Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Yammer 110: File Sharing with Yammer

In Yammer 104 I wrote about how Yammer can be an all-purpose GTD reference filing system, and not just for individuals but for a company. You can write relatively brief posts about a topic, and can include hyperlinks to external Web sites or to intranet pages.

But what if the information you want to share is in the form of a document, not a Web site URL?

After my return from the Thanksgiving weekend, and as I was posting something to my personal journal in Yammer, I noticed an interesting feature that provides a great answer to this question:

An “Attach File” icon was at the lower left of the text box! So I decided to upload a document to another group I’ve formed, for our Social Media Team. And here’s what that Yammer post looks like:

So my team members can just click the link to the attachment and download the PDF I posted. I don’t need to send the PDF as an email attachment, but my team members know the document is there to be reviewed if they want to download it.

This is a really well-done feature, with an interface that matches the conventions we’ve come to expect for uploading files. And it makes a significant step toward making Yammer the all-purpose knowledge-sharing service for the enterprise.

The updated version of Yammer’s iPhone application supports viewing the attachments that are included in Yammer posts. That’s well integrated, too, although I couldn’t view Word documents as I can within the iPhone Mail application. But for viewing PDFs it was fine.

I uploaded a few different file types as a test: PDF, Word (.doc) and even a couple of mp3 files. The largest file I tried was 18 MB, and it worked flawlessly. Maybe the Yammer team can fill us in on the file types that are supported, and any size limitations.

But meanwhile, if you haven’t yet tried Yammer, I’d encourage you to explore it, and the SMUG Yammer curriculum can be your step-by-step guide. I’m impressed at the way Yammer is continually improving its product and adding important and useful features.

200 SMUGgles Learning Social Media Together

With the exception of composing my annual Thanksgiving letter/post, I was pretty much unplugged from the Web over this long holiday weekend. It was a great time with family and working on some projects, like hanging our outdoor Christmas lights and insulating the North Annex.

But I did check in briefly Saturday morning and saw that our SMUG student union (a.k.a. Facebook group) had 201 members, which meant that we had 200 SMUGgles besides me. And as I check this morning, we’re up to 204, with members from most U.S. states and every continent except Antarctica.

How cool is that?

Actually, that number probably understates the true number of SMUGgles, because we have well over 200 subscribers to our RSS feed and nearly 400 who are following my Tweets. There may be some overlap among the three groups, but we likely have some unique members in each.

Thanks to everyone who has enrolled in Social Media University, Global to learn about social media together. Unlike traditional models of education, in which a low student/teacher ratio is considered beneficial, with SMUG we all gain by having more people participating. I may be the Chancellor, but in reality we’re all SMUGgles (with apologies to J.K. Rowling): ordinary humans who possess no wizard-like powers, but who want to do magical things using social media tools. More about tools in a future post.

If you’ve found our coursework helpful, I hope you’ll take a moment to share SMUG with your friends, co-workers or members of your non-profit volunteer organizations. You will not only help them by introducing social media tools like blogging, podcasting, Facebook and Twitter that they can use (or you can use together with them on joint projects), but you’ll also make SMUG stronger, as we will have more people sharing and contributing, and we can learn from each other.

For instance, Norway’s Jan Husdal, who became our first SMUG associate professor, taught me how to embed the social sharing toolbar on posts in WordPress.com. Our student body name, the SMUGgles, came from Jim Streed of Green Bay, Wisc. And I think we may be welcoming another associate professor soon.

I hope you’ll use the toolbar below to share this post with your Facebook friends, either by posting it to your profile or singling out some particular friends by sending directly to them as a message. Or feel free to use any of the other sharing buttons (or tweet about it on Twitter) to otherwise spread the word.

If you’re not yet a SMUGgle, you can enroll in Social Media University, Global through one of the options on this page.

Thanksgiving Reflections 2008

As I noted two years ago in Top 10 Reasons I’m Thankful, and to Whom, my performance in composing annual Christmas letters was spotty in the B.B. (Before Blog) era. Doing a family newsletter was such a production that procrastination (and eventually abject failure) was the most frequent outcome.

But that all changed in 2006, and I followed it up last year with another compilation (though that one was in December, on my daughter Rachel’s first wedding anniversary).

My new tradition is not only to beat what was formerly the Christmas snail mail crush, but to have my year-in-review distributed before the Black Friday sales have even begun.

Continue reading “Thanksgiving Reflections 2008”

RAQ – Posting Friendfeed to Facebook News Feed

Here’s another Recently Asked Question:

As Ashok asked, here is how you can use the Friendfeed application to import updates from Twitter, your blog, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and dozens of other services into your Facebook profile.

First, you need to sign up for FriendFeed.

Then, pull in feeds from you various social networking services. Here’s a snapshot of mine:

Then, install the Friendfeed application on your Facebook profile.

After that, it’s pretty straightforward to have your updates that are fed into Friendfeed also be posted to Facebook.

I like Friendfeed in that it has the ability to aggregate information from various social sites. I’m sure I don’t get nearly as much out of it as I could, but even so, it’s been useful.

If other SMUGgles have stories or examples of how you’re using Friendfeed effectively, I hope you’ll share them in the comments below.

Facebook 108: Photo Sharing and Tagging

Flickr is a fantastic photo-sharing community, but it’s not the biggest one.

Facebook is.

More than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook, and more than 30 million new photos are uploaded every day.

Flickr is great for sharing photos with the world, with people you don’t know. Facebook is for sharing photos with your friends.

And after all, for most people, aren’t your friends the people you want to see your pictures?

One of my first “Aha!” moments with Facebook came when my daughter Rebekah went to her high school Homecoming as a sophomore. Many of her classmates attended the same pre-Homecoming party, and everyone took pictures of everyone else, and uploaded them to Facebook, tagging their friends who appeared in the pictures. If there were 50 girls each taking 50 pictures, that’s 2500 photos from that party alone. I can’t imagine those girls moving to another social networking site and abandoning their Homecoming photos (and those from Prom and other high school events.)

And if the girls aren’t leaving, neither are the boys. I also wonder what impact Facebook is having on the high school yearbook business. How great will the demand be for these bound and printed keepsakes, when so many of kids’ high school memories are available online in Facebook?

But I digress. The point of this course is to show you how easy it is to upload photos to Facebook to share with friends, and how tagging lets them (and their friends) know that the photos are there. Here’s a quick video tutorial I did, using some photos from our preparation of “Old Main” for the Holiday Tour of Homes, a fundraiser for our local chapter of the American Red Cross:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5VrFclyiCk]

Assignments:

Join Facebook if you haven’t previously. (Which would tell me you’ve skipped some of the earlier 100-level Facebook prerequisites, in which case you might want to go through Facebook 101 and 102.)
Upload a photo of yourself with an appropriate caption, to the SMUG Facebook group. Be sure to “tag” yourself so you see how the photo shows up in your minifeed and news feed.
Think about the implications of photo sharing and tagging in Facebook for social media projects you might want to start for your work-related or community organizations.