Sunlight Foundation

Tools for Transparency: Google Reader is Still Relevant, Part III

In continuing with the "Google Reader is Still Relevant" meme (read Parts I and II here) I wanted to make a quick note on how I'm seeing extended value in Google Reader after integrating it with IFTTT.  Google Reader has morphed from a somewhat useful curation channel to an incredibly useful one.  On its own, Google Reader provides a number of ways to share content, including Google Plus, email and Send to:

In your Reader Settings, you can customize the services you want to use and manually add any that aren't included (here are few a services you can add yourself):

While I find the options provided by Google useful, they seem somewhat limited in comparison to what you can both add and automate through IFTTT.  With the addition of Recipes to IFTTT, you can see the clever examples of how users are tying one service to another (although with a bit of redundancy).

If you click through to IFTTT and filter by Google Reader, you can sort by popular Actions or Triggers to see how others are using the service. Triggers will show you various ways to stream content into Google Reader, while Actions offer methods for curating and sharing content from Google Reader to other sites.

Some of the more popular Trigger recipes include sharing feed items to Evernote, Instapaper and Read It Later, which are great for personal consumption but you will quickly find ways to automatically share interesting posts and pieces to Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

By starring items, pushing new items from a tag or folder or by using the Send to feature, you can begin to add content to your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, Delicious and Pinboard accounts, to Storyboard, Tumblr and Posterous, to name a few quick examples.

Of course you aren't limited to just those services.  If you look at the available channels to push and pull content from, you find that you have plenty to begin working with:

I would love to hear what you come up with and if you create any public recipes.  We've created a handful of recipes that you can find here.

 

Tools for Transparency: URL Builder for Google Analytics

The Google Analytics URL Builder is a simple tool that helps you track traffic statistics for specific campaign related links.  The tool works by adding parameters to a link from a page on your site that you then track using Google Analytics.  When running an advertising or social media campaign, this is incredibly handy for tracking your ROI.

I'll walk you through how I used the URL builder for this past Tuesday's Sunlight Live coverage of the State of the Union address.

Below is a screenshot of the URL builder.  In the first field, you enter the main URL you want to track. In this case, I'm watching http://sunlightlive.com. The next few fields determine the "Campaign Source" or the traffic referrer you'd like to watch, the "Campaign Medium," the way in which the traffic referrer is driving to your site, and the "Campaign Name." For Sunlight Live, the source was Facebook, the medium was through an advertisement and the name of the campaign was SOTU-2012.

After entering in this information, click the "Generate URL" button, which will add those parameters to your original link:

http://sunlightlive.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Ads&utm_campaign=SOTU-2012

..Which we then used to direct Facebook ad traffic to the Sunlight Live site. Check out the full entry process below:

To track every medium you use, whether it's Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Delicious or some other site, you'll need to create a unique URL for each.

Once the campaign is over, open your site profile on Google Analytics to access your link statistics.  On the left side navigation, head over to Traffic Sources, then Sources, then Campaigns:

To set the date for the life of the campaign, look in the top right corner. Google Analytics will show you the campaigns for that time period, you'll need to sort them by Source so you can differentiate the sites. Above this list click on Source then Traffic Sources then Source:

Below you'll see the statistics by Source for the Sunlight Live State of the Union campaign over the course of two days. You can see that our Facebook Ads brought in the most traffic by far. (You may also notice I wasn't consistent with my naming conventions for Source -- I need to work on that.) For reference, our Facebook drivers are the Facebook link posted above (top driver) and our fan page (second driver):

Remember, this is only traffic to our Sunlight Live page through tracked links we pushed through social media and advertising. The screenshot below captures all traffic to the page, including both links we promoted and organic links from followers of Sunlight.  The first two links are ads we ran for the campaign, though the Google ads weren't captured in the campaign view (I'm unsure of the reason for that):

While Google Analytics provides plenty of information and site data, using the URL builder makes it much simpler to track the ROI on your campaigns and on your efforts to promote them.  What are your experiences with tracking campaigns? Have any of you used the URL builder tool in the past?

 

Tools for Transparency: 10 Sunlight Foundation IFTTT Recipes

In July, I wrote about a recently launched service called "If This Then That", IFTTT.com. This services helps you automate certain aspects of online life, like sending you emails based on Twitter interactions or posting links to your Facebook wall from your LinkedIn account.

IFTTT

Recently, IFTTT added a new feature called Recipes, which allows you to share your automations with everyone else. You can sort the recipes by type as well as by popularity -- how new or how 'hot' it is.

I have added ten Sunlight Foundation related recipes to IFTTT to help you automate and share Sunlight-related content and events. You can see them below:

I don't want to inundate you with Sunlight recipes, so I'll stop at 10. Let me know how these work for you and if you have other ideas for recipes I could create. If you have your own you would like to share, please the recipe with a link in the comments.

Tools for Transparency: Fluid for Mac

Fluid is a compelling Mac-based application that allows you to turn almost any website into its own 'app.'

What does that mean, exactly? Basically, Fluid is a program that allows you to remove a few steps from the process of launching and accessing frequently used web-based tools and services. For example, I use a browser-based, social media service called Cotweet on a daily basis, but I would prefer to not keep it open in a tab in my browser, where it could be easily closed or open me up to Endless Tab Syndrome. Fluid allows me to create a Cotweet application, which means I can have a separate application window open for the tool, allowing me to keep Cotweet on a separate desktop on my Mac or to quickly launch it from the dock as needed.

It's very simple to create your own Fluid application:

Enter the website's URL, provide a name, and optionally choose an icon. Click "Create", and within seconds your chosen website has a permanent home on your Mac as a real Mac application that appears in your Dock.
The service is free to use but for $5 you can access a few more features:
  1. Separate cookie storage (usually cookies are shared with Safari)
  2. Minimize app to the menu bar instead of the dock
  3. Userscripts or Userstyles
  4. Lion Full Screen mode
What do you think of Fluid? I understand Chrome for PC has a comparable feature but it doesn't work on Mac yet. Have you found other services like Fluid which you prefer?

Tools for Transparency: ePub and the Kindle Store

ePub logoAfter 7,000 uploads and 585,000 reads on our Scribd account, it appeared that a cross section of the Sunlight audience was interested in pieces longer than the short blog posts and the social media updates we're accustomed to writing.  In terms of accessibility, cost and distribution, the next logical step to engage that audience would be mobile.

Month on month, we were seeing mobile access to Sunlight content growing exponentially and anecdotally I knew that ereaders like the Kindle and the Nook were popular with a demographic in ways blog posts weren't.

We published four reformatted long form posts to the Kindle store, in hopes of reaching that audience.  I realize that these aren't the length of full books and should probably live in the Kindle Store Singles section. Hopefully I can iron that out in the new year.

The process for publishing, which I'll save for another post, is straight forward.  If you already have an Amazon account, you can log into the Kindle publisher platform and poke around. Here are the posts -

Only recently did I realize uploading our content in .doc or .pdf files to the Kindle Store was the least optimal publishing format.  ePub, an open ebook standard, is the suggested format if you want to publish to all the ebook platforms, from the Kindle Store to iBook to the Nook. With that being said, I'm in the process of updating our four pieces to the ePub format for republishing.

Calibre, which works across platforms, is a great piece of software for formatting, converting and storing your content in the ePub standard. For the Mac, I use Sigil for further editing and formatting and then test the results on the Kindle Previewer app before publishing.

Clearly there's a learning curve here and I hope to add more pieces to our library as well as publish to new platforms aside from Amazon Kindle. It's clear to me that mobile access will only continue to grow as the costs of devices decline, which means we'll continue to create mobile apps and search for new ways to interact with our audience.

Tools for Transparency - Increase Your Tweet Reach with Buffer

There are a ton of apps out there to help you boost your Twitter efficacy, some of the biggest being HootSuite, TweetDeck, Spredfast and CoTweet. Most of these tools either help you schedule future tweets or provide useful analysis and metrics on your reach and engagement. These sorts of applications enhance usage while making it less of a chore and provide feedback that helps you tweak your strategy, but you're usually stuck combining platforms to get the right balance of feedback and realtime usage that you want.

That's what makes Buffer -- a new web app we've been testing -- different. Buffer allows you to schedule tweets and measure feedback and relative success of each message within a single platform. Buffer suggests times of day for posting based on when you've received the most retweets, mentions and click-throughs, too.

You can check out an example of some of the feedback Buffer provides on the tweets you've posted through their platform below. There you can see the icons for the accounts that retweeted you, how many retweets you've received, number of click-throughs, mentions and favorites.

You can post through Buffer without scheduling ahead of time and you'll see utility in comparing suggested times against other times.  You'll find that certain times of day really do work better than others when trying to maximize your reach and engagement.  I've found that the 8:10am and the 4:49pm times do really well for our content when compared to other times throughout the day.

While Buffer is useful and we'll continue to test the service, I'd like to point out that automating your posts isn't necessarily the best way to engage your followers.  I would suggest a mix of buffering important tweets but continue to monitor feedback and engage your audience with sincerity.

Tools for Transparency: Push Your Content to Google Currents

Google Currents logoMobile access to Sunlight content -- across our main site and many of our projects -- has grown exponentially year-on-year since 2006. It's safe to assume we'll see this growth trend continue as smart phones, iPads and tablets continue to proliferate.

That being said, I've been a fan of how the Flipboard app for the iPad (and now the iPhone) has made social media and other forms of news accessible and easily digestible. I've gone as far as to contact Flipboard with the thought of creating a Sunlight channel to access an emerging mobile audience, ultimately to no avail. At the moment users are only able to access their own social media feeds and pre-selected partner feeds, with self-service coming in the Spring.

Luckily for Sunlight, Google launched a product called Currents, which allows content creators to publish their own content to mobile devices in a user friendly magazine-style layout, very similar to how Flipboard displays media. This self-serve platform gives Sunlight an accessible mobile venue for content promotion and user engagement.

As the video above shows, Google Currents, which launched yesterday with over a dozen featured media partners, makes it simple to set up your own mobile channel. The process is as easy as adding a few RSS feeds and customizing a handful of options (which are only accessible through Google Chrome for the time being) before publishing.

In another post I'll walk you through setting up your own channel, but in the meantime you can check out The Daily Sunlight here. You'll need to install the Google Currents app on your mobile device, but once you do, you'll be ready to go.

Tools for Transparency: Capture Your Signature with OS X Preview

It's often the case that your signature is required for various documents, whether paper or PDF, to carry out your work. I would personally prefer to skip the process of printing, signing and then rescanning or faxing documents if it can be helped, and I bet you would, too.

A colleague alerted me to the fact that the Preview app in Lion, the latest version of Apple's OS X, was catered to folks like us: Using the built-in iSight program, Preview makes it easy to capture your signature and apply it to a PDF form. This allows you to skip the printing, scanning and faxing of anything requiring your signature, so long as you already have a PDF of the form you need.

TUAW -- a.k.a. "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" -- does a great job of breaking down how this feature works:

Lion's version of Preview comes with a built-in signature scanner that makes signing documents far simpler. In the Annotations toolbar you now have an option to create a signature from your Mac's built-in iSight camera. All you need to do is use black ink to sign a piece of white paper, align your signature toward the camera using the onscreen guides, and take a snapshot of the signature.

As TUAW notes, it's solid step in the direction of a truly paperless office.

(h/t from our own Joshua Hatch)

Tools for Transparency: 10 Tools You Might Have Missed

It's been a while since I've posted a round-up of the latest Tools for Transparency posts. Take a look at the posts you may have missed over the past few months:

Google+ Pages - November 10th, 2011

Fundraising with Square - November 3rd, 2011

Chat With Your Audience on Google Hangouts - October 21st, 2011

Use Topsy to Track Your Content - October 14th, 2011

Use A Cell Phone to Collect Campaign Signatures - October 6th, 2011

Finding Uses for SoundCloud - September 29th, 2011

Monitor Your Site with Chartbeat - September 23rd, 2011

Managing Contacts with Rapportive - September 15th, 2011

Digest Content in Minutes with Topicmarks - August 18th, 2011

Track the People Tracking You with Ghostery - August 11th, 2011

As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, do you have any thoughts on topics I should write about?

Tools for Transparency: Google+ Pages

Though Google+ launched this past June, they only just this week launched Google+ Pages for groups, nonprofits and businesses. You can find out a bit more below:

Google+ Pages is similar in functionality to what's already available to individual users, with features like circles, sharing links, status updates and posting photos and videos.  At the moment, the service is limited to one admin per page.

We were quick to set up a Sunlight page when the service opened up this week and I've had fun posting even in its current limited capacity.  At the moment I don't foresee our usage of Facebook Fan Pages diminishing, but rather Google+ Pages complementing our overall social media presence.

To see some example pages, take a look at these partners that were  available at launch:

Are you interested in creating your own page?

It's a fairly straight forward process; you'll need a personal Google+ account and then click through here.  Select the category of page you want to create, whether for a group, a business, a nonprofit or for something else.

Once you've selected the category, Google will ask you for some basic information related to your page, like the name, a related web site url, the page administrator and other info depending on the page type.  When you finish, your page is created and you can begin posting text, photos, videos, links or your location.

To access your page again, you'll need to go to your personal Google+ home screen and click on the drop-down next to your name:

You can also add Google+ Page buttons and badges to your website by going here.

How does Google+ Pages compare to Facebook Fan Pages? Do you find the interface easy to use? Any tips or tricks you've learned this week?

 
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