SMUG Social Media University Global

Dr. Seltman’s Opus

Among the reasons for my relatively lighter posting in the last few days is this video, which I produced (with some of my colleagues) to honor Kent Seltman, who celebrates his retirement from Mayo Clinic at a reception this afternoon.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjtCAmmT4h8]

Unlike the character played by Richard Dreyfuss, Kent not only left his influence within the lives of the people with whom he worked at Mayo. He actually did get to write his Magnum Opus. Kent is the author, with Leonard Berry, of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World’s Most Admired Service Organizations. You can read a review here.

RAQ – Related Posts

In the comments about my post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Peggy Hoffman asks:

Question (and yes great book) can you share with us how-tos on the related post widget you are using here that produces automatically generated material.

It’s really easy. In your WordPress dashboard (and I’m glad I’ve waited until WordPress 2.7 was released before I did my overview of the dashboard for Blogging 111; that’s coming soon), you click on the Appearance link on the left side:

picture-14

And then choose Extras:

picture-15

At which point you will see a set of options like this:

picture-131

All you need to do is make sure the last option, “Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other blogs or get traffic that way” is unchecked.

So, on WordPress.com, having the automatically related links is the default option, I believe. You can decide you don’t want to have it, but as Peggy points out, it can be really helpful to your readers.

They are automatically generated, so they aren’t guaranteed to be related, but on balance I think this is a good option. I’m sure some SMUGgles found their way to our University originally because of a possibly related link on someone else’s WordPress.com blog.

If that’s your story, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please let us know if the automatically related links helped you discover SMUG. That will help our fellow SMUGgles see the value of this feature as well.

While I was doing this post I saw another feature that has no useful point, but I’m turning it on just for effect. Let me know what you think of the falling snow. Only available on WordPress.com, and only until 1/4/09.

Monday Morning Chess and iPhone Blogging

We have had house guests this weekend at Old Main – the Kelley family from Louisville. This morning our daughter Ruthie vanquished Christian Kelley in chess. Apparently he has difficulty focusing in her presence. I’m also using this as a chance to show Christian’s Dad, Rick, a soon-to-be-SMUGgle, how to blog with a iPhone.

Here’s a post-victory photo as they engage in the rematch…and a photo of the current state of play.

Required Reading: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

As your Chancellor, from time to time I offer book reviews. And most of my reviews are really book recommendations. In other words, I don’t write a review unless it’s a book I think you would find worthwhile.

With Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, we reach another level: beyond review or even recommendation.

It’s a Requirement.

You really need to read this book. I downloaded it last week through Audible and listened to it while doing some work around the house and yard. It’s absolutely riveting.

Gladwell’s subtitle for the book is, “The Story of Success.” His aim is to look at wildly successful people and to evaluate what sets them apart…what makes them “outliers.”

He disappoints the rugged individualist by showing how cultural history and accidents of birth (even the month of the year we are born) play huge roles in our opportunities for success.

And with his elucidation of the 10,000 hour rule, he dispels the myth that there is such a thing as a “natural talent” that can be extraordinarily successful without sustained practice and skill development.

Along the way, Gladwell provides surprising, interesting (and compelling) answers to perplexing questions, such as:

Why are Asians so much better at math than westerners are?
Why did Korean Airlines have such an abysmal safety record?
Why were the mountains of Kentucky home to so many notorious family feuds?
Why do so many of the most successful corporate lawyers in New York City have amazingly similar biographies (born in the 1930s to Jewish parents who worked in the garment industry) and how did those factors contribute to their success?

Outliers is both humbling and motivating. It’s humbling because it reminds all of us that for any success we have, we can trust that factors and background beyond our control (and perhaps even seemingly random, like the month in which we were born), have played a role. And it’s motivating because the 10,000-hour rule emphasizes that hard work is an indispensable ingredient for success, though it offers no guarantees.

Gladwell is a fantastic storyteller, as he demonstrated in The Tipping Point and Blink, both previously reviewed (or rather recommended) here. Any of his books would make excellent Christmas presents.

By definition, the vast majority of us won’t be outliers. But everyone reading this post has access to a computer with power far beyond what Bill Gates had as junior high school kid in 1968. He and Steve Jobs were born at the right time, and had extraordinary access to computers as youngsters that enabled them to put in their 10,000 hours and be in position to take advantage of (and help create) the personal computer revolution. But because of the legacy they have left, we have amazing opportunities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined.

In the scope of human history, we’re all outliers. Based on our SMUG enrollment figures, it’s highly likely that within 24 hours of this post being published it will have been read by at least one person on virtually every continent except Antarctica.

Fifty years ago, no one had that kind of power – not even the richest or most powerful rulers on earth.

But today, if you’re reading this post, you do.

I’m not suggesting that you spend 10,000 hours learning and practicing social media skills. But in just a few minutes a day you can work through the entire SMUG curriculum, taking advantage of the Jobs/Gates computer revolution, the Internet and Google to develop a whole new set of skills that you can use practically in your work and in your avocational pursuits.

I hope you will make becoming proficient in social media one of your New Year’s resolutions. (And for tips on keeping your resolutions, see this post.) If SMUG can help in your learning, I’d be honored to have that opportunity.

But meanwhile, get Outliers and read it. It will change the way think about success and its causes.

Update 12/29/08: Seth Godin has a thoughtful take on the 10,000 hour rule and its application in newer or niche markets.

Social Media 110: 7 Ways to Shrink URLs

After exploring a couple of alternatives to the granddaddy of URL shorteners, TinyURL, I had been planning to write a post about why these services are important and what are the advantages and disadvantages.

(By the way, I think it’s kind of funny…a sign of the rapid innovation in social media, really…that a service like TinyURL, which was started in 2002, could be considered an “old-timer.”)

When I found out yesterday that Ragan.com had an article (including a video interview) from a presentation I did in October at SAS in Cary, NC as part of Ragan’s corporate communications conference, I saw a good opportunity for a real-world, practical demonstration of how these services work.

Here was the URL to the Ragan article:

http://www.ragan.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=

MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=5AA50C55146B4C8C98F903986BC02C56

&tier=4&id=86C724C3E1794BA8ACD9D7CC55BC6DE5&AudID=3FF14703FD8C4AE98B9

B4365B978201A

And of course, when you paste a link like that into an email, for instance, what typically happens is that the URL is broken, so that when the recipients of your email click the link they get error messages.

Not a happy outcome.

That’s where TinyURL and similar services come in. Using the browser bookmarklet for TinyURL, I got this message:

By reducing a 215-character URL to 25 characters, it meant I could paste the shorter version into an email (or into Twitter) without worrying about a broken link.

How does this work?

It’s brilliantly simple, really. With a six-character string of letters and numbers, TinyURL can create over 2.1 billion URL options. So when you submit a gigantic URL, TinyURL generates a random six-character code and links it to that URL in a table. Then, when users click that TinyURL link or enter it into a browser, they go to the TinyURL site, which looks up the longer URL and redirects them to the original longer URL.

See the Wikipedia article on TinyURL.

Here are six other link-shrinking options:

BudURL – This service has a free option or a paid upgrade that gives you access to statistics on how many times your BudURLs are clicked. I’m just using the free option, which I think limits me to 25 BudURLs. It also has a browser bookmarklet, which I will describe in the SnipURL discussion.

SnipURL – Also goes by Snurl or Snipr if you want to squeeze those last two characters out of your 140-character Twitter limit. It has a javascript bookmarklet you can drag to your browser’s toolbar (at least in Firefox and Safari):

So that when you are at a page and want to create a SnipURL, you just click the link and it automatically creates one for that page:

Here’s the sequence when I clicked the link from the main page of my blog. This window popped up:

And then I had an opportunity to decide where I wanted to share it (or whether I just wanted to copy to my clipboard)

And when I selected Twitter, it opened a new window with some text pre-populated (and which I then completed):

Adjix.com – This is an interesting one in that it is ad-supported and offers revenue share. When people click your adjix link, a new browser window opens with a narrow ad banner. I think it’s relatively well done and the ads aren’t annoying. Here’s an adjix.com link for this post (which will create a recursive loop). What do you think of the ads? Annoying or OK?

NotifyURL.com – Similar service to some of the others, but you get an email the first time someone clicks your link. More recursive fun.

DwarfURL.com – Not very politically correct, but workable. Here’s the DwarfURL for this post: http://dwarfurl.com/01e3a

Linkbee.com – an ad-supported platform like Adjix. I like the way Adjix incorporates ads, as opposed to Linkbee, although Linkbee does give options. The interstitial ads show up for a few seconds (with the option to skip like some of the newspapers use), and there also is a banner option. What do you think?

TinyURL, SnipURL and BudURL offer browser bookmarklets, which makes the URL shrinking much faster and easier. TinyURL is actually automatically incorporated within Twitter, but I’ve found that it doesn’t always work. Adjix says it has a couple of bookmarklets (and even has video demonstrations of how to use them), but I can’t find the bookmarklets anywhere on its site.

Any of these seven tools will do the job for you. One potential downside of them is that if you use them instead of your long URL you may not get the Google/SEO benefit of links, because the link is to an intermediary site instead of your own site.

I’d appreciate hearing any thoughts you have relating to these services, or others like them that I haven’t reviewed. Please add your thoughts and reviews in the comments, so all SMUGgles can benefit from your experience.