Conferences | 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.

Blog Council Dinner in Chicago

Last night I made it back from Galena, IL, where I spoke to the ILCMA group about blogs and social media (and also played my first 9 holes of golf in a couple of years and achieved a par on the second hole, as verified by this video.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbzaLk9eM8o]

Continue reading “Blog Council Dinner in Chicago”

Blogs in City and County Government

At the ALI Social Media Summit, we heard from Jeremy Lasich, the Deputy Director for Communications for Fairfax County, VA.

This was especially timely for me, since I am presenting Wednesday at the Illinois City/County Management Association’s Summer conference, at a pre-conference workshop entitled: “Everything Local Government Officials Need to Know about Blogs and Social Media.”

One of the stories Jeremy shared was about the wife of a Fairfax County school administrator ranted at a student who had called her husband at home complaining about his decision not to call a “snow day.” That story got widespread attention in the blogs, and also significant news media attention, including from ABC News on its World News webcast and from Good Morning America, along with the Washington Post.

Fairfax County has a Facebook group, a MySpace page and a YouTube channel.

I asked Jeremy to share some thoughts for the ICLMA group, and here’s what he had to say:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIr8V0Y4Lxw]

Two issues they have so far:

Their IT department won’t let most county employees access these sites from their work computers.
Their legal department has not allowed public comments on these sites because of First Amendment issues, that if these are “official” government sites they could get in trouble if they censor or delete any comments. This doesn’t seem to be a permanent policy, but the County Attorney is at least concerned enough about it that they haven’t turned on the commenting features on these official social media sites.

At the ALI conference on Wednesday they also will be hearing from Mayor Bill Gentes of Round Lake, IL. Bill’s blog is another one the ILCMA will find interesting. I heard Bill speak just over a year ago at another ALI conference, and he was quite enthusiastic about the benefits that had come from his blogging. His blog and the story behind it is among those featured in this American City & County article.

Here is a blog from the Rockford, Mich. City Manager, and here’s an article from the Boston Globe about city government blogs. That article points out some mayoral blogs that have gone to seed, with no posts in several months. One key point to remember if you’re planning to start a blog is that most of them that fail don’t do so because of some controversy that caused them to be pulled down, but rather from slowly withering away from neglect.

I think combining a YouTube channel with a blog is a great way to make blogs both easier to maintain and more authentic. When you see someone talking on a video blog, and you can see that he or she clearly isn’t reading but is instead talking from the heart, it’s a great way to avoid being flogged for running a ghost-written flog.

I will update this post later to include my slides.

Meanwhile, if anyone has questions about local government and social media, please add them in the comments, and we will discuss them during the presentation and beyond.

This is a post I did as part of a SMUG Extension Class.

Update: Here are the slides from yesterday’s presentation.

ALI Social Media Summit Highlights

Today I attended the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media Summit at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, and presented a case study on our social media efforts at Mayo Clinic.

Chairman Michael Rudnick gave a good overview, Andy Sernovitz of GasPedal did his usual great presentation, and we also heard from Patty Crowley of Johnson & Johnson on the new intranet portal J&J has launched for its IT employees, and from Jeremy Lasich, the Deputy Director for Communications Fairfax County, Virginia. I will have a follow-up post about Jeremy’s experience, since it will be highly relevant for the group for which I am presenting a workshop tomorrow.

I had lunch with a few of the ALI participants, and Jorge from HEB said my demonstration of the Flip video camera was his most important take-away so far:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpZ8HWh3RY]

And just after he said that, one of our lunchmates shared her family’s Mayo Clinic story. I won’t use her name, since this story is about her Mom’s experience with Mayo Clinic (and she corrected herself afterward that the problem was carbon monoxide, not dioxide):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZEMRPrV28s]

This all just goes to show both the power of sharing personal stories and how quick and convenient the Flip video camera is. Editing the clips was really simple, and took just a couple of minutes.

As Andy Sernovitz says, in word of mouth marketing you first need to give people something to talk about, and then make it easy for them to share. Clearly the Flip camera and YouTube are tools that make sharing easier.