January 31, 2008

Centralizing Your Social Media Content: Integrating Activity Streams into your Blog

Six Apart, the developer of the Movable Type (MT) blogging platform that I use for Great Dance, has introduced a new plugin called Action Streams. [via ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Mashable]

This new plugin is similar to Facebook's News Feed that allows you and your friends to see your latest activities and interactions on this popular social networking site. Except with the new MT plugin, you can add this aggregation tracking capability to your blog for others to view and subscribe to.

So, I can install the plugin and then visitors to my blog can see my latest activity on:

- Blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter, WordPress, Blogger)
- Social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn)
- Social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us)
- Photo and video sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube)
- Calendar and event tracking, and (Upcoming)
- Other social media sites

There are already many widgets that allow you to add content from the above social media sources to your blog. For example, you can embed a video widget on your blog that displays your latest YouTube videos (See VodPod, for example). But with Action Streams, you can aggregate and organize your choice of multiple media sources.

Here are examples linked to from MT news story of how Action Streams can be used:

- Byrne Resse
- Michael Sippey
- David Recordon
- Group activity stream from Movable Type

The Value of Action Streaming for the Dance Community

If you are an active user of social media sites, then this type of action streaming tool, whether you use the new MT plugin or upcoming similar widgets, may prove worthwhile.

I have not yet used this MT plugin. I will soon and then I'll write about it more or just install it.

Here are some possible scenarios for how you could use activity streaming:

Fundraising: I will be writing more about online fundraising for dancers. For now, take a look at this successful fundraising effort from Boston-based choreographer Amanda Gravel. If you are raising money for a favorite charity, your dance company or outreach efforts, making it easy for your blog readers to see your latest photos and videos on sites such as Flickr and YouTube can be very worthwhile as a way to motivate more and larger donations. With the Action Streaming plugin, your site visitors would be instantly notified when you post your latest multimedia content.

Performance promotion: There has been a large increase in the number of dancers and dance companies who use social networking sites as well as video and images sites. But the process of aggregating and centralizing new content and updates is time-consuming. With the Action Streaming widget, all of your activity on these social media sites is centralized and updated so that your audiences and blog readers have quick access to the latest developments. I think the end result is that your audiences are better connected to what you're doing and are thus more likely to attend your performances. I think that this plugin would be especially fun for promoting flash mobs and site-specific performances.

Dance instructor and dance event promotion: Following-up on my post yesterday on how dance teachers can use video and social media, I think action streaming can be valuable for dance instructors who want to share their latest activities, provide helpful content and ensure that students are motivated to attend upcoming classes and dance events (parties, practices, workshops, etc.) In addition to the video, pictures and blog aggregation, dance instructors and dance event promoters can also integrate updates from event sites such as Upcoming so that their students can conveniently subscribe to your latest event information.

Public relations: Last week I wrote about how dance publicists can embrace social media press releases (SMPR). This idea of aggregating activity streaming is very similar to the idea of SMPR where you're pulling together content from a number of different social media services. This action streaming plugin may be a good addition to SMPR or could prove to be redundant.

User-generated content creation: Would you like to encourage your audience to submit their own video content? Maybe you could upload a video of a dance routine and encourage others to videotape their version of your routine and upload it to YouTube. With the activity streaming plugin, you could then pull this video content into your blog as well. Since more visitors to your website or blog would see the submitted user videos, you would likely increase the level of participation. Just to clarify, as I mentioned above, there are already widgets that allow you to post YouTube videos on your website or blog or social networking pages. The difference is that with the action streaming plugin, you can aggregate content from multiple sources. So if you are also twittering about your user-generated video content, then your visitors can see the contributed videos and your twitter posts at the same time - it's just a higher level of aggregation that makes it easier for people to track what you're doing and stay engaged.

Group aggregation of activity feeds: Many dance companies and other dance organizations do not consist of a single person. So in some cases, you'll want to aggregate the activity feeds of multiple people for others to track. According to the overview of this plugin, if you manage a community with MT (I don't know what MT means by "community"), you can publish a summary of all community members' action feeds. I could see this group functionality being especially valuable.

Conclusion

While this activity streaming tool can only be implemented by a small number of people at this point, I think its availability is part of a larger trend toward the aggregation and distribution of content and interactions across a wide-range of social media sites and services. Over time, I think that more and more dancers and dance companies will move to this integrated, distributed model as opposed to one focused primarily or exclusively on a dedicated website.

In the end, the quality and value of this type of aggregation comes down to the whether you create engaging media and develop interesting social networks. The tools by themselves are interesting, but they are only going to benefit individuals and organizations that create lively and captivating interactions and content.

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