Category: Social Media

A Class Organization

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting a case study for a two-day workshop on social media for corporations that Shel Holtz was doing on behalf of Ragan Communications. Minneapolis was the second stop on Shel’s six-city tour, and he asked me to share what we’ve been doing with social media at Mayo Clinic. I’ll upload my slides a bit later, but for now just want to share a good turn done by the hotel at which the event was held, the Depot Minneapolis, a Renaissance Hotel.

When I arrived home last night, my MacBook Pro power cord was missing. So I quickly sent a message to Shel through LinkedIn, asking if he had noticed that I had left it in the meeting room. (Meanwhile, it was another reason I was glad I had bought my wife a MacBook, so I could use her cord.) A couple of hours later, when Shel landed in Little Rock, he sent word via his mobile device that he had found my cord and left it at the hotel’s front desk, and that I should contact the hotel so they could send it to me. I live 100 miles from Minneapolis.

What a relief…made possible by a social networking site and mobile e-mail technology!

When I called the Depot this morning, the front desk attendant asked for my name and confirmed that he had the cord. When I asked if he could send it, and said I would give a credit card to pay the cost, he put me on hold for a few seconds and came back to say they would mail it to me and that there wouldn’t be any charge.

Thanks to the Depot for its good turn…which deserves another…so I just want people to know about a good hotel in Minneapolis.

Managing for Excellence Presentation

Today I’m doing a presentation to the Managing for Excellence meeting at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. This is a meeting of all Jacksonville supervisors, and I get a chance to tell them about what Mayo is doing in social media.

On our internal blog I did a post with links to some of our projects (many of which I had previously highlighted here), but I’m closing my fast-paced presentation (I only get 15 minutes) with a little more “show” to go along with the “tell.”

I’m planning to show:

I will be updating this post during the meeting today, embedding a video, for instance.

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3vfIgfTVI]

If you’re interested in learning more and getting information on topics from Flickr to Twitter to RSS to Wikis, check out the Enroll Now page for your continuing education options.

Making it Easy to Enroll

It just occurred to me (maybe because I’m too close to the content of this blog) that I need to make it clearer how people can enroll as SMUG students. So we have a new page, Enroll Now, to simplify the process. You have enrollment options, but now you don’t have to find your way to this post on the SMUG page, which was kind of buried.

There’s a difference between being unstructured and being disorganized. Hopefully now we’re back on the unstructured side.

Social Media University, Global doesn’t have any financial barriers to entry, since we charge no tuition; hopefully now we’ve eliminated a site navigation barrier, too.

Blogging 108: Starting Your WordPress.com Blog

Note: This post is part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

This may be a case in which our course sequence is out of order, since Blogging 109: Experimenting with WordPress.com should perhaps logically come before this one. In Blogging 109, I offer a chance for you to do practice posts on a Training Wheels Blog that isn’t your own. So you can feel free to experiment and make mistakes there, before starting your own blog.

But in another sense, it probably makes sense to at least start your blog here in Blogging 108, then go and experiment a bit in Training Wheels before coming back to start your own blogging in earnest.

As I describe on this page, which was my first effort to give a step-by-step intro to starting a blog on WordPress.com, the process is really simple. But I didn’t show exactly what it looks like as a first-time user, because the screen shots you see are from me starting a second blog, when I’m already logged in to my first one.

So now it’s time to update and enhance as part of the SMUG curriculum, and I’m making it a SMUG Podcast and putting it in the form of a Slideshare.net presentation.

Since everyone should have a blog, I’m going to start by creating a blog for my nine-year old son, John. Of course, I’ll need to start by getting a Gmail account for him. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the presentation:


Homework Assignments:

As indicated in the presentation, your homework assignments are as follows:

  1. Go to John’s blog and leave a comment on this post about what a great Dad he has. (And by the way, A Grand Start was really the title he chose for this post.)
  2. Start your own blog on WordPress.com.

It’s fine if you want to leave your blog in that initial condition for a few days. Send me an e-mail or a message through Facebook with the e-mail address you used in signing up for your WordPress.com blog, and I will add you as an author for the Training Wheels blog. Then you can experiment and learn how to do posts before you start doing it for real on your own blog.

Free File Sharing Site: Senduit

Today I ran across a simple, elegant free site that’s a great alternative to a complicated ftp site. If you need to share files that are too big to e-mail but less than 100 mb, Senduit is an excellent choice.

Almost all social software utilities like Facebook and YouTube are free, because as Chris Anderson says, there’s a huge psychological difference between $0.00 and $0.01. The price of admission for these sites is usually creating a username and password. Not a huge barrier, and there are benefits that accompany the accounts, but it still creates some hassle in getting started with a service.

Senduit is as effortless a file sharing utility as I can imagine. Check that: I think it’s as effortless as anyone could imagine. Here’s the user interface:

You just choose the file, pick how long you want it to be available, and hit the upload button:

After a few minutes, depending on your file size, you get a screen that looks something like this:

Then, if you send that URL to someone by e-mail, or insert it in a blog post as a clickable link like this:

http://senduit.com/921e87

They can click the link and the download starts automatically.

Note: This link should be working until about June 4, 2008. It’s video I took of some friends and former patients who were back in Rochester to visit last week. You can read their updates here. If you’re reading this post after that date, give Senduit a try with your own file.

At first I wondered how this could possibly be a money-making enterprise, especially given the Senduit privacy policy, which says:

File Privacy
The name, type, contents, and origin of your file are not saved, reviewed, or analyzed. The only monitoring that takes place are our automated tallies of file uploads and our automated cleaning of expired files.

Transfer and Storage Security

Although we take appropriate measures to ensure the privacy of our user’s data, it’s impossible for us to guarantee 100% security. For this reason, we suggest you do not use our service to share sensitive data. Once a file has been uploaded, it is your responsibility to share your file’s address in a secure manner.
File Expiration
All uploaded files are designated to expire at the point in time selected (anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 week). After a file has expired, it becomes inaccessible to the public and is permanently removed from our systems.

But then, when I downloaded my own file, I saw how they work in the advertising. It looks like this:

Unlike the annoying pop-up ads you see on newspaper web sites, this isn’t one you’d click to skip. And when you click the ad it opens in a new window, leaving your download happening in the background.

This seems like a great, user-friendly service, and the only real costs should be bandwidth. Files never stay on their servers for more than a week, so storage costs should be negligible. Like they say, you wouldn’t want to place highly sensitive files on their servers, but it appears that the odds of someone randomly finding your URL are something like 1 in 2,176,782,336.

Give Senduit a try and let me know what you think about it.