SMUG | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

SMUG Super Bowl Ad and Social Media ROI

Here’s the Super Bowl Ad you didn’t see on NBC:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_WIBoEf730]

Among the reasons for this omission:

The ad 34 seconds long, instead of the customary 30;
I was about $2.6 million short of the cash required to pay for the airtime; and
I created it during the Super Bowl today.

One of the ironies of social media is that everyone asks about the ROI, or return on investment. It’s an understandable question, but one of the points I make in presentations is that as I (investment) approaches zero, ROI approaches infinity, because it is calculated as follows:

ROI = benefits/costs

My cost of producing this stellar Super Bowl ad wasn’t exactly zero, but it was zero out-of-pocket. I already had invested $150 in the Flip video camera used to record it, and the production took a bit of my time and attention as I enjoyed the game .

I expect the benefits to be non-monetary as well, measured mainly in the satisfaction of getting more people involved in exploring social media. I hope you will use the ShareThis tool below to pass this post (with its embedded ad) along to your friends and co-workers who might benefit from becoming a SMUGgle, and invite them to enroll. I think it captures the essence of SMUG in a brief video snippet (but how did I manage to leave Blogging out?!)

Then we’ll see what happens to the SMUG enrollment, currently at 261 members of our Facebook group.

Updated: I originally had embedded the ad in the Facebook player, but I’m wondering whether that might be responsible for a SMUG slowdown, so I took that version down, at least for now. But you can see the higher-resolution Facebook version in the SMUG Facebook group.

Updated 2/3/09: Here’s the same video in a Blip.TV player. Another post coming on the topic of video players soon:

A Year of Being SMUG

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For some events it’s really easy to pinpoint a date. The births of all of our six children were quite memorable, for instance. But with the last one, John, his arrival was so rapid — and almost exactly at midnight — that we got to choose his birthday. We didn’t know for sure when he made his debut, so we picked 12:01 a.m. on November 23, which enabled his mom to get three full days of recuperation in the hospital.

The birth of SMUG was less momentous and more gradual, so it’s a little more complicated to choose an official anniversary date. Though I’ve been blogging since July 30, 2006, it wasn’t until January 24 of last year that I first used the term Social Media University, Global and explained the rationale. The next day I had posts on Tuition and Financial Aid (we don’t have either), and on the 28th bestowed upon myself the title of Chancellor. After setting policies for auditing classes and applying for admission as well as attendance and grading on the 29th, I officially changed the name from Lines from Lee to SMUG on January 30.

And having previously said that I wanted to limit my blog to only things I could do without spending a single penny (just to make a point), I agonized over whether to spend the $19 for domain mapping, so that my URL would be social-media-university-global.org instead or leeaase.wordpress.com. I finally made the switch on February 20, 2008.

People who know me may say my SMUGness goes back long before last year, so picking any of these dates as the official birth of SMUG is somewhat arbitrary. January 25 would be a good choice, as it was the day I started the SMUG group in Facebook, which now has 252 members. But I guess I’m going with January 30, which is the day I went from having SMUG just be a page on my blog to being its complete identity, although the vanity URL came three weeks later.

So on Friday of this week we’ll be celebrating a year of being SMUG. It’s been great fun, and I hope you’ve learned as much as I have. If you have highlights or key observations to share with your fellow SMUGgles, I hope you’ll leave them in the comments below.

@SMUG_U Twitter Profile Lets You Connect with SMUGgles

In addition to the SMUG Twitter Group, I’ve also established a SMUG_U profile in Twitter as a way to enable SMUGgles to connect with each other.

I’ll be logging into it regularly (probably increasingly as we progress), and may use Twitterfeed to automatically publish some links to posts from this blog, but one of the key benefits will be that you can see who else is following @SMUG_U, and you can follow them, too. That will be covered in Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed.

For now, just follow @SMUG_U.

If you’re a smarty pants who wants to skip ahead, you can see who else is following @SMUG_U and follow them.

And as you are tweeting, feel free to use the #smug hashtag if you think the item will interest your fellow SMUGgles.

Winter Wonderland

Here’s part of the fun involved in living in Austin, Minnesota. With 7″ of snow so far (and the local public schools canceled for the day – although SMUG is still in session), I got to spend a half hour in some really productive exercise before catching the bus to Rochester.

At SMUG, the Chancellor also is in charge of Environmental Services.

These lights are called “icicle lights,” mainly for the visual effect they create. In our case, because our new garage doesn’t have gutters yet, we give that term a literal interpretation.

And after a half hour of shoveling, I had tamed the rugged driveway, much as my ancestors tamed the prairie. (OK, forget that. They didn’t get to go in and take a warm shower after they went out to chop wood.)

They also didn’t have wifi on the bus to work (or a bus to work) that they could use to share their morning experiences with the world.

So although we sometimes grumble about having to get up early to shovel the driveway and dig out after the snow plow has passed, we have a wonderful life. We’re blessed with a theater of seasons, and an opportunity to get out and become actors in the play.