Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Paying it Forward with a Small Good

Earlier this year I got a chance to meet Chuck Hester when we presented together at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit in San Francisco. Chuck’s story is about using LinkedIn for power networking, and he’s organized what he calls LinkedIn Live events to turn his local virtual network into a face-to-face networking opportunity.

I hope to see Chuck again this week at the Ragan Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World conference at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC. I’m unfortunately going to be traveling during his presentation, but will plan to connect with him later in the conference.

Chuck is turning his experience with LinkedIn into a new book that will be released later this year. It’s called Linking In to Pay it Forward: Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media. You can read about it on Chuck’s Pay it Forward blog. So when Chuck asked me for the “Small Good” of giving his book a shout out, I was glad to help.

One of the things I appreciate about the social media world is the “pay it forward” philosophy. Much of what I’m doing with SMUG is experimenting publicly with different tools and techniques. Then, after I’ve worked out the kinks and gotten hands-on experience with the tools, I can confidently recommend the best ways to use them in my work environment. And I figure if I can help others by letting them learn from my experimentation, that’s a worthwhile service.

But I can’t experiment with everything; I personally haven’t used LinkedIn nearly as much as Facebook. So if Chuck would like to write a guest post with some highlights from his new book, I’d be happy to confer Associate Professor status and make him a SMUG faculty member.

Facebook 303: Career Fairs and Recruitment

Today I had the pleasure of participating in a Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival, as part of our Public Affairs/Media Support Services booth.

We had about 700 high school students from across southern Minnesota attending the day-long event, where they got to participate in some classes and also meet people who work for Mayo Clinic in various capacities.

This is a great application for a Facebook group. In our booth, we had eight laptops connected to the Web and with the Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival Alumni group set as a “Favorite.” Students could log in to their Facebook and join the group, so they can go back and see the photos and videos we’ve uploaded, including photos of them. (Note: we obtained parent permission and had release forms signed for students to participate.)

Here’s one of those photos that shows our booth:

We’ve uploaded photos and videos from the day to the group, and the students will be able to go back to it and tag themselves, or otherwise interact with each other and with Mayo staff. It also will provide our Human Resources and Education colleagues an opportunity to share updates on internships or course offerings with students who have expressed interest by attending.

As of this writing we have 335 members in the group. Some of them are Mayo staff, but most are students. We also have 7 videos and 136 photos.

If you have any kind of event that involves primarily high school or college students, you definitely could use a group like this to engage participants and to stay in contact with them.

Key Elements for Success

Choose a platform participants are already using. For high school students, Facebook is it. If you have to get people to join the networking site and then join your group, you’ve created a two-step process that’s too complicated. At our event today it took less than a minute for students to join the group.

Have a way for participants to sign up while they’re in your booth. Having the laptops with Internet access right there, so all they had to do was sign in to Facebook and join the group, made it easy. I guarantee that if we would have given them a flyer with the URL we wouldn’t have had 10 percent join the group. As it was, we had about 300 sign up in the first few hours.

Give them a reason to return. For today, having the photos and videos of them (and links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites like our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel, News Blog and Facebook Fan Page was novelty enough. Hopefully they’ll go back to the group when they’re at home, and will tag themselves in photos and videos and will invite friends to join the group. It will be up to our HR team that sponsored the event to continue to make the group interesting and relevant to the students in the longer term.

What do you think of this application of social media in career recruiting? What other ideas do you have for applying Facebook?

Yammer 101: Getting Started with Yammer

I’ve previously written about Yammer and how I think it has some neat potential applications. I’m actually writing this post to show some work colleagues how to get started with Yammer and how it could practically help in

Limiting the mass e-mails that tend to overwhelm our inboxes,
Ensuring that we are included in conversations that interest us, and
Making non-confidential information that could help anyone in the organization easily available to everyone in the organization, instead of having it locked in the inboxes of a few.

Here’s a slideshow that takes you through the process, step-by-step, of joining (or creating) your company’s Yammer network.

I had originally planned for this to include a narration track (as you see in this video I shot in the SMUG Annex last night), but I think the slides themselves are fairly self-explanatory.

As we get into some of the subsequent courses in the Yammer curriculum, there will definitely be a place for screencasts and slidescasts. But for now, here are your…

Assignments:

Create or join your work-based Yammer network.
Share your questions or comments about Yammer in the comments below, so they can be addressed in future courses.

Thanks to my colleague, Bob Nellis, for serving as the guinea pig and allowing me to capture screen shots of his sign-up process.

YouTube Progress

There’s a double meaning with that headline. YouTube is making progress by telling us how our uploads are making progress.

One of my pet peeves with YouTube had been its lack of a progress indicator. When uploading a video, I never knew how long it would take to complete an upload. I just got the spinning circle for a seemingly interminable time.

No more.

As of yesterday, I noticed what you see in the screen shot below:

How cool is that?

Blogging 112: Pages vs. Posts

The great thing about blogs is that the newest and freshest material is always right at the top.

And the bad thing about blogs is that the newest material is always right at the top.

So you can write a great post, but over time it gets pushed further away from the front page, accessible only through the monthly archives and via Google.

That’s why Pages are a helpful alternative to Posts.

Pages become the overall high-level structure of your blog. So, for example, on this blog the Pages are

The Curriculum page is the “Parent” page for the Blogging, Core Courses, Facebook, Podcasting and Twitter curricula.

Then each page can have links to posts that have been done over time. So, for example, the Podcasting page has links to courses from Podcasting 101 through 110. These posts were written between March 31, 2008 and July 29, 2008. During that same time, I probably wrote a couple of dozen other posts, and I didn’t write the podcasting posts in numerical order.

By creating the Podcasting page, though, I could bring links to all of the podcasting-related posts together in one place, so that people stumbling upon SMUG (or one of the podcasting posts) can work through the related posts in a sequential manner.

As I write this post (part of the Blogging curriculum), it is Sept. 30, 2008. Soon it will be part of a previous month’s archive, and within a couple of weeks will be off the front page. But several months from now, when someone is wanting to learn all about blogging, she will start at Blogging 101 and work her way through.

Creating Pages is easy. In your WordPress dashboard, click the Write link:

Writing a Post is the default, but if you then click the Page link, you’ll be able to write a Page.

From that point, it’s just like writing a post, except a Page becomes part of your overall navigational structure.

Use Pages with care; once you start them you shouldn’t get rid of them. But if you need to bring order to your blog, Pages are important tools.