THINKeEXTENSION » social media

Australian Adult Social Media Research Released

dean — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:50:04 +0000

Alright I know that THINKeEXTENSION is read by an International audience, however for the Aussies reading. Forrester have just released a report on the Australian Social Media landscape.
Australian Adult Social Technographics® Revealed by Steven Noble – Forrester Research

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: SocialMedia, THINKeEXTENSION

eExtension, Social Media, and Communities of Pracrice – 3 peas in a pod.

dean — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:53:48 +0000

Early in my Extension career, I learned about the power of “Communities of Practice“. Also a decade later I find myself automatically asking the question, how will this Extension effort I’m working on, relate to a “Community of Practice“. eExtension with it’s foundation is Social Media is all about “Communities of Practice“, to me Social Media is the ultimate Extension tool. Today I received a blog post in my RSS reader, from Michelle Martin who I would describe as someone from my broader online “Community of Practice“. Michelle writes a thoughtful blog at The Bamboo Project, where today on offer were 2 videos and an article about the power of “Communities of Practice“. These videos are not from Agricultural, Natural Resource Management or Environmental organisations, however I’m sure if you take the 9 – 10 mins to watch them you will be able to imagine your own eExtension Strategy feeding a “Community of Practice” around your Extension niche.

Embedded Video

Two helpful Social Networks closely aligned with eExtension are the Ag Communication Group at Ning (a service that lets you build your own Social Network)and eExtension Basecamp at LinkenIn. You might like to go ahead and check them out. Start building your eExtension “Community of Practice” now.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: eExtension, Communities-Of-Practice, Extension, Social Media, Social Networks

New report reveals rapid growth in Social Media adoption

dean — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:48:18 +0000

If you have been doing Extension for more that 2 weeks I have some news for you your audience is changing. They are changing the way they consume information and what they expect from information regarding the Internet and Social Media trends and a surrogate for eExtension trends the Forresters Social Technographics Report has just been released for 2008. Geuss what? Social Media usage is up!

There are more people creating, critiquing, collecting, joining and consuming Social Media then there were last year. That is probably no surprise

Social technology adoption increased tremendously this year. Three in four US online adults now use social tools to connect with each other compared with just 56% in 2007. What else changed? Ratings and reviews, “voting” for Web sites, and peer-generated video experienced the largest growth, while blogs and tagging closely followed. Older adults are now also more likely to participate socially as Spectators and Critics, placing them in the active rungs of our Social Technographics® ladder. Source: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44907,00.html

This graphic is a useful way to segment your eExtension audience, no matter how good your stuff is some people will not even see it. But as you can see from the graph below the percentage of people who are likely to respond are growing as are the number of people online. Therefore more and more people are ready for eExtension. This trend is coming fast, and it is a great time to getting to know your way around the Social Media landscape.

New 2008 Social Technographics data reveals rapid growth in adoption

First discovered via ReadWriteWeb

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: SocialMedia, 2008SocialTechnographicsReport, eExtension

Harnessing Information Technology – the Nature Conservancy’s take.

dean — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:01:55 +0000

The Nature Conservancy is an organisation with conservation activities worldwide. They are good at conservation, they are good at fund raising, and as it happens they are quite good at eExtension. I was interested to read an article on their site entitled Big Ideas in Conservation – Harnessing Information Technology. The article was in a section called “Next Big Ideas in Conservation“, and was written by the Director of Emerging Strategies, Jonathan Hoekstra. Hoekstra points to a realisation in a jungle in Borneo as a moment of understanding the possibilities for IT to influence conservation.

Best Practice eExtension

Let’s for a moment examine how the Nature Conservancy are using technology in their extension efforts and compare that with what might be considered Best Practice eExtension. The Nature Conservancy website

has an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed of news items
Allows visitors to respond
Makes good use of multimedia including photos and slideshows
Uses video including a Public Service Announcement video that is hosted on an external network Google Video
Uses Audio podcasts distributed by an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed
Uses Email capture to convert visitors into contacts
Associate Director Digital Marketing, Jonathon Colman @jcolman regularly uses microblogging application Twitter to drive traffic to Nature Conservancy

All great eExtension practices!

Nature Conservancy PSA on Google Video

Using a video sharing network to host your online video is smart for at least 5 reasons.

If the video becomes popular someone else pays for the bandwidth.
Your video will receive traffic from your website and your website will receive traffic from the video sharing network.
If you put a link to your site in the video description you will build a high value incoming link to your site which is important for search engines.
People can embed your video on other sites like I have just done with this video building more exposure and traffic for your site.
Via the video sharing site people can comment and respond to your video

What’s Missing?

Well it’s hard to be critical of an organisation and a site that doing so much so well. One important component of a smart eExtension strategy is to choose tools and a workflow that suit your organisation’s goals and resources. The enhancements I am about to suggest are components of an optimal eExtension strategy in an organisation with unlimited goals and resources. Knowing the good work that Jonathon does, I’m sure he and his team may have considered or are working these additions.

Incorporation of a blog technology particularly with the ability for people to comment and respond to individual articles
Use of a social media aggregation service such as friendfeed to put all Nature Conservancy online content in one place.
Nature Conservancy has a facebook not for profit page with almost 8000 fans. I would love to know why it’s not more prominent on the website, probably a good reason for this

All in all Nature Conservancy is an awesome website, which is being done very well. Testimony to this is it’s ranking by Alexa (an internet traffic ranking site similar to Neilsen’s rating of TV shows) as being in the top 0.14% of sites worldwide and the number of incoming links 450,720 which means lots of other websites are linking to it (good for search engines and traffic). For eExtension Best Practice I would give Nature Conservancy an A to and A+, mind you on the same criteria THINKeEXTENSION is in the C+ to B- zone.

What are your thoughts? What do you like about the Nature Conservancy website? Or what features do you think makes a A+ eExtension site?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: eExtension, ConservationWebsite, NatureConservancy, eExtensionStrategy,

Ten (More) Ways to Change the World Through Social Media : Sustainablog

dean — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:07:01 +0000

This morning Sustainablog has written a post about 10 Social Media applications that can change the world.

Ten (More) Ways to Change the World Through Social Media : Sustainablog

Is this a proposterus proposition? Universal McCann’s Wave 3 report tells us

that social media is persuasive. i.e. “36% think more positively about companies that have blogs”
22% visit a friend’s social network page daily i.e. they listen to friends
“Social Networks have evolved into platforms to organise users internet experience.”

Some of the applications in the Sustainablog list have great potential for eExtension check out the list and see what you think. Can you imagine using any of these applications to compliment your extension program?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: SocialMedia, eExtension, SocialNetworks