Businesses can test their creativity on different video hosting sites by creating and sharing videos. Some of these video hosting sites are better than others. There are different factors that attract users to these video hosting sites such as pricing packages, features, options etc.

Contrary to what you may think, YouTube is not the one-size-fits all solution for video hosting services. As a ‘free’ service, it contains many elements that make it untenable for some commercial uses (more on this below). To choose an online video host is to assess your own video host needs, and then to figure out which website provides the best service. Thankfully, there are a thriving number of options, some even targeting particular niches.

Here’s a list of free and paid video hosting websites that have gained a lot of popularity among businesses:

Free:

YouTube:

This is the first name in video hosting sites. YouTube was founded in February 2005 and has billions of users from all over the world. It allows users to upload, watch, discover and share countless videos. It is a great platform for businesses, not just for creating original content, but also for sharing and connecting with a global audience.

There are many ways to monetize through YouTube, most famously through the YouTube Partners Program. However, when promoting a product or service, you’ll want to leverage its strengths as a video host, landing page, Google Hangouts, social network, etc. YouTube also offers internal advertising opportunities, allowing you to pay for Promoted Videos, as well as to bid on keywords in its search function, just like Google itself.

Unfortunately, using YouTube now comes with drawbacks as well as advantages. Most notoriously, you can get your work content ID flagged if your video uses audio or visuals that match copyrighted material. Consequences for content matching range from nothing happening, to losing access to your AdSense, to getting your channel closed. YouTube uses an algorithm to mechanically find these content matches, and so mistakes are common. There was even a notorious case of a YouTube user who performed on Leno and later found his original videos flagged when NBC uploaded his performance. For this reason, it’s worthwhile to look at alternatives, such as:

Blip:

Blip brings users a new experience, web series! You can upload as well as follow different web series on Blip. Blip has many advantages, such as a revenue sharing program competitive to YouTube,  a large amount of free storage (1 GB) and analytics.

Becoming a Blip user means getting your show pitch approved by the site itself, so, it is not for everyone. However, if your social media strategy involves user generated content, video blogging, or perhaps the video itself is the product, Blip may be a good option for you.

Blip’s focus on promoting web series means it has deals with TV distributors and even other video hosts to share your videos there. This is dependent on whether your series meets certain criteria.

Vimeo:

Vimeo allows users to upload and share videos for free. It supports many different kinds of file formats and it supports HD.

Vimeo is a great alternative to YouTube. On a technical level, it loads quickly, and shares many features YouTube has, while lacking YouTube’s more pernicious aspects (like ads between videos).  However, Vimeo also has many limitations. Vimeo is stricter about copyright than YouTube, and will not allow you to make commercial videos.

Paid:

Vimeo PRO:

This leads us to Vimeo PRO. Originally a website solution, Vimeo PRO is now a paid Vimeo subscription that allows you to make commercial videos under them. Vimeo PRO offers a host of features, such as 50 GB storage, 1080p, HTML5, mobile compatibility, Vimeo Creator Services, etc. Vimeo PRO offers practically all the things YouTube can’t to commercial users.

SproutVideo:

SproutVideo is a simple, inexpensive video hosting service with features such as customizable playlists that allow you to display as many videos as you want, analytics that keep track of how, where and when your videos are being viewed and HD video. SproutVideo is a very basic commercial service that’s good for beginners.

VideoPress:

VideoPress is a video hosting service made just for WordPress by Automattic. For $ 60 a year, you get all the flexibility you would want in your WordPress video. VideoPress has HD and ad-free playback. You can upload from your iPhone, but also even from feature phones with cameras. There is a 1 GB size limit, but videos can be as long as you want them (variations made on quality). If WordPress is a vital part of your business, VideoPress may be all you need.

Viddler: Viddler gives users a chance to test their service with a 14 day trial period before paying for a pro or a business account. It is a reasonably priced platform for video publishers with features such as customization, video management, analytics etc.

Viddler is not for beginners. We can’t recommend the free service at all because they layer ad all over them automatically. However, Viddler business solutions offer a range of video hosting plans, and they will also customize to fit your needs when those aren’t enough. One cool feature Viddler has is it allows you to comment from anywhere in the video. Basically, if your video needs have grown to the point that you feel constrained by services like YouTube or Vimeo you’ll want to switch to Viddler.

In the end, choosing a video hosting service is not an either/or proposition. Many of these services, like Blip or Vimeo, reupload to YouTube. This is a feature, a part of their service. You yourself can always choose to switch between these services, or reupload your work between them. Your needs will change as your business shrinks or expand, and as needs and priorities change.

Online video is a very potent tool for content marketing, but there is no rule set in stone requiring you to invest much of your time and money in it. You invest in it according to your needs.

Which of the above mentioned video hosting services have you used before? Feel free to share your experience with us in your comments.

The future of content

Gigaom ran a very interesting piece this week, on how New York Times found great success running a major magazine story called SnowFall. In fact, the feature was so successful no less than GigaOm founder Om Malik wrote about how traditional mainstream media outlets like the New York Times may finally have found a way to compete with Buzzfeed and Huffington Post.

This is huge. This is a complete turnaround from a story GigaOm also published last year about what lessons the mainstream media can take from the likes of BuzzFeed. Heck, this story is timely for the fact that BuzzFeed itself is planning to expand their work and teach ad agencies how they do what they do.

Admittedly, this story may be a little hard to put together for the casual blog reader, even the average social media marketer, so I’m going to try to explain in unelaborate terms the relationship between content, the mainstream media, Google, blogging, and the future of the Internet. This is closer to you than you think.

Mainstream media dilemma

Mainstream media outlets have been seeing their industry decline, not so much on the journalism end of it as the business end. Newspapers and magazines have been slowly dying out, with subscriptions falling and readership declining.

The web has disrupted the business of news, in several ways. Google Ads actually started the disruption years ago proving that online ads were a more effective ad platform than traditional classified ads in the papers. The product called news has also been co-opted by the web, first on message boards, RSS and blogs, and now social media. The web created so many news delivery platforms that had the immediacy news outlets, even 24/7 cable news, didn’t.

Some argue this immediacy from the web has also devalued the quality of news received, as people with no training in journalism or journalism standards provide live updates and do their own news curation using so many accessible tools (the most elaborate being privately owned spy drones providing live camera feeds. No, really).

Still, traditional news outlets have managed to create an uneasy truce with these platforms. Their openness has allowed mainstream media individuals to actually integrate among them, as journalist bloggers, Twitter and Facebook users, etc. Furthermore, the media found the opportunity to themselves take stories from the web, easing the work of investigative journalism and opening opportunities for more introspection, not to mention greater distribution.

And then, enter the content scrapers.

Content reshared or scraped?

Websites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post don’t want to call what they do content scraping. Scraping is a dirty word on the web, associated with taking precious pageviews, which results in lost revenue to site owners. More likely, they want to be referred to as curators, or aggregators, sharing links to sources when applicable.

In actuality, Buzzfeed and Huffington Post are as different as night and day. Buzzfeed expressly flounts their work in finding viral content on the web to reshare on their own website. Huffington Post, now an AOL subsidiary, is a news site that integrates elements of an aggregator and a blog. However, there is one particular thing both sites do that warrant their being mentioned in this post.

Both sites do find content around the web, often in blogs or even other commercial sites, and reshare them in their own websites. Their effectiveness in using this tactic to drive pageviews to their own site is what drives many critics to call foul and accuse them as scrapers. Interestingly enough, the two sites do have an overlap in staff (Buzzfeed senior staff Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer both came from HuffPo).

This issue came to a head early this year when the Verge’s Joshua Topolsky complained to HuffPo that they were guilty of ‘theft of our SEO on title and text’ when they reshared The Verge’s piece on “The death of the American arcade.” In so doing, HuffPo reproduced 239 words from the original article, and as Joshua observed, took a sizable number of pageviews, exceeding that from Verge’s own original page and tantamount to compromising their bottomline.

The debate on online content

And so a new debate that’s come about because of the interaction between mainstream media and the new media, comes to a head: how do traditional news outlets protect their own content? Their work is easily made money off of by aggregators, curators and scrapers alike, but the nature of the open web has left content creators without a mechanism to receive compensation for this work. Whatever you call it, aggregation is light years easier than content creation, and the creators found that there were increasingly lower returns for their hard work.

As we talk about the New York Times, they actually came forward with the first possible solution: a paywall. Although initially jeered for allegedly breaking the open nature of the web, as they found success, other traditional media companies like Reuters soon followed suit. The paywall is now considered a viable monetization strategy for traditional and new media alike on their sites.

When I say protect their content, this means more than protecting their source of income, their precious bottomline on those webpages. As New York Times has demonstrated, bringing that subscription model online has allowed them to retain quality control over their content, both in terms of how it is investigated and produced, and in how it is distributed.

Rise of the brand as publisher?

Now, this is relevant to the average social media manager because they, too, are part of this cycle. When I write this, of course I refer to myself as much as you. I am also an aggregator and curator of sorts, when in my work, I find articles to share on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. In this capacity, however, I’m not driving views to my own site, and I am hopeful my work helps the people who make content make a living.

From where I’m sitting, I’ve also seen a change to how people and companies promote their brands online. As recounted here, brands can take control of how their stories are told online becoming their own content creator and publisher. They can tap new media more effectively than traditional media in this regard as well.

I don’t necessarily think the move towards a Buzzfeed model for content creation will be good for brands, and not for the common web user. I worry that brands will get caught up in the drive for more hits and attention, choosing to use campaigns and stories that might dilute the value of their brand.

How Snowfall changes the conversation

And this is where Snowfall changes things. Snowfall is a New York Times feature from December 2012 about the increasing number of deaths caused by ski accidents in the US. The Times recently announced that Snowfall is one of their most successful stories of all time, definitely the biggest one online.

Snowfall’s real values isn’t in the story itself, which is unfortunately tragic in tone, but a necessary one to tell. However, the feature is rich with content, like video interviews, and html5 animations, and the page itself was designed to take full advantage of html5. For example, there is a screen wide animation that identifies mountain peaks that feature in a major accident. The animation does not start moving until you scroll the text down at a certain point.

Snowfall was no doubt a very expensive piece on the production end, and as the Times says, it seems to have paid off. It is not the usual five second read daily blog post either. This is a longform piece that demands time and attention.

Stories like Snowfall can only be created by media outlets with the resources of a New York Times. Although it’s possible for HuffPo or Buzzfeed to create similar longform stories, because of the nature of their business they are disincentivized to do so.

Which side should you be on?

This may seem to be a leading question, but it’s not. A resurgence in demand for quality content will make the work of making content, as well as curating/aggregating it, a lot more difficult. We may see a decline in user generated and amateur content, which comes with its own consequences.

For myself, it would be great to see a return in the valuation of content. The web would become a more discoursed, intelligible place to be in again. Which side are you on? What do you think online content should be like in the future?

Looking for some innovative ways to spice up your website? Give video content a go!

Online video hosting services are leading businesses in a new era where they are able to express themselves freely online. It is a great way to send your message to a global audience, without depending on traditional advertising outlets, such as print or television. You do not have to run up huge budgets to create and promote these videos. If you have something to say to the world, you should just create a video. If the video is good enough to grab the public’s attention, it will go viral in a matter of a few days, if not hours. Examples of online videos that successfully went viral, intentionally or not, are the Old Spice ‘Look at Your Man’ videos starring Isaiah Mustafa, and more recently, the Dove ‘Real Beauty Sketch’ ad campaigns.

Online video hosting services such as Youtube, Vimeo, SproutVideo, etc, are the reason anyone has the opportunity to make video advertisements on an even playing field with the big boys. They allow users to come forward and do something awesome that will grab people’s attention on a global level without having to spend a lot of money.

So, we all know that video content is great for lead generation, but should you just haphazardly make that viral video, post it, and hope for the best? Isn’t it worth asking if you should even be making videos? While it’s true that some video go viral without much effort or marketing behind them, this does not happen every time. Going back to our above examples, the Old Spice and Dove videos seem to have been manufactured to go viral, but when you compare it to the bigger number of videos advertisers make every day and don’t become as famous, you see that these videos have an intangible quality about them that most other ads will simply not replicate. Assuming your video won’t go as viral as theirs will, you have to justify making your video another way. Creating a great video is not enough; your focus should be on getting ROI.

Here are a few reasons why you need to invest time when creating online video content for your website:

SEO Benefits

First and foremost, you need to learn the SEO benefits of video content. Multimedia objects such as videos add value to your site. To be specific, they do so in three different and apparent ways:

First, it improves your landing page quality score. Google reads the video as another relevant element in your landing page, adding to your score.

Second, it adds value to your page. Outside of Google’s own algorithms, having videos on your page helps communicate your message to your audience easier (more on this below). As your audience enjoys watching your videos, it makes it easier for them to absorb that message.

and last but certainly not least,  it has a positive effect on your keyword relevance. When you use your most important keywords in the title and “about” section of your video, it associates that video with those keywords. Whether people find your video on YouTube or on your site, each view raises that keyword’s relevance to your brand.

People are also more likely to spend more time on your website when there is video content available on it.

Communication

The reason businesses spend thousands of dollars on marketing and advertising is to communicate with the users,. You want to send them a certain message that helps them connect with your brand. Online videos, when conceived and executed correctly, are an awesome way to achieve this goal, and it’s also been proven to be highly effective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk

As an example of this, let’s go back to the Dove Real Beauty Sketch campaign. This campaign did not try to convince women they will be more beautiful if they bought Dove products. More dramatically, it taps into the conversation of beauty issues, and is actively helping women feel beautiful irregardless of how they are now. The video went viral because, as Dove’s advertisers Ogilvy found out, this was a common untapped sentiment among Dove’s market. Not only does the Dove campaign generate a halo effect around their products, it also highlights the fortrightness of Dove products, and so now they seem natural and genunine.

Tapping Into Creativity

Online video hosting gives you a chance to think outside the box, to be creative beyond your capabilities. You give the audience something novel to watch, maybe something they haven’t see before.

 The Dove Real Beauty Sketch certainly was creative, however, a better example for this is the ongoing Old Spice ‘Look at your man’ campaign. Old Spice understood the half-life of a meme like “Look at your man’ is relatively short, and so they have constantly kept reinventing their campaign to keep grabbing attention. Even when they took that perceived misstep and the internet complained that they had hired Fabio, they turned it around into an online poll and won their old fans back. Old Spice’s latest campaign revolves around a fictional new marketing director, Mr. Wolfdog. As their captive audience stays enthralled, it translates IRL to a popular brand.

Conclusions

Before creating a video, think, how are you different from your competitors? What sets you apart from them? What is the best way to communicate your message to the world in a loud and clear way? Once you have the answer to all these questions, creating video content to generate leads will be easy as pie.

Twitter has been doing advertising for three years now, and keyword marketing since last year. Is today’s change that big a deal?

I certainly think so. Let me explain exactly what the changes entail first and I’ll get into how this could mean a sea change for Twitter as an ad platform:

So, to put it plainly, Twitter will serve ads to their users based on the keywords they use in their tweets, as well as tweets from others that they engaged in.  The intent is to give them these ads just as they are tweeting about it. Tech blogs are comparing it to Google’s Adsense algorithm, since the ads are relevant temporally.

Here’s an example. I love talking about Nintendo on my Twitter account. Nintendo could make ads targeting their name as a keyword, so that every time I tweet the word Nintendo, or fav or retweet someone else’s Nintendo related tweets, I would get their ad. Of course, other video game companies, like Sony, Madcatz, IGN, or Capcom, could target that keyword and share an ad to me too.

The great thing about this is that Twitter did some beta-testing with some famous brands prior to public release and they confirmed that it works.

Why is this that big a deal for Twitter? For a while, Twitter’s financial viability was in serious question. It emerged as a great resource to follow news, but did not have a clear cut way to make money from that position.

In fact, there was some debate as to whether making Twitter free at the onset was a mistake to begin with. A competitor has even emerged that asks users to pay for their accounts (a little more on that later). When Twitter finally came out with Promoted Tweets, it wasn’t quite welcomed, but more importantly, it didn’t seem that effective. Twitter has been tweaking their advertising business quietly and effectively in the periphery, and with this change their platform finally gains the robustness it needs.

Keywords are part of what makes Twitter relevant. With Twitter’s own search function, it became so much easier to find like minded people to connect with, or perhaps debate with, interact with in any number of ways. When you add hashtags into the equation, you can discover and follow keywords that are trending in Twitter, popular in a particular given time. This turned out to be even more powerful than we initially imagined, as the hashtag function made it possible to track the exponential growth of a keyword’s popularity, and one can even use the system to make a topic trend on its own.

Twitter literally had the power to create fame, but at this point it hadn’t decided how to do monetization. When they finally settled on Promoted Posts, they were criticized for making it intrusive. At the time, though, I think part of the problem was that we were receiving generic advertising tweets, many years after Adsense. Twitter’s advertising platform seemed primitive and generally ill-conceived then, and maybe it was.

The most significant negative reaction to these changes would appear to be the creation of rival service App.Net. App.Net allows users to publish 140 character tweets, but is a paid service that trades cost with privacy and content ownership. We have yet to see how the App.net experiment will be working out in the next few years.

Coming back full circle, as these recent changes to Twitter advertising make it more similar to Google Adsense, it similarly acquires Adsense’s power. If you’ve worked with Adsense before, you’ll know that it literally built an entire industry around keywords. To add to that, Twitter is a system that can be gamed, as seen again and again in Trending Topics. You can expose a mass of users to your keywords and then target your ad towards them.

However this does not seem to be the direction Twitter wants you to take. Twitter has actually built up a simple FAQ/guide for business owners who want to advertise on Twitter, including some essential web marketing basics. They do not offer a keyword tool, although you can certainly avail of several third party tools instead. Rather, Twitter wants you to trust their system to do the targeting for your ads, and they can also do geotargeting for local brands.

So, there are two ways you can go about Twitter marketing looking forward: trying to game it with keyword research, or using Twitter’s default tools as is. The great thing with Twitter advertising is that using certain keywords don’t make your ads any more or less expensive. However, this is unexplored territory as of yet, so we don’t know for sure if the effort is worthwhile or if Twitter’s algorithm nullifies that effect. Remember, Promoted Tweets themselves can’t be favorited or retweeted. They’re treated as a different kind of tweet entirely. Not everything that works on Google Adsense may work on Twitter ads.

To sum, Twitter keyword marketing is a much more attractive platform for social media marketers compared to before. We’re sure there will continue to be tweaks and changes, but based on what we know so far, Twitter’s ad platform is a useful one if you’re willing to pay for it. Twitter is already great for marketing without using any of their official advertising tools, so this just makes it a much more powerful service for marketers and consumers alike.

If you’re using Twitter to market your product now, you really need to look into its official advertising offerings. Twitter is now a serious contender vs. Adsense and Facebook marketing as the best online ad platform.

Well, worry not; here are some useful tips to help you keep your business blog on track and on schedule:

1. Editorial Calendar

Creating an editorial calendar should be the first step towards more disciplined and timely blogging. Make sure to maintain your editorial calendar on a regular basis.

2. Be Punctual but Experiment

Although it is more professional to be punctual with your blog posts you should experiment a little bit to see what time of the day your blog gets more clicks. Does it get more clicks when you post it at 9am every day or does it get way more visitors at 5pm in the evening?

3. The Time Frame

It isn’t very smart to schedule posts months before they need to go live. The fresher the content, the better it is for your Blog.

4. Scheduling Time

Scheduling times are very important to keep in mind when planning your blog posts. You need to be sure what kind of readers you have and schedule accordingly. If you deal mostly with businesses then it is smarter to schedule your blog posts to go live in the morning, whereas if you deal with public, you should schedule for later in the afternoon or in the evening.

5.  Day to Day Happenings

Always recheck what you have scheduled for the day as you might find something better, more interesting to post.

6. Time Zones

If you are one of those businesses with customers in different time zones then you must schedule your blog posts at a time that is reasonable for all of your customers.

7. Working and Non-working Days

It is always smart to schedule your post for working days instead of non-working days as most of your customers won’t be spending much time on their computers on weekends or holidays.

8. Hire Someone

This is especially for those small business owners that keep complaining that they don’t have enough time to maintain blogs. Well, there’s a simple solution for this problem – hire someone to manage your blog and other social media activities.

9. Set Deadlines

If you have someone who writes your blog posts for you -internal or external blog contributors- set firm deadlines for them to submit the blogs.

10. Post on Social Networks:

Once your Blog post has gone live make sure to post it on your business’s social media pages as it will attract more visitors to your blog which will ultimately bring you more business.

Following these tips won’t just make blogging much easier for you but it will also make your blog a reliable place for your customers to get updates and fresh content. Happy Blogging!

And if you need help in your social media management, you can always reach out for help. This is where the value of an outsourced social media company like Third Team Media comes in. Get in touch with us soon for your needs.

You can achieve all of the above and more by spending only a small amount of money on outsourcing your social media management and nothing else. You will define the goals and your hired Social Media Team will be the one using their expertise to achieve those goals.

By this point you will have read countless tributes and obituaries to Roger Ebert. Following Mashable’s excellent roundup of his digital life (link here), I wanted to put focus on Ebert’s shrewdness in promoting himself and his passions for film and film criticism. Ebert is an endlessly fascinating man, and this piece, among others, will not do justice to his legacy.  He was a great social media marketer, in the same way that he was great as a mass media personality in what seems like a lifetime ago. This tribute intends to be more practical and sentimental. But first, let’s start at the very beginning:

Who is Roger Ebert?

Wikipedia notes above all else that Ebert was a film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He had worked with them from 1967 literally until death.

Ebert was also known for bringing film reviews to TV with perennial friend/rival/colleague Gene Siskel. They started out with a small, popular PBS show called “Sneak Previews” in 1975, and then conceived their first show “At The Movies” with Tribune Entertainment from 1982-1986, until finally settling for a syndicated program under Disney. Ebert and Siskel coined, lost and regained the show title “At The Movies”, but was able to trademark the “two thumbs up” rating system the show had become famous for. Ebert’s tenure with Disney ran from 1986 to 2008, surviving Siskel (died of cancer, 1998)

Ebert’s third life came online in various forms and incarnations. His early dalliances with CD-ROM and Compuserve are noteworthy, but we know him very well today from having established a site that hosted and archived his film reviews, as well as becoming one of the more popular voices on Twitter.

What are Roger Ebert’s achievements in the mass media?

Ebert has been pivotal in the popularization of film reviews. The way he reviewed films makes them very accessible to everyone, and he encouraged others to form and share their own opinions of films. He also championed favorite films and filmmakers, even when those films may not have been popular with other critics. He can be very critical of the industry that makes the films he does and can have very harsh opinions. He is particularly known for his acerbic takedowns and disses of people.

He spread his passion for film and film criticism very deliberately and brilliantly. In his Chicago Sun-Times film reviews, many of which were archived for a new generation in his website, Ebert wrote not for himself, but for the viewing audience, describing his work as “relative, not absolute.”

Ebert’s intentions were more overt when it came to television. Between him and his co-reviewer Gene Siskel, and later Richard Roeper, Ebert popularized forming opinions on movies, even arguing about them with each other. Whether both reviewers were to come to a consensus was not as important as making them care enough to assert their views in the first place.

Behind the scenes, Ebert and Siskel fought to keep their shows going in the direction that they wanted. They had left both shows under PBS and Tribune after contract disputes, finally settling in with Disney.

Unlike Siskel, Ebert had the foresight to expand his following with the advent of computers. This started with his Cinerama CD-ROMs, which were effectively reference books for movies in a cheap digital format.

More forward thinking than that was his presence at Compuserve, before the World Wide Web even existed. Beyond posting his reviews online, Ebert used Compuserve as a second mail box, taking questions from other users.

The Chicago Sun-Times gave Ebert his own site in the 1990s, including an archive of his reviews, and in 2003 he launched RogerEbert.com, hosting expanded archives of his work. By 2008 Ebert was effectively blogging on his sites, and started a presence in Twitter a year after that.

Ebert enjoyed steering his ship online. He may have also published books and did TV, but in those media he had to contend with editorial direction, and many times he had to compromise or bow out. When it finally came to his blog and Twitter, late in life, Ebert felt firsthand the consequences of the digital revolution. He could say whatever he wanted, in the way he wanted to. No need to worry if advertisers would back out or if he might piss off some bigwigs. His most famous online squabbles revolved around his ‘videogames are not art’ statement, his criticism of 3D cinema, and his secular humanism.

What can Roger Ebert teach us about staying up to date in the new media?

a)      Stay on top of technology that connects with people.

Ebert dabbled in everything; from a newspaper column, which he never left, to books, television, and several incarnations of the internet, Ebert experimented with all the avenues available to spread his love of film and film reviews.

Physically, Ebert’s health started a painful road of deterioration in 2002 when he was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, he found himself blogging and tweeting to keep communicating with people. One would imagine he would have lived a less happy and fulfilling life if these avenues were not available for him.

In fact, Ebert had broader online ambitions than he could accomplish. Even when he first passed the baton over for his Disney show “At The Movies”, he was already talking of bringing the show online, with some monetization model firmly in place, way before Hulu or Funny Or Die showed something like that was even possible.

b)      Share your life and passion online.

Ebert would share much of his private life in the relatively short span of time he was on Twitter and on his blog. He loved to come back and annually revise his list of the 100 best movies, reminisced on his rivalry-turned-friendship with Siskel, named his favorite foods long after he could physically eat them, and other diversions.

He made public the conversation on long term care and physical illness in the elderly, in ways that may have made many uncomfortable, but those who followed him were concerned and made intimately familiar of those details.

It’s hard to gauge if he could have really kept his influence online the same way he did on TV so many years ago. Hollywood used to genuinely fear that thumbs down from him, as it could make or break the fortunes of a production, comparable to how Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes affects the business of movies now, but back then in the hands of only two (he and Siskel).

What we do know is Ebert kept his own name relevant. The Ebert brand itself, which was synonymous with the movies, movie opinions and movie reviews, predated and dominated those search terms, and will now likely continue to do so as Ebert.com remains a going concern.

c)       Archive everything.

No doubt, Ebert had a lot of help retaining and maintaining his archive of reviews. He may not have had the technical knowhow to backup his WordPress, and probably knows less about this than most of us.

But even if he needed help, he knew it was important to archive all that work, and make it easy for his followers to access and find it. It was not just for the benefit of his hardcore fans, or to boast that he had done all this before. You archive all your work so that you can clearly define your identity.

Ultimately, his branding served to fuel back his conversations, which is what he used the web for the most, but even if we have other intentions, it’s infinitely invaluable for us to follow his example on this end. This may seem like a relatively minor consideration, but Ebert’s fans actually learned more about him in the last five to ten years of his life than in the first few, because of this invaluable action.

What other learnings did you get from Ebert? Share any stories you would like below:

Started in 2005, Google Reader quickly established itself as the de facto RSS reader of choice for the World Wide Web. As one of the first few examples of web application connectivity, your Gmail account was connected to your Google Reader account. Not only did this make switching between the two painless, it also allowed them to interact with each other and with other services in ways that other RSS services could not match.

Google recently announced that they would be officially ending Google Reader this coming July 1, 2013 (links here and here). The reactions to the pending closure have been varied but intense, ironically making Reader a trending topic on social networks like Twitter and Google Reader. As of this writing, a big deal of the firestorm has died down, but it’s still a very relevant topic, and will continue to do so for the months leading up to July.

As a quick roundup, this is what people are saying about the end of Google Reader:

1) RSS readers are outdated.

Under this thread of thought, usage of RSS readers has been on the decline for several years now. In connection to a perceived declining relevance of blogs, RSS has become an irrelevant delivery platform for blog updates compared to posting on social networks, or push notifications on mobile apps.

2) Google Reader users became complacent.

This is an interesting perspective since it faults the loyal Google Reader fanbase for having stuck with the service for so long. Some commenters suggest this is a call to clean up online habits, not follow and read so many things. Most have pointed to the many other RSS readers out there, and some initiatives have sprouted that pledge to replicate Reader as it originally was. Among alternative RSS readers, Feedly has seen the most benefits, quickly rising to be the top app of the last week.

3) Google is ending Reader so that more people would make use of Google Plus.

This is corroborated by one former Googler involved with Reader. He says it was highly likely that current Google Reader staff has simply been moved to other more pressing projects. If we were to be harsh, we could say that Google placed their own self interest above their consumer’s needs in closing Google Reader.

4) Google Reader is a vital service that needs to survive.

There are actually a few compelling arguments to this. Obviously, many longtime users were angered by the announcement, and questioning if everything Google is saying is above the level.

However, if we take that out of the equation, Google Reader is still needed by people who rely on Google services. Because of the way Reader has been built around open standards, it’s been embraced by the online community as a valuable tool. One particularly compelling argument has sprung up from Iran, where many users attest that Google Reader is one of the ways Iranians evade government censorship. Aside from this, however, it could also be the end of many publishers, who can’t compete in social and depend on RSS for their content to thrive.

For the moment, the Google Reader story has died down, as other news stories divide our attention.  Google has given us a generous four months to prepare, and the conversation continues. The Change.org petition itself continues to earn signatures.  Therefore, you can expect this to become a major story again in the near future. Perhaps sooner than that, if Google makes another related announcement or decision.

We won’t be providing prescriptive advice or discussing what can be learned from this incident, because to be honest, this continues to be a developing story. However, we do think you should care if Google Reader is closing or not, whether you use it or not.

We’ve collected and will continue to collect stories, tweets and article on Google Reader on our Storify, which we’re sharing below. We ask that you go through the articles and share your thoughts with us on this topic. You can comment below, or tweet us at @thirdteamph or post at our Facebook page. Let us know as well if you have articles you want us to add to our Storify, between now and the actual closure. Thanks!

You can click over to our Storify article here.

I often tell people to not look at social media as a marketing medium, but to look at it as a solution. “A solution to what?” they ask me. Well it is simple, social media is the name of that cost effective solution which can help your business reach customers, prospects and other stakeholders directly. It gives you endless opportunities to reach out to a global audience and tell them about you, your brand and create value for your brand.

A study published in Social Media Examiner unveiled the following statistics from Social Media Marketers and businesses in 2012:

• 69% of respondents (businesses as well as marketers) reported that social media marketing led to an increase in website traffic.
• 58% reported lead generation was a benefit.
• 40% reported increased sales attributed to social media efforts.

So there, you have it. Social media marketing doesn’t only have the power to enhance branding and awareness, when done right it can generate qualified sales leads, increase traffic to websites as well as increase sales.

Now to emphasize more on my point lets talk about Facebook, there are over a billion people on Facebook out of which 600 million are active users. What your business needs to realise is the opportunity that this social network provides you with. You have a world of audience waiting to be inspired, to be spoken to and to be given something to talk about. You have been given an opportunity to raise awareness for your brand without having to spend millions of dollars on it. All you have to do is get it right.

So how exactly do you get Social Media Marketing right?

The best thing I learned from my former boss was that if you want to see results and return on your investment, you must hire the best in the business.

So to answer the question you can get Social Media Marketing right by hiring the experts! But who has the time, money and energy to hire a whole in-house Social Media team and then train them when there are so many core business activities that need your time and attention? The simple, not to mention smartest solution, is to hire a Social Media Management agency.

A good social media management company has a team of experts who have the knowledge and the skills to build business relationships between brands and their customers by leveraging and attracting them with content valuable to the business, engaging them with social media and over time, converting them to leads as they get to know and trust the brand, the products or services.

Outsourcing your Social Media has many benefits, first of all it gives you the freedom to focus on the more important stuff – your core business activities.

A good Social Media Management firm can help you with the following:

• Increase awareness of your brand
• Create a positive image for your brand
• Rank higher on Google and other search engines
• Enhance public relations and build an online community of fans and followers on channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn , Twitter etc
• Help you provide better customer service
• Generate sales and leads
• Help increase repeat and referral business

Not only does outsourcing your social media management help you build a community and generate leads but it can also lead to a marketing competitive advantage as well as save you time, money and reduce risk for your company. This is where the value of an outsourced social media company like Third Team Media comes in. Get in touch with us soon for your needs.

You can achieve all of the above and more by spending only a small amount of money on outsourcing your social media management and nothing else. You will define the goals and your hired Social Media Team will be the one using their expertise to achieve those goals.

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Have things changed in the realm of password management in 2013? The recent Evernote hack may have done so.

This week, for the first time ever, Evernote had to announce that they were hacked. Evernote is one of the few online services that has thrived without giving away user information, with the privacy itself being the service.  Evernote is a freemium service, thriving thanks to the power users who have found the service infinitely useful.

Now, the recent Evernote hack is not particularly noteworthy in itself. Every website is going to get hacked one way or the other.  Many times, the hackers only want to test around a given website’s security measures and there is no actual ill intent involved. Kudos should also go to the Evernote team for identifying the security breach on their own, without even knowing who was responsible, as well as for acting to immediately to shut the breach down.

You can also rest assured that Evernote has been able to keep your data itself safe from prying eyes. Evernote makes use of SSL encryption to keep the data in its servers from being hacked into. SSL encryption worked in this instance, although there are no guarantees in the future.  Existing Evernote desktop users should also be aware that you can backup data both locally and in the cloud, and choose to keep some data locally, adding another password layer yourself.

However, hackers were able to collect Evernote users’ passwords. Evernote was protecting user passwords with a  process called salted hashing. This process encrypts the data even further, breaking up individual passwords into chunks, so that it would be harder to get that data. Unfortunately, this was a situation where Evernote’s precaution failed. Given the age of the internet, password as a security solution seems less useful now than it did years ago.

Google’s current workaround uses two factor authentication, which many IT experts point to as a highly protective security measure. To be brief, two factor authentication requires using not just one, but two authentication factors to verify a user’s identity.  Those of you who remember the ordeal of Wired editor Matt Honan will also remember that he failed to make use of this safeguard, which could have protected him. Google remembers Honan’s problems quite well, and is now proposing hardware based authenticators, such as smartchip enabled USB drives, keyrings, or potentially NFC devices.

In the meantime, many still argue that passwords are not going away soon. If a replacement for passwords is emerging, whether from Google’s proposals or through some other system, it will take a while before it gets widely adopted.

For the online worker, passwords may be something that’s easily taken for granted, but it shouldn’t be. Your livelihood, your payment channels, all of these are vulnerable to attack at any time by malicious hacks. This is not to say that any one hacker should single you out, 98 per cent of us should never have to worry about that. However, most online workers use the same systems and services, and when those get attacked, you are adversely affected.

Many tech blogs currently recommend you use Lastpass to secure your passwords, and it’s certainly come a long way from when it launched for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Lastpass now supports a broad range of browsers, and can also be installed as a separate desktop program. Lastpass is not the final word in security, but it will make your passwords more secure.

Basically, Lastpass is a browser add on that takes your passwords, encrypts them, and saves them to Lastpass’ servers. This approach keeps your passwords from being accessible in your device, and Lastpass does the work for you so you won’t have to worry about it. Lastpass also has advanced tools that will allow you to check how strong your passwords are, and you’ll want to use that feature to keep your data safe.

If you think your security needs go to the other end of the spectrum, Keepass is what you want. Keepass is an open source desktop program that stores your passwords locally. It can also generate safe passwords for you and keeps a good record for everything. Many Keepass users make backups of their password records, and upload them online. Although some people would argue that this much work is unnecessary, it’s not stuck to one browser and could serve higher security needs.

Both Keepass and Lastpass use encryption at its core, so in that sense, they are equally secure. Done the right way, encryption can keep your data absolutely safe. However, if you wanted to add to that security yourself, you can always add a human element. This may sound contradictory, since many hacks are often traced to human instead of computer errors, but there are some things you can do better than encryption programs can.

For one, you can change your passwords randomly.  Switching between autogenerated passwords and passwords you make yourself could add to the randomness, as well as switch up how often you make changes. Take one of the autogenerated passwords and add letters or numbers in between, or remove letters or numbers. Increasing randomness makes things harder to predict, and your passwords harder to crack.

Another thing you can do is to prioritize passwords for certain accounts. This should be common sense, really; some services need to be more secure than others, and in many cases access may be more important than security. If you put more focus on securing accounts you need security on, it’ll make those accounts that much safer.

One final note; the old security questions used on email accounts, asking the name of your high school teacher, or your favorite color, are potential security risks. One way to mitigate that risk is to randomize your selected answers, writing b1u3 instead of blue. If you’re allowed to put your own question in, you can randomize that as well, even put in gibberish if you wanted to, and just make sure to keep a record of the password handy. Whatever you do, you can’t use these security questions as is.

What do you think about passwords in the year 2013? Should we be looking at replacements? What security measures and best practices do you use to keep your passwords safe?

If you work with small teams online, chances are, you are already using or have previously used Trello. Compared to competitors like Basecamp and Greenrope, Trello and all of its features are free. It may not be as fully featured as its competitors, but for many companies and organizations, it is sufficient to meet all their needs.

Introduction to Trello and its features

Trello is a web based project management application, thats very easy to learn and use. Without getting into details, you can make different “Boards” for each project or account you’re handling, and within them, make little “Lists” and add “Cards” in them. Cards are where you can put to do items, or free form instructions. Collaborators can also interact in Cards, commenting, attaching documents and moving projects around.

The naming of the “Boards”, “Lists”, and “Cards” can help you make some associations with real life bulletin boards and lists. However, when you enter a board and look at the lists at a glance, you may be more reminded of a card catalog, and in my honest opinion, that makes it feel more organic and eases use.

Trello takes inspiration from kanban, which was conceived in the 1980s part of Toyota’s ‘Just-In-Time’ (JIT) system, now also known as the Toyota Management System (TMS). You can find out more about how to use Trello here:

The dilemma with Trello comes with attaching documents. While it’s convenient to attach a document to just any card, the problem comes when the card gets bigger as conversations keep going. One problem is the limit that you cannot upload documents bigger than 10 MB, although you can always just post a link to a document from somewhere else so there are turnarounds.

The bigger problem comes with the ‘here and now’ nature of Trello. As mentioned above, Trello was conceived as a virtual equivalent of Toyota’s kanban system, which was great at handling logistics in a production sense. When a new project comes in, it’s easy to use Trello to assign tasks to people and track their progress. However, Trello does not duplicate certain qualities kanban has IRL. Toyota can store documents, and pass them around as needed. However, in Trello, drafts and supplemental documents for projects will just get placed on top of each other in cards. Documents needed for other cards or other projects cannot be linked to, and will have to be reuploaded separately.

On one hand, this appears to be a weakness for Trello, but on the other, it also keeps their service simple. You can upload documents to generate links in Basecamp. However, Basecamp is more complex and a little harder to learn than Trello.

It’s debatable if Trello should eventually provide storage for documents used in projects. Ultimately, businesses uses other cloud storage services anyway. The web equivalent of the file cabinet, cloud storage is convenient way to share files across collaborators, across physical boundaries almost instantly. Some, like iCloud with iWork, Google Docs and Skydrive are also online office suites, but even when they’re not, many cloud services like Dropbox at least let you view your documents from the cloud.

Right now, we do have good news. Both Google Docs and Dropbox have been incorporated into Trello! Companies and organizations that use these services can compensate for Trello’s weaknesses and really power up their work flow. Here’s how:

Google Docs

Uploading files to Trello from Google Docs is easy. When you click on the ‘Attach File’ button, you get to choose to upload from Google Docs. Select a file or a group of files and Voila! It generates a link for you.

Keep in mind that your Google Docs and Trello accounts are still considered separate (something you may take for granted if you used your Google login to make a Trello account). To get the most out of this integration, you have to give access of your Google Docs to your other collaborators in Trello, and vice versa.

I think this was the best way to implement integration. For companies that already share and collaborate on Google Docs, there’s no need to deal with learning a different system. You can also work on the same Docs with people not in your Trello. Trello also sidesteps the problem of filesize limits here, it’s now Google Docs problem.

Dropbox

Just a few months after integrating Google Docs, Trello was able to do the same with Dropbox. This is because Dropbox enabled a new feature called Dropbox Chooser. With Chooser, any web application can access the files in your Dropbox, and display or play them. Dropbox is not an office suite like Google Docs, but will allow you to view documents, as well as play audio and video files stored from their site.

So much like Google Docs, uploading files from Dropbox to Trello is painless. Click on the ‘’Attach File” button, choose Dropbox, and Dropbox Chooser shows up for you to select files for uploading. Trello will generate links back to Dropbox for viewing or playing files..

Here’s an important point. You do not have to choose to use Google Docs or Dropbox exclusively. Some of you may want to use both. The important thing is these two integrations bring more power to your Trello account  -  assuming you have accounts in these services as well.

For the moment, Skydrive is not yet incorporated into Trello, and I think it’s a shame. Microsoft has made a genuinely game competitor to Google Docs with Skydrive. I’m sure others will bring up other cloud storage services, like iCloud, SugarSync, Mega etc., but don’t hold your breath. Between the three services, however, I would say that you have a near complete project management system, definitely more than enough for many small and medium enterprises and organizations.

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