Good tips here. You do not have a specific self-appraisal component but the overall process allows a fair bit of reflection. Take the opportunity to take a big step forward!
1. Know Your Audience
If you don't know who your audience is, how will you ever connect with them? Most brands have an understanding of their audience's demographics - age, gender, HHI, ethnicity. But you have to go beyond these statistics to get a better understanding of their interests, needs, mindsets, and behaviors to truly make a connection and become an important part of their lives.
In addition to the standard methods of audience discovery - industry research, focus groups, and brand surveys - you can also use social media data to build audience personas. Social monitoring software, Facebook Custom Audience, social referrals to your website, and question-and-answer sites are just a few of the sources you can use to learn more about your audience.
2. Provide Value
Your content must provide some type of value to your audience. That value could be education, increased productivity, entertainment, or cost savings. To the consumer, it shouldn't seem like marketing, even though we know it is by nature. It's providing long-term awareness and brand recall. It's making sure your brand is right there with the consumer at each step along their path to purchase so that when it comes time to make a decision, you're the first brand that comes to mind.
4. Look Beyond Facebook and Twitter
Creating content doesn't automatically mean users will come consume it and engage with your brand as a result. You must draw attention to the content through owned, earned, and paid methods across a variety of channels, not just the big ones.
Ask yourself how else you can maximize the value of each piece of content and each campaign: Can you make the content more visible and sharable on your website? What other social channels does your audience use besides Facebook and Twitter? Can you use sites that accept submissions of specific content, like Visual.ly for infographics or Online-Sweepstakes.com for contests? How much are you able to pay to distribute your content on sites such as Outbrain or Taboola? Are you using Google+ to link to content on your website? (If the answer is no, I urge you to start today. Google+, while lacking in the engagement department, has a major impact on organic ranking.)
People share things not only because those things look good, but because those things make them look good.
7. Measure Success
Before creating a single piece of content or posting one Facebook message, determine the objective of your content and what metrics you will use to measure performance.
hile the specific metrics in each bucket will vary based on your strategy, objectives, and resources, some common ones are:
Awareness - impressions, reach, mentions
Consumption - clicks, visits, referrals
Engagement - likes, shares, +1s, time on site
Actions - leads/sales, PDF downloads, newsletter sign-ups, site navigation
Well,
that was quick. Right after yesterday's surprising announcement,
Sony flew its yet-to-be-released NEX-VG10 camcorder into London just in time for
today's showcase event. Naturally, we had to get our hands on this shiny baby,
and boy we were impressed. In case you missed the news, this snazzy device is
the world's first consumer HandyCam with interchangeable lens, meaning you can
share E-mount lenses with your young NEX DSLRs, or take advantage of
the abundant A-mount lenses with the help of an adapter (which will cost you
extra, mind you). Likewise, there are also hot and cold shoe mounts on the mic
shaft to cater your current camera accessories. Read on for our thoughts on the
rest of the camcorder -- we've put together a little sample clip for you at the
end as well.
There
isn't much to complain about with this $2,000 (and, sadly, possibly £2,000 for
the Brits) piece of kit in terms of appearance and ergonomics. We like being
able to hold it by either the seemingly solid body (using the strap) or the mic
shaft, and both ways provided comfortable grip without much fatigue due to the
light weight (even with the bundled lens). We were also able to quickly master
the jog-dial control next to the 3-inch screen, but for this price, we expected
a touchscreen interface as well to make life easier. As for the bundled F3.5-6.3
18-200mm lens, we found that zooming required a bit more effort than we liked,
so thankfully there's auto focus mode -- just like any ordinary camcorder -- to
save us from further wrist work with the focus ring. We must also point out that
unlike the Olympus PEN,
this Sony camcorder didn't pick up any mechanical noise from its lens auto
focussing; otherwise, this kit totally wouldn't deserve such price tag.
Of
course, what we really care about is the picture and sound quality. All is
revealed in our sample reel below (remember to enable HD playback mode), but in
brief: stunningly accurate colors, sharp 1080/60i picture, and impressive audio
sensitivity (notice how the mic was able to pick up conversations from afar; you
can also enable just the front mics to minimise background noise). You may
notice some shakiness while we were adjusting the lens -- we'll blame it on our
lack of practice from the little hands-on time we had. Regardless, the NEX-VG10
certainly lived up to our expectation, and we look forward to hear what the
filming hobbyists think of this prosumer-level camcorder when it comes out in
September.
Update: commenter
aim120 dropped us a link to Sony's own sample clip. Enjoy!
My class is organized like a syllabus. I need a button for Unit 1, a button for Unit 2. Every time we do a workshop where one of our faculty demonstrates how we’ve adjusted an LMS to make it look like a syllabus, we see light bulbs go on all over the room. We have, over the years, called these workshops things like “Making Blackboard Work for You”, “Redesigning Blackboard”, and “The Interactive Syllabus”. Yesterday our presenters Andrea Petri and Laura Paciorek gave a workshop called “A New Wardrobe for Blackboard: Technical Basics of Instructional Design”. Andrea showed us his class, organized into units, with each unit a page full of links, all in one place for that unit.
We’ve got tutorials, like this one on creating an interactive syllabus in Blackboard by Pilar Hernández . We have a handout showing a logical chapter-based LMS menu. Laura Paciorek made a screencast on how to change the Blackboard menu .
Interesting article! I think one reason why many teachers keep on sticking to the defaults is because _precisely_ BB can be so flexible and do so many things, and there's a lot of templates available. This panoply of choices leads to decision fatigue on the teachers' part: "Which features should I use for presenting to my students? how can I package and so on... arrrrh I'll just stick with the defaults and customize another day."
(Can read more about decision fatigue at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html)
So, I think our training strategies would have to recognize and take into account this human tendency to choose the easy defaults, especially when mentally tired.
Defaults are bad? hmmm... My son started using the kiddy skate scooter about 4 mths ago and he does it like a pro now. When I bought the scooter, it came with 'default settings', i.e. all fixed up and ready to use. He had a go at it and we adjusted the height and widen the handles along the way. He grew more confident and I removed the trainer wheels. I cannot imagine when the scooter came without any 'default settings', i.e. 4 wheels, 2 bars, rubber tubes, etc, I will be quite frustrated setting it up from scratch and my son will be climbing all over me.
Defaults cannot be seen as something bad in my opinion. It gives new users or busy people something to start with, I personally appreciate that. When we design instructions, we provide foundations to get our learners started, building blocks or scaffolding their learning as they progress. A range of basic, intermediate or advanced instructional plans can also be presented later on.
Essentially, what are the characteristics of our learners or the users of BB? What do you think they need?
Demographics of our acad staffs for example are quite 'senior adult learners' (correct me if I am wrong). Do we think we want to present a blank BB page and tell them, 'hey, guess what? its all about customisation now, whatever you want, put it in.' No prize for guessing what their reactions will be.
On the other hand, there maybe a group of people who do not want to conform to defaults but to change things or customise their experiences. Nothing wrong with that too.
My point is, let's provide a range of options for users, we inform that there are default settings to get them started but there are also room for customisation for the adventurous. We want to be learner centric, hence customisation of experiences but we also do not want to leave anyone behind.
That said, I am going to change all my default passwords and user ids of my mobile.... no wonder banks have been calling me to ask if I needed loans.
wittyben on 03 Apr 13In the light of the coming appraisal, you might find this article useful :)
Ashley Tan on 04 Apr 13Good tips here. You do not have a specific self-appraisal component but the overall process allows a fair bit of reflection. Take the opportunity to take a big step forward!
