Technology Archives - Outdoor Writers Association of America

When, how to tag on social media

OWAA Developer — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 23:08:15 +0000

BY TAYLOR WYLLIE
It used to be that all it took to maximize social media was knowing how and when to post something. Since then we have entered an era where mastering social media is a profession within itself. Posts likely show up in your feed that have been carefully crafted in phrasing, timing and subject matter.
And they can look complex too — with seemingly random highlighted names of both people and companies.
This is tagging. It’s impactful, will keep you relevant and is surprisingly easy to master.
Think of tagging as bringing relevant people or companies into a conversation, like cc’ing someone on an e-mail that concerns them, or talking about someone while they’re in the room.
To get into specifics, you should absolutely tag:
When you mention a person, or company.
Don’t overthink social media. When you have a main subject that’s tagable, tag them! But don’t be too liberal — aim for one main subject and one tag in any given post. As journalists, you already know to keep your writing as concise and simple as possible. The same applies to social media.
When you’re citing your source.
Think of this as the social media form of attribution. Tag someone if you quote or
paraphrase them in any way.
When you want to grow your social media account.
Any person or business you tag will see your post in their notifications. There’s a good possibility they will retweet or favorite that post, which makes it available to all of their followers. The more people exposed to your account, the more replies, followers, comments and likes you’ll receive.
This becomes truer when the person you tag has a large following. That’s often why people choose to tag businesses or companies with a substantial fan base.
When you are being paid to.
There are people who are paid to promote products or brands. Usually it’s apparent when a post is sponsored. There will be a coupon code, a glowing review or other obvious indicators. These people, too, are usually professionals or semi-professionals in their fields: athletes, models or social media personalities.
How to tag:

On Facebook:
Tagging people on Facebook is as straightforward as social media gets. Start typing in the name of whoever it is you would like to tag. Their account will pop up in a little gray box beneath your cursor. Click on the pop-up or hit enter and you’re done.
On Twitter, Instagram and most other social media:
Type in the @ sign and their handle. Voilà, they’re tagged.Know the difference between a reply and a mention:
Twitter has very specific lingo. In the Twitterverse, a mention is when you tag someone in the body of your Tweet (after at least one character, whether it be a space, period, letter or word). It’s called a reply if you tag someone at the beginning of a tweet. A reply is directed specifically toward that person or business. Essentially it’s a digital conversation between two people. Only the sender, recipient and people who follow both accounts will be able to see a reply.
The same applies on Instagram.
If a person doesn’t have a social media account on the platform you’re
using:
You have two options. You can turn their name into a hashtag or use their name
without a tag.Not everything concerning the digital age has to be complicated. So go forth and tag away. Then maybe we can talk about analytics.

— Taylor Wyllie was an OWAA intern and is a student at the University of Montana, studying journalism and environmental studies. She’s worked for the independent student newspaper, The Montana Kaimin and her work has appeared on Montana PBS, Montana Public Radio and in the Missoulian.

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Recording audio on your iPhone

OWAA Developer — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 22:21:50 +0000

BY PAUL QUENEAU
You know there’s an app for that?
Those seven words have become cliché in this age of do-everything smart phones.
Make that almost do-everything. One of the more fundamental telephone accessories for outdoor writers — the ability to record an interview — remains elusive even on the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ big 2007 unveiling of the first iPhone.
I have long employed Radio Shack’s finest $5 handset splitter to tape interviews on my office landline, first recording them to mini-cassette and now to MP3 tracks using my handheld digital recorder. Easy enough.
Unfortunately, my cutting-edge iPhone won’t allow me to record a single phone call to its internal memory. I’ve researched the available “apps for that,” but all seem to involve per-minute subscription fees and offloading of audio to a third-party site. Way more complicated than it seems to me it needs to be.
The hang-up may lie in the legality of recording calls, which I’ve got a hunch scares off app developers since in some states callers are required by law to notify anyone they wish to tape. (Always remember to ask!)
I instead devised a somewhat ludicrous hack using my Macbook. Since Apple introduced OS X “Yosemite,” I’ve had the option to place calls on my computer using my iPhone’s cell connection over a Wi-Fi network (phone has to be running iOS 8 or later).
I do this by entering any phone number I want to call into my computer’s contacts app, which then displays a “call” button over the listing. Once clicked, the calls begin, and I use a Mac screen-capture app called Screenflow that also allows me to record computer audio. I use my Apple headphones with a built-in microphone, and in the end get an audio file of the conversation that’s about as high-fidelity as you could possibly get over a phone.
Granted, Screenflow costs $99, but never fear: there is a free download called Soundflower that allows you to record computer audio using Apple’s built-in Quicktime app. I use Screenflow because I already had it installed at the time, and Soundflower takes a couple more steps to get it to work, but it is a good option for an admittedly complex route.
Freelancer Aaron Teasdale has used a somewhat similar setup to record his interviews using Skype, his speakerphone and QuickTime’s audio recording feature.
But wasn’t the original goal of all this to keep it all within our smartphones? For that, a viable option is the Google Voice app, which allows one to record conversation with a simple key punch. The big caveat is it only works for incoming calls—a clumsy hurdle to have to ask every interviewee to call you right back, especially on a cold call.
From what I can gather, smartphone users on the Android side of things have an
easier time recording calls using free apps such as Smart Voice Recorder.
On the iPhone side, though, the best in-phone option appears to currently be the $10 TapeACall Pro app. It creates a three-way call between you, the caller and the TapeACall service. This creates a downloadable MP3 file, which your phone can grab off the company’s servers after the conversation. That doesn’t carry the same peace of mind as having a recorder there right in front of you, but probably your best option at this point. After a year, TapeACall requires an annual $8 fee.
Teasdale said he’s used this app rather than his Skype workaround in recent months, and largely likes it.
“It works well, but the setup process for each call isn’t exactly intuitive,” he said. “I have to refresh myself on the procedure each time. But it does make quality recordings. I still wish there was something simpler, but it’s the best I found.”
Another iPhone option is the NoNotes, which is free for first the 20 minutes, but costs 25 cents per minute after that, or $7 per month. One advantage, though, is that it includes a built-in competitively priced transcription service ($0.75/minute or $40/hour) to save you the task of putting words to text.
Whatever smartphone you use, it doesn’t appear that the level of ease-of-use we’ve all become so accustomed to has yet made it to primetime. That could all change with the next version of any competing phone’s operation system, but until then, we can rest assured that foreign governments and state intelligence agencies have long ago gotten this cell phone recording thing down pat, and like drones, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before it makes the leap to the consumer side.
— Paul Queneau is an editor for Bugle magazine at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in Missoula, Montana. He is also a freelance and photographer with credits in Outdoor Life, Montana Quarterly and other publications.

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The appeal of magazine apps

OWAA Developer — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 22:02:56 +0000

BY RUSSELL ROE
Our art director at Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine likes to put “Easter eggs” in the app version of our magazine as a way to amuse readers (and, truthfully, himself) with little surprises. One month, a skunk sprayed at the screen when readers turned to the feature story on the animals. Another month, an “ouch” appeared on the screen and was heard through the device’s speakers if readers touched a prickly plant.
These little extras offer readers pleasant surprises as they swipe through the content of our magazine. And they’re something that can’t be accomplished in print. Apps can be expensive and time-consuming to produce, but they can be fun, too, and offer another way to reach readers and present content in new forms.
We launched our app in January 2015 for three reasons:

We wanted to be positioned for a digital future. We don’t think print is going anywhere anytime soon, but the world is increasingly digital and we wanted to be a part of it. We also want our advertisers ready when digital advertising exceeds print advertising. We want to create value not just for our readers, but for our advertisers by giving them new ways to reach their customers.
We wanted a new revenue stream. We figured that by offering a digital magazine, we could reach new readers who weren’t interested in print. We thought we might lose a few print readers who wouldn’t switch to digital, but figured we’d gain more new readers who were out in the digital marketplace already. Those new digital readers would provide us money we weren’t getting otherwise.
We wanted to reach younger readers. Our audience is old and getting older. Our reader surveys tell us that. Younger Americans are reading on their computers and on their phones, and we knew we needed to go where young readers are in order to reach them.

It’s an uncertain time for magazine apps. The rise of tablets gave magazines a lot of hope for expanding audiences, and many new tools have come along to help magazines produce digital editions. But it hasn’t been smooth sailing, and some magazines have already pulled back after dipping a toe in the digital waters.
Apple got rid of Newsstand, where most of the digital magazines lived. That means magazine apps now live on a person’s home screen instead of clumped together with other magazines, a position that may give them more visibility or get them lost amid the clutter.
Despite that uncertainty, it’s important be in the digital marketplace.
Magazines can start small and build a presence as time goes by. Many publications start with creating digital replicas of their content. There’s software out there to convert a print magazine to digital form, and producing such a version doesn’t cost that much. The digital pages look just like the print pages, shrunken down to fit on a tablet. One drawback is that readers looking for digital magazines expect more features than a replica can provide (a replica is especially hard to read on a phone). A replica’s clunkiness can turn readers off, though replicas can be enhanced with videos and hyperlinks. A replica at least gets your publication into the world of digital products, and that’s saying something.
Stepping up from the world of replicas means developing a more fully featured app using Adobe digital publishing products or app producers such as Twixl or Mag-Plus. This will take more time and money but will provide the reader with a more satisfying digital reading experience, with photos and type sized appropriately to suit the device. The costs rise dramatically in terms of staff time and software expenses when stepping up from a replica. But the payoffs can be big.
These apps provide new ways to present content. Videos, slide shows and audio enhancements can be easily integrated with articles, dramatically expanding the storytelling possibilities.
In the first app issue Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine published, we ran a story about wolf snails, which hunt and eat other types of snails. After hours of experimentation, our art director finally created a snail to crawl across the screen, complete with slime trail for the digital version of the story. The result is a little piece of interactivity that adds a bit of levity to the page.
For an article on river songs, we enlisted the help of some Texas singer-songwriters to record videos of a couple of notable Texas river songs mentioned in the story. The videos were placed directly into the app version of the story, providing enhanced content that print readers were not able to get. For the same article, we asked our in-house artist to provide illustrations and cover art. We shot a time-lapse video of him creating his artwork, and the video became a key part of the app experience. The app also linked to a Spotify playlist of dozens of Texas river songs.
Perhaps the best example showing the full use of the app’s capabilities came in an article we did on favorite bird songs. In print, an article on bird songs can do only so much. In the app, it came alive. The print version featured photos of the birds along with a description of the bird song. The app version provided the same, but came with an important extra: a recorded version of the bird song so that readers could hear what the bird sounded like in addition to reading about it. The ability to hear songs of birds, such as the canyon wren and brown thrasher, provided readers a much richer and fuller experience, and that is what we are always striving to achieve.
— Russell Roe is managing editor for Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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Using Instagram for instant career success

OWAA Developer — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 20:08:21 +0000

BY PHILIP QUADE
For awhile, I resisted joining Instagram. My climbing partner insisted I check it out, saying it might help me in my recent foray into climbing photography, but I wasn’t big into social media. I didn’t get it. I joined in 2014, but it wasn’t until I took a road trip last May that I finally learned how to harness the platform to help my photography business. In only a few months it helped me go from an unknown in the world of climbing photography, to publishing in national magazines and working with some of the industry’s biggest brands and athletes.
I picked up my first digital camera when I was about 20 years old. Originally I wanted to shoot wildlife. I envisioned myself tracking snow leopards in the Himalayan mountains, or something equally as rare in a similarly exotic location.
I discovered climbing while working at the Calgary retail store Out There Adventure Centre in 2013. I was already used to carrying my camera with me everywhere outside, so without thinking, I started taking it on weekend climbing trips. The things I loved about climbing myself — the movement, environment, power and precision — also made me love photographing the sport.
I realized that climbing photography was its own niche in the outdoor world and people actually did it for work. That became my dream.
I hit the road in May with a plan to visit some of the best- and least- known climbing destinations in North America. My plan was to climb — a lot — but also build my climbing photography portfolio.
A newbie to the niche of climbing photography, I turned to Instagram for networking and the results were astounding.
As a climbing photographer, if I have no climbers, I have no shoot. So my first steps were to line up subjects and areas to photograph. With a rough road map in place, I searched Instagram using hashtags and location tags to find climbers in the areas I traveled. I gradually sifted through photos and accounts — sometimes hundreds or thousands, sometimes barely a half dozen — and picked my top-choice candidates. I used Instagram’s direct messaging system (which only allows 500 characters per message) to reach those with whom I wanted to connect. Thanks to push-notifications, which alert account users if they receive a new message, recipients often responded within minutes of my crafting a message.
I was a little shy and unsure about this tactic when I started, but it quickly proved its effectiveness. I was pleasantly surprised by how welcoming and excited many people, including elite athletes, were to connect and work together on projects.
This new style of cold-calling proved to be the most effective method for me to land climbing subjects, tour guides and partners throughout my trip. In return for their time, I gave them a small portfolio of photos from our adventures. I built a name for myself much quicker than I imagined and soon had climbers, who had heard about me from friends or other athletes, reach out to me.
The domino effect had begun. Instagram became not just a networking tool, but also a type of live portfolio for my work. I used it to announce my agenda and let people know where I was currently and where I was headed next.
The more elite athletes I worked with who shared my work, the more comments and exposure I started to receive. I started paying close attention to who else was admiring my work — their sponsors. I understood the concept of shooting for a brand, but I had never chased the opportunity.
But while on a shoot with climber Claire Bukowski in Rifle, Colorado, that changed. I knew shooting sponsored climbers like Bukowski opened doors with companies that worked with her. I also knew shooting strictly editorial content is a hard way to make a living. Not only do brands usually pay well for images, it also provides you exposure to a larger audience. I also wanted to find my own sponsors for future trips and expeditions.
While working with Bukowski, I focused on getting images for social marketing and planned out shoots focused on branding and layout. I spent more time shooting from fixed ropes, instead of from the ground. We also planned our climbing around product placement, from what Bukowski wore to what gear we used. I also shot more lifestyle shots, like Bukowski drinking from her Skratch Labs water bottle, or coiling her Blue Water rope at the end of the day, or packing her SoiLL backpack. While all of these images were designed to showcase the brands, I still tried to shoot them candidly instead of having her pose with the gear.
I researched her sponsors, as well as brands she hoped to work with one day beforehand, and after made some calls. Bukowski is a well-known and respected climber, as well as the daughter of accomplished climbing photographer Todd Bukowski. On several occasions the brands I called already knew what we had been doing, thanks to Instagram.
Several companies requested my portfolio. I sold images and even had one company seek me out requesting my work for two projects.
The new world of social media got me attention from these companies, but good old-fashioned phone calls got me the sales. On more than one occasion I had a brand representative thank me for making direct contact and taking the time and effort to make a phone call, or at least sending a personal email.
It’s a changing world and an adapting market. But it doesn’t mean the old tricks don’t still work. Sometimes, you just need to take a different approach to the same ideas, and roll with the punches.
When I returned home after almost four months on the road, I had shot numerous assignments for Gripped magazine.
I also had a chance to work with the editorial team at Rock and Ice magazine during its annual climbing photography camp, where I worked with some of the best climbing shooters in the business. The magazine published a half page of my work in an issue featuring images from the camp. It marked my first photo published in a major national magazine.
Now home, I’ve been regularly working with Butora, a company that makes climbing shoes and accessories. Within the last six months, companies I shot for, or sold images to, include Skratch Labs, The North Face and Icebreaker. I’ve also covered local competition climbing for the Calgary Climbing Center and attended the Go Pro Mountain Games in Vail, Colorado, as the official photographer for the Canadian Climbing Team.
Instagram completely redefined my approach to marketing. It also helped me launch the career of my dreams.
— Philip Quade is a 28-year-old climber, photographer and writer from Calgary, Alberta. He is interested in climbing and expedition and exploration photography. He just completed a 3 1/2-month North American road trip where he explored some of the best- and least- known climbing destinations in Canada and the U.S. Follow him on Instagram at philip_quade, or on Twitter @_Quade and view more of his work at www.philipquade.com.

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Hearing aids designed for the outdoor life

OWAA Developer — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 16:42:00 +0000

BY RICH PATTERSON
It was the sound of birds, or the absence of it, I noticed most.
Military noise augmented by youthful years in small planes, using power saws and hunting eventually caught up with me. By my 40th birthday my ears started buzzing. Called tinnitus, increased ringing has been part of my life for decades. Gradually it became harder to hear high-pitch sounds. Conversing in a crowd became maddening as I could hear background conversation but not the person in front of me.
Eventually wood thrushes convinced me to shun procrastination and seek help. No sound in nature is as magical as the springtime notes of this woodland bird. Several years ago I heard my last thrush. Either they were avoiding my woods or my progressive hearing loss blocked their music.
Studies link hearing loss with depression, dementia, falling, high blood pressure and anxiety but, it was the inability to hear birdsongs that launched my search for a solution. I’m not alone. At least one in three people over age 60 suffers hearing loss.
Advertisers know this, and when my 60th birthday passed, advertisers started bombarding me with information on hearing aids. Some claimed cures for tinnitus and most offered better hearing at bargain prices. Most sounded too good to be true. I decided to seek a certified audiologist and within a week, I was sitting in a quiet booth as Jennifer Reekers tested my ability to hear.
She patiently answered questions and convinced me that I was not just about to buy hearing aids, but was beginning a long-term relationship with professionals committed to improving my hearing. They fitted me with a trial pair of hearing aids appropriate for my unusual lifestyle.
I’m outside in wind, rain, blizzards and other quirks of nature. Sometimes I need to amplify sound, then suppress a saw’s roar or a rifle’s bark with ear protection.
Reekers adjusted the aids to fit my needs. They aren’t merely amplifiers. They are computers enabling aids to fit varied needs. Mine are designed to dampen background noise, while increasing my ability to hear high-pitched sounds.
An important feature of my new aids is a tiny mute button. Just before I pick up my power saw, I mute the aids and slip quality muffs over them. The mute function eliminates the hassle of removing hearing aids before noise exposure.
I spent a week trying everything I could think of to frustrate the new hearing aids before I decided to buy them. I went out in the rain and wind. The aids stayed in place and kept working. I couldn’t shake them out. They were comfortable, even after 14 hours. One afternoon I rowed to the middle of a smallish lake and could clearly hear anglers on the bank conversing.
The hearing aids are expensive, but one day shortly after getting fitted with my custom devices I hiked seven miles in the Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, amid calling orioles. As I sat on a bluff over the Mississippi, the song of a wood thrush filled my ears.

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The evolution of the #hashtag

OWAA Developer — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 20:07:58 +0000

And how to keep up with ever-changing social media

BY TAYLOR WYLLIE

In August of 2007, then-Google designer Chris Messina suggested Twitter use hashtags as a way create groups and categorize conversations.
Twitter rejected the idea. Its users did not.

As hashtags grew in popularity, they jumped from Twitter, to both Facebook and Instagram, to people’s speech (as a millennial I’ve witnessed many a colleague ending a sentence with “#Blessed”).

But since its inception, Twitter has sharpened its search function so you can follow events using keywords. All you have to do is type in whatever it is you’re looking for — say the National Park Service Centennial — and it’ll pull any Tweet the subject’s mentioned in. Essentially, Twitter’s current search function stole the adopted role of any hashtag.

Keywords are trending now and the reign of the hashtag is over.

But don’t rejoice (or mourn) just yet. Hashtags are still an essential part of succeeding on social media, both in reaching your audience and following your beat.

Here’s a few things reporters should keep in mind each time they send out a Tweet:

Don’t make up a hashtag on your own.

Chances are, if you randomly decide on a hashtag, no one else will pick up on it. You may end up following the wrong conversation, and your Tweet will be filed away where people won’t find it. If you’re not sure if you’ve made it up or not, search your hashtag. If nothing comes up, scrap it.

But if you notice a hashtag that organically becomes popular, use it.

Sometimes a hashtag will naturally emerge — particularly surrounding bigger events. Monitor the conversation and you’ll likely be able to see what people are using, although 100 percent hashtag consensus is rare. Begin by searching the name of the event or business.

If there is no user-generated hashtag for the event you’re covering, and if you’re one of the only media members covering it, send out a Tweet sans hashtag.

Use hashtags sparingly.

Gone are the days when news agencies use multiple hashtags per Tweet, or even a hashtag with every Tweet. So-called “clean Tweets” can get more views than their hashtagged counterparts.

Remember to maintain objective reporting, even when tweeting.

Journalists have a responsibility to be mindful of the hashtags they do use — noting any unintended bias in the language of their hashtag. That doesn’t mean reporters can’t use slanted hashtags, it simply means know why you’re using it and how you’re using it. There’s still a debate on what the best way to go about this is, but essentially, if a trending hashtag is using language you otherwise wouldn’t, use the hashtag at the end of the tweet as a way to enter the conversation, not as a way to describe the event.

Know where your audience is getting news.

It’s a smart idea to consider whether or not the people you write for are actually on Twitter.

According to an article on Forbes, Facebook has 1.3 billion monthly, active users, compared to Twitter’s 271 million. If your audience is older or rural, you may not be reaching them by sticking to Twitter. Think about creating a reporter’s Facebook page instead, and use Twitter only to stay on top of your beat.

Remember hashtags aren’t only a feature of Twitter anymore.

The same information applies to all forms of social media — Facebook and Instagram especially.

The social media world is an evolving one — what happens today could change tomorrow.

Continually keep an eye on emerging trends and the evolution of old functions to stay on top of your social media game.

— Author’s Note: this article was written with the help of the social media editor of The Washington Post, Ric Sanchez.

— Taylor Wyllie is an OWAA intern and student at the University of Montana, pursuing a degree in both journalism and environmental studies. She’s reported and edited for the independent student newspaper, The Montana Kaimin, for two years and her work has appeared on Montana PBS, Montana Public Radio and in the Missoulian.

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Smart phone map apps that get you there and back

OWAA Developer — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:17:36 +0000

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BY PAUL QUENEAU

In my job I’m often deployed to remote places to photograph and write about parcels of land that have recently been protected or otherwise conserved.
I relish this chance to get to explore new country and try to capture its most appealing angles in photographs. Yet often time getting there becomes part of the adventure. Trying to navigate myself to the right spot can take me scrambling up dirt roads or single-track trails at zero dark-thirty hoping to catch good light at sunrise. My first line of defense has long been a collection of war-torn, coffee-stained Delorme state gazetteers. Then I switch to more detailed USGS maps. But lately those have started shacking up with my smart phone.
Chances are you’re already accustomed to a computer voice emanating from your phone telling you a take a right in 500 feet.
But what about when you leave the cell tower grid behind? The rule book goes out the window. Your GPS may still technically work, but mapping data doesn’t stream without a tower. This requires you to download and cache the maps for the area you plan to visit well before you leave the digital comforts of civilization.
Two summers ago at the OWAA conference, I was introduced to a superb app called GPS Topo USA by Gogal Publishing Company. For $7 it quickly delivers any USGS topographic quad in the United States to your iPhone at the same 7.5-minute detail that outdoorspeople of a certain age will know all too well. The app’s maps, though, are shaded to better show mountains and valleys, and it allows you to swap to a satellite image à la Google Earth, or to sandwich both map layers together.
But the killer feature for me is that fact that once you’ve viewed a map, it’s automatically saved in memory so you needn’t have any cell-tower coverage to pull it up again. Before I leave town I just run my route plans with my finger, and all my maps are stored and ready.
For fish-heads, Gogal also publishes a Colorado Wild Trout app that maps out the Centennial State’s steams by fish species, access points and other key data. Again, it is designed to work with or without phone service. The company is also hard at work on similar apps for the Northeast, Pacific Coast and other areas, and makes a mapping app for National Parks and Monuments as well.
Gaia GPS is a similar app for both iOS and Android with more bells and whistles. At $19.99, it’s almost three times the price, but includes world-wide topo maps, weather radar (if you’ve got cell coverage), and tools for printing maps, among other features.
If you need map layers for landowner names, property boundaries and hunting units, OnX’s HUNT app delivers. It requires an annual subscription of $29.99 per state, but if legal boundaries are a concern, it will be money well spent keeping you in the good graces of the law.
For photographers, another type of app worth considering is one that provides data on sunrise and moonrise times, angles and directions of light for any given date, and even what direction the sun or moon will appear behind a given mountain. The Photographer’s Ephemeris app ($8.99) provides all this and more, but suffers from an overloaded interface due to its smorgasbord of options. PhotoPills ($9.99) is another option with a better interface, and adds exposure recommendations for time-lapse, star trails and other photo-exposure techniques.
No matter what the app, though, it’s worth looking for the term “offline viewing” to assure you can store e-maps and other data away for the backcountry. Also remember that using the GPS can zap your battery, so leave with a full-charge.
Do you have an app that you’ve found especially useful in your outdoor storytelling work? Share it on OWAA’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/OWAAonline.
– Paul Queneau is an editor for Bugle magazine at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in Missoula, Montana. He is also a freelance writer and photographer with credits in Outdoor Life, Montana Quarterly and other publications.
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Get Social Media Savvy

OWAA staff — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 18:39:29 +0000

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BY MARY LINKEVICH
If you’re a 40-something-or-older like me, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the world of social media. But at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, where I manage communications and grants, our hikers, hawk watchers and other visitors look to social media for information about us. That means learning the ropes is a necessity.
I spent countless hours scouring the ‘net for best practices in using LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest. Each platform requires a unique approach and yields different results. Here’s a little of what I’ve learned:
LinkedIn
For organizations like Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, LinkedIn is at the bottom of the list because I’m not actively seeking professional relationships and my ability to hire freelancers is slim to none (darn that budget). Think of this as an online resume and professional networking forum, a place to shamelessly tout any and all accomplishments. For writers, this is an ideal place to search and “link up” with editors, and there are numerous private groups you can subscribe to, such as LinkEds and Writers.

If you’re marketing skills or a product, then set up a profile. Be as complete as possible and keep it current. When you complete a project, post it as an accomplishment.
Link up with businesses or professionals with whom you wish to build a relationship.
Ask appropriate people to “rate” your skills. Reciprocate with your own “thank-you” rating.
Post job openings. It’s worth having a profile set up just for this, so it’s ready when you are looking for new employees.
Find me at Mary Linkevich or Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.

Facebook
At Hawk Mountain, Facebook is second only to our website, and I spend the most of my carefully-managed time here. Birders turn to our page for weather and flight conditions. Our Facebook page links to Twitter, so our followers are updated at both sites.

If you don’t have a profile, then set up an account today. Consider creating both personal and professional accounts.
Add additional administrators to help update the page for your business.
Post links back to your website, but post infrequently to avoid inundating your followers with information to the point they are annoyed.
Use Facebook “insights” to help tweak your approach.
Keep it professional. Avoid personal posts, but do share articles relevant to your organization.
Post information about your organization on your personal page, too, to reach more people.
Find me at www.facebook.com/mary.linkevich or at www.facebook.com/HawkMountainSanctuary.

Pinterest
Think of this as an online bulletin board. Pinterest continues to be female dominated, but if attracting this audience is important to your business, then jump in.

Establish yourself as an expert on topics that support your brand and create boards in your area of expertise. Include content you or your organization has produced, but also material from credible sources your customers will enjoy. At Hawk Mountain, our female customers are savvy, conservation-minded outdoors women, so my boards include Learning Outdoors, Nature Crafts, Mountain Wear, Campfire Cooking, and Great Reads (including Hawk Mountain publications and that of our partners), as well as Raptors in Flight and The Sanctuary.
Create a business account using an email different from your personal address, even if you have to set up a new gmail account just for this purpose.
Find me at www.pinterest.com/marysue72 or at www.pinterest.com/HawkMountainPa.

Of course there are more forms of social media, and each could run its own column. So here are a few best practices that can be applied to any platform.

Focus on visuals and variety. Great images always get top response.
Focus on quality over quantity. Look for “good” followers, not just all your personal friends who may not share your interests.
Engage with other outdoor communicators and learn from watching what works and what doesn’t.
Don’t forget to be human. It’s really NOT all business, and to connect with new audience members, you do need to connect on a personal level.
Don’t be scared. Just jump in and test the waters when new outlets become available and then stick with what works; drop those that don’t help you meet your goals.
Model best practices and learn from those you think do a great job and you enjoy following. This isn’t stealing, it’s just smart.

-Mary Linkevich is a full-time information, communications and grant manager for Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a nonprofit outdoor nature center and research and training facility. You can contact her at linkevich@hawkmountain.org.
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Ensuring Face-time on Facebook

OWAA staff — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:01:32 +0000

BY PAUL QUENEAU
Building a tribe of Facebook followers doesn’t mean they will all see your posts. Here are some tips from a practiced pro on how to get back in front of your readers.
Time was, if you had a business Facebook page, posting on Facebook meant all of your followers had a chance to actually see your posts appear on their feed, assuming followers checked into the site in a timely manner.
Times have changed. Facebook is now charging publications, businesses and even individuals to guarantee every follower can see their posts. That becomes a big deal now that every corner of the outdoor writing profession uses Facebook to connect with audiences and the site has hit one billion users. Assuring a wide-distribution is more important than ever.
This change came as an unpleasant surprise to Carol Sharkey- Blodgett, who had “worked her fanny off,” as she puts it, to build more than 14,000 Facebook followers for her website, Makeitmissoula. com. She gained them by publishing stimulating content from a variety of local Missoula writers and photographers (myself being one of them), and by purchasing ads on Facebook to make sure Missoula locals would find out about her site.
Prior to starting her own publishing company, Carol was director of niche publishing for several of Lee Enterprises’ newspapers, so she knew exactly how important it was to maintain a readership. Facebook remains her No. 1 gateway for linking readers to new content, yet she now faces a situation where perhaps only 2,500 of her 14,000 “likes” can see her site’s new Facebook posts in their news feeds.
“We were desperate to find a solution. We simply couldn’t afford to sit on all those ‘likes’ and not do something,” Blodgett said. So she researched all she could find about strategies for maximizing post distribution. She has since dug up some tricks to making her posts “stickier”:
1. Consider doubling up on popular posts. Blodgett says she sometimes posts in different day parts — similar to broadcast media. For example, she may post a story first thing in the morning to catch the Facebook-beforebreakfast crowd. If an update goes viral and is clearly popular, she will sometimes post it again in the afternoon with an altogether different update in the evening.
“We will hide the original post on our wall, then in the afternoon, we’ll post it exactly the way we did originally and people don’t seem to notice the duplication. We’ve never had anyone complain or even comment that we posted something more than once in day. But by doing that, we sometimes can get in front of 50-100 percent of our audience,” she said. “Now keep in mind we don’t do it frequently — only when we have a story we know will resonate.”
2. Aim for two to three updates per day, but no more. “We’ve done a lot of reading about how much is too much — and we’ve watched our Facebook Insights so we know when people are ‘unliking’ us. The worst way to alienate your readership is to ‘robo-post.’ We generally aim for one post in the morning, one in the evening.”
3. Don’t just rely on the feature image that Facebook automatically pulls off your website. Go big. “Pictures speak 1,000 words with Facebook posts. If you want to draw attention, you want to post an eye-catching photo, not just the automatic thumbnail. And if you can do it with a truly spectacular photo, 90 people might just like it just because they like the image.”
4. Cartoons or humorous text-images can be as powerful as photos: Sharkey-Blodgett says even with something as mundane as job postings, she’s been amazed how many likes can be garnered with a bit of wellplaced humor. “We posted a listing for a fitness instructor, and included an image of a funny little saying, something like ’sweat is your fat’s way of crying.’ It was a very dry job service posting, but it got a huge number of people to read it.”
5. Engage your audience by asking questions, but keep the conversation authentic. “We try to mix it up and carry on conversations to engage readers. But you have to keep it authentic and make sure it doesn’t feeling like you’re spamming them.”
Whether Facebook will be the go-to social network to distribute outdoor media five years from now is anyone’s guess. Until then, Sharkey-Blodgett says she will keep experimenting with it while looking forward to a viable alternative where posts aren’t a pay-per-viewer proposition.
“That’s what is so frustrating about what Facebook is doing with business sites like ours,” says Sharkey-Blogett. “And as of Sept. 19 [2012] Facebook further ratcheted down the number of fans that see posts. If I wanted to ‘promote’ the post to our entire fan base, it would cost me $75 for one post. As a small business, I can’t afford that — especially after I’ve paid thousands of dollars over the last two years to do [Facebook] ads to get my fan base to where it is.” ◊
Have you found other tricks to growing your Facebook following? Go to — you guessed it — OWAA’s Facebook page and chime in at www.facebook.com/owaaonline.
Paul Queneau grew up in Colorado hunting, fishing and backpacking. He started with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s Bugle magazine as an intern and is currently the conservation editor. Contact him at pqueneau@RMEF.org.

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FTP be damned

OWAA staff — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:32:17 +0000

New approaches to moving videos, photos across the Internet

BY PAUL QUENEAU
The demand for dynamic content on websites, smartphone and tablet apps has put video on par with photography as a sought-after element in much of today’s outdoor media. Yet in most cases high-definition video is typically too large to attach to email and sometimes even to burn to disc.
File transfer protocol, commonly known as FTP, has been a common way to transfer large files, but it isn’t exactly user-friendly. It requires an FTP server, login names and passwords, sometimes an FTP app and most of all, patience to get big files moved. If you are the one doing the downloading, previewing what you’re getting isn’t often possible until the deed is done.
Yet the age of cloud computing is creating some much more streamlined ways to move monster files. Sites such as Senduit.com started this trend, allowing you to upload files up to 100 megabytes for free that can be downloaded by others using a simple emailed web-link. But I like another option even better that only requires you to drag files you look to share to a simple folder on your desktop.
Dropbox popularized this concept, placing a folder on your computer that was synchronized to their servers so your files were not only backed up but available on your other computers, smartphones, tablets — you name it. Then Dropbox took it a step further, though, allowing you to create public folders with an emailable web-link so you could share files instantly.
Once you share a folder, Dropbox creates instant galleries of images and now video as well, complete with thumbnails, lowresolution previews and a full-resolution download link. Eyeing Dropbox’s 50 million users, Microsoft has created a potent competitor called Skydrive with much the same functionality, but offering 7 GB of space to users. Dropbox responded by giving another 3 GB of space for photos and video uploaded directly from your camera. Google is also getting in the game with Google Drive, but so far I haven’t been as impressed with it, nor Apple’s iCloud, when it comes to sharing photos and video. All of them allow you to purchase additional storage space.
Another compelling option is Vimeo, a top competitor to YouTube, but cleaner and more professional looking. Vimeo doesn’t limit your storage space, only how much video you upload per week — 500 MB for free. If you’re willing to shell out $60 per year that leaps to 5 GB per week and allows you to share a download link to your source video. That means you can take a very large video, upload it and create a private link that doesn’t show up in Vimeo’s search, Google or elsewhere if you’re not looking to offer your video to the free world. Only those editors with whom you choose to share a link can preview your videos in gorgeous streaming HD, with the option of downloading the master file, if you choose to allow it. Very handy indeed.
If history is any indication, the storage space offered by these sites should only increase in the future and their ease-of-use should only grow easier. And with any luck, the term FTP will dissolve into the alphabet soup of bygone techno-headaches. ◊
Paul Queneau grew up in Colorado hunting, fishing and backpacking. He started with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s Bugle magazine as an intern and is currently the conservation editor. Contact him at pqueneau@RMEF. org.

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