One thing I frequently lament about the cause marketing field is that there just aren’t enough practitioners blogging about their work. After Selfishgiving.com, Causerelatedmarketing.biz and the Cone Blog, the pickings get pretty slim. (Although folks like Steve Drake, Olivia Khalili, Scotty Henderson, Brian Powell, Noland Hoshino and Mike Swenson are certainly great contributors.)
Part of the reason I think people don’t blog is that no matter how easy it is to start and update a blog, a lot of people still see it as a lot of work.
But I’m here today to tell you that not only is not hard to start and publish your own blog, it’s downright easy. And for that I think we all owe a debt of thanks to the blogging platform Posterous, which launched in July 2008.
Behind the times as I am, I only discovered it recently when I was looking for a quick way to get a personal blog up and running for things that were happening in my life outside of cause marketing (e.g. gardening, my wife’s burgeoning pastry career, and, oh, cause marketing). I’ve been truly impressed, and, if I hadn’t gone through all the time and expense of setting up my Selfish Giving blog on Wordpress, I would be posting on a Posterous platform today.
I liked Posterous so much I used it as the platform to launch the blog for my nonprofit and have continued to be impressed.
Here’s how Posterous makes it easier for you to join the ranks of cause marketing bloggers.
Email posts right from your inbox. Nothing to log into or learn. Just write your post and email it to post@posterous.com. Have an image you want to include? No problem. Just copy it into your email or attach the image. Posterous will post that too.
You’re not limited to text. You can email Posterous pictures, video, audio. Check out my nonprofit’s blog as I’ve been experimenting with different media. You know which one I love? To post a video from Youtube (or a whole set of pictures from Flickr) to Posterous I just need to email them the URL and they do the rest.
This is great news because you’re not limited to text! You can talk about cause marketing any way you want and Posterous makes it easy to share it with the world.
Owning an iPhone makes it even easier to use Posterous. I installed the PicPosterous app on my iPhone so I can easily capture photos and video and upload them to my blog. Like me, you’ll start to see cause marketing everywhere and you’ll have an easy tool to contribute to the conversation.
When you post to Posterous you post to everything. The autoposting feature on Posterous automatically pings Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Delicious, Flickr and a host of other sites. I enjoy posting to Posterous and do it more and more because it’s not another site to update. It is the site that updates all the other sites you’re on. This is a real time saver.
So, tell me again: why aren’t you blogging about cause marketing?
Joe,
I'll be the first to say that Posterous rocks! I've been using it for almost a year and love it – as a way to post personal items or as a way to post items that are "two short for a blog post, but too long for a tweet".
There are, however, several reasons why I wouldn't recommend it as a main blog for large organizations:
*If you also want to include a lot of functionality on your blog (mailing lists, widgets, links to websites, blog rolls, product lists, news feeds).
*If you want to highly customize the blogs functionality (drop-down navigation menus, rotating images)
*If you want to brand your blog with a similar look and feel to your main website.
*If you want total control over your content.
*If you want to rank in search engines.
I will say that Posterous *is* perfect for a secondary blog. For example, a blog that features discussions of events (like Halloweentown) could be a secondary blog, while the main blog about BMC would be WordPress.Org
Just my two cents.
John
John, your two cents is worth a lot! Thank you.
@nolandhoshino emailed me this comment:
I'm like a squirrel in the woods. I'm drawn to things shiny and new —
especially in new media. I think I started Posterous
<http://nolandhoshino.posterous.com/> shortly after you did (If it's good
enough for Joe it's good enough for me) and watching John Haydon's video. I
agree with you on the cool things you can do with Posterous, i.e., email
posts from your computer or phone, spread post across the social media
universe, great media uploads, share on Posterous (my favorite feature),
etc. Plus, Posterous posts ranks high in SEO searches. I Googled my name and
my Posterous ranks high on the first page! What Posterous lacks are theme
choices. Unless you know how to write your own CSS or HTML script, you have
only a hand-full of themes to choose from their library.
science panel 103 compared believed climatic activity depletion [url=http://omgl.org]gun allows suggest[/url] http://www.cenbank.org