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8 Ways to Promote Your Work Through Internet Collaboration
Promoting our products and services can be a time consuming and daunting task. A lot of us get tangled up in online self promotion without realising the value in collaboration more often with other people through the web. It can be a wise way to expand your network, pool resources and save time, money and work.
The internet has opened up a range of exciting possibilities for gaining value through mutually beneficial arrangements or simply interacting with others in promoting your work effectively and ultimately landing more clients.
Here are eight ways you can do this:
1. Joint Blogs/Sites
Getting a blog or simple website out there that you can use to showcase your work, build credibility in your field, promote yourself, and simply express your interests, is an important element in one’s online self-promotional strategy.
A successful blog requires regular and outstanding content to be in for a chance of attracting many visitors. Particularly for those lacking in time, it is worth considering setting up a site with one or more suitable other people. With others working on the same platform, it is now possible to build up posts quicker, combine skills and resources, and promote everyone’s work through a single site.
Some freelancers might even want to consider using a joint site as a platform to promote the combined skills of several people as a business, as opposed to promoting individual freelancers.
2. Contacts on Social Media Sites
Social media allows people to build up substantial networks of people who we’d want to know about our work. With sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, it has become possible to link up with potential clients, fans, as well as key influencers and even celebrities in your industry. It’s best to add new people to these networks with appropriate personal messages.
What is extremely powerful with being connected to people who are well connected themselves, is that you are effectively ‘piggybacking’ on their networks whenever they are linked to something of yours. For example, on Facebook, if someone with connections joins your page, all their contacts will be aware of this in their newsfeeds. Linked up with key people, you can keep them in the loop with whatever you are working on, which will benefit your online visibility.
3. Content Exchanging
Getting material on someone else’s website can be a great way of having fresh new people seeing your name on the internet. You can agree to put an article or a guest post on another site in return for content for your own, or even agree to swap decent comments with someone else with a site or blog relating to yours.
One underused method of enhancing your validity online as a freelancer is to request a review/testimonial swap with someone. These can be placed visibly on your site, is mutually beneficial, and adds real value to the services etc you offer.
4. Joint Interviews
Find someone in your industry to interview in return for them interviewing yourself. Interview each other, either in written, audio or video format and upload to each other’s blogs or elsewhere. Include each other’s links at the bottom of and incorporated into interviews.
Appearing as an interviewee on another, ideally popular website, is an excellent self promotional method because, apart from appearing a separate site, an interview is a great endorsement of you and will add value to you as a professional.
5. List Promotion
If you send out a newsletter to a mailing list that you’ve built up, you can use this to promote other people and get your name on other lists. Having a feature, link, article about you on someone else’s newsletter is possible through polite asking. However, it’s even more possible through agreeing with relevant people who have mailing lists to swap content like articles or even simply a link in a newsletter so that you and your work get seen by a new and targeted audience.
6. Joint Products
By ‘products’ I mean both physical products such as giclee prints, and non-physical, like information products or audio downloads. Creating products like ebooks are one way of gaining exposure, especially if it is something that will spread through people are sharing it with others.
Obviously, sharing the knowledge, skills and work load with one or more partners is an excellent way of getting a high quality product together faster and to each collaborator’s already established contacts. You might also consider making products to give away for free for the promotional value within them.
7. Exchanging Links
A straightforward but useful promotional tactic is in agreeing to place a link on your site to someone’s work who has done the same for you on their site. People do click on links featured on or recommended by sites and by having many of your web links on key sites around the web, this will benefit your exposure.
8. Working with Others on Collaborated Projects
These can be paid projects, but it is also an option to create an interesting, self initiated project with others that you can add to your portfolio. Pooling skill and talent in this way will lead to high quality projects that will greatly boost the value of your personal portfolio and support your self-marketing efforts.
Really aim for a piece of work that is remarkable as you make use of the benefit of combining talents with others. The ideal partner to collaborate with is obviously someone who is well known in the first place, so that you can ‘piggy-back’ on their success and promote via the contacts they have as well.
How social media works…
Now let’s take a look at each of the main types of social media, and how they work. These explanations are intentionally very general, because with social media every rule seems to have an exception.
In fact, among the defining characteristics of social media are the blurring of definitions, rapid innovation, reinvention and mash-ups. Each explanation also has a section on how to try out that form of social media yourself, with pointers on both how to find social media that’s relevant to you and how you might go about creating it. If you want to really understand how social media works, there’s no better way than to take part in it.
Mash-ups
The combination of two or more pieces of content (or software, or websites) is one of the phenomena in social media that make it at once so exciting, fast-moving and sometimes bewildering. Mash-ups are possible because of the openness of social media – many websites and software developers encourage people to play with their services and reinvent them.
There are literally hundreds of mash-ups of the Google Earth service, where people have attached information to parts of the maps. For instance there is a UK rail service mash-up where you can track in real time where trains are on the map. Fans of the TV series 24 have mapped locations from the shows’ plotlines on to a Google Earth map.
How social networks work
Social networks on the web are like contained versions of the sprawling blog network. People joining a social network usually create a profile and then build a network by connecting to friends and contacts in the network, or by inviting real-world contacts and friends to join the social network.
These communities retain the interest of their members by being useful to them and providing services that are entertaining or help them to expand their networks. MySpace, for instance, allows members to create vivid, chaotic home pages (they’ve been likened to the walls of a teenager’s bedroom) to which they can upload images, videos and music.
MySpace has built a lot of its popularity around its music services. There are said to be over three million bands and musicians registered on it, trying to attract a fan base from the 200 million registered accounts. According to Hitwise, in September 2006 MySpace was the 8th largest referrer of traffic to HMV.co.uk, more even than the MSN search engine.
In 2007, Facebook, a social network that originated in US colleges, became available for public use in the UK. Its popularity quickly rocketed. Part of Facebook’s success is its creators’ decision to ‘open up’ and allow anyone to develop applications and run them on Facebook - without charging them. This has seen Facebook users able to play each other at Scrabble and Chess, compare each others’ tastes and send ‘virtual gifts’, among any number of new ideas vying for attention.
Bebo, which is popular among school-age children, actually has the most members, perhaps helped by the fact that it is grouped around schools and colleges. Crucially, the growth in the use of social networks by young people in recent years has come at the expense of their consumption of traditional media such as TV and magazines. This switch in behaviour was one of the drivers behind the biggest deal in social media to date, when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for US $580 million.
Marketers have also increasingly begun to experiment with trying to reach the members of MySpace and other social networks. Bebo hosts pages for many children’s authors for instance, while MySpace has seen a rush of marketing efforts from Toyota to the US Army. Perhaps the most ‘grown-up’ of the popular networks is LinkedIn, which allows users build their business and professional contacts into an online network. It has been criticised for not being open enough and for charging for too many of its services – but next to Facebook it is still the most popular online social network among people aged 25 and over. The huge success of the ‘opening up’ of Facebook, as mentioned above, could be a challenge to LinkedIn’s ‘closed’ approach in the future.
How BLOGS WORK
At its simplest, a blog is an online journal where the entries are published with the most recent first. There are a number of features that make blogs noteworthy and different to other websites:
Tone
Blogs tend to be written in a personal, conversational style. They are usually the work of an identified author or group of authors.
Topic
blogs tend to define what it is they are writing about. They can be as specific as a blog about a book in progress or as wide in scope as „my musings on life and stuff‟.
Links and trackbacks
the services people use to write blogs make it very easy for them to insert links to other websites, usually in reference to an article or blog post or to provide further information about the subject they are writing about.
Comments
each blog post has a comments section, effectively a message board for that article. On blogs with large audiences the debates in these sections can run to hundreds of comments at a time.
Subscription
blogs can be subscribed to, usually via RSS technology, making it easy to keep up with new content. Blogs are easy to set up using any of a number of services. One of the simplest is the free Blogger service from Google. Others such as Wordpress and TypePad offer more features, the latter for a fee.
How WIKIS WORK
Wikis are websites that allow people to contribute or edit content on them. They are great for collaborative working, for instance creating a large document or project plan with a team in several offices. A wiki can be as private or as open as the people who create it want it to be.
Wikipedia
The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that was started in 2001. It now has over 2.5 million articles in English alone6 and over a million members. In 2005 the respected scientific journal Nature conducted a study7 into the reliability of the scientific entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. No one was surprised that Encyclopaedia Britannica was the more reliable of the two – what was remarkable was that it was only marginally more accurate. The Encyclopedia Britannica team issued a 20-page rebuttal of the study a few months later. Others observed that while Encyclopaedia Britannica had no entries for wiki, Wikipedia has a 2,500 word article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, its history and methodology. But Wikipedia is more than a reference source. During a major breaking news story, especially one which affects large numbers of people directly, such a natural disaster or political crisis, Wikipedia acts as a collective reporting function.
How PODCASTS WORK
Podcasts are audio or video files that are published on the internet and that users can subscribe to. Sometimes ‘vodcast’ is used to specifically describe video services. It is the subscription feature that makes a podcast so powerful as a form of social media. People have long been able to upload audio content to the web, but the subscription feature means that people can build regular audiences and communities around their shows. It effectively puts private individuals or brands on a level playing field with traditional media organisations when it comes to competing for people’s attention with AV content online.
Podcasts, like personal video recorders (PVRs), are part of a shift in media consumption patterns, which increasingly sees people watching or listening to content when and where it suits them. This is sometimes known as time-shifting. When a new podcast is posted to the web, all the subscribers’ podcast services (such as iTunes) are automatically notified and download the programme to their computer’s hard drive. The podcast can then be either listened to on the computer or downloaded onto an MP3 player, such as an iPod.
Naturally the advent of the podcast has also meant that media brands have been able to invade one another’s traditional territory. Many national newspapers in the UK have started effectively producing their own radio-style programmes and distributing them via their previously text-and-picture based websites. Channel 4 has also launched its own audio/podcasting brand, 4Radio.
How FORUMS WORK
Internet forums are the longest established form of online social media. They most commonly exist around specific topics and interests, for example cars or music. Each discussion in a forum is known as a thread, and many different threads can be active simultaneously. This makes forums good places to find and engage in a variety of detailed discussions. They are often built into websites as an added feature, but some exist as stand-alone entities. Forums can be places for lively, vociferous debate, for seeking advice on a subject, for sharing news, for flirting, or simply for whiling away time with idle chat. In other words, their huge variety reflects that of face-to-face conversations. The sites are moderated by an administrator, whose role it is to remove unsuitable posts or spam. However, a moderator will not lead or guide the discussion. This is a major difference between forums and blogs. Blogs have a clear owner, whereas a forum’s threads are started by its members.
Forums have a strong sense of community. Some are very enclosed, existing as ‘islands’ of online social activity with little or no connection to other forms of social media. This may be because forums were around long before the term ‘social media’ was coined, and in advance of any of the other types of community we associate with the term. In any event, they remain hugely popular, often with membership in the hundreds of thousands. Forum search engine BoardTracker monitors over 61 million conversation threads across almost 40,000 forums8, and it is by no means a comprehensive index.
How CONTENT COMMUNITIES WORK
Content communities look a bit like social networks – you have to register, you get a home page and you can make connections with friends. However, they are focussed on sharing a particular type of content.
For example,
Flickr is based around sharing photography and is the most popular service of its kind in the UK. Members upload their photos to the site and choose whether to make them public or just share with family and friends in their network. Thousands of groups have formed on Flickr around areas of common interest. There are groups dedicated to particular graffiti artists, towns, sports and animals. If you work for a reasonably well-known brand it is worth taking a look to see if there is a Flickr group about you – there are groups for motorbike brands, consumer electronics brands and even the cult notebook brand Moleskine. As testament to its enormous success.
YouTube is the world’s largest video sharing service, with over 100 million videos viewed every day. Members of YouTube can upload videos or create their own “channels” of favourite videos. The viral nature of YouTube videos is enhanced by a feature that makes it easy for people to cut and paste videos hosted by YouTube directly into their blogs.
As well as thousands of short films from people’s own video cameras, webcams and camera phones, there are many clips from TV shows and movies hosted on the service. Some people also use the service to record video blogs. YouTube started as a small private company, but was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006.
Digg is a news and content community. Members submit links to news stories that they think will be of interest and these are voted on by other members. Once a story has garnered about a critical number of votes (the number varies according to how busy the site is) it will be moved to the front page where it will receive wider attention from members as well as more casual visitors to the site. Digg claims to receive 20 million unique visitors every month, and certainly the volume of traffic via popular links from the service is so great that it can cause smaller companies’ servers to crash.
As with other social media platforms, rumours of acquisition deals and massive valuations for the service are flying around, but it remains independent and relatively small in terms of the number of employees (around 40).
How MICRO-BLOGING WORKS
Micro-blogging is tool that combines elements of blogging with instant messaging and social networking.
The clear leader in the micro-blogging field is Twitter with over 1 million users11. Other notable micro-blogging players include Pownce and Jaiku, which offer various different features, but for the purposes of this e-book it makes sense to focus on the Twitter format.
Twitter users can send messages of up to 140 characters instantly to multiple platforms. 90% of Twitter interactions12 are not made via the Twitter website, but via mobile text message, Instant Messaging, or a desktop application such as Twitterific. Its flexibility is further enhanced by the ability to subscribe to updates via RSS. Uses of Twitter vary. It’s popular among homeworkers and freelancers, who use it in part as a ‘virtual watercooler’. Other people use it simply to stay in touch with a close network and share thoughts or start conversations. Its suitability as a vehicle for breaking news has encouraged the BBC and CNN to introduce Twitter feeds. Even candidates for the US Presidency have taken to Twitter (for example, Barack Obama). An important feature to note is that Twitter can be indexed via Google. As with so much on the web, it’s a public platform, so it’s worth remembering that as such your use of it may become part of your ‘permanent record’.
Read more…
In fact, among the defining characteristics of social media are the blurring of definitions, rapid innovation, reinvention and mash-ups. Each explanation also has a section on how to try out that form of social media yourself, with pointers on both how to find social media that’s relevant to you and how you might go about creating it. If you want to really understand how social media works, there’s no better way than to take part in it.
Mash-ups
The combination of two or more pieces of content (or software, or websites) is one of the phenomena in social media that make it at once so exciting, fast-moving and sometimes bewildering. Mash-ups are possible because of the openness of social media – many websites and software developers encourage people to play with their services and reinvent them.
There are literally hundreds of mash-ups of the Google Earth service, where people have attached information to parts of the maps. For instance there is a UK rail service mash-up where you can track in real time where trains are on the map. Fans of the TV series 24 have mapped locations from the shows’ plotlines on to a Google Earth map.
How social networks work
Social networks on the web are like contained versions of the sprawling blog network. People joining a social network usually create a profile and then build a network by connecting to friends and contacts in the network, or by inviting real-world contacts and friends to join the social network.
These communities retain the interest of their members by being useful to them and providing services that are entertaining or help them to expand their networks. MySpace, for instance, allows members to create vivid, chaotic home pages (they’ve been likened to the walls of a teenager’s bedroom) to which they can upload images, videos and music.
MySpace has built a lot of its popularity around its music services. There are said to be over three million bands and musicians registered on it, trying to attract a fan base from the 200 million registered accounts. According to Hitwise, in September 2006 MySpace was the 8th largest referrer of traffic to HMV.co.uk, more even than the MSN search engine.
In 2007, Facebook, a social network that originated in US colleges, became available for public use in the UK. Its popularity quickly rocketed. Part of Facebook’s success is its creators’ decision to ‘open up’ and allow anyone to develop applications and run them on Facebook - without charging them. This has seen Facebook users able to play each other at Scrabble and Chess, compare each others’ tastes and send ‘virtual gifts’, among any number of new ideas vying for attention.
Bebo, which is popular among school-age children, actually has the most members, perhaps helped by the fact that it is grouped around schools and colleges. Crucially, the growth in the use of social networks by young people in recent years has come at the expense of their consumption of traditional media such as TV and magazines. This switch in behaviour was one of the drivers behind the biggest deal in social media to date, when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for US $580 million.
Marketers have also increasingly begun to experiment with trying to reach the members of MySpace and other social networks. Bebo hosts pages for many children’s authors for instance, while MySpace has seen a rush of marketing efforts from Toyota to the US Army. Perhaps the most ‘grown-up’ of the popular networks is LinkedIn, which allows users build their business and professional contacts into an online network. It has been criticised for not being open enough and for charging for too many of its services – but next to Facebook it is still the most popular online social network among people aged 25 and over. The huge success of the ‘opening up’ of Facebook, as mentioned above, could be a challenge to LinkedIn’s ‘closed’ approach in the future.
How BLOGS WORK
At its simplest, a blog is an online journal where the entries are published with the most recent first. There are a number of features that make blogs noteworthy and different to other websites:
Tone
Blogs tend to be written in a personal, conversational style. They are usually the work of an identified author or group of authors.
Topic
blogs tend to define what it is they are writing about. They can be as specific as a blog about a book in progress or as wide in scope as „my musings on life and stuff‟.
Links and trackbacks
the services people use to write blogs make it very easy for them to insert links to other websites, usually in reference to an article or blog post or to provide further information about the subject they are writing about.
Comments
each blog post has a comments section, effectively a message board for that article. On blogs with large audiences the debates in these sections can run to hundreds of comments at a time.
Subscription
blogs can be subscribed to, usually via RSS technology, making it easy to keep up with new content. Blogs are easy to set up using any of a number of services. One of the simplest is the free Blogger service from Google. Others such as Wordpress and TypePad offer more features, the latter for a fee.
How WIKIS WORK
Wikis are websites that allow people to contribute or edit content on them. They are great for collaborative working, for instance creating a large document or project plan with a team in several offices. A wiki can be as private or as open as the people who create it want it to be.
Wikipedia
The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that was started in 2001. It now has over 2.5 million articles in English alone6 and over a million members. In 2005 the respected scientific journal Nature conducted a study7 into the reliability of the scientific entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. No one was surprised that Encyclopaedia Britannica was the more reliable of the two – what was remarkable was that it was only marginally more accurate. The Encyclopedia Britannica team issued a 20-page rebuttal of the study a few months later. Others observed that while Encyclopaedia Britannica had no entries for wiki, Wikipedia has a 2,500 word article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, its history and methodology. But Wikipedia is more than a reference source. During a major breaking news story, especially one which affects large numbers of people directly, such a natural disaster or political crisis, Wikipedia acts as a collective reporting function.
How PODCASTS WORK
Podcasts are audio or video files that are published on the internet and that users can subscribe to. Sometimes ‘vodcast’ is used to specifically describe video services. It is the subscription feature that makes a podcast so powerful as a form of social media. People have long been able to upload audio content to the web, but the subscription feature means that people can build regular audiences and communities around their shows. It effectively puts private individuals or brands on a level playing field with traditional media organisations when it comes to competing for people’s attention with AV content online.
Podcasts, like personal video recorders (PVRs), are part of a shift in media consumption patterns, which increasingly sees people watching or listening to content when and where it suits them. This is sometimes known as time-shifting. When a new podcast is posted to the web, all the subscribers’ podcast services (such as iTunes) are automatically notified and download the programme to their computer’s hard drive. The podcast can then be either listened to on the computer or downloaded onto an MP3 player, such as an iPod.
Naturally the advent of the podcast has also meant that media brands have been able to invade one another’s traditional territory. Many national newspapers in the UK have started effectively producing their own radio-style programmes and distributing them via their previously text-and-picture based websites. Channel 4 has also launched its own audio/podcasting brand, 4Radio.
How FORUMS WORK
Internet forums are the longest established form of online social media. They most commonly exist around specific topics and interests, for example cars or music. Each discussion in a forum is known as a thread, and many different threads can be active simultaneously. This makes forums good places to find and engage in a variety of detailed discussions. They are often built into websites as an added feature, but some exist as stand-alone entities. Forums can be places for lively, vociferous debate, for seeking advice on a subject, for sharing news, for flirting, or simply for whiling away time with idle chat. In other words, their huge variety reflects that of face-to-face conversations. The sites are moderated by an administrator, whose role it is to remove unsuitable posts or spam. However, a moderator will not lead or guide the discussion. This is a major difference between forums and blogs. Blogs have a clear owner, whereas a forum’s threads are started by its members.
Forums have a strong sense of community. Some are very enclosed, existing as ‘islands’ of online social activity with little or no connection to other forms of social media. This may be because forums were around long before the term ‘social media’ was coined, and in advance of any of the other types of community we associate with the term. In any event, they remain hugely popular, often with membership in the hundreds of thousands. Forum search engine BoardTracker monitors over 61 million conversation threads across almost 40,000 forums8, and it is by no means a comprehensive index.
How CONTENT COMMUNITIES WORK
Content communities look a bit like social networks – you have to register, you get a home page and you can make connections with friends. However, they are focussed on sharing a particular type of content.
For example,
Flickr is based around sharing photography and is the most popular service of its kind in the UK. Members upload their photos to the site and choose whether to make them public or just share with family and friends in their network. Thousands of groups have formed on Flickr around areas of common interest. There are groups dedicated to particular graffiti artists, towns, sports and animals. If you work for a reasonably well-known brand it is worth taking a look to see if there is a Flickr group about you – there are groups for motorbike brands, consumer electronics brands and even the cult notebook brand Moleskine. As testament to its enormous success.
How CONTENT COMUNITIES WORK
Content communities look a bit like social networks – you have to register, you get a home page and you can make connections with friends. However, they are focussed on sharing a particular type of content. For example,
YouTube is the world’s largest video sharing service, with over 100 million videos viewed every day. Members of YouTube can upload videos or create their own “channels” of favourite videos. The viral nature of YouTube videos is enhanced by a feature that makes it easy for people to cut and paste videos hosted by YouTube directly into their blogs.
As well as thousands of short films from people’s own video cameras, webcams and camera phones, there are many clips from TV shows and movies hosted on the service. Some people also use the service to record video blogs. YouTube started as a small private company, but was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006.
Digg is a news and content community. Members submit links to news stories that they think will be of interest and these are voted on by other members. Once a story has garnered about a critical number of votes (the number varies according to how busy the site is) it will be moved to the front page where it will receive wider attention from members as well as more casual visitors to the site. Digg claims to receive 20 million unique visitors every month, and certainly the volume of traffic via popular links from the service is so great that it can cause smaller companies’ servers to crash.
As with other social media platforms, rumours of acquisition deals and massive valuations for the service are flying around, but it remains independent and relatively small in terms of the number of employees (around 40).
How MICRO-BLOGING WORKS
Micro-blogging is tool that combines elements of blogging with instant messaging and social networking.
The clear leader in the micro-blogging field is Twitter with over 1 million users11. Other notable micro-blogging players include Pownce and Jaiku, which offer various different features, but for the purposes of this e-book it makes sense to focus on the Twitter format.
Twitter users can send messages of up to 140 characters instantly to multiple platforms. 90% of Twitter interactions12 are not made via the Twitter website, but via mobile text message, Instant Messaging, or a desktop application such as Twitterific. Its flexibility is further enhanced by the ability to subscribe to updates via RSS. Uses of Twitter vary. It’s popular among homeworkers and freelancers, who use it in part as a ‘virtual watercooler’. Other people use it simply to stay in touch with a close network and share thoughts or start conversations. Its suitability as a vehicle for breaking news has encouraged the BBC and CNN to introduce Twitter feeds. Even candidates for the US Presidency have taken to Twitter (for example, Barack Obama). An important feature to note is that Twitter can be indexed via Google. As with so much on the web, it’s a public platform, so it’s worth remembering that as such your use of it may become part of your ‘permanent record’.
