Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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I’m a member of the Institute for Public Relations’ Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation, and recently was asked by some commission colleages to complete a survey about social media and to encourage others to participate. If you work in public relations, please take a few minutes to complete the survey by clicking here.
Blogs are a conversational medium. As we learned in Blogging 101, a blog is essentially a newspaper. Two major factors that set blogs apart are:
I say “within reason” because some people go out and leave meaningless or off-topic comments as a way of driving traffic to their sites. Thankfully, as a wordpress.com site, SMUG is protected against comment spam automatically by Akismet. But still, sometimes one sneaks through, with an innocuous comment like, “Great site. Keep up the good work” that includes a link to a Russian porn site. When that happens, I mark the comment as spam, which deletes the comment and makes it more likely Akismet will prevent that person from infecting other wordpress blogs.
But comment spam isn’t the main point of this post. This post is about how you can legitimately engage in discussions through comments on other related blogs, and as a natural byproduct attract visitors to what you’ve written.
If you’re commenting just to attract blog traffic through that single link, people will sniff it out and you won’t get much out of it. But if you’re contributing meaningfully to the conversation, you not only will get some visitors via the link in your comment (as described below); you also make it likely that the blog’s author will take notice of your blog and possibly link to it in a future post.
Continue reading “Blogging 117: Attracting Blog Visitors through Comments”
Facebook‘s video player isn’t as popular as its photo sharing application (which is the most popular photo sharing site in the world), but it’s a great way to share video with a defined group of people.
In YouTube, you have the choice of sharing either with the whole world or with a group of up to 25 of your YouTube friends. There’s really no intermediate option.
In Facebook you can make the sharing much more widespread without sharing with the world. And you can “tag” your video with the names of your Facebook friends who are featured, which makes it likely that they and their friends will see it, because it will show up in their news feeds.
It’s also possible to share videos just with members of a group, whether its members are all friends of yours or not. So, for example, I uploaded some videos of my daughter’s volleyball team to a group I had created as an on-line “booster” club.
Here’s a video screencast for Facebook 109, demonstrating how you can upload a video to your personal Facebook profile:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW1taSN0MjM]
Advantages of Facebook for Video Sharing:
Some disadvantages of using Facebook instead of YouTube:
It isn’t, of course, an either/or proposition. You can upload videos to both YouTube and Facebook, but that’s double the work, double the upload time. An alternative is to upload your videos to YouTube, and then post the link to your video on your Facebook profile, page or group.
I’m not talking about the national elections (except a bit at the end.) I experienced all of these emotions before noon yesterday, as we attended the funeral for my aunt Donna, who passed away Nov. 1 after having Alzheimer’s for about 13 years. A funeral is always sobering, but Donna’s was more so personally because she was my Mom’s sister, and she developed symptoms when she was just 55. I’m only 10 years younger now than she was then. It makes me realize anew how precious each day is.
Donna’s husband Rod has been amazing through the whole process, first caring for her at home and then faithfully going to visit her every day in the nursing home, even when she long ago ceased to recognize him. Rod exemplified “in sickness and in health…as long as you both shall live.” I want to honor him and tell the world how thankful we are for his love for Donna, and how proud we are of him. So I just did.
Another proud moment came in the afternoon, when we returned home and took the family out for our civic experience in voting. My daughter Rebekah cast her first ballot.
Bekah and her parents contributed 3 votes of Sen. Norm Coleman’s (at this writing) 762-vote margin over Al Franken in the Minnesota U.S. Senate race, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. A recount is coming, but we don’t have hanging or dimpled chads like Florida (we mostly have optical scanning of fill-in-the-circle ballots), and the precincts outstanding are from remote areas of the northern Minnesota arrowhead where there probably aren’t enough votes to make up the difference.
So it was a day of mixed emotions, but the big lesson we took from Uncle Rod is that how you handle adversity is what matters most, and from the election we again saw that every vote counted. And in the Minnesota Senate race, it will be counted again.
Facebook without friends is like… well, I’m not sure exactly what the simile would be, but it would certainly be lonely.
But you don’t need to remain friendless for long. If you’re a SMUGgle, I for one would be glad to be your friend. Just indicate your SMUGgleness when you send the friend request.
That’s what this course is about. It’s easy.
Continue reading “Facebook 106: Inviting Friends to Join Facebook”