Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Shel Holtz Ragan Presentation: What’s Next?

I’ve known Shel for several years, and I try to keep in touch via Twitter, his RSS feed and listening to his For Immediate Release podcast (with his sidekick Neville Hobson.) Still, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve heard him present, and this talk at the Ragan conference with SAS was really interesting and helpful.

As I sit in the Charlotte airport, loving the free wi-fi, I’m taking the opportunity to clean up my liveblogging post from his talk, and to add some links to the sites he mentioned.

The title of the presentation was, “What’s Next?” and he had ten key trends he saw as important. I missed #9, so if anyone else (or even Shel) can fill in the missing info, I would appreciate it. But before I get into those trends here were a few of Shel’s observations.

Shel says the high-end webcast is going the way of the DoDo, because now anyone can do a webcast using Qik or Ustream.tv.

Seesmic – lets you record videos at your Webcam. Put video up instead. Twitter for video. And WordPress now has a plug-in that lets people comment on your posts via Seesmic.

Integrated social networks. Websites, networks merge. Conversation with customers becomes part of the online presence.

Fastcompany.com has redesigned its Web site extensively to incorporate conversation. All of the content except one cover story is contributed by the community.

Tulane University is using LiveWorld.

Google Open Social will enable you to turn your Website into a social network, just by copying some code.

Shel says Web 3.0 involves these key trends:

Trend #1: Ubiquitous connectivity

Broadband
Wireless
Mobile computing – get to the Web anywhere you have a phone signal. Very few organizations have mobile phone strategies; they (we) really should.

Trend #2: Network computing. Web services, cloud computing, grid computing, distributed computing

Shel uses Live Mesh. I like Dropbox. Google has a video service just for corporations, available only to employees. Videos are hosted outside the firewall. Company IT departments will need to get comfortable with software as service like this. Shel uses Google Docs to develop and store his documents. He mentioned Yammer, too.

Trend #3: Open technologies – APIs and protocols, software, data. This is a huge trend. Why spend a half million dollars on a CMS when you can download a free open source package that is just as powerful, and pay someone $10K a year for support?

Trend #4: Open Identity – Open ID, Open reputation, Open portable identity

Business world doesn’t like this because companies want to gather your info.

Trend #5: The intelligent web. Use Pandora, for instance. It looks at music you like and finds similar songs that are what you’ll like. Recommendation agent. Natural language search instead of keywords. Semantic Web. Check out Twine.

Trend #6: Distributed Databases

Trend #7: Technology Populism: Tech has gotten so easy that you don’t need an IT person to help you implement it. That’s really one of the main ideas behind SMUG. “It’s Not That Hard.”

Trend #8: The information workplace. Getting people whatever information they need when they need it.

Prologue is a WordPress Theme that can be added to a blog you have behind the firewall.

TownSquare is a plug-in for Microsoft SharePoint that adds functionality like Facebook. Not available yet.

As Shel mentioned, FriendFeed is a great way to pull together information.

Yahoo Pipes is a really interesting service and Shel showed a video that demonstrates it. Here it is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3h6ROs__II]

Gotta play with that.

Trend #9: (Updated) Aggregation–Friendfeed, Dubpages, Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes (mashup feeds), Feedburner – (Thanks to sktuttle for providing in the comments.)

Trend #10: Widgets will also increase in importance for distributing your content.

Comcastcares uses search.twitter.com to do customer support. Symantec has a fan page on Facebook.

Why Dad is Blogging (And Why I’m Helping)

As Lee LeFever has noted, mixing politics and education isn’t a good idea, though someone should break the news to people like Ward Churchill, who rant about their personal political views at taxpayer expense. (Come to think of it, I guess the governor of Colorado has communicated that to Churchill.)

That’s why, although I’ve been transparent about my previous work in politics, I’ve confined SMUG posts to analyzing how social media is being used by campaigns and is affecting this year’s elections. As Chancellor, I can’t be fired, but I also want to keep SMUG true to its educational mission. And frankly, I have a family and a very interesting and challenging day job that keep me fully occupied.

But last week my Dad, who is co-chair of the Mower County Republican Committee, asked me to help him by typing the text for a newspaper ad, I got an idea for something I thought would be much better.

Instead of a single ad that would run once or twice and would be limited in space and content, I suggested that he and his fellow activists start a blog and use a series of smaller ads on radio and in the local newspaper to promote it.

That way they could write in more depth about the issues that mattered to them, instead of settling for slogans that wouldn’t likely convince anyone, especially given their limited budget and the huge amounts being spent by the various candidates.

People who are active politically usually get involved because they have ideas about issues, and have something to say.

Until now, getting their ideas out usually meant sending a letter to the editor of the local newspaper or other traditional forms of political involvement.

Blogs and social media have changed all of that. Now they can publish their ideas to the world, unlimited by the word counts or political dispositions of newspaper editors.

And they can tell their stories through video by getting their own YouTube channel.

All things considered, if they can get on local TV or in the newspaper they still should do it, because the reach will be larger. But at least now they have an alternative.

I’m not sure whether I’ll be writing any posts on Dad’s new blog, but I will be using it to help illustrate and demonstrate some how-to tips that will be useful for all SMUGgles.

For instance, earlier this week I mapped Dad’s blog to a new domain, from sixissues.wordpress.com to sixbigissues.com (sixissues.com was taken.) And in the process I took screen shots that provided the basis for Blogging 305: Domain Mapping, which will help me illustrate how you can point your blog to a domain or subdomain of your choosing.

I plan to host a training session for Dad and his fellow activists on Saturday, when I return from North Carolina. We’ll be conducting it in the Lewis J. and LaVonne A. Aase Retreat Center, part of the SMUG North Annex.

So if you want to follow along as they learn how to blog, hopefully that will be helpful. And if, as this recent news suggests, surfing the Net helps senior citizens stay vital, blogging should be even better for Dad.

My Ragan/SAS Presentation

Here’s the presentation I’m scheduled to give this afternoon at the Ragan Communications conference, Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World.

Updated: Shel Holtz is liveblogging the conference on his blog.

Here’s the information about how you can enroll in SMUG. I would appreciate any comments or questions from those participating in the session. Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below. You also can leave a recommendation on LinkedIn, or “friend” me on Facebook (be sure to mention that you attended the Ragan conference.)

Here are links to our:

Mayo Clinic News Blog

Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel

Mayo Clinic Podcast Blog

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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.

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.