Tag: Blogging

Healthcare Blogging Audio Conference Next Week

On Jan. 28, I will be presenting at an audio conference entitled “Blogging: Communicating and Marketing to Key Audiences.” It’s sponsored by Strategic Healthcare Communications, and other presenters include:

  • Sarah Brandon, Manager, Internal Communications, Alegent Health, Omaha, NE
  • Lisa Dombro, Chief Development Officer and Vice President, Marketing, Neurologic & Orthopedic Hospital of Chicago
  • Mark Gothberg, Editor, eHealthcare Strategy & Trends, Rye, NY

I’m looking forward to hearing about their experiences, too. If you’d like to join the audio conference, click here for more information.

It’s not free like SMUG, but should provide some good case studies of using blogs in healthcare communications.

Blogging 122: Being a WordPress Blog Contributor

This post is a companion to Blogging 119: Managing Multiple Contributors, and is written from the perspective of someone with Contributor-level access to a WordPress or WordPress.com blog.

After your blog administrator has added you as a contributor, you should have a link sent to you where you can sign in.

For WordPress blogs, you can access the dashboard from the front page of the blog by adding /wp-admin/ to the end of the URL. So for SMUG, the dashboard is at:

https://www.social-media-university-global.org/wp-admin

Alternatively, you may see a link in the sidebar that looks like this.

meta-login

Click the Log in link, and you will see a screen where you can log in. But I’m getting ahead of myself; watch the video and you’ll see step-by-step how you enter and save your posts as a contributor.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWyRzFkK7oY]
 

For further information about writing a post, see Blogging 116.

Speaking at BlogWell

BlogWell - How Big Companies Use Social Media - Chicago, IL - January 22nd

Next Thursday I’ll be in Chicago for BlogWell, an event sponsored by the Blog Council (of which Mayo Clinic is a member.) Here’s the agenda.

It should be a great event. I understand it’s sold out, but you can click here to get on the waiting list if tickets become available.

I’m sure there will be a whole lotta Tweetin’ going on.

Blogging 352: Adding an Email Subscription Form to Your Blog

Here’s an RAQ from Katie M:

I am currently using wordpress.org for a few blogs. I am setting up for some doctors and another blog for another pilot program … so doctors can learn from each other…I am wanting to have the similar option that you have for subscribing, that is via e-mail. How do I go about doing this?

The answer is pretty straightforward.

I recommend that you use Feedburner to replace your blog’s RSS feed with one that gives you more features, particularly better tracking. Feedburner is free, and among its built-in benefits is the ability to let your readers subscribe by email.

Here’s how you can add a subscription form to a sidebar widget on your blog, assuming you have set up a Feedburner account and “burned” your feed.

Continue reading “Blogging 352: Adding an Email Subscription Form to Your Blog”

Self-Hosted WordPress Advantage: Part I

This evening as I left work I flipped the switch on my Domain Name Server to direct the SMUG domain to this self-hosted WordPress installation. Within about an hour it seems the traffic was being directed appropriately, as you see in the comments on the post below.

I had several reasons for making the change, and in addition to doing 300-level courses in the Blogging curriculum based on my experience in migrating to self-hosted WordPress, I’m going to plan to highlight some of those advantages I was pursuing.

One downside of WordPress.com is that it strips out all javascript, so I was limited in the kinds of widgets I could embed in the sidebar or within posts. So while I could include a single YouTube video (as in this Twitter 103 course), I couldn’t embed a playlist like the one below, which features several videos of Mayo Clinic patients and their families sharing their stories:

There’s no way to do that with WordPress.com! Pretty cool, huh?