The posts on SMUG have been sparse for a few weeks, and here’s why: In my “day job” we’ve been on the verge of announcing what I think is an exciting new development, the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.
Here’s a story about it from KTTC TV in Rochester, which includes an interview with our interim medical director, Victor Montori, M.D.:
As you might imagine, I’m seriously excited that we have gotten to this point. I’ll be writing more about this later, but just wanted to resurface after several days of what may have seemed like summer vacation here at SMUG.
Update 7/30/2010: The KAAL TV story on the launch of the center also was picked up by ABCNews.com. You can see it here:
Words of wisdom from Marlow Cowan, the elder half of the “Octogenarian Idol” piano duo whose YouTube duet at Mayo Clinic…
… has been viewed more than 7.2 million times as of this morning (and which led to their appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America as well as NHK, the national TV network in Japan.)
Marlow is now well past octogenarian status (he’s 91), and his wife Fran celebrated her 85th birthday yesterday. My wife Lisa and I were honored that their daughter, DeDe Shour, invited us to join them for the surprise birthday celebration at their home in Ankeny, Iowa (click any of the photos to enlarge):
We got to see some pictures from their very full life together…
…and then also join their family (even some great-grandchildren) for dinner at the Country Kitchen in Des Moines.
At dinner, Marlow and Fran reflected on how their lives have changed in the last 15 months since their video went viral…
…how they’ve renewed connections with former students and members of the touring youth musical performance groups they hadn’t heard from in decades. They’ve had numerous requests for concerts, but travel isn’t as easy as it used to be. Marlow and Fran both expressed their gratitude to God for their 63 years of marriage and the many blessings he has given them. They see their performances as a way of serving him by sharing those blessings with others, so they do as many as they can.
Marlow said they have certain stipulations when they agree to a concert, one of which is, “They’ve gotta have a back-up act in case something happens to us. We’re not getting any younger, you know!”
At their advanced ages, he said they’ve also developed a couple of rules for their personal lives: “We don’t buy any green bananas. And we eat dessert first.”
Chancellor’s Note:This is part of the SMUG beautification project, cleaning out some of the underbrush of content originally published at the “page” level but that needs to be demoted.
This content was first published on October 22, 2006. Since then, Google bought Feedburner. But Feedburner is still a great way to add functionality to the RSS feeds from your blog.
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Thanks to Shel Holtz for his advice on how to incorporate “Digg This” and “Add to Del.icio.us” links/badges into blog posts, using FeedFlare, a free service that is available through Feedburner, another free service.
That’s also where I got the badges for My Yahoo, Google Reader, and others that you see at right. Shel explained that Feedburner adapts and enhances your site’s existing RSS feed and provides great reporting on subscriptions and click-throughs.
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Feedburner is definitely still a service worth exploring.
Note: This is reposted from what was originally part of the “page” structure of this blog. It shows what you can expect when you decide to start a blog on WordPress.com.
Suus Not Ut Difficile!
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When you click this link to start a new WordPress blog, you will see a screen something like this:
All you do then is enter a name, like this:
And then, provided your name is unique enough, you get a message like this:
Chancellor’s Note: This is a reposting of the first WordPress Page I created, which was originally published on October 19, 2006. The original title was “It’s All Free (And Mostly Easy)” and it was my first attempt to keep some basic themes foremost on my blog, which was at that time called “Lines from Lee.” As you’ll see below, I had resolved that I wasn’t going to do anything on my blog that required me to spend any money. This page (now demoted to a post) highlights all the things you can do in social media for free.
Over time, that “It’s all free and mostly easy” theme morphed into the school motto for SMUG: Suus Non Ut Difficile, or “It’s Not That Hard.”
I’m going to be cleaning up some of the navigation on SMUG, and demoting some of the other Pages to “Post” status as well. This also will give me a chance to reflect upon things I wrote three to four years ago, and see how my thinking has evolved since then.
And how many things I saw in social media then really haven’t changed. It’s still mainly free. And it’s not that hard.
So…here’s a blast from October 2009:
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With 100 million blogs listed in Technorati, obviously there isn’t too much inertia preventing people from starting blogs, but among public relations professionals I have seen less familiarity with blogs, podcasts, and social media.
This ought not to be.
One reason for the reticence to jump in might be a lack of understanding and a misperception that it’s expensive, difficult or requires extensive IT support. That’s why I’ve decided that on this blog I will only use services that are FREE, such as:
And, of course, WordPress.com is a free blog hosting site.
For social networking, I use Facebook (and you can friend me here.) MySpace is also free.
Many of these services offer paid upgrade packages that let you do more, and maybe you (and I) will want to do that in the future (e.g. to be able to upload more than 20 megs of photos per month). But the point is, you can start right now with a blog and have it up and running in about 90 seconds (and that’s if you take a minute or so to decide what you want for your username or domain name.)
So, I may blog about some services that have a cost, but what I incorporate in my site will all be free.
This is my first time creating a standalone page (outside of the reverse chronology of the blog.) I hope to add some related pages that would highlight other free stuff, and maybe a step-by-step tutorial on how to get started.
If you want to use another free hosting service other than WordPress, that’s fine. Blogger and others probably have some features that differ slightly. But for whatever tutorial I develop, it will be in WordPress, so my examples will be easiest for you to use on that platform. Besides, how much better can you get than free? And if you decide to wait and research which is the best free hosting service, that’s a recipe for procrastination. Just do it.
Also, to prevent inappropriate mixing of business and personal worlds from an email perspective, go get a free email account from Google or Yahoo!
Here’s another post where I have boiled this all down into a 12-step social media program for PR professionals. Follow this plan and you’ll be conversant with key social media tools and trends within a couple of weeks. Not expert, but at least conversant.
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By the way, I’m now up to spending about $80 a year for blog hosting. And the above post was published just six months after Twitter was created, well before it had gotten any kind of critical mass. Just another free (and easy) service that has become much more prominent in the last four years.
