Wiser.org Blog

Maybe you should be making better use of web services like YouTube, Slideshare, and Flickr. Here we share what makes these services so valuable as a complement to your own web publishing efforts, be they a website or a blog, and how they will enhance your social media efforts.

What is embeddable media? It’s when you take content that exists on one website (like a video on YouTube) and include it in an article that you publish on another. So why would you want to embed media from another site, rather than have it as part of your own like an attachment? Here we share the six arguments for why you should embed:

1. It’s viewed more often: Most services that allow you to embed their content have significant numbers of people on their own sites. This allows you to get two audiences for the price of one. For example, you may only have a few views of a YouTube video on your own website but many times that number on YouTube itself. On top of that, other people may embed your content on their sites. So you get a viral distribution of your content that wouldn’t be possible if you hosted it only on your own website.
2. It’s talked about more: Many services have social elements built in. For example, you can create channels to house your content, you can make friends, you can develop followers that subscribe to your content, and you can get feedback and encouragement. It all adds up to another way to make your content more relevant and accessible to your community.
3. It’s in the right format: Your content is optimized. Rather than just supporting one file / program / operating system, most services will take a file and make it viewable on all standard browsers. For example, SlideShare will take Powerpoints, OpenOffice and PDFs as an input.
4. It offers more functionality: For example, in the case of Flickr, you can turn a group of photos into a slideshow, or in the case of Slideshare, your readers can download your presentation in the file format of their choice. Or in the case of Google Docs or Zoho you can open up editing of your content.
5. It gives you free and easy-to-use statistics: Most services keep track of how many people have viewed your content and some show how many times it’s been embedded on other sites. Then if you aggregate your content in a channel (e.g. YouTube Channel) you can see the entire viewership across all your videos. It’s a nice set of data points to bring back to your colleagues, board and supporters.
6. It offers lower cost & better performance: Serving videos and other large-sized content from your servers can slow down your website and cost you money for the extra bandwidth. Generally, Google is going to provide a faster, more reliable service than you can!

If you want to see more advice on how to embed videos, music, presentations, PDFs, spreadsheets, documents and more into the webpages that you publish, read Amit Agarwal’s excellent post on How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website. WiserEarth currently allows embedding of YouTube videos, CurrentTV, GoogleVideo, Flickr, and PhotoBucket. We also use SlideShare and PollDaddy on our blog. Let us know what you would like to see available on WiserEarth by posting a comment below.

Tags: communication tools, content management, social media