Podcasting 110: Listing Your Podcast in iTunes and Other Directories

iTunes, Podcast Alley and Yahoo are among the major directories that people use to search for podcasts that interest them. If you’ve created a podcast and want it to be widely heard, getting listed in these directories is important.

So just how do you go about doing this? Glad you asked! Podcasting 110 takes you step-by-step through the process of getting your podcast listed, and reviews how you can guarantee that your podcast can be found through Google.


Here’s where Chancellor Conversations is listed on Podcast Alley.

Assignments

  1. Go through the earlier courses in the Podcasting curriculum so that you will have a podcast of your own
  2. Submit your podcast feed in iTunes
  3. Submit your podcast feed in Podcast Alley
  4. Submit your podcast feed in Yahoo Search
  5. Put your podcast feed in a widget on your own WordPress.com blog
  6. Post links to the directory listings of your podcast in the comments below

Extra Credit

If you really want to impress the Chancellor with your thirst for knowledge, subscribe to Chancellor Conversations.

Blog Council Transparency Toolkit Draft Released

Actually, the formal title is the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit, and through Mayo Clinic recently joining the Blog Council I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in “the end of the beginning” of the discussions in development of these resources.

The Blog Council is an organization of mostly Fortune 500 companies (and their non-profit or not-for-profit equivalents like Mayo and Kaiser Permanente) who are actively engaged in blogging and other social media. (See a membership list here). Mayo is among the newer members, and so our role in the development of these guidelines has been minimal, but the Blog Council’s work on projects like this is a big part of why we wanted to join. It’s helpful to be able to network with and learn from similar-sized organizations as we navigate the social media world together.

As corporations are developing policies related to blogging and social media, there are some good resources out there already, such as on Constantin Basturea’s TheNewPR/Wiki. (You’ll note that it’s in my Blogroll.) It has lots of links to real corporate policies, for instance. One of the strengths of the Blog Council project, though, it that instead of being a collection of individual company policies it is a “best practices” document, and represents the best collective thinking of companies with lots of real-world experience in this arena.

I also appreciate the spirit in which this toolkit is offered: it’s an open source draft. As the broader community gets involved in the discussion, it will be further improved. But anyone can take the documents and use them as starting points for developing their own policies, and the toolkit can be applied beyond just blogs.

The Blog Council isn’t some kind of “policing” or “watchdog” agency, and we’re not here to make binding rules for anyone. But our members united by enthusiasm for social media, and we want our organizations to be involved in an ethical, open, transparent way…and we’d like to do all we can to encourage our corporate colleagues to do the same. The toolkit is just about making it easier for us to share with each other and also more broadly, and to provide a mechanism for community feedback.

For example here’s what the first checklist, on Disclosure of Identity, currently says:

Focus: Best practices for how employees and agencies acting as official corporate representatives disclose their identity to bloggers and on blogs.

When communicating with blogs or bloggers on behalf of my company or on topics related to the business of my company, I will:

1. Disclose who I am, who I work for, and any other relevant affiliations from the very first encounter.

2. Disclose any business/client relationship if I am communicating on behalf of a third party.

3. Provide a means of communicating with me.

4. Comply with all laws and regulations regarding disclosure of identity.

5. We will educate employees, agencies, and volunteer advocates.
– Train them on these disclosure policies
– Monitor to the best of our ability
– Take action to correct problems where possible

6. Pseudonyms
(Option A) Never use a false or obscured identity or pseudonym.
(Option B) If aliases or role accounts are used for employee privacy, security, or other business reasons, these identities will clearly indicate the organization I represent and provide means for two-way communications with that alias.

7. “We Didn’t Know”
All blogs produced by the company or our agencies will clearly indicate that they were created by us.

I hope you’ll check out the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit, and share your comments either below or on the Blog Council site.

Update: Here’s the post about the toolkit on the Blog Council site. See more discussion from Valeria Maltoni here.

Chancellor Conversations Podcast Available Now

I’m about to complete the 100-level courses in the Podcasting curriculum, so I started by dressing up the podcast feed (as described in Podcasting 109) for Chancellor Conversations, which has been my learn-as-you-go experiment in personal podcasting. You’ll note that we now have a “Subscribe to Podcasts” widget in the SMUG sidebar at right, which looks like this:

So, to become a subscriber, you can either click on that link in the sidebar, or this one, which has the same effect.

Most of the segments so far have been “how to” lessons on podcasting from the 100-level courses. I look forward to further enhancing the production values and making Chancellor Conversations a little more polished over time.

But this podcast is in keeping with SMUG’s mission, which is to help people explore how they can use social media, and to take the mystery out of it. As I try some new things to improve the quality, I’ll share those, but what you’re hearing in the first few episodes is what you can record for free using Audacity and a built-in computer microphone.

And of course, the offer from Podcasting 105 stands, enabling you to start your own experimental podcast for FREE.

Mayo Clinic Social Media Update

As I Tweeted earlier today, I had an opportunity this morning to provide an overview of Mayo Clinic’s social media activities to another division within our department. One of the things I enjoy about doing presentations like this is that as I update previous versions I can see where we’ve made progress in the intervening time.

Coincidentally, a Mayo Clinic colleague — Nancy Jensen — who leads our Public Affairs division in Florida and also is extensively involved in cancer communications nationally, asked me to provide an overview of what Mayo is doing in social media for a discussion board on which she is a member. It’s a group of cancer communications contacts for academic medical centers. She also thought it would be good for them to get a taste of SMUG and some hands-on social media education, so I decided it’s time for another update here.

Since my last Mayo Clinic social media progress report in May (which I would encourage you to check out for background), we have three significant developments:

  1. Our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel has been significantly upgraded. We’ve been able to get the look and feel customized to closely match mayoclinic.org, our main Web site for patients, and we’ve added playlists to group some of the similar videos and highlight them. Currently we have featured our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge videos and the video testimonials and personal stories we shot at the Transplant Games with the Flip.
  2. We’ve started a Mayo Clinic News Blog. We still have some refinement to do, but it serves at least two good purposes. First, it enables us to provide video and audio resources to journalists on a password-protected, pre-embargo basis, which should help us get more news coverage. Second, when the news embargoes lift, we take off the password protection and make those same resources available to interested members of the general public. And the videos we put there can discuss the research stories in much greater detail than would get into any mainstream media news story, which is a great service to potential patients.
  3. Finally, in just the last two weeks (coinciding with the Transplant Games), we established a Mayo Clinic Flickr account. The first application was to make photos available to the participants who visited our booth, but we’ve also created sets for photos of our campuses, and it seems the next move might be to put photos there that accompany our news releases.

Nancy also mentioned that it would be good for me to discuss some things a smaller communications unit, perhaps with three or fewer members, could do. It’s easy for people to look at the resources Mayo Clinic has, and think that these tools are just for the bigger players.

That would be a mistake; the truth is just the opposite. Here’s why.

Social media tools are a great democratizing force. They enable anyone to create content and distribute it worldwide (and also get feedback from users.) Kids can do this in their basements or dorm rooms; as communications professionals we certainly are capable of learning social media.

On a related note, the cost of participating in social media is extremely low. Through wordpress.com, you can get a blog with customized look and feel, mapped to a domain or subdomain of your choosing, and with the ability to deliver your podcasts, for $45 to $55 a year. A Flickr account with unlimited bandwidth and storage costs $25 a year. A Facebook page is free, and if you work for a non-profit, so is a YouTube channel. You may need to pay someone to do the blog and YouTube customization if you don’t have that in-house capability, but if you have a corporate Web site those design elements would be fairly easy to match. And you can get a Flip video camera, with tripod, for less than $200. A digital still camera also can be had for that price or less, and you already have computers capable of using these tools.

You can learn more about how to use these tools for free. That’s what Social Media University, Global is all about. You can enroll here and then go through step-by-step, hands-on courses in general social media, blogging, podcasting, Facebook and other topics. All it takes is your time.

In the end, that’s the real potential cost for social media: it takes some people and a commitment to be involved. But I would submit that these tools provide leverage for you to accomplish your other work, and that by using them you will get better results in less time. And they also provide an opportunity for you to leverage the involvement of others in your organization, outside of your public affairs or communications group.

Tell your story! How are you using social media?

In the comments below, please share your stories and examples of how you’re using social media in your organization. I’d like to see them, and I know Nancy’s fellow cancer communicators would enjoy them as well.

SMUG Diversity – Extra Credit Weekend Assignment

As described in Salon, Stuff White People Like is

a satirical blog about a particular segment of Caucasian culture. It’s like an extended “you might be a redneck if” joke recast for a more upscale set. It gently mocks the habits and pretensions of urbane, educated, left-leaning whites, skewering their passion for Barack Obama and public transportation (as long as it’s not a bus), their idle threats to move to Canada, and joy in playing children’s games as adults. Kickball, anyone?

I first became aware of this site about a week ago (which is further evidence of my non-whiteness, at least according to Mr. Lander’s criteria), when people at work started sending me “Have you seen this?” notes regarding this post announcing the Stuff White People Like Facebook application.

I don’t know what would be the basis for calling the Mayo network the whitest on Facebook — whether it’s the number of installs of the application, or the scores of those who take the “whiteness” test. I’m just glad that I’m helping to bring diversity to Mayo. 😉 I did get whiteness points for liking Apple products, however.

That got me thinking: How diverse is the student body at SMUG? Among the 123 current members of the SMUG Facebook group, I know we have at least 10 countries on five continents represented. So I’ve come up with a just-for-fun weekend assignment for SMUG students. It’s completely optional, but then again all of our coursework is completely optional.

Assignment:

  1. If you haven’t already done it, Enroll in SMUG and be sure to join our Facebook group. This is your chance for a free education in practical use of social media in your business or other organization.
  2. Visit the Stuff White People Like Facebook application and take the “Whiteness Test.”
  3. Enter your score and whiteness percentage in the comments below.