Month: July 2008

Seven Steps to Promoting Transplant through Social Media

I’m in Pittsburgh for the 2008 Transplant Games, an event sponsored by the National Kidney Foundation “to demonstrate the success of transplantation, honor those who have given the gift of life, and call attention to the need for more organ donors.”

I am accompanying a couple of staff members from the Mayo Clinic Transplant Center in our Mayo Clinic booth. They’re the experts in transplant and medicine, and I’m helping them work with the transplant recipients, living donors and their family members who are here to promote organ and tissue donation through social media.  Here’s a description of what we’ll be doing.

More than any type of patient I know, transplant recipients seem to be especially grateful for the opportunity at a new life they have been given through transplant. Whereas some patients may want to keep the fact of their medical conditions private (which is absolutely their right), my experience with transplant patients is that they have an evangelical zeal to let people know how important organ and tissue donation is.

It seems to me that social media, whether it be networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, or through sharing videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr or via a blog, present unique opportunities for transplant advocates to spread the word. Here’s why:

Continue reading “Seven Steps to Promoting Transplant through Social Media”

Joining the Social Media Club Interim Board

Last week I got a note from Chris Heuer asking me to serve on an interim board of directors for the Social Media Club, the formation of which was announced today. This is an exciting project, and I was delighted to accept his invitation. Here’s what Chris says about what our charge will be…

According to Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and Partner at The Conversation Group, “The Social Media Club is honored to have so many accomplished and well-regarded industry evangelists come forward to lead the organization. While the interim board will focus on charting the organization’s future direction, our core mission will remain the same: promotion of media literacy; support of industry standards efforts such as Creative Commons licensing, Microformats, Data Portability and OpenID; discussion and promotion of ethical behavior; and sharing our knowledge among our members and the industry community at large.

I’m honored to be included in this group, and clearly the interim board membership roster is in alphabetical order instead of by any measure of industry prominence. But then again, maybe I’m the only university chancellor. 😉

I look forward to engaging with the Social Media Club, which is “A community for the champions of Social Media and those seeking to learn.” That’s what SMUG is all about, too.

Podcasting 109: Hotter Podcast Feeds through Feedburner

Note: This post is part of the Podcasting curriculum for Social Media University, Global.

In Podcasting 105 through 108 we demonstrated how you can use a WordPress.com blog as a server to create an RSS feed for your podcast, and can subscribe to your podcast by cutting and pasting that feed URL into your iTunes program. But using the native RSS feed from WordPress.com has a couple of disadvantages:

  1. It doesn’t give you feed statistics, so you don’t know how many people are subscribing. That’s fine if you are doing a personal podcast just for fun, but if you’re doing this in a work environment your employer will likely expect better statistics so you can determine whether the podcast is worthwhile.
  2. Cutting and pasting is a little clunky for your users. They have to know how to subscribe manually in iTunes, and it would be a lot better if there was a nice interface to guide them through the process.

“Burning” your feed through Feedburner.com provides solutions to both of those problems, as you will see and hear below:


Homework Assignments:

  1. Go to Feedburner and set up an account. You will be able to use this to burn your RSS feeds for your WordPress.com blog as well (to be described in a future post in the Blogging curriculum), but it all starts from having a Feedburner account (as Toby Palmer now does).
  2. Go back through the earlier courses in the Podcasting curriculum so you can record an audio file and launch your own student podcast. As you will see in Podcasting 105, we have a standing offer for any SMUG student to  create a free podcast hosted from the SMUG Podcast Blog (and thereby avoid paying the $20/year additional fee to WordPress.com in order to experiment with your own podcast.)

After you’ve learned how to do a personal podcast, you’ll be ready and confident in your abilities to launch one for your business or non-profit organization. You’ll probably want to spend a little money on better recording equipment, and at that point paying the $20 to be able to podcast from your own blog will be well worth it.

But our goal at SMUG is to let you experiment with all of these tools without spending even a penny of your own money, only investing your time in the on-line education process. So please take advantage of the opportunity and start your own podcast today.

Bible Bowl 2008

My daughter Ruthie experienced emotions at Bible Bowl 2008 that ranged from despondency to delight, and we who joined her (with her brother and teammate, Joe) for the five days of competition all got to experience those same highs and lows with her. It was quite a dramatic week that started with great difficulty.

I’ll get to the story in a bit, but first here’s a little background. Bible Bowl is a competition similar to the now-defunct College Bowl or Quiz Bowl, but with subject matter taken from selected books of the Bible. This year the text was the Gospel of John as well as his epistles (1 John, 2 John, 3 John) and 1 Peter and 2 Peter. The strongest players have memorized and can recite the entire text (1,178 verses). More demonstration of that in a bit.

Continue reading “Bible Bowl 2008”

Georgia Aquarium

On Monday, before the Bible Bowl competition really started, I got to take my youngest son, John, to the Georgia Aquarium. It’s billed as the largest aquarium in the world.

Here’s some video from that afternoon, in which John (in red and white) got to touch some rays and a hammer head shark:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHhb2kmdaWw]

John is a pretty sentimental little guy; as we walked back to our hotel he got a little bit quiet and thoughtful and when I asked him why he said, “We probably won’t ever see any of those animals again.” When I said we might go to aquariums in some other cities (as we did in Baltimore a few years ago) he replied, “But we won’t see any of those animals that we saw today.”

I guess the bonding from touching these aquatic creatures with two fingers went a little deeper than I thought.

It was a precious afternoon.