blog | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blog Birthday

Today we celebrate the second birthday of this blog. I don’t know how big the “we” doing the celebrating is, but it has definitely grown in the last year.

When I started it as “Lines from Lee” with these three posts on July 30, 2006 I had no idea what a great adventure I had begun. In fact, it was more than a month before I wrote another one. But by the end of September I had pretty much decided to go for it. I described the first full year a year ago today with this post: Looking Back: One Year of Blogging, which closed with this:

It’s been a great year of learning, and while I’ve invested some time, the financial cost has been zero.

Where else but the blogosphere can you learn so much at no cost?

I’m looking forward to continuing my education!

Little did I know that just a few months later I would become Chancellor of an on-line institution of higher education!

In that last year (and particularly in the six months since Lines from Lee became Social Media University, Global – SMUG), traffic has increased by about 600 percent. The number of RSS subscribers is up 800 percent. And we have 134 members of our SMUG Facebook group. This is my 530th post over two years, and Akismet has spared me nearly 50,000 spam comments. Thank you, WordPress!

While in last year’s wrap-up I highlighted some specific posts, this year I would just direct you to my Rebranding the Blog post and others from January. They describe what we’re all about at SMUG:

using free or ridiculously cheap social media tools

to learn how to

use free or ridiculously cheap social media tools

for real business/work-related projects and for more in-depth relationships with key stakeholders.

But as I think about it, there have been a few other key highlights I should mention:

My 12-Step Social Media Program for PR Professionals was a precursor for SMUG, in that its popularity helped me see the need for an orderly, step-by-step introduction to social media. And while I’m not aware of the post being translated into any other languages, it has been edited and adapted for publication in magazines or newsletters for association Executives and veterinarians.

Other posts and pages that have gotten significant traffic include:

B2B Facebook: Limited Profile (which has since been improved and updated by Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy)
Facebook Business
Top 10 Facebook Business Uses, and
The SMUG Curriculum

But the best part of blogging has been the people I’ve met through this journey. Among those I’ve gotten to know a bit without meeting face-to-face (yet) are Ben Martin, Kelsey Thompson, Scott Meis (a Chicago snowstorm prevented our meeting), Brycie Jones, Steve Levine, Sidney Williams, Toby Palmer, Jennifer Texada, Hilary Marsh, Rick Sauter, Aruni, and Peggy Hoffman. I hope that in the coming year they’ll become in-person acquaintances, like Chris Heuer, Rick Short, Katie Paine, Chris Martin, Tim Collins, Susannah Patton, Hillary Weber, Scott Hensley, Kevin Hoffberg, Michael Masnick, Bonnie Sashin, Sally Falkow, Jeremiah, Erik Giberti, Lee Odden, Charlene Li, Dennis McDonald, Jim Long, Sallie B, Michael Brito, Andy Sernovitz, Adam Brown, Michael Rubin, Kami Huyse, Chuck Hester, Paula Cassin, and many others. Daniel Rothamel is an in-between case: I haven’t met him, but we did talk via Skype videoconference.

These are just a few of the folks with whom I’ve gotten connected over the last year or so, and they all have enriched my life. So have the scores of additional people I’ve met through conferences, or virtually through Twitter, blog comments or the SMUG Student Union. For those whose names I should have mentioned but didn’t, please just chalk it up to the lateness of the hour.

And of course, Facebook has helped me reconnect with many friends from the foggy, distant past.

If you haven’t taken the social media plunge, I encourage you to immerse yourself. To borrow a phrase I heard someone use in the last few months to close an on-line video:

“If you enjoyed it half as much as me, that means I enjoyed it twice as much as you.”

But even if your social media enjoyment is 10 percent of what mine has been, you’ll find it well worth the effort. And you could start by clicking any of the links above, which would introduce you to an interesting person. These are can’t miss recommendations.

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.

Managing for Excellence Presentation

Today I’m doing a presentation to the Managing for Excellence meeting at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. This is a meeting of all Jacksonville supervisors, and I get a chance to tell them about what Mayo is doing in social media.

On our internal blog I did a post with links to some of our projects (many of which I had previously highlighted here), but I’m closing my fast-paced presentation (I only get 15 minutes) with a little more “show” to go along with the “tell.”

I’m planning to show:

A video about Mayo Clinic that someone else posted to YouTube
How I can post that video to my personal Facebook profile
How I can post it to the Mayo Clinic Facebook “fan” page
How I can directly share it with some of my friends through Facebook
How I can add it to the “Favorites” for the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel
How I can embed the video in my blog, and
How any of our patients or employees can do all of the above.
I also will show how the YouTube channel links to our mayoclinic.org Web site.

I will be updating this post during the meeting today, embedding a video, for instance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3vfIgfTVI]

If you’re interested in learning more and getting information on topics from Flickr to Twitter to RSS to Wikis, check out the Enroll Now page for your continuing education options.

Blogging 108: Starting Your WordPress.com Blog

Note: This post is part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

This may be a case in which our course sequence is out of order, since Blogging 109: Experimenting with WordPress.com should perhaps logically come before this one. In Blogging 109, I offer a chance for you to do practice posts on a Training Wheels Blog that isn’t your own. So you can feel free to experiment and make mistakes there, before starting your own blog.

But in another sense, it probably makes sense to at least start your blog here in Blogging 108, then go and experiment a bit in Training Wheels before coming back to start your own blogging in earnest.

As I describe on this page, which was my first effort to give a step-by-step intro to starting a blog on WordPress.com, the process is really simple. But I didn’t show exactly what it looks like as a first-time user, because the screen shots you see are from me starting a second blog, when I’m already logged in to my first one.

So now it’s time to update and enhance as part of the SMUG curriculum, and I’m making it a SMUG Podcast and putting it in the form of a Slideshare.net presentation.

Since everyone should have a blog, I’m going to start by creating a blog for my nine-year old son, John. Of course, I’ll need to start by getting a Gmail account for him. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the presentation:

Homework Assignments:

As indicated in the presentation, your homework assignments are as follows:

Go to John’s blog and leave a comment on this post about what a great Dad he has. (And by the way, A Grand Start was really the title he chose for this post.)
Start your own blog on WordPress.com.

It’s fine if you want to leave your blog in that initial condition for a few days. Send me an e-mail or a message through Facebook with the e-mail address you used in signing up for your WordPress.com blog, and I will add you as an author for the Training Wheels blog. Then you can experiment and learn how to do posts before you start doing it for real on your own blog.