Tag Archives: Twitter

Fireside chats in Internet


The interesting story of fireside chats and how you can make one today

Exposing a politician to the questions of the general public is not something that new. President Roosevelt, starting in 1933, initiated a series of radio talks where the questions were directly made by the listeners.

Roosevelt addressing the nation in the radio firechat

Roosevelt addressing the nation in the radio firechat

Nowadays, something similar has been done by President Obama with his #askObama hashtag in Twitter, that is still being used today. So, even if today the digital media make it so easy to have a direct contact with the public personalities, it is quite curious to see that this trend was initiated more than 80 years ago.

Sources:

Terminología fireside chat, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fireside+chat an informal address by a political leader over radio or television, especially as given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt beginning in 1933.

historia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireside_chats

How to use emoji emoticos in Twitter for desktop (web version)


Ok, so you started seeing the emoji emoticons in tweets and would like to know how to do it?

Use the following keyboard combinations:

MAC: Command + Ctrl + Space

PC: More complex here, if you use Chrome, get the the free /chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromoji-emoji-for-google/cahedbegdkagmcjfolhdlechbkeaieki/details?hl=en-GB” title=”Chromoji plugin” target=”_blank”>Chromoji plug-in, which will let you view, copy and paste Mac-style emoji easily.

Use Emoji emoticons in Twitter Desktop

Use Emoji emoticons in Twitter Desktop

Prefer another browser? Woe is you: You’ll need to connect your Twitter to an app like iemoji.com,

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/04/14/how-to-use-emoji-on-twitter/

How can I publish a live Q&A session on the Internet?


This short guide will try to help you out if you are looking for a solution to publish live chat sessions of questions and answers

In the web you can also open the floor for questions!

In the web you can also open the floor for questions!


Thanks for reaching out our blog. Let’s see if we can give you some good piece of advice…

Who are you? why do you organise a Q&A?

The starting point that we assume is that you are a digital publisher or related to one as a consultant/advisor/contributor, and you are either active in your website, blog or have a Facebook page. You probably use Twitter as well.

What are you looking for?

The need you have to address is to organise, manage, and publish a session of questions and answers (commonly shortened as Q&A). Why do you need to organise a Q&A on-line? well, it may be that you are a journalist that would like to interview someone, or you are a community manager that is planning to invite someone to answer to your reader’s questions. It could also be the case that you work for a marketing department of a publishing house or a music producer and you are in charge of promoting the author, writer or singer who is making a new launch of a book or record.

There are many other situations that we have seen in our clients, where they have raised the need of publishing a digital Q&A:
– Promoting university courses: the directors of the postgraduate courses had to respond to the questions of the potential candidates
– An e-commerce portal, that wants to promote the writer or music band when launching the book or record
– An organiser of conferences that wants to warm-up the events publishing live chats with the guest speakers
– A pharmaceutical lab that invites experts on various matters to chat with the readers and sort out their questions publicly
– You have seen an AMA in Reddit and want to do a similar thing

Questions and Answers are managed through an intuitive panel in Dilmot.com

Questions and Answers are managed through an intuitive panel in Dilmot.com

How were you doing it so far?

You may have tried various methods such as:

Asking the readers to send their questions
– as comments in a post of your web or blog
– in Twitter, either addressing them to a @user or through a #hashtag
– via email
– as comments in a Facebook page

And then, asking the guest to answer:
– through a regular chat platform
– by email
– or dictate the answers to someone who will type them for her

And the live event will be either not possible or cumbersome. I.e. those systems does not connect questions and answers automatically, manual copy and paste is needed. Or if it works as a chat it will not remain published at the end of the Q&A session.

All of these alternatives can do the job somehow, but have one major problem: they are not integrated with the system that you will use to answer the questions. These solutions require you to copy and paste the questions into the platform that you will use to answer them. If you have a platform at all!! in many cases, people will just send the questions to the guest via e-mail or read them loud and type them as the guest gives an answer.

Why not use a Q&A sessions platform that simplifies your publishing workflow?

Yes, that’s right, we mean to use a custom software that has been designed specifically to do the job:
Receive all the questions in one place, no matter where they come from
Allow easy moderation
Allow to manage the guest participation within the same platform, so the guest will see the questions and will be able to respond seamlessly, in an easy interface
Integrate with social networks

Well, the news are that such software exists already and it is a web application called dilmot.com.

Use Dilmot to promote a music group or singer

Use Dilmot to make live chat Q&A’s

Dilmot is a web publishing software. You can open an account for free and give it a try! Create a stream (this is how Dilmot refers to the flow of questions and answers). It is similar to liveblogging or a chat. But it is designed to do one thing well: set up a web page, invite a guest, receive questions, and let the guest answer these questions, while they can be previously moderated. That simple.

Besides, you can leverage on the viral power of Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter: Readers will be able to send their questions by using a hashtag that you decide as the administrator of the Q&A stream.
Facebook: Publish the Q&A session inside your Facebook page, using a simple iframe
Facebook & Twitter: Readers will be able to use their credentials in order to identify themselves when they send their question.

A guide to Dilmot for experienced bloggers

Dilmot works in a similar way to a blogging platform like wordpress.com or blogger.com in the sense that when you create your account there will be a home page created for you, and it will be a subdomain of dilmot.com, just like WordPress or Blogger do it.

Again, like in a blogging platform, you can create posts in your account. But in Dilmot they are not called posts, they are called streams. Stream is the name chosen because it is a sequence of questions and answers. And this sequence of questions and answers are shown like a real-time chat. There is no need to refresh the browser page, because the new questions and the new answers will be shown as they are published by the guest.

In the admin page, the account owner can create or delete streams, and for each stream define the title, the guest and generate a secret token access url to send to the guest. This makes organising the event a breeze, since the guest need not any sign-up or special requirement. Once she has the access url, then the guest can see the stream panel with the questions expected for her to answer. The procedure at this point is very simple: Click “answer” within the question that she is going to answer and save, so it gets published.

A single webpage and the possibility to embed it inside your own web

Why not make a video Q&A?

We have also launched a new web app to publish live video questions and answers using Google Hangouts and other platforms such as Livestream or Ustream. The reality is that organising a live webcam broadcast is more complex than a live chat Q&A, the main reason being that video requires higher bandwidth and skills to make a good recording. Anyway if you have the right support for the guest, the bandwidth and the time required to set all up, we invite you to open an account at Qstion, the web application to make live Q&A’s.

Is that all?

Yes, this is already a long story to convey the message: live Q&A sessions are easy to publish with Dilmot. Go ahead, it is free, and you will only need 2 minutes to see and learn how it works. Good luck!

As always, let us know your feedback via comments or contact us directly. We are more than happy to help you out with your project!

Publish on-line Q&A’s with Dilmot


The time has come to use an on-line software to organize and moderate interviews (Q&A’s) on your website or blog. Dilmot makes it very easy in only four steps

These are the instructions to get started with your Dilmot account:

Create an account

1 – Visit http://www.dilmot.com
2 – Select “Create Account”
3 – Choose your account name, e.g. “springfieldnews”
4 – You will receive an email and you have to click the link to confirm the account

Once you log in as administrator, you will notice that there are two items in the top menu: Streams and Account.

Dilmot top menu

Dilmot top menu

Account Settings

You may, as an option:
– upload an account logo
– upload an image (“avatar“) that will be used for the moderator/admin when she interacts in the stream chat
– put a description of what your account publications will be about (normally this can be the description of your medium)
– put the timezone

Dilmot account settings

Dilmot account settings

Create Q&A’s (Streams)

This web app is used to publish Q&A’s. In the application these are called “streams”. A stream is a sequence of questions and answers.

Each stream is held in a dedicated web page, where the readers will see the form to send their questions. Below the form, the Q&A will be published in real-time. No need to refresh the browser.

The Q&A can be embedded into other website. As a simple rule to remember, you just need to add the text “/embed” to the end of the url of the public stream, and you can use an iframe code like the example below:

<iframe src="http://mysubdomain.dilmot.com/streams/title-of-the-qna/embed"width="100%" height="800" scrolling="yes" frameborder="0"></iframe>

This iframe can be embedded into the page of WordPress, or any other content management system such as Joomla, Drupal, etc. And of course into any standard html website.

The cool thing about Dilmot is that you can manage a guest easily.

In the stream settings page, you may:

  • assign an image to the interview Q&A as well as to the guest (avatar). The difference is that the stream image will be shown in the lists of streams, and also next to the public form to send questions. The image assigned to the guest, or “guest avatar” will be shown next to the bubble where the guest responds. If there is no guest avatar set, then the stream image will be used as avatar, in reduced “thumbnail” size. If there is not even a stream image set, then a blank avatar will be shown.
  • For the guest to access the application and respond to the questions, you only need to send her the link that is given to you automatically by the application. You can find this link in the section “Guest information”. This is a secret link that has the password incorporated, so do not share it with anyone other than the person that will answer the questions.
Dilmot guest information section

Dilmot guest information section

Manage and moderate the interview Q&A

As soon as you create the stream you will be ready to receive questions from the readers. In the Panel page you will be able to delete the ones that the Guest should not be able to see.

When the Guest enters the application through the link that you have sent her, the only thing that she needs to do is click “answer”, type it and publish it. Besides answering the questions, it is also possible to write comments. This is useful, for example, to publish a welcome and farewell message.

The readers will see a page where they see on top the new questions, as they are being answered.

Once the administrator considers that the Q&A has come to an end, she can click “Close” stream. This can only be done by the administrator, not the Guest.

Once the stream is closed, the form used to send questions will disappear, and the questions will be sorted in reverse order, that is, the first one will be the oldest, like in a newspaper interview. On the other hand, while the Q&A is open, the last question published is shown on top, as if it was a Twitter stream.

One Q&A (stream) can last as long as you want. It can be open for hours, days, or months. It is a continuous thread of questions and answers. It can be used as a tool for live events, but you can also use it as an on-going page that is built along time.

After you close the interview, you may open it again at any time. And the form to send questions will reappear, and the sorting method will be again, “most recent answered question on top”.

***

With this quick guide you will be able to publish your own interviews and Q&A’s, solve readers’ or clients’ questions, create faq pages or a forum with experts. It’s up to you what you would like to do with Dilmot!

And if you want to see further details, check out the Administrator and Moderator Manual for the Q&A

Should you have any question, please get in touch with us by writing a comment to this post or directly at http://www.dilmot.com/contact

How to post automatically images from Instagram in your blog or website


Managing your on-line marketing efforts can be a nightmare if you don’t use the productivity tools out there.

We have talked already about tintup.com, that allows you to embed social content in your site easily. Today we are going to explore if it is possible to automatically post on Instagram.

Instagram feed of Spanish&Surf. Courtesy of spanishandsurf.net school

Instagram feed of Spanish&Surf. Courtesy of spanishandsurf.net school

Looking at the discussion in this post http://www.warriorforum.com/social-media-marketing-forum/859029-there-way-schedule-posts-instagram.html, it is very true that what is the point of automating posts in Instagram if this network is thought to drive engagement and therefore if users don’t visit it and it becomes full of robots (automated scripts) then it would not make any sense. In this other post in StackOverflow they also discuss if Instagram makes this available via API, and the answer is again, no. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21641298/how-does-posts-so-post-directly-to-the-instagram-api. Although they find some workaround for programmers.

But the discussion makes a lot of sense, since there are some networks that do allow scheduled posts such as Twitter. For example, if you use the social network manager Hootsuite, you can autoschedule posts, as explained here: http://blog.hootsuite.com/autoschedule/.

So, coming back to the question that titles this post, is it possible to automate Instagram posting?

Yes and no. Instagram is not putting this option in its API, but

If this then that

I have checked this amazing tool to see if there is any recipe available that posts to Instagram automatically. And I have not found it. When looking at the Instagram related recipes, there are a lot, but all of them will use instagram as the source of an action (this links shows what I mean https://ifttt.com/recipes?channel=instagram
There are other ways of doing it such as ifttt.com (If this then that).

Latergram

This service allows you to schedule posting images in your Instagram account. It is free and at this moment it is available both as a web application and as an iOS app. http://www.latergram.me/.

It is not fully automated though, because you have to authorise the moment of publishing the picture. Probably the Instagram API is not allowing this degree of automation, but at least you can get a warning about when to post.

Post.so

This service used to make it possible to post to Instagram at certain hours automatically. But today it is not possible. Only posting to Twitter, VK and Pinterest. Check out https://postso.com/

If you read this post, https://boostlikes.com/blog/2013/12/automatically-post-instagram-account, it seems that it is possible, but truly it is not anymore.

Schedugr.am

They do offer this possibility. Check out http://schedugr.am/. It is not a free service, but it may be interesting for you if you are posting into Instagram professionally.