Facebook 201: Secret Groups as Your Free Small Business Intranet

I have a friend who has become seriously SMUG and wants to use Facebook and other social media tools in her home-based marketing business. She has an organization involved in selling stuff, and wants to be able to communicate with people in her marketing network, which is widely dispersed geographically.

In essence, she would like to create an intranet without the corporate firewall.

If her team members all had a company email address (e.g. personname@companyname.com), Yammer would be a great solution, and you can read all about it in the Yammer curriculum here at SMUG.

But that’s not the case in many small or home-based businesses, nor is it for my friend.

Let’s call her “Terri” (since that’s her name). One of “Terri’s” concerns is that when she does business-oriented work on Facebook, the things she posts get all mixed in with her personal Facebook feed. And while her business activities may not be super secret, she would like to keep personal and work activities somewhat segregated.

A Secret Group in Facebook can be a good answer in this case.

To use this, though, everyone in your group needs to be a Facebook “friend” — at least until you have invited them into your secret group, although there is a workaround, as I will explain below.

Here are the three steps to creating your free small business intranet, assuming you have already created your Facebook account. (You have done that, haven’t you?)

Continue reading “Facebook 201: Secret Groups as Your Free Small Business Intranet”

SMUG Speed Solution (I Think)

In an earlier post I lamented some issues we had been having with the SMUG service, in that pages were taking inordinately long to load: sometimes as long as 45 seconds, and occasionally even having some “timeouts.” Not the kind of timeouts modern parents give their children in lieu of spankings, but the kind that made me want to spank my hosting service provider.

Bill Ferris (@billfer) offered some good pointers in response, and suggested that I call my hosting provider to see if we could clarify the problem. But then, having applied some of his tips (and deactivating a couple of plug-ins), the response times seemed to get somewhat better.

So, like the typical male who cancels the doctor appointment when he starts feeling a little better, or who just learns to live with a little nagging health concern instead of getting to the root of the problem, I let the situation continue.

Yesterday, though, I had the blog equivalent of an out-of-hospital-cardiac arrest. When I tried to visit SMUG I got an “unable to create database connection error” message, and got a similar message when I tried to access my WordPress dashboard. The WordPress error message suggested I might want to contact my hosting service.

So I called GoDaddy, and as often happens the problem went away while I was on hold. But the friendly customer service guy checked into it further with those on the technical side, and apparently there had been some problems with the server on which SMUG is hosted, and they were in the process of solving them.

When I Tweeted about the issue, @paulacassin said:

@LeeAase YES! It’s not blindingly fast, but 3-4secs. Much better than before. 🙂 Looks like they tweaked something the right way

…and Monty Flinsch (@mflinsch) echoed the assessment.

So it appears we may have solved the problem. To confirm it, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment indicating the approximate page load time you’re experiencing, and what kind of Internet service you have (i.e. T1, cable, dial-up, etc.)

I hope it’s not blindingly fast, because I would hate to be responsible for vision loss, but it would be nice if it could be just a little blurry, like Michael Johnson in the 200 meters.

RAQ: How Can I Find Journalists in Twitter?

From the mailbag:

I met you a few months ago when you came to speak at my PRSSA meeting, and now I graduated and am working in PR and realize how important everything you talked about really is. I have been enjoying SMUG, and have since passed on the links to my co-workers, and we are loving it…what a great resource. I was looking through the Twitter curriculum, and I am having a hard time finding a specific answer, so I thought I would ask. I am trying to find journalists from North Dakota who have Twitter handles, but am having a tough time. Do you have any suggestions, or is it a pretty lengthy process?

Answer:

Google is always a good place to start: when I searched for Journalists in Twitter, I found this MediaOnTwitter wiki and another wiki with sections for journalists using Twitter and media outlets using Twitter.

Those don’t get you too far in finding North Dakota journalists (and I always think it’s funny when people build wikis that are alphabetized by first name.)

So another good step is to use Twitter.Grader.com to find the “Twitter Elite” in a particular geographic area. You can search for North Dakota or any of its cities, such as Fargo, Grand Forks or Minot. These won’t necessarily get you journalists, but you might find some. 

Another suggestion would be to look on news media Web sites within the state, to see whether any of them have Twitter listings.

Based on my quick survey, it doesn’t seem there are a ton of North Dakota journalists on Twitter, but I did at least find the Fargo Forum’s account.

It’s probably going to be a long process to find twittering journalists, with you adding them to the list of those you follow as you gradually discover them (and as more join the service.) As you do build your list, though, you may want to add them to one of the wikis listed above, so you can work together with a community to build a worthwhile resource. The MediaOnTwitter wiki seems to be the best organized one, at least from my initial review.

OK, fellow SMUGgles: What other advice would you offer for finding journalists on Twitter?

World Health Care Congress Consumer Connectivity Summit Presentation

Here’s the presentation I’m giving this afternoon at the World Health Care Congress Consumer Connectivity Summit. Regular SMUGgles will note significant similarities to my previous presentations, but for those attending the Summit or who are unfamiliar with what we’ve been doing with social media at Mayo Clinic, I hope this will be a helpful resource.

World Health Care Congress Summit

View more presentations from Lee Aase. (tags: whcc whcc2)

Please feel free to chime in with any questions or comments below; it can help illustrate some of the benefits of social media, in that it allows conversations to continue even after the presentation is complete.

You also can follow the stream of tweets at #whcc2.

WHCC Innovator’s Showcase

During my presentation as part of the Innovator’s Showcase at the World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity, I’ll be talking about three kinds of health care innovation in social media. 

Straightforward application of technology, but in a health care setting.

This is the “Use as Directed” level of innovation; what is innovative is that many in health care have not taken advantage of these tools. As Mayo Clinic examples we have:

  • Facebook Fan page. We have 5,497 fans as of this writing. We established our page on November 6, 2007, the first day Facebook made pages available. To find out why we moved so quickly, see Track 1.
  • YouTube channel – We were able to customize the look to match our mayoclinic.org site, including a link to our site from the Mayo Clinic logo.
  • Yammer – Twitter for the Enterprise. This is a tool for workplace collaboration that you can try before you buy. You don’t have to spend on something when you don’t know whether users will…well, use it. If you don’t have a Mayo.edu email address you can’t see our Yammer site, and even if you do work at Mayo you can’t see our Social Media Team group or our Sharing Mayo Clinic editorial team group. See the Yammer curriculum for more details, but a key benefit of Yammer is the ability to hold meetings asynchronously.
  • Dropbox – Lets you mirror audio/video files “in the cloud.” You can get 2 GB of storage at no cost.
  • Blogs – If 100 million people can start blogs, it can’t be too hard for your organization. And if you don’t need branding/customization, it can even be free, but the customization is inexpensive and relatively easy.

Thinking like MacGyver – how can you creatively combine cheap (or even free) and readily available tools to accomplish your goals?

 

Facebook groups: Options include open groups like the WHCC group, closed groups like Health Science Career Festival Alumni, or even secret groups like the One Voice Group to gather feedback from a patient advisory group. Depending on your need for exclusivity or privacy, you can adapt these group types to get started quickly to see whether these applications would be beneficial and whether your target group would join. If you find that these are successful, or if you identify barriers to success, you can use what you’ve learned to perhaps develop a customized, single-purpose social network.

Blogs – In addition to our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog for patients and staff to share their stories, we have others hosted externally and mapped to subdomains of our Web site:

  • Podcast blog to host and serve our podcasts. Here’s a post on POTS and another on Niemann-Pick Disease Type C.
  • News blog that serves as our password-protected multimedia online newsroom, with video and audio resources for journalists. After embargo, these provide great resources for patients too.
  • This week we launched our Physician Update blog.

YouTube is the video server for our blogs, and Dropbox enables us to make large video files available for download without the muss and fuss of FTP. To see an example, right-click and “Save As…” here to download a 60 Mb video file to your desktop, or here is an example of a particular post related to a recent story.

Think Like Dr. Henry Plummer or Dr. John Kirklin.

Among his many innovations, Dr. Plummer essentially invented the PMR that makes today’s EMR possible. Dr. Kirklin took the heart-lung bypass machine developed elsewhere and perfected it.

Similarly in social media, when you have proven the concepts with the free or low-cost tools you can decide whether it’s worth the time and development expense to further customize or to pay for a premium service from a vendor.

We have some Plummeresque applications in the works. Nothing to announce just yet. Watch this space for news as it becomes available.