Hello to translators and interpreters surfing by following my recent Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) webinar. I intend to blog about this in more detail later this week, but until then, here are some resources you might find useful:
- A series of short videos introducing Twitter.
- Some 5 minute videos on how I use LinkedIn, WordPress, and Google Reader for professional purposes.
- A half-hour* presentation on social media for translators, which takes a more hands-on approach than my presentation today as it covers how to use Tweetdeck (co-presented with Philippa Hammond – check out her blog for a great guest post on search engine marketing too).
- If you still think Twitter is just noise, then read about how one translator used it to track what she was learning at a conference.
- Here’s some more thoughts on how I fit all these tools together as part of the bigger picture of my professional practice.
- Finally, a write-up on using Skype for business purposes.
Thanks again to everyone for tuning in and for their questions. I plan to pull together a summary of some to the key issues raised as part of my write-up, but in the meantime, feel free to post your questions in the comment section below. I’m not promising I know the answer but I’ll certainly be able to point you in the right direction.
* 14 October: correction – it’s a half-hour presentation, not a one-hour one… Thanks Kimmo.
Re your presentation on social media for translators – a one-hour audio and slideshow? I am very interested in how many people watch this. Given the ultra-short attention span of web users, I would think a more skimmable version might fare better. Please do not take this as criticism, I’m just interested.
Thanks for your comment, Kimmo. I’ve since realised my error and corrected my post – it’s actually a 30 minute audio and slideshow – but I think your point is still relevant.
It’s interesting you raise the point of the attention span of online viewers because it’s something my co-presenter Philippa and I did consider before deciding to post the presentation online. However once we realised that our primary aim wasn’t actually to grab or even really hold attention all the way through, then suddenly length became a lot less important.
Our primary aim was simply to share a presentation we had already presented with those who were genuinely interested, either because they had been at the original presentation or because they had missed it, and wanted a chance to see it again in its entirety. The functionality is there for users to do the skimming themselves via the progress bar on the bottom of the slides, should they so wish, and we aligned the audio with the slides especially so it’s easy to do this.
One further pragmatic but still important point was that re-writing our material to produce a skimmable version would have been more work than we were prepared to do at that time. We’re jobbing translators, and despite rumours to the contrary, our paying clients do expect us to turn in some actual translation work every now and then 😉 So realistically, our options were to share the material “as is” or not share at all.
Saying all that… I think we make too many assumptions about users’ attention spans sometimes. If content is interesting, valuable enough and freely available, I believe people won’t mind if they’re not being spoon-fed bite-sized morsels. Of course if our priority was to communicate a powerful and convincing call to action, for example, then we would have gone about it very differently.
With regards to the viewing stats, these are freely available on SlideShare by following the links on my blog post under the presentation. It’s had 779 views in 3 months. I’m not sure how many of these were views right to the end, and you’re probably right – a shorter version may well have gotten us more page-views (if that’s what you mean by faring better), for example, by making it more palatable to a general audience. But as I’ve explained, that wasn’t something we were concerned about as it’s already fulfilled its purpose. Speaking for myself, I’d say the viewing stats have even exceeded expectations, particularly given the relatively niche subject-matter and the fact that we did very little to promote it.
Above all, I’m glad we didn’t let assumptions about attention span prevent us from sharing the presentation in the first place 😉 Thanks again for dropping by.