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As you can see in the post about Sharing Mayo Clinic being featured on FIR, it’s possible in the self-hosted version of WordPress to provide a Flash player for your mp3 files, which enables your users to listen to the audio track without downloading it and opening in another program, such as iTunes.
What you may not know is that it’s really easy to provide this functionality.
Continue reading “Blogging 369: Adding an Audio Player in WordPress”
It was a week ago today that we launched our new Mayo Clinic blog, called Sharing Mayo Clinic. You can see some of the related news stories here, but I also wanted to post a link to the segment Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson included on their For Immediate Release podcast (Episode 416) last Thursday.
You can hear the portion specifically about Sharing Mayo Clinic below, but of course I recommend that you subscribe so you can get their “hefty and good” podcast delivered automatically to you twice a week.
I’m scheduled to have a recorded conversation with Shel and Neville next week (not sure whether it will be an Interview or a Cut), so if you subscribe you’ll get that delivered as well.
I’ve known Shel for several years, and he has consulted with us a couple of times, providing an outside perspective on and validation of our plans. He and Andy Sernovitz have been really helpful to us in getting social media programs going at Mayo, so I’m looking forward to sharing our progress with the FIR community.
Today I’m participating in an audio conference sponsored by Strategic Health Care Communications, entitled Blogging: Communicating and Marketing to Key Audiences. I’m looking forward to it, and to hearing what the other speakers have to say.
I will be talking about our Mayo Clinic experience, including our podcast blog, news blog, the various MayoClinic.com blogs and Sharing Mayo Clinic, which launched last week.
We will have a Q&A period as part of the audioconference, but one of the great benefits of blogging is that the conversation can continue beyond the time bounds of a conference call. So I hope you’ll share your reactions and questions in the comments below.
If you would like to connect and stay around for the long-term conversation on using social media (particularly in health care), “friend” me on Facebook, “follow” me on Twitter, or otherwise Enroll in SMUG.
If you want to chat about this subject matter in Twitter, you also can use the hashtag #healthstratchat. Might be kind of a fun demonstration during the audio conference.
Here’s another advantage of self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com, particularly as Facebook has extended the functionality of its video player.
For each video you have uploaded to Facebook, you have an option to embed it in your blog.
When you click Embed this Video, you see a window pop up like this:
And then, when you’ve copied the code, you can just paste it into your WordPress blog post in the HTML editor,
so it looks like this:
Which is what I did below, and you see the results. I had not indicated any privacy protections on this video, so you should be able to see it. Please let me know if you can’t.
This is an Aase family classic, in which I discuss the ins and outs of our birdhouse project with my firstborn son. Jake demonstrates exceptional bravery in completing the conversation even after receiving a grave injury.
As part of the launch of Sharing Mayo Clinic last week, we published guidelines for Mayo Clinic employees involved in blogging, social networking sites and other social media.
We previously had published the guidelines internally; our publishing them externally was inspired by our colleagues at Intel, a fellow member of the Blog Council, publishing their company’s guidelines, which are really well done.
We hadn’t considered publishing our guidelines externally until we learned that Intel had done it, and after some discussion within the Blog Council about the merits of disclosing these policies. It seems like the right thing to do, in the spirit of transparency.
From our perspective, these guidelines for social media aren’t really new policies; they mainly are applications of existing policies to new communications platforms.
So, if you’re looking to create social media policies or guidelines for your company, these are two examples you could consider.