simple!

Success With A Facebook Fan Page In Edmonton

While it can be difficult to quantify how Facebook measures up versus other marketing opportunities, it’s certainly a place to keep your circle of influence informed. And while feeding content from your primary brand is a start, top Edmonton AB Real Estate firm ‘The Schmidt Realty Group’ is rapidly accumulating a following … by finding efficient ways to participate:

Hi Kathy. Looks like you’re having a lot of success in Facebook. What are you guys doing with your page to get all those fans?

Thanks Chris! We have worked hard to develop a page worth following Our page is less than one year old and we are constantly seeking to improve our online presence. When we first created our site with Kinetic we did a phone campaign as a team to check in with all our past clients and we had an exciting new website. Similarly with our new Facebook page we got in touch with our clients in a number of ways to let them know about it. We announced it in our monthly newsletter and every team member did a post on their own Facebook profile to invite people to visit our page. As well, we emailed our clients to invite them to check it out as well. And for our whole first year we have let people know that we will donate a dollar to Habitat for Humanity Edmonton for every new fan on our page!

Of course getting the fan is one thing, keeping them is another! We are very aware that we have to earn the right to those fans every day. In terms of content, we have a number of posting “streams” to keep it interesting and varied. I created a Facebook Team in my company, which consists of myself, our marketing coordinator and one of our realtors who not only has an interest in Facebook and social media, but who has a great sense of humor and is already active on Facebook herself. Each of us has a clear role. Danielle, our marketing coordinator, is responsible for consistency – ensuring that that we have a consistent presence on our page. To do this she posts our new listings (weekly, not daily as then it’s too much about “sales”), and she also posts information on new marketing approaches we are taking. I am responsible for credibility – this means that I ensure that there is information going on the page about the market and our local economy. I forward online articles about our economy or other items of interest to homeowners in our area to Danielle to post on the blog, and then these become part of our FB page as well. Natasha is responsible for personality She collects stories from the team (and steals, with permission, from our team member’s own Facebook profiles) to give our fans a feel for who we are as people, and for our corporate culture. A lot of these posts are pretty funny, and some of them are just plain happy, like pictures of clients getting the keys to their new home. Together we form the Facebook Trifecta lol! And it seems to give us a good balance of content.

Also, it’s important to note that everything we do is connected. We post to our blog (thank you again Kinetic Knowledge!) and it automatically feeds to both Facebook and Twitter. All of our team members are also fans of our page and so they get the new posts in their own newsfeed. We encourage them to “share” a post once a week with their Facebook friends, and to add a personal comment to the post so that it is truly from them,

Wow, incredible discipline Kathy. Do you guys set & pursue any goals in particular?

Obviously it’s good to have a lot of fans, but in particular I hope that the people we already have relationships with will find enough value to be worthy of them following us. We are a referral based business and deepening our relationships with our clients is not only smart business, frankly it is a really fun way to do business as well. I love connecting with my own past clients on Facebook and having a company page is just one more way to stay in touch. Our next focus will be to engage our fans more in conversations on our page

So right now, its reinforcement of your brand & repeat impressions with people who know ‘The Schmidt Realty Group’. Has it been difficult to find the time?

By linking our FB page with our site, and by sharing the workload with our internal FB Team, it is not overwhelming for any of us. We have run contests from time to time as well to encourage other team members to send their photos and stories to Natasha to ensure she has lots of material to draw on.

Have you been able to generate new business?

Definitely! FB has brought us business, specifically through the personal profiles of our team members and their efforts to connect with people. It’s difficult to measure whether or not our page has brought us business on its own as it is all so inter-connected, however we recently hired a new staff member and the top two candidates looked at our page and really liked what they saw! So, while it might not be the first place people hear about us, I believe that increasingly it is a place where people will visit to decide if we are the kind of organization that they would like to work with. That’s why we focus so much on making sure our corporate culture rings through loud and clear on our page

Thanks for sharing this with everyone Kathy

My pleasure Chris! I hope it’s helpful to your readers! If I can make one final comment it would simply be this… Just start! Take the plunge into social media. Get your feet wet and learn by doing. If you wait till you’ve got it all figured out, the landscape will have changed again anyway Start connecting today!

According to Pew’s data, the intent for two-thirds of online adults (66%) using social media platforms is to connect with family members, friends and old friends they’ve lost touch with. Other factors such as connecting around a shared hobby or interest is also a reason they use social media, but it plays a less important role at 14%.

While its popular to say Social is a ‘must do’ versus investing time & money in other marketing opportunities, these studies help to shed light on whether or not the average social network users intent is truly open to marketing messages. Or at least to a degree the potential return for an investment of time or money is right.

For the balance of this report read on here Pew Research: ‘Why Americans use social media‘.

Related Posts:

• SMARTPHONES, MOBILE, CONSUMERS AND YOUR SITE
• WHY IS 8 % OF AMERICAN ADULT INTERNET POPULATION USING TWITTER REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU?
• EACH DAY 21% OF AMERICAN ADULTS RESEARCH PRODUCTS & SERVICES ONLINE
• OLDER USERS OUTPACE YOUNG ADULTS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA GROWTH!

Auto-Post Blog to Facebook or Twitter with Hootsuite

On the left sidebar, click on the gear icon. When you hover over the left sidebar, it will pop out and give a better explanation of what each icon means. Underneath settings, click on “RSS/Atom” this will take you to the settings window, and the RSS/Atom tab.

When you hover over the left-hand sidebar, more descriptive text appears for each icon, along with any sub-menus.

• Click the “Add New Feed” button on the bottom of the Settings window.
• Where it says “Feed URL” place the rss feed for your wordpress site.
• The next option is “Profiles to send feed to:”, any social media account you have assigned to your hootsuite account will show up in the drop down, you can add it to any of these accounts by simply clicking on them.
• “Check this feed for new posts every” you can pick how often you want hootsuite to check your site for new content, usually every 12 hours should suffice, but it is up to you and how often you post new blogs posts to your site.
• “When new posts are found, send up to” you can choose how many to send to your social media accounts, I would suggest 1 post at a time”, you do not want to oversaturate your followers/fans with information, it is better to have a steady flow of links and info.
• - Next is a checkbox that says “Include text from post in messages.” I check this, the more info you can present the better.
• “Prepend text to each message (20 chars max):” you can add info infront of each post you bring to your accounts, for example you can have “New Blog Post: ” appear before your new Blog post announcement.link.
• Finally, you can pick which url shortener you can have, there are all Hootsuite url shorteners, what this does is take the url for your post and shortent it so it can fit for example if your url for your blog post is “http://kineticknowledge.com/blog/social-media/how-to-auto-post-your-blog-to-facebook-using-hootsuite/” it makes it “http://ow.ly/6S88x”. Then click “Save Feed”. Within the time feed, it will check for new posts. Thats it, please write any questions or comments below.

Better Content

It’s never a bad time to revisit the subject of better content, which can always be an incredibly powerful  advertising tool. Look guys, no matter what they’re selling out there as a traffic driver your knowledge ‘published as content’ is not only the most sustainable, but the most cost effective means to advertise you!; your expertise!; your product and/ or your service! Google, the other search engines and humans are all always looking for sources of good content… so be one!

The 9 Best Practices: Preparing Content Better For Search Engines!

Here are the practices we’d strongly suggest you get comfortable with in order to improve search engine indexing when publishing new content:

1. Have your 15- 25 target key phrase list ready! Ultimately you want to impress humans, but in order to capture them in the search engines you’ve got to be visible for the phrases you believe they will search in the engines and also in social networks.

2. Create strategic post titles! Search engines and humans typically want different things out of a title; to be successful you must strive to please them both. In technical terms, your page or blog post title is a header tag. This means it’s the first thing a search spider will encounter on a new post or page. Be specific using targeted phrases, so that spiders identify the purpose of the new page, but also impactful so that you attract human attention.

3.  Leverage your content! Search spiders tend to look for phrase consistencies in titles and then high in a page. Random spider crawls also digest more content toward the top of a page or post. Without this, at least during random crawls, they may skip your page leaving you with less potential key word & phrase indexing. Create compelling first paragraphs that include your target key words & phrases, but demonstrate a value proposition for humans too. On the flip side, don’t overuse keywords or use them out of context. The search engines have filters to flag this behavior – often referred to as “keyword stuffing”. And then too much keyword duplication is also just boring for humans.

4. Gather and add good links! When competing for search rank, links remain an important metric, including those you create in text phrases pointing to other content … including your own. Links matter most when relevant to the purpose of a post and also when they come from a trusted source. The best way to generate links organically from others is to create content others will appreciate enough to link back too. Consider notifying news sources that might be interested in your coverage because they just may link to you. Creating links [especially in targeted key phrases] to relevant articles you’ve already written, essentially voting for those pages yourself. That’s right folks, adding ‘anchor text based links’ in your own content to your own content is a proven strategy too. Whether creating or receiving links, it’s always best to have them laid into descriptive anchor text. Search engines prefer anchor text based links! If your page is about widgets and the link comes from text such as ‘the top widgets’ – search engines will recognize and value that more than they would ‘go here’ or go to tomswidgetshop.com.

5. Use Proper Formatting! Most readers give you a few seconds to qualify whether or not they will go deeper into your content. It’s imperative that you make it simple for them to do so. Use simple formatting and a clean layout for every blog post you create. Bold section titles, bullets and numbers are a great way to call attention to your main points and search engines can see certain emphasis too! Fonts should be uniform throughout, with photos and links well placed. If it’s a train wreck for the eye, people will typically not give it a chance AND assume neither will search engine algorithms.

6. Add Images & Video when possible! Search engines place emphasis on alternative image and video content, so use of these forms of content are actually separate competitive visibility opportunities to text based content for you. Use proper tagging, as well as descriptive text, techniques so that your images and video are easily understood and working to generate that indexing for you.

7. Categorize & Tag! Add posts into broader categorization (i.e. a blog post titled, ‘Olive Oil Prevents Alzheimer’s Disease’ should go into the ‘Olive Oil Health’ category) and tags, strictly based upon key phrase emphasis from content itself (they are summarizing bullet points from your article only – not overall descriptors of your site). Summarized, 2- 4 specific tag phrases will typically do and generally one category per post is a good discipline too.

8. Add ‘Call to Action’ & Contact Information! A call to action like, ‘Please, Use Our Complimentary Santa Barbara Online Property Search’, linked to that actual resource can drive greater engagement. And in case visitors are ready, be sure to have your personal contact information easily accessible! Remember, most consumers will NOT comment. Most don’t necessarily want to be a part of the conversation; if they’re interested, most will call or email you – give them what they need!

9. If at all possible, maximize the number of places your blog posts and thereby your brand appear! Social Networks typically offer blogs and while they aren’t going to present your brand exclusively, they certainly an opportunity to be visible to people who may be looking for your product or service. Most of these will allow for your blog posts to automatically appear via feed, eliminating the need to duplicate your effort AND saving you valuable time! You should also enable social icons on all your content so that visitors can easily share your content with their own social networks. Focus on as much visibility in as many places as possible, but do it with the intention of bringing prospects back to where you sell best. For instance, Twitter is not your brand… but you can sure use it to get people there

Related Posts:

Business Blogging Refresher Series: General Writing And Content

Business Blogging Refresher Series: Visibility, Then Qualified Users

Facebook released a short video on the new features here:

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently released survey data on people and their cell phones. It’s probably no surprise to hear that adult cell phone usage has become virtually pervasive in the U.S. and according to Pew Research 83% own some kind of cell phone. Let’s focus on three data points from their research directly related to consumers and smartphone usage and then we’ll look quickly at possible strategies for your site.
 
Smartphone Research Data
 
In Pew Research’s telephone survey, conducted from April 26 to May 22, 2011 among a nationally-representative sample of Americans, they found:
 
1. That while 83% have cell phones, a little over one third of American adults (= 35%) own a smartphone of some kind.
 
2. 84% of those people use their phone to go online.
 
3. 16% reported difficulty reading something because the screen was too small.
 
Building Mobile Sites
 
It’s because of this very data we’ve been working on mobile sites OR what are actually mobile versions of an existing site. If you’re interested in developing a mobile version of your site or even just thinking about it, we feel focus on the most widespread user friendly experience possible is key. While 16% suggest difficulty, it’s likely most people’s experience isn’t great on a phone unless there’s direct access to core information. Other words, it’s possible [ if not likely] folks are looking for immediate gratification and in order to help it’s navigation to your most important content that is key.

1. Develop a front & center navigation very much like what you see in the image here.

2. Your site detects mobile devices like iPhones, iPads, Android & Blackberry via the mobile browser used and serves up the mobile version instead of your regular site.

3. Visitors can always switch back to your regular site if they so choose, but to support better user experience in small screen based devices your mobile will show first.
 
If you’re thinking about mobile or any any form of site upgrade or redesign get in touch, we’d love to answer any questions or discuss neat new options.