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Blogging 115: The Blogroll

A blog’s Blogroll plays two main roles. When you add a link to your blogroll you are typically either saying:

“I have found this site helpful, and I would like to share it with you” or
“Here is a blog that covers some of the same subject matter as mine, and if you like my blog you might also enjoy this one.”

So politically oriented blogs tend to include like-minded others in their blogroll, for example. And blogs that are about social media often have blogroll links to others that have a similar focus.

The SMUG blogroll has been rather spartan because I haven’t updated it for about 18 months. Here’s how it looked before I began this post:

So I’m taking the opportunity of this course to both demonstrate blogroll management and to bring the SMUG blogroll up-to-date. Or actually, it’s what it looked like immediately after I did this first addition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvd4jJhQr0]

Here are some more blogs that fit both of the above criteria, and which I’m therefore adding to my blogroll:

Allfacebook
Blog Council
Buzzmachine
Commoncraft
Communication Overtones
Don’t Get Caught
Global Neighbourhoods
KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog
Scobleizer (Robert gave me the cue to use WordPress)
Social Media Club
Social Media Snippets
TechCrunch
Techmeme

These are only a Baker’s Dozen of the 230 or so feeds in my NetNewswire feed aggregator, but they’re the ones I think will be most interesting for the SMUG student body. I also added links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites (on Facebook, YouTube, our News Blog and our Podcast Blog.)

Also, this course is the first one for which I’m using a YouTube screencast instead of a Slideshare.net narrated slidecast. I’ll post about how I did it in a future course. I obviously have some things to learn to improve the quality of the screencast (and make it a snappier presentation), but I think having the ability to show exactly how to do things instead of narrating still frames will be really helpful in the show-and-tell courses.

Assignments:

Go to the sites linked above and subscribe to their feeds. See Social Media 102 on RSS feeds if you need a refresher.
If you have a blog, create or update your blogroll. You get extra credit points for adding Social Media University, Global.

Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups

Sites like CarePages and CaringBridge have been developed to meet important needs for hospitalized patients and their families and friends.

But Facebook, as a powerful general-purpose social networking site, may prove to be an even more useful alternative to these dedicated patient communication sites.

I will start by describing the very real needs CarePages and similar sites meet, and then discuss how Facebook can meet those needs.

Continue reading “Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups”

Facebook: Biggest AND Fastest-Growing Social Network

As Erik Schonfeld wrote today on TechCrunch, Facebook is blowing away the other social networks both in monthly unique visitors and in growth rate.

Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world,—with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing.

(At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

Read the whole story here: Facebook Is Not Only The World’s Largest Social Network, It Is Also The Fastest Growing.

When I first started writing extensively about Facebook a little over a year ago, it was growing by 3 percent a week. At that time, MySpace was the bigger player and was growing more slowly, but that was rationalized by many as a byproduct of its size: when the denominator is huge, you can’t expect the percentage growth rate to keep up with smaller competitors.

Erik analyzes what’s driving the growth for Facebook, and clearly the user-contributed translation to other languages has been the major factor. But even in North America, Facebook’s growth was 38 percent. That compares favorably with any of the other sites, and is more than 10 times the growth rate for MySpace.

One question: Where does LinkedIn fit in? Why is it nowhere to be found on these comScore charts?

I guess that’s two questions. But if anyone has the answers, I’d love to hear them and I sure so would our SMUG student body.

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50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

As part of her homework for Facebook 107, SMUG Student Peggy Hoffman used Facebook to send me this helpful overview list from Chris Brogan. It’s worth a look.

Social media isn’t always the right tool for the job. Not every company needs a blog. YouTube worked for BlendTec, but it might not work for your company. And yet, there’s something to this. Over the last three days, I’ve spoken to four HUGE brands in America that are considering social media for one project or another, and there are many more out there working on how these tools might integrate into their business needs. Here’s a list of 50 ideas (in no particular order) to help move the conversation along. Note: I mix PR and Marketing. They should get back together again.

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing | chrisbrogan.com.

Chris has created a nice list of some potential ways to use social media; SMUG’s objective is to give you hands-on experience using the tools, so you can go to management with confidence both that a given tool is right for your organization AND that you know how to use it.

For example, the Podcasting curriculum, and in particular the 10 Steps to Your Own FREE Podcast post, walks you through the process to recording, publishing and promoting your own personal podcast.

So please follow Peg’s example by using Facebook to share some more of these good finds (or put them in the comments below.)

Have a great weekend. I’m hoping it doesn’t rain so we can begin painting the SMUG North Annex. Video reports about our construction process will be coming soon.