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Using New Media Tools to Reach New Audiences
Silent
Treatment: Addiction in America
was developed with the
wide reach and exciting potential of new media in
mind. Powerful media tools are available to maximize
traffic to your Web site and reach new audiences.
These include podcasting — online broadcasting of
interviews and music that can be downloaded for later
enjoyment — video clips and personal blogs that allow
the public to share views.
These online tools offer a broad
range of choices in how you communicate your message. You might, for
example, tell your story through text, photos and sound and video
clips on your own Web site. Or, you could send sound and video clips
to news organizations to use on their news broadcast or Web site to
encourage reporting on your organization.
To Blog or Not to Blog
With spam filters on high alert,
delivering a newsletter by email is not as easy as it
once was. Even if it does make it to your subscriber's
inbox it still has to compete for attention. A Weblog
or blog, on the other hand, is a page on your Web site
that can be updated several times a week with fresh
content. If a reader has "subscribed" to your blog, he
or she gets an alert, consisting of the headline and
brief summary, every time you post new information.
Some blogs function as personal
journals; some function as a group newsletter, while others are
generated and maintained to serve as communication venues for a
large community of like-minded individuals. New material
shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what's new. They can
then comment on it or link to it.
The first
consideration when creating a blog is which tool to use. There are
countless options with a variety of different features. Some tools
are free, others are opensource, some require no IT help, while
others require quite a bit of programming and configuration to get
up and running. Which tool you pick to build your blog depends
largely on your commitment to blogging.
• If
you are unsure if blogging will work for your
organization and you want to “test the waters,” then
Blogger, is a
good place to start. The technology is free, easy to use
and there are no hosting costs.
• If
you have tried blogging and are ready to make a
commitment but don’t want to invest heavily in a
technology infrastructure, then
TypePad, may be
the tool for you. Typepad provides a few more options
than Blogger, adding to the manageability of your blog.
It costs more than Blogger and you’ll need to assign
someone to update the blog, but the extra options could
be worth the investment.
• If
you are ready to host a blog on your own server and have
the ability to build and customize as you see fit,
there’s WordPress,
which is opensource, or
Six
Apart's Movable Type, which offers
not-for-profit pricing.
Other popular blog software include
Radio Userland,
which includes a year of hosting if you need it, and
Greymatter,
which is opensource.
Two good blog primers are:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/primer/blogprimer1.htm
http://sbinfocanada.about.com/cs/blogarticles/a/blogfaqindex.htm
A word about liability: The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers an
excellent legal guide for bloggers, which includes information for
Web site hosting of blogs, at
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-230.php.
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