There’s something about McHenry County which keeps drawing me back to conduct training. Maybe its the sprawling landscape or the mom and pop shops that still keep their doors open, but most definitely its the people.

At my last training at the Shaw Center for Corporate Training, I was once again delighted to work with about 30 nonprofit staff working from Seniors Centers to Emergency Preparedness to issues of homelessness and affordable housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Ingrid Gonçalves, communications director at Center for Labor and Community Research from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

When Ingrid Gonçalves said during a round of introductions that she had five Web sites to create or update, I knew I had to try out the flip camera to get her story. It turns out to be a great story, not so much for how unusual it is, but for how typical it is, I think you’ll agree! (Apologies, this time the wrist is really shaky–I’m still learning!)

Ingrid was one of about 20 folks at this morning’s search engine optimization workshop this morning, led by
Tim Frick from Mightybytes. Tim delivered a workshop highlighting how to get found online, drawing on info from his forthcoming book tentatively titled Return on Engagement from Focal Press.

Below the fold here you will find, in the somewhat unlikely event that anyone finds it useful, my more or less complete notes on Tim’s presentation, which I found useful in charting some benchmarks for SEO. In a nutshell, here’s the Tim Frick program (of course it makes more sense when you see him lay it out, but still, it’s a good one):

1. Content, content, content–Have a content strategy and implement
2. Install an analytics package so you know what your Web visitors are doing when, etc.
3. Use alerts to see who is talking about you
4. Track user behavior and adjust your approach as appropriate
5. Rinse, lather, repeat (in other words, go back to step one, fine tune your site–”it’s never done” Tim says)

What do you think– is this an accurate description of what you do right now? Or what you aspire to be doing? Let me know in the comments or by email! Meantime enjoy Ingrid’s story and if you want more, click to see some notes in the rest of this (phew) looong post (hopefully, doing justice to Tim’s presentation): Read the rest of this entry »

Have you read the “Obama plan” for health care? I finally started this morning.

If you’re like me you’ve probably finally started to pay attention now that the debate has reached a crisis (I know, I’m not proud of my ignorance, but what can you say). Getting caught up to the headlines got me curious about how some longtime local health-care advocacy organizations have been dealing with the related issues of finding their issue in the spotlight and moving their work onto the Web, and next week I’ll share some case-study-type thoughts from a couple of local organizations, with a little about both their take on the debate and how they are handling the attention.

Meantime, I did some background research, and the first thing I found was the “Obama Plan,” more or less. It’s right here, with specifics and everything. I got there from whitehouse.gov but the page, “Healthreform.gov” is officially maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. Read the rest of this entry »

As friends at social service agencies are getting set to layoff staff in the coming weeks and organizing rallies in the hope that they can stop it, we get the sense of the limits of the power of effective communication.

The situation, which calls to mind the phrase “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention” is that governor and Legislature are at a standstill in fixing problems a long time in the making. Governor Pat Quinn says the current budget “creates a $9.2 billion dollar funding gap and forces deep and distressing cuts to our vital social service agencies” on his home page. Rich Miller’s authoritative Capitol Fax (fair warning, if you haven’t been following along, you may have to spend 15 minutes or so reading to get a sense of what’s going on in springfield) documents that legislators feel Rod Blagojevich’s replacement has done a less than stellar job of convincing them to support his income-tax increase solution.That’s the simplistic (maybe overly so) sum-up of the situation.

The news coverage has been good, as a recent google news search shows. Some favorite columnists such as Mary Schmich and Phil Kadner, have both had nice stories on local rallies, for example. (Mary’s story ends with a great quote from a picket sign: “the state budget is a bigger mess than my room.”)

Read the rest of this entry »

Just picking up on the theme of new news, in the “truth is stranger than fiction” category:

Dan Pacheco is no slouch in the world of citizen journalism: his printcasting.com site promises to help you “start your own local magazine in minutes” (intrigued? I am) and has grant support from the Knight Foundation. But as he posted June 15, “Citizen Media Goes Fisher Price” (also at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab, where I first read it) his daughter scooped him and the rest of the news media with a tornado picture she snapped with a Fisher-Price camera in the suburbs of Denver earlier this week.

In a nutshell, there’d been some freaky weather in the Denver area for several days, so Dan was on the lookout already for tornados; his daughter walked into the home office to tell him she’d spotted a weird cloud, he went to grab his camera, tweeted it , and started taking pictures. The 6-year-old naturally grabbed her camera as well (who knew fisher price made a $64 digital camera?) And they all ended up on the local TV news. Anyway, read it there, at his blog, as Dan tells the story great, with video and pictures.

His takeaway is that “a confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we’re witnessing the birth of a completely new — and arguably better — breaking news system that involves everyone.”

Yes! but also, that new system is still going to incorporate some kind of Big Media that reaches out to wider audiences.(Like, in this story CBS 4, the local TV news guys). That role is still key to a better news ecosystem. Anyway, I get a kick out of imagining a 6-year-old on the weather–or any other–beat.

Interesting day at the office with the unveiling of our NEW News report on Chicago online news.

I wished I was interviewing Phil Rosenthal instead of the other way around this afternoon, since he came up with the best soundbite so far:”It’s about the value, not the cost of local news.” Wish he’d said that in his column! ah, well.

It was nice to get a call from Alexander Russo of the District 299 blog covering Chicago Public Schools. It’s now appearing at Chicago Now and includes a brief mention of the report (good move, Tribune!)

Just a quick wrap up of other reactions: Read the rest of this entry »

As struggling local newspapers continue to abandon the printed page, foundations, entrepreneurs and journalists are launching “hyperlocal” and watchdog news Web sites.

Where and who are they? What do they tell us about the new media landscape?

We’ve pinpointed significant news Web sites emerging around the United States and beyond by creating this custom Google Map for the Community Media Workshop.

Chicago is fertile ground for a number of “new news” sites, such as LISC/New Communities, Chi-Town Daily News and EveryBlock, to name just a few.

Click on the map, then zoom in or search it for specific locations to get a closer view of the emerging players in online news.

Have more sites to add? Please tell us in the comments!

–Elsa Wenzel

Urbana Champaign Indy Media Center is in a former post office

There is no news here, no hot communication tips…. Just two really interesting and unique spaces — just two hours away from each other and a world apart.

A couple weeks ago I toured the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, a 30,000 square foot former post office–with its prisoner books project, bike shop, clothes closet, clubrooms and office space for local organizations, radio station, video editing facility, library, artist studios, performance space and, uh, other stuff I am probably forgetting.

It was a no-brainer to connect Danielle Chynoweth and some of the other leaders of the UC-IMC space (which is cooperatively owned) with some peers in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook turned 5 years old a couple of weeks ago, so it has now began kindergarten. I’ve been on it since July 2004, when the Facebook was barely sitting up, a mere toddler with no big hoopla attached to it. I’ve watched it evolve through all these adaptations, to the juggernaut that it is today. Mark Zuckerberg and I are the same age, and its crazy to know that what he started as a class project his Sophomore year at Harvard has turned into a multi-billion dollar empire. This project turned into a tool that has revolutionized the way we communicate, the ease of access to people we would otherwise be complete strangers to, and shrank those 6 degrees of separation to about 3. My class project as a Sophomore at University of Illinois was… hmm yeah I don’t remember.

Anyway, I’ve been on since there were only Ivy Leagues and Big Ten Universities there, and profiles had no tabs, just a simple page. I’ve been on Facebook since wall posts looked like discussion board messages and groups were only intra-campus (not yet global). When I joined Facebook, there was actually a guy with a face that was it’s official icon (I kinda miss that guy holding down the upper left corner of the pages), and profiles used to display the exact date you joined the service.

Each change Facebook has made in the past 5 years has given people easier (and more) access to one another, and the point of “Where does it end?” is quite relevant. The changes have been half welcome, half looked upon with disdain by me. As a full member of Generation Social Network (as I have named us), I cannot imagine life without the internet, and more recently, social networking. However, there ought to be boundaries set, and I sometimes long for the good old days when I was not so accessible. How much access is TOO much? Well, we may have reached that point.

By now, I will assume that everyone has heard about the controversy with Facebook changing it’s Terms of Service to allow them unrestricted use of content users upload on there, even AFTER they leave Facebook. This Orwellian move has rightfully been met with a good amount of backlash, and I believe the brunt of it is yet to come. However, I do think that the whole thing has began a discussion that is necessary to have in this day and age of 24/7 access to everyone and everything.

*With all the content we are uploading to the web (videos, photos, writing, artwork), what rights do we retain once we make them available on such a public domain?

*Will people become more deliberate and conscious of the content they upload to the web?

*What future implications will the permanence of uploaded content have long term in terms of personal responsibility, goals and overall our 2-dimensional representation? (i.e. Will our future president’s Facebook account- which goes back to his college days-be a huge factor in his vetting process and qualifications?)

Now, that shag mullet or bad perm you decided to experiment with is forever immortalized on remote servers somewhere. Oh, the HORROR! *wilhelm scream*

Lovette Ajayi
Marketing Coordinator for Community Media Workshop

P.S. Interestingly enough, Facebook’s deactivation page now says:”Are you deactivating because you are concerned about Facebook’s Terms of Service? This was a mistake that we have now corrected. You own the information you put on Facebook and you control what happens to it. We are sorry for the confusion. – The Facebook Team”

Oh, really?
Edit: This morning, Facebook’s homepage (after you log in) was changed to say “Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

The people spoke, and they had to listen.

Women Employed 35th Anniversary Video from Women Employed on Vimeo.

Lauri Apple and Rebecca Wellisch from Women Employed took time out of their work to answer a few questions about how the organization is using social media to advance its mission:

Q. You mentioned you’ve been using social networks that you already know about from your personal life to spread the good word about Women Employed. Why is WE doing this now?
Using social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook enables us to reach new audiences and keep our supporters apprised of our initiatives. They help us reach out to people in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with whom these sites are especially popular, and help engage the next generation of advocates for workplace equity. And they offer tremendous flexibility — we can post links to articles, inform people about events, and recruit new supporters, with a level of ease that a regular paper newsletter or even an e-newsletter (which takes time to create) can’t offer.

Q. Why should nonprofits consider making promotional videos like Women Employed’s 35th anniversary video? What are the benefits?

Read the rest of this entry »