SMUG | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Podcasting 106: Creating an RSS Feed

We have a volunteer to be the class podcasting example. Toby Palmer has done the narration of his children’s book Lilly and the Russet Gigantus, and wants to make a podcast of the narration.

So we will start by creating a category in the SMUG Podcast blog, which I have to do for him as an administrator. I can do this quickly and easily because Toby has used WordPress.com to host his blog.

Once I hit the Add User button, we see that Toby is now added as an Author on the SMUG Podcast Blog. He remains an Administrator on his own blog. By being part of the WordPress.com community, you can have some blogs on which you are the Administrator or an Editor, and you can be an Author or Contributor on others. This graphic shows Toby as an Author:

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Blogging 304: Does Google Treat Hyphenated Domain Names as Spam?

A reader named Andy raises a point I hadn’t considered, and which I tend to doubt, but I’d like any feedback from someone who may know. And because Social Media University, Global is a research institution for social media higher education, in addition to offering practical, hands-on learning, I’ve devised a project in which we can all participate to test for ourselves whether what Andy said is correct. This post is added to the SMUG curriculum as Blogging 304: Hyphenated Domain Name Research Project.

Andy writes, in a comment in the About Me page:

I can say that domain names with dashes like your’s “social-media-university-global” treated by Google and others like spam domains…

The reason I doubt this is three-fold:

When I Google social media university, this blog comes up in the first two positions in my search results, ahead of American University’s centerforsocialmedia.org.
When I Google blue shirt nation, a post I wrote about Best Buy’s employee social networking site comes up #5 (see below), and if I search for best buy blue shirt nation it’s #3.
What I know about Google bots is they can parse words in URLs better when you separate them with hyphens. So social-media-university-global.org is easier than socialmediauniversity.org, because you’re coaching the bot as to where one word stops and the other starts. A URL like mikeisnowhere.org could mean mike is now here, mike is nowhere, or perhaps mikei could be an adjective modifying snow. For more discussion of this, see Blogging 201: Google Loves Blogs.

The results I get when I search (and the fact that I get traffic based on search terms like blue shirt nation) doesn’t sound to me like I’m being penalized in Google’s search results.

But who knows? Maybe Google adjusts the results when I’m searching because it associates my computer with my blog, and therefore considers my blog more relevant to me.

So here’s your SMUG assignment:

Open click here to do a Google search for blue shirt nation, followed by a search for best buy blue shirt nation (no quotes around either phrase.) Note the highest position at which you see a social-media-university-global.org search result.
Enter your results in the comments on this post.

I’m looking forward to learning through this SMUG research project, and hope you’ll take a couple of minutes to participate.

SMUG Extension Class for LifeSource

Today I had the opportunity to do a presentation on social media for LifeSource, the non-profit organization that manages organ and tissue donation in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and parts of western Wisconsin.

I had been asked to do this because of a presentation I had done for the Minnesota Health Strategy and Communications Network. I told the LifeSource group I would provide a link here to my presentation; since it was substantially the same as the one I did in February, I’m just linking to that post.

I will be interested to see what LifeSource does in social media; for an organization that is so volunteer-intensive and deeply affects so many people in a positive way, these tools are a natural way to give a voice and a platform to people who are passionate about this life-saving work. Here’s the Facebook group, Donate Life Minnesota, they have formed. I suggested they should talk with Scott Meis from the Donate Life Illinois campaign, where they’ve had a lot of success using social media.

I’m also looking forward to connecting with LifeSource at the Transplant Games in Pittsburgh in July, where Mayo Clinic will have a booth as one of the sponsors. We will be having opportunities for participants in these Olympic-style events to share their stories via a Facebook group and in other ways.

Wanted: Professor of Graphic Arts

Update 6/13/09: Please read all the way through for the update at the bottom of this post.

As we approach the four-month anniversary of the founding of Social Media University, Global, your Chancellor is still looking for a creative logo to replace this wordmark:

I’m thinking something that resembles a coat of arms or a crest, like all of those “real” universities…such as:

Harvard

Yale

Or maybe something round, like these:

Stanford

Carleton College

Or some blending of the two, like this one from the University of St. Thomas:

Given that many college seals are in a circular shape, and that part of our school’s name is “Global” it would seem to make sense to have a representation of the Earth as part of the SMUG seal’s framework.

If you wanted to include Latin in your design, maybe you could use fragments of the “Lorem ipsum” text traditionally used for placeholders in mock-ups. Or if anyone can translate our University motto — It’s Not That Hard — into Latin, that would be even better. The year of our founding, 2008, should be included in the seal, too.

My artistic skills are limited to drawing word pictures, so I would appreciate it if students who are more graphically talented would contribute their artistry to good ol’ SMUG U. Please let me know if you’re interested in working on this.

Speaking of word pictures, one project I will be working on myself is a school song. It’ll be coming soon. But to do a really cool recruitment music video, we need a better logo.

Whoever submits the best logo will of course be compensated in links and salutations, and will earn tenured professorship in the SMUG Department of Fine Art.

Update 6/13/09: I’m working on a project for which it would be really great to have a new SMUG seal. And an official seal would be a nice addition to my presentations. As you can see from the banner at the top of this page (and the comments below) we’ve got our school motto translated as Suus Non Ut Difficile, which ideally would be incorporated into the seal design. If you’re up for the challenge (or know someone who might be able to help) please get in touch with me by email (see the contact form) or by Twitter @LeeAase. I’m open to providing financial remuneration if necessary in addition to the fame and glory referenced above.

Twitter 110: Tools to Automate Cross-Platform Status Updates

Note: Twitter 110 is part of the Twitter curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

Here are some great tools that enable you to automatically use one of your social media tools to update others. They save you double-entry of the same information, and also help ensure that your profiles don’t go stale.

Twittersync is a handy Facebook application that turns your latest Tweet from Twitter into your Facebook status update. This is really helpful for me, because I’m notoriously bad at updating my Facebook status. It’s not that I don’t spend time in Facebook; it’s just that I’m doing other things instead of updating status.

Update: See Nathon’s comment below, about why Twittersync isn’t working and the alternative method for updating your Facebook status through Twitter.

Twitterfeed, by contrast, takes any RSS feed, such as this one from my blog, and uses it to create Tweets in an account of your choosing. For Mayo Clinic’s Twitter account, for example, I connected Twitterfeed to our RSS feed of news releases. That way if people want to use Twitter as their all-purpose river of news, we can make sure the Mayo Clinic tributary is flowing into it. And tonight I just added the SMUG feed to my personal Twitter account.

I have previously Tweeted about new blog posts. Now I don’t need to remember to do that anymore. By combining Twitterfeed and Twittersync, I can write a post to my blog and have that fact posted both to Twitter and to my Facebook status.

I like both of these services, and another that’s really helpful is Twittermail. One of the most irritating parts of mobile Tweeting is that when you do it via SMS text message it’s really slow. At least for me. But with Twittermail I have an e-mail address I can use to send a Blackberry e-mail message, which is much faster: unlike SMS, I don’t have to hit keys multiple times to select the right letters.

So, for example, I just used my Blackberry and Twittermail to Tweet the following:

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