Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

Lately I’ve taken to using Flock, the Social Web Browser, because it consolidates and simplifies my social web lifestyle. Today, Flock just got better.

For Earth Day 2008, Flock launched the Eco-Edition of the Flock browser that delivers the latest environmental and sustainable living content to eco-minded social media and web users. The Eco-Edition comes prepopulated with the best news, photos, videos, and feeds from leading eco-content partners on the Web,delivering fresh content from Grist, GroovyGreen, Treehugger, PlanetGreen, Sprig, Current and other top eco brands daily. Furthermore, Flock will donate 10% of the proceeds of the Eco-Edition browser at the end of 2008, and as a recognition of the power of community to create change, will allow users of the Eco-Edition to select the recipient of this donation.

The Flock Eco-Edition Browser, is available as a free software download for Mac, PC and Linux at www.flock.com/eco.

Why Use Flock?

If you are a social media news hound, blogger, Twitterer, are active on multiple social networks, and depend heavily social bookmarking to manage your favorite links, Flock will help you consolidate all your social web activities into a single dashboard.

• You can see updates from friend on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter in the Flock people sidebar
• You can simultaneously favorite your urls to the Flock browser and to del.icio.us.
• You can post to multiple blogs from the same interface
• It does Technorati tags for you
• You can drag and drop Flickr images & YouTube videos into your blog
• Manage your favorite news feeds

Technorati Tags: flock eco-edition, flock social web browser, social media, web 2.0, blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, lorna li

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Last week’s Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Maryrose Dunton, the Head of User Experience at YouTube,, who spoke about YouTube’s Nonprofit Program.The YouTube Nonprofit Program, is an in-kind donation by YouTube to the nonprofit sector that’s worth about $20 million. Currently available to established 501(c)(3)s, YouTube offers participating nonprofits:

• A premium branded channel - some environmental nonprofits that have done a good job with this include Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. The ability to upload videos of any length. Currently the limit on video length is 10 minutes.

• Rotation into the “Promoted Videos” section on YouTube’s homepage.
• Listing in the Nonprofit Channels and Nonprofit Video areas
• The ability to collect donations using Google Checkout (with no processing fee).
• The option to participate in the user partner program, which allows you to show partner ads on video - and share the ad revenue. However, there is currently no way to filter ads, which may not work for some organizations.

YouTube has 30 million visitors daily and over 100 million videos are viewed each day. By connecting nonprofits to the world’s largest online video community, the YouTube Nonprofit program will allow these organizations tap into a significant pool of potential small donors. While large nonprofits are able to receive 10-15% of donations from online fundraising, smaller organizations have the most difficulty establishing a web presence. By offering a dedicated channel on YouTube, YouTube’s Nonprofit Program hopes to empower smaller organizations to significantly expand their reach. Now its just the matter of these, often, short-staffed nonprofits finding the manpower to manage their YouTube presence.

YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofits

Maryrose recommended these tips to help nonprofits engage successfully with the YouTube community:

1. Keep it fresh, keep it short. Best not longer than 10 minutes

2. Be genuine, no public service announcements (PSAs)

3. Engage and interact with the community - have a dialogue, allow people to post video comments, be sure to respond to comments
4. Create a call to action

5. Invest in your channel - update content, make sure links and videos work

7. Do not fear comments, ratings, related videos - while you can moderate user engagement, do not disable the commenting or rating features as this tends to upset the community

New Plans for Nonprofits on YouTube

New developments coming down the pipeline include:

1. Extending the program to include international nonprofits.

2. Incorporating more calls to action that are important to nonprofits, petitions, signup forms.

3. Improving nonprofit discovery on YouTube’s website.

Technorati Tags: maryrose dunton, net tuesday, net2, youtube nonprofit program, youtube nonprofit channel, lorna li

by Lorna Li

Search engine marketers, bloggers, and social media fanatics wore their favorite hats at Search Marketing Salon’s “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Launch party at the chic and intimate Otis Lounge in San Francisco. Tips were swapped, secrets were traded, and product ideas were bounced around that would take search marketing to the next level.

Forest Kolb, Sharon Lin, and Julie Blaustein.

“We need a Google Adwords Editor that also includes Yahoo and MSN on a single UI,” stated Clay Schulenburg, Interactive Marketing Manager for Healthline. “This will take search to a whole new level.”

F*ck the Yahoo bulk upload, is what I say to that!

Hear that, web entrepreneurs? That’s big bucks for you!

Jacob Morgan, Search Marketing Alchemist and Nicolette Toussaint

Search-obsessed bloggers that dropped by included Michael Brito, who writes a fantastic blog about Social Media & Conversation Marketing, Lisa Whelan social media queen on Vox, Jim Yu on how to be a Search Marketing and SEO Maven, and Andy Kaufman, the real estate blogger and Twitter king.

William Gauthier, Alicia Lin, Damon White, and Lorna Li.

e-Storm’s William Gauthier, Lisa McGuire, and Daniel Riveong

Leon Krishayana and lovely lady in black beret

Leon Krishnayana of iSpionage, offers a technology platform that helps search engine marketers track competitors’ PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ads daily. It allows you to see the ad copy, keywords, and average rank on the major search engines side by side. Very handy indeed.

Vera Belenky and Alex Gamburg

Other attendees included Mark Fiske, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Gap, Pete Park of web advertising agency Vectorhaus, Yan Rozovsky VP of LeadClick Media, Jason Hart of the search-focused Online Marketing agency Domain Methods, Jeff Rohrs, VP of search marketing agency ExactTarget, Leo Haryono, Head of Natural Search of Shopping.com, Josh Pierry and Clay Shulenburg of Healthline, Biren Talati, of Sandalstore.com, Peter Koontz, Founder and CTO of Sprenzy, Vera Belenky of Walmart.com, Alex Gamburg Search Marketing Director of Trulia, specializing in real estate search, Gabriel Carrejo, the original sinner, Forest Kolb of BizzFlip who has cracked the secret of the Digg first page, Sharon Lin, Online Marketer for Web 2.0 companies, Irina Greenman, and Danny Cheung, who is about to revolutionize the world of WordPress publishing the Good Magazine way.

More pictures can be viewed on the Search Marketing Salon Flickr album.

Join Search Marketing Salon on Facebook!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: searchmarketing salon, e-Storm, iSpionage, Domain Methods, Good Magazine, Sandalstore.com, Michael Brito, Andy Kaufman, Jim Yu, Lisa Whelan, Sharon Lin, Josh Pierry, Clay Shulenburg, Peter Koontz, Jeff Rohrs, Biren Talati, Jason Hart, Gabriel Carrejo, Pete Park, Mark Fiske, Yan Rozovsky, Leo Haryono, Leon Krishnayana, Vera Belenky, Nicolette Toussaint, Lorna Li, Jacob Morgan