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Social Edge Media Empire®
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When we started considering relaunching Social Edge last year, we thought about launching a Social Edge Media Empire®! Radio! TV! Movies! We're very humble here on the Edge, but our aspirations know no boundaries. Sure, we're small, but we could take on the CNN's, NPR's & Sony's of the world!
Alas, then we remembered, we're a web community. We want to build conversations, not transmitter towers. The cost involved in setting up a TV station or a radio station? Astronomical. The range? Not so hot. Our audience here on the edge is global, and we want to expand that global reach, not constrain it to any one place.
Still, we knew we wanted to expand our offerings in new ways in order to incorporate audio and video. We added audio in our Peace Corps Entrepreneurs podcast series and video in Global X's series of X-Interviews. Yay! We had made a move towards being more media rich. Not an empire just yet, but hey, have you priced Colosseum sized real estate these days? Even in Second Life, virtual land is starting to gain in value.
Now, SocialEdge.org has global reach. Anybody on the internet can reach us no matter where in the world they are, government censorship not withstanding. (Is there a site out there that will tell you if your site is being blocked by a government? I would love to find one.) Still, Social Edge may be older than YouTube, but we don't get as much traffic as the average otter video does there. 5,546,204 views? 36,472 people marked it as a favorite? 7984 comments? I kid you not, this is what is more important to people than microfinance and social entrepreneurial scalability:
That's what we need here on the Edge: more videos of cute and fluffy animals! The lure of anthropomorphized aquatic mammals is the siren song of the 21st century.
So, we started our own YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/socialedge. Okay, I'll be honest, not a lot of people have visited our channels and watched our videos. Maybe we need to get a couple of social entrepreneurs to float in a pool holding hands. Any volunteers? We have a couple of subscribers thus far, but the main thing is that if you want to include an X-Interview in your blog, you can embed the YouTube code into your blog to do so. And it is free to post the videos, so if it never picks up much, we're not losing any money, just a couple of minutes each time we post a video.
For the next part of the expanding Social Edge Media Empire® we turned our attention to iTunes. As I detailed in an earlier post, I used a shareware app for the Mac called Feeder to create the XML feeds with iTunes extensions and then posted them to our site. I submitted them to Apple and we got picked up pretty quick. Peace Corps Entrepreneurs showed up the next morning, while the X-Interviews took about a week to show up. I was very impatient and emailed Apple to find out what was taking the second feed so long to get indexed! Nothing in particular, I just needed to be patient and voila! It showed up.
I had thought that it would link the two podcasts together on a single author's page, but that is something that Apple does manually if you ask them to. Our page is plain, but shows both our podcasts. Apple designs custom artist pages for the most popular podcasters, so maybe it'll be prettier someday. We've been very excited to see them rise on the charts, reaching as high as #3 & #9 on the non-profits sub-category list of top podcasts and #6 & #19 on the Governments & Organizations category. More rewarding still was to see the X-Interviews in the New Releases section of the iTunes Podcast home page.
As it turns out, it wasn't rocket science. If your organization has audio or video that you think a larger audience would benefit from than traditionally pass through your site, take a look at publishing on iTunes. It won't take long and is a small added step to your publishing process that could expose more people to your organization's purpose and mission. Just don't be too popular, okay? We like seeing ourselves listed in the top podcasts and don't need you coming in and kicking us out! Maybe in a year or two there will be enough podcasts from Social Edge members to warrant a new Social Entrepreneurs category in iTunes. Now that would be the start of a real Social Edge Media Empire®!
Alas, then we remembered, we're a web community. We want to build conversations, not transmitter towers. The cost involved in setting up a TV station or a radio station? Astronomical. The range? Not so hot. Our audience here on the edge is global, and we want to expand that global reach, not constrain it to any one place.
Still, we knew we wanted to expand our offerings in new ways in order to incorporate audio and video. We added audio in our Peace Corps Entrepreneurs podcast series and video in Global X's series of X-Interviews. Yay! We had made a move towards being more media rich. Not an empire just yet, but hey, have you priced Colosseum sized real estate these days? Even in Second Life, virtual land is starting to gain in value.
Now, SocialEdge.org has global reach. Anybody on the internet can reach us no matter where in the world they are, government censorship not withstanding. (Is there a site out there that will tell you if your site is being blocked by a government? I would love to find one.) Still, Social Edge may be older than YouTube, but we don't get as much traffic as the average otter video does there. 5,546,204 views? 36,472 people marked it as a favorite? 7984 comments? I kid you not, this is what is more important to people than microfinance and social entrepreneurial scalability:
That's what we need here on the Edge: more videos of cute and fluffy animals! The lure of anthropomorphized aquatic mammals is the siren song of the 21st century.
So, we started our own YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/socialedge. Okay, I'll be honest, not a lot of people have visited our channels and watched our videos. Maybe we need to get a couple of social entrepreneurs to float in a pool holding hands. Any volunteers? We have a couple of subscribers thus far, but the main thing is that if you want to include an X-Interview in your blog, you can embed the YouTube code into your blog to do so. And it is free to post the videos, so if it never picks up much, we're not losing any money, just a couple of minutes each time we post a video.
For the next part of the expanding Social Edge Media Empire® we turned our attention to iTunes. As I detailed in an earlier post, I used a shareware app for the Mac called Feeder to create the XML feeds with iTunes extensions and then posted them to our site. I submitted them to Apple and we got picked up pretty quick. Peace Corps Entrepreneurs showed up the next morning, while the X-Interviews took about a week to show up. I was very impatient and emailed Apple to find out what was taking the second feed so long to get indexed! Nothing in particular, I just needed to be patient and voila! It showed up.
I had thought that it would link the two podcasts together on a single author's page, but that is something that Apple does manually if you ask them to. Our page is plain, but shows both our podcasts. Apple designs custom artist pages for the most popular podcasters, so maybe it'll be prettier someday. We've been very excited to see them rise on the charts, reaching as high as #3 & #9 on the non-profits sub-category list of top podcasts and #6 & #19 on the Governments & Organizations category. More rewarding still was to see the X-Interviews in the New Releases section of the iTunes Podcast home page.
As it turns out, it wasn't rocket science. If your organization has audio or video that you think a larger audience would benefit from than traditionally pass through your site, take a look at publishing on iTunes. It won't take long and is a small added step to your publishing process that could expose more people to your organization's purpose and mission. Just don't be too popular, okay? We like seeing ourselves listed in the top podcasts and don't need you coming in and kicking us out! Maybe in a year or two there will be enough podcasts from Social Edge members to warrant a new Social Entrepreneurs category in iTunes. Now that would be the start of a real Social Edge Media Empire®!
