Blogging | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 401: LifeSource Blog on Organ Donation, Transplant

As Chancellor of Social Media University, Global I enjoy getting to do Extension Classes, on-site presentations with organizations interested in getting involved in social media.

I did one of these in May with LifeSource, the organ procurement organization for the upper midwest.

Even more than doing the presentations, though, it’s especially gratifying to see organizations move forward with their social media projects.

That’s why I was so delighted to get a note from Becky Ousley, saying that LifeSource was launching The Source, its blog for news and conversations about donation and transplantation.

Today’s post announces the LifeSource activities associated with the Minnesota State Fair, and its booth where people can register as donors. They’re planning lots of updates from the “Great Minnesota Get Together” as people stop by to share their stories.

In addition to having hosted the extension class, Becky and her blog co-author Susan are long-time SMUGgles, participating in the on-line learning opportunities available through SMUG.

Our goal with SMUG is to have people who have participated here launch their own blogs, particularly for business or organizational use. As they do, we’ll profile them here in the Capstone Projects section, the 400-level Blogging courses. And this will give others a chance to see what their fellow SMUGgles are doing.

Please join me in visiting the LifeSource blog and congratulating Becky and Susan on pulling together everything they’ve learned into a first-class blog for a great cause.

And if you’ve started a blog or are planning to do so, please let us know so we can profile you, too.

That’s My Boy!

Actually, that’s not my boy. He’s Inkswamp‘s. But my youngest son, John (pictured below) did something this week that made me look for a photo in Flickr representing a boy looking up to and emulating his dad.

John Aase, as long-time SMUG students know, has a blog. He’s 9. On Monday, he told me, “Daddy, I’m going to write a page on my blog.” “A page?” I asked him. “Don’t you mean a post?” “No Daddy, I’m going to write a page.”

John had previously written this page about the bird’s nest on our porch. His posts and pages tend to be much more concise than mine.

I have to say his latest page just completely melts my heart. Not the subject matter, but the thought that he wants to follow in Dad’s didactic footsteps.

I know most SMUGgles won’t be familiar with Pokemon, but John is quite an expert. So if you wouldn’t mind going to his P.G.A. page and leaving a question to prime his pump, you would be providing great encouragement to a blogger who’s just getting started.

Maybe some of the younger SMUGgles who have gone through a childhood Pokemon stage would know better questions to ask. For others, you could ask simple questions like:

How many different kinds of Pokemon are there?
Which ones are the most powerful?
What’s your favorite one?
How do you play Pokemon?

You get the picture.

Beside setting John off on a writing spree, which would be good for his learning about computers and blogging, he would really get a kick out of seeing his daily page views spike.

So if you wouldn’t mind taking a minute to encourage John, I would greatly appreciate it.

Blogging 115: The Blogroll

A blog’s Blogroll plays two main roles. When you add a link to your blogroll you are typically either saying:

“I have found this site helpful, and I would like to share it with you” or
“Here is a blog that covers some of the same subject matter as mine, and if you like my blog you might also enjoy this one.”

So politically oriented blogs tend to include like-minded others in their blogroll, for example. And blogs that are about social media often have blogroll links to others that have a similar focus.

The SMUG blogroll has been rather spartan because I haven’t updated it for about 18 months. Here’s how it looked before I began this post:

So I’m taking the opportunity of this course to both demonstrate blogroll management and to bring the SMUG blogroll up-to-date. Or actually, it’s what it looked like immediately after I did this first addition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvd4jJhQr0]

Here are some more blogs that fit both of the above criteria, and which I’m therefore adding to my blogroll:

Allfacebook
Blog Council
Buzzmachine
Commoncraft
Communication Overtones
Don’t Get Caught
Global Neighbourhoods
KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog
Scobleizer (Robert gave me the cue to use WordPress)
Social Media Club
Social Media Snippets
TechCrunch
Techmeme

These are only a Baker’s Dozen of the 230 or so feeds in my NetNewswire feed aggregator, but they’re the ones I think will be most interesting for the SMUG student body. I also added links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites (on Facebook, YouTube, our News Blog and our Podcast Blog.)

Also, this course is the first one for which I’m using a YouTube screencast instead of a Slideshare.net narrated slidecast. I’ll post about how I did it in a future course. I obviously have some things to learn to improve the quality of the screencast (and make it a snappier presentation), but I think having the ability to show exactly how to do things instead of narrating still frames will be really helpful in the show-and-tell courses.

Assignments:

Go to the sites linked above and subscribe to their feeds. See Social Media 102 on RSS feeds if you need a refresher.
If you have a blog, create or update your blogroll. You get extra credit points for adding Social Media University, Global.

WordPress Growth Rocks

TechCrunch calls the growth of the WordPress blogging platform, as announced today at WordCamp, “Awesome.”

It doesn’t surprise me at all that U.S. unique visitors to WordPress.com have roughly tripled in the last year to 20.9 million per month, while Typepad.com has only increased about 20 percent to 7.2 million. The two platforms were roughly equal a year ago.

But what wasn’t equal was the value proposition. WordPress.com offers 3 gigabytes of free storage and unlimited bandwidth, and for $45 a year you can customize the CSS, buy an extra 5 gigs of storage (and the ability to upload mp3 files so you can host podcasts), and map your blog to a domain or subdomain of your choosing.

You’d have to spend at least $299 a year on Typepad.com for anything approaching this functionality. And the cheapest, entry-level package price on Typepad.com is $49.50 a year.

With Typepad you can get a two-week free trial, but with WordPress.com you can blog for free almost indefinitely. And even with upgrades that would give most people as much functionality and capacity as they could possibly need, the cost for WordPress.com is still less that that for the stripped-down version of Typepad.

It all adds up to powerful incentives for new bloggers to start with WordPress.com, because all it costs them is their time to learn.

And that doesn’t even take into account the free, open source WordPress.org software you can download and install on another server for even more functionality.

Ben Martin agrees.

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Blogging 103: Commenting on Blogs

In one sense, a blog is just a Web site.

A Web site that, because of easy-to-use and free software like WordPress, anyone can publish. You could decide to use WordPress.com as your content-management system, to produce your own one-way Web site. All you would have to do is turn off the comments feature, either for the whole site or for individual posts. In this way, you would have an easy Web publishing system.

But what sets blogs apart from traditional Web sites (Can you believe that? I used the word “traditional” to describe something that first started in 1994!) is the ability to invite comments and create conversations.

That’s what makes blogs interesting.

Yet most people who read blogs never participate in the discussion by leaving a comment. Forrester research indicates that about 33 percent of Internet users are “Spectators” who read blogs, listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos without leaving any comments, and 52 percent of users are “Inactives” who don’t even read blogs. (I think the inactives number is overstated because, as I said earlier, a blog is just a Web site. People are going to blogs without even knowing it.)

In keeping with our SMUG goal of getting people to stretch into new areas of social media, in Blogging 103 I hope to help some of those Inactives and Spectators move up the Forrester Ladder of Participation into the Critics category.

Just complete the assignment below, and you’ll climb a rung or two.

Assignment:

Click the “Comments” link at the bottom of this post. It looks something like this if no one has commented yet:

Or if some people have commented, it will have a number in front of the word “Comments” – like this:

Then you’ll see the full post reload, showing any comments from others, and at the bottom you will have a chance to add yours.

I’ll bet you can figure out how to fill in that comment form.

In a future post, I’ll show you how to participate most effectively, but for now, it’s important to just take that first step and make a comment.

You’ll note that I have set this blog to accept comments without being approved by me. In other words, I’m not “moderating” comments in advance. So you’ll get the immediate gratification of seeing your comment show up right away after you submit it, provided you’re a real human being. I use Akismet to weed out the automated comment spam that unsavory characters use to promote their herbal Viagra alternatives and the like. More on that in a future post, too.

But I also know that one reason why people don’t comment on blogs is because they don’t know exactly what to say. So I’ll set you up with a couple of questions to prime the pump, just to make it easier for you to dive in.

Is this your first time commenting on a blog? If so, what has been the main barrier that keeps you from commenting?
If you do comment sometimes, what are the factors that cause you to join the conversation?
For extra credit, what social media topics are most interesting to you? What questions about social media would you like to see answered and discussed further?

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