Month: October 2008

Yammering, Listening, and Improving the Product

This post is about a prime example of how companies can use social media tools to improve their products and services.

You would expect this from a company looking to make a name for itself in social media, as Yammer is. If social media is your core product, you should be out there listening and participating in discussions related to your company.

But by actually following through on this philosophy, and listening to your users, you can identify and solve the problems you didn’t know were problems.

As SMUGgles know, I like Yammer a lot, and have been experimenting with it. I’ve even started a Yammer curriculum in this university.

Continue reading “Yammering, Listening, and Improving the Product”

YouTube Deep-Linking Example

In yesterday’s highlights I called attention to a new feature from YouTube that allows deep-linking to a specific point within a video.

I decided to try it, because I wanted to show some key parts of a couple of videos during a presentation for which I had a limited time. The total time for the two videos is about eight minutes. I encourage you to watch the entire videos, but by deep linking to four separate spots I could show some highlights within the presentation.

This video is from an interview I did with Rhonda King, in which she explains how she used an online support group to gather information about her son Trevor’s condition. She later explained the decision she and her husband made to seek a second opinion for Trevor, and what happened when she sent an email to Michael Ackerman, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who specializes in diagnosing and treating Long QT syndrome and other heart rhythm abnormalities. She also describes her experience in getting Trevor examined by specialists at Mayo for his other medical conditions.

RAQ: How Do You Generate Related Links?

Steve ask this question about a recent post:

How did you generate the “Possible related posts”?

It’s really simple. Automatic even.

In your WordPress.com dashboard, choose “Design” and then “Extras”

Then you will see two boxes you can check, or not:

By making sure you have the second box unchecked, you automatically generate possibly related links. And your posts are eligible to be included in the possibly related links in other WordPress.com blogs.

It’s that easy.

Social Media 111: Customizing Your iGoogle Page

In Social Media 102 we introduced you to RSS, which is a powerful way for you to keep tabs on what’s new in dozens (if not 100 or more) of Web sites and blogs that provide RSS feeds. Instead of having to go to the sites, you can use Newsgator or NetNewswire or Google Reader, and have the updates sent to you.

iGoogle is an alternative that enables you to embed what Google calls “gadgets” featuring the latest content from your favorite sites, all on a single page. It lets you, in effect, create a simple, free blog monitoring dashboard.

I recently heard that Yahoo! said as many as half of all MyYahoo! users never customize it from the default settings. I expect that may also be true of iGoogle. That’s why I made this video screencast, to show just how easy it is to customize iGoogle, to have the latest posts from the key blogs you’re monitoring available to you with a single click.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B7u49Ky_oo]

Homework Assignment:

  1. Sign into your gmail account (or get one if you haven’t yet)
  2. Go to iGoogle.
  3. Click the “Add Stuff” link (on the right side), and then the “Add feed or gadget” link in the left column.
  4. When the box pops up, paste in a URL from any blog post. If you like, for example, you could use this one: https://www.social-media-university-global.org/2008/10/27/smug-reading-list-102708/ then hit the “Add” button.
  5. When you get the confirmation that the feed has been added, click the “Back to iGoogle Home” link, and you will see that the gadget containing this RSS feed has been placed in the upper left corner of your page.
  6. Repeat the steps for each blog you want added to your monitoring dashboard.

Please note that while iGoogle lets you just enter the URL from a single blog post, and figures out the related RSS feed you want to monitor, you also can paste in the URL from an RSS feed in step 4. So, for example, I did a Blogpulse search for posts mentioning “Mayo Clinic” and got this URL:

http://blogpulse.com/rss?query=%22Mayo+Clinic%22&sort=date&operator=

Which I pasted into a gadget and now it sits on the front page of my iGoogle.

Please note also that you can edit the number of feeds that go into your gadget, increasing to up to 9:

This will be most helpful for those feeds (like Blogpulse or Technorati searches on keywords) for which you expect more frequent updates.

Alltop has several pre-configured pages like this, as described in this post. But you can’t tailor those. You can configure iGoogle to exactly meet your needs, though, and as our SMUG motto says:

It’s Not That Hard!

SMUG Reading List 10/27/08

Some helpful recent readings on social media from other sites:

  • Now you can link to a specific spot within a YouTube video. So if you find an interesting spot in a YouTube video that you want to share, you can direct people to that portion instead of making them watch the whol thing (or saying something like “scroll ahead to the 1:45 mark.”) Learn how and see an example of deep linking on  YouTube courtesy of TechCrunch.
  • Wikipatterns has interesting thoughts on how to spur adoption of wikis in your organization (and how to eliminate barriers to adoption.)
  • TwitThis is “The new ‘share this’ for Twitter.” You can drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar, and then easily share whatever page you’re currently viewing through Twitter.
  • And Brian Solis has a helpful post cataloging the Twitter tools (including TwitThis) that are available to make Twitter even more useful for community and communications professionals.