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Christmas, The Little Mermaid and the Power of the Flip

SMUG has been observing our Christmas recess (although newer SMUGgles are certainly welcome to explore some of the existing curriculum) as the Chancellor’s family has been celebrating our Savior’s birth. The regular curriculum development will resume Monday.

We’re about to begin Day 3 of our Christmas gatherings, with Lisa’s side of the family joining us here at Old Main. Last night we were at my parents’ place with the Aase clan, and on Christmas night we had our six kids, our “adopted” son Jeff, and our granddaughter, Evelyn here to open presents. Here’s a picture of Evie and her Grandma Aase:

Evie’s Dad, my son-in-law Kyle, deserves a special mention, for many reasons. We’re glad he’s been brought into Rachel’s life (and therefore ours), and that he will be starting seminary classes next month. For SMUGgles, this relationship between Kyle and Rachel is an illustration of the power of social media, as they met through Facebook. So in some sense, Evelyn is here today because Mark Zuckerberg decided to start a social networking platform.

Kyle inadvertently demonstrated the power of another tool in social media, the Flip video camera, on Christmas night as Rachel unwrapped a gift — a Little Mermaid songbook — from her sister, Rebekah:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqO2rBlCepM]

As I’ve said previously, one of the main benefits of the Flip is that you can always have it with you, and so therefore you are much less likely to miss capturing that priceless memory.

This is Exhibit A!

This video may yet make its way to Facebook, where Kyle can be tagged so that all of his 926 friends can see his musical expression. Somehow, I think Kyle’s brothers and sisters-in-law will take care of that. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve uploaded some video highlights of their youth directly to Facebook so their friends can see them. And because Facebook now defaults to sharing video with everyone (although it lets you limit who sees them), I think you SMUGgles can see them too (and I’d be interested in having you confirm in the comments below.)

Here’s one of my son, Jake, in which he shows immense bravery (at least for a few seconds) after suffering a foot injury, and another in which he displays an interest in botany.

Here’s Ruthie giving her newborn brother Joe “a swoppy kiss.”

And here are Ruthie and Bekah (but mostly Bekah) singing one Sunday morning before church.

It’s time now to go make and capture some more memories, as the Wacholz clan is about to arrive.

Merry Christmas to all of you from all of us!

Social Media Sends Marketing Back to the Future

Below is an interesting video my wife discovered this morning, and it highlights why continuing education through institutions like SMUG is so important. One of the interesting segments says:

The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010…did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist…using technologies that haven’t been invented…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

I don’t agree with everything in this video (for instance, how can they know what the top 10 in-demand jobs will be in 2010?), but in general it’s quite thought-provoking.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]

Here are a few of the thoughts it provokes in me:

At least half of my job as it currently is structured didn’t exist in 2004. My title is “Manager, Syndication and Social Media.” The syndication part, providing medical news content for traditional media, isn’t new. But being a manager for social media (and the fact that we have a social media team at Mayo Clinic) is definitely a more recent development.

The pace of technological change is amazing, but in many ways it reverses some societal trends. Following widespread adoption of radio and TV (the timeframe of which is mentioned in the video) we entered a mass marketing era. Before that time, we were a society of smaller communities, and word of mouth and localized media were the most important ways of disseminating information. But mass media meant advertisers carpet bombed us with their messages because they could, and there was no way for us to really escape.

While in some ways the era of social media seems to be hurtling us toward a wild new world along with other technological innovations, in another sense it reverses some of those 20th century realities.

It’s never been easier for word-of-mouth messages to be distributed. For instance, I have a few hundred Twitter followers who will get a tweet about this blog post. If some of them decide to retweet it, they may pass it to thousands of their followers. And RSS, Facebook and Friendfeed (to name a few) are other ways the message will get distributed. RSS is the oldest of these technologies, and it first became widely available in 2003.

So with hundreds of millions of people able to make their thoughts potentially available to anyone in the world (for free), and with the social media tools making it easier than ever for friends to stay in touch and reconnect (and for people of common interests to congregate, regardless of geography), the mass media aren’t the only game in town anymore. Which is why we continue to see headlines like this one.

Word of mouth is free. As my friend Andy Sernovitz says, “Advertising is the price of being boring.” Or as Seth Godin puts it (I just downloaded one of his audio books), “Small is the new big.”

And that’s why SMUGgles will be ahead of the game; you’re preparing for and adapting to the changes that are happening, and seeing how these new tools can help you solve the problems you face in your work.

What thoughts does this video provoke in you?

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200 SMUGgles Learning Social Media Together

With the exception of composing my annual Thanksgiving letter/post, I was pretty much unplugged from the Web over this long holiday weekend. It was a great time with family and working on some projects, like hanging our outdoor Christmas lights and insulating the North Annex.

But I did check in briefly Saturday morning and saw that our SMUG student union (a.k.a. Facebook group) had 201 members, which meant that we had 200 SMUGgles besides me. And as I check this morning, we’re up to 204, with members from most U.S. states and every continent except Antarctica.

How cool is that?

Actually, that number probably understates the true number of SMUGgles, because we have well over 200 subscribers to our RSS feed and nearly 400 who are following my Tweets. There may be some overlap among the three groups, but we likely have some unique members in each.

Thanks to everyone who has enrolled in Social Media University, Global to learn about social media together. Unlike traditional models of education, in which a low student/teacher ratio is considered beneficial, with SMUG we all gain by having more people participating. I may be the Chancellor, but in reality we’re all SMUGgles (with apologies to J.K. Rowling): ordinary humans who possess no wizard-like powers, but who want to do magical things using social media tools. More about tools in a future post.

If you’ve found our coursework helpful, I hope you’ll take a moment to share SMUG with your friends, co-workers or members of your non-profit volunteer organizations. You will not only help them by introducing social media tools like blogging, podcasting, Facebook and Twitter that they can use (or you can use together with them on joint projects), but you’ll also make SMUG stronger, as we will have more people sharing and contributing, and we can learn from each other.

For instance, Norway’s Jan Husdal, who became our first SMUG associate professor, taught me how to embed the social sharing toolbar on posts in WordPress.com. Our student body name, the SMUGgles, came from Jim Streed of Green Bay, Wisc. And I think we may be welcoming another associate professor soon.

I hope you’ll use the toolbar below to share this post with your Facebook friends, either by posting it to your profile or singling out some particular friends by sending directly to them as a message. Or feel free to use any of the other sharing buttons (or tweet about it on Twitter) to otherwise spread the word.

If you’re not yet a SMUGgle, you can enroll in Social Media University, Global through one of the options on this page.

RAQ – Posting Friendfeed to Facebook News Feed

Here’s another Recently Asked Question:

As Ashok asked, here is how you can use the Friendfeed application to import updates from Twitter, your blog, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and dozens of other services into your Facebook profile.

First, you need to sign up for FriendFeed.

Then, pull in feeds from you various social networking services. Here’s a snapshot of mine:

Then, install the Friendfeed application on your Facebook profile.

After that, it’s pretty straightforward to have your updates that are fed into Friendfeed also be posted to Facebook.

I like Friendfeed in that it has the ability to aggregate information from various social sites. I’m sure I don’t get nearly as much out of it as I could, but even so, it’s been useful.

If other SMUGgles have stories or examples of how you’re using Friendfeed effectively, I hope you’ll share them in the comments below.

Facebook 108: Photo Sharing and Tagging

Flickr is a fantastic photo-sharing community, but it’s not the biggest one.

Facebook is.

More than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook, and more than 30 million new photos are uploaded every day.

Flickr is great for sharing photos with the world, with people you don’t know. Facebook is for sharing photos with your friends.

And after all, for most people, aren’t your friends the people you want to see your pictures?

One of my first “Aha!” moments with Facebook came when my daughter Rebekah went to her high school Homecoming as a sophomore. Many of her classmates attended the same pre-Homecoming party, and everyone took pictures of everyone else, and uploaded them to Facebook, tagging their friends who appeared in the pictures. If there were 50 girls each taking 50 pictures, that’s 2500 photos from that party alone. I can’t imagine those girls moving to another social networking site and abandoning their Homecoming photos (and those from Prom and other high school events.)

And if the girls aren’t leaving, neither are the boys. I also wonder what impact Facebook is having on the high school yearbook business. How great will the demand be for these bound and printed keepsakes, when so many of kids’ high school memories are available online in Facebook?

But I digress. The point of this course is to show you how easy it is to upload photos to Facebook to share with friends, and how tagging lets them (and their friends) know that the photos are there. Here’s a quick video tutorial I did, using some photos from our preparation of “Old Main” for the Holiday Tour of Homes, a fundraiser for our local chapter of the American Red Cross:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5VrFclyiCk]

Assignments:

Join Facebook if you haven’t previously. (Which would tell me you’ve skipped some of the earlier 100-level Facebook prerequisites, in which case you might want to go through Facebook 101 and 102.)
Upload a photo of yourself with an appropriate caption, to the SMUG Facebook group. Be sure to “tag” yourself so you see how the photo shows up in your minifeed and news feed.
Think about the implications of photo sharing and tagging in Facebook for social media projects you might want to start for your work-related or community organizations.