SMUG | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

A Year of Being SMUG

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For some events it’s really easy to pinpoint a date. The births of all of our six children were quite memorable, for instance. But with the last one, John, his arrival was so rapid — and almost exactly at midnight — that we got to choose his birthday. We didn’t know for sure when he made his debut, so we picked 12:01 a.m. on November 23, which enabled his mom to get three full days of recuperation in the hospital.

The birth of SMUG was less momentous and more gradual, so it’s a little more complicated to choose an official anniversary date. Though I’ve been blogging since July 30, 2006, it wasn’t until January 24 of last year that I first used the term Social Media University, Global and explained the rationale. The next day I had posts on Tuition and Financial Aid (we don’t have either), and on the 28th bestowed upon myself the title of Chancellor. After setting policies for auditing classes and applying for admission as well as attendance and grading on the 29th, I officially changed the name from Lines from Lee to SMUG on January 30.

And having previously said that I wanted to limit my blog to only things I could do without spending a single penny (just to make a point), I agonized over whether to spend the $19 for domain mapping, so that my URL would be social-media-university-global.org instead or leeaase.wordpress.com. I finally made the switch on February 20, 2008.

People who know me may say my SMUGness goes back long before last year, so picking any of these dates as the official birth of SMUG is somewhat arbitrary. January 25 would be a good choice, as it was the day I started the SMUG group in Facebook, which now has 252 members. But I guess I’m going with January 30, which is the day I went from having SMUG just be a page on my blog to being its complete identity, although the vanity URL came three weeks later.

So on Friday of this week we’ll be celebrating a year of being SMUG. It’s been great fun, and I hope you’ve learned as much as I have. If you have highlights or key observations to share with your fellow SMUGgles, I hope you’ll leave them in the comments below.

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”

Twitter 104: Four Steps to Building Your Twitter Network

This is the equivalent of a “lab exercise” to accompany Twitter 103. See that course for the the theory. Twitter 104 gives you the step-by-step roadmap to building your own personalized network in Twitter.

Please note that you probably want to follow no more than 10 new people at a time on Twitter; because of the spammer phenomenon, following tons of new people at once raises alerts that can cause temporary account suspension (at least I’ve heard that’s the case.) I’ve put a tweet out about this and will try to confirm when I get an answer, and will update the post accordingly. So you may need to complete this course over several days (especially Step Three) to avoid this problem.

Let’s get started!

Step One: Invite Friends & Family to Twitter

In a variation on the the old saying, “The family that prays together stays together,” I says “The family that regularly Tweets doesn’t miss a beat.” Click this link and then enter the email addresses of your spouse, offspring, siblings, parents and closest friends. Follow them and ask them to do likewise. Unlike the cell phone providers with their “circles” and “fave fives” you don’t have a limit on the number with whom you can connect through Twitter.

Then, hypothetically speaking, when your daughter drives 250 miles to meet the family of the young man with whom she has become involved, she can just send a quick tweet to let everyone know she made it safely. Not that we’ve had an issues with kids causing us to stay up worrying or anything. 😉

Step Two: Invite 10 Work Colleagues

In like manner, pick 10 people with whom you work regularly and invite them to join so you can follow each other. Then, as you run across interesting articles on the Web, for instance, you can tweet about them instead of sending the group email that typically snowballs into the “reply all” blizzard that overtakes your inbox. (Not the greatest use of metaphors, but it’s early a.m. as I write this.) If you want to have more company-confidential conversation, Yammer is a Twitter-like service for which I have developed a separate curriculum.

If either your family or work colleagues want more information on Twitter and why it’s worthwhile, send them to Twitter 101 for an overview.

Step Three: Follow Your Fellow SMUGgles

Students (and faculty for that matter) at Social Media University, Global are known as SMUGgles. (Here’s an explanation of the term.) You can go here to see a list of your fellow SMUGgles on Twitter. (or at least the ones who have chosen to follow the @SMUG_U feed.) As of this morning, you’ll see something like this:

Just click the “Follow” button next to each name (as illustrated in Twitter 103), and you’ll start to develop a network of like-minded people interested in learning more about social media, and who are tweeting about our discoveries. As of this writing, we have 238 members in our SMUG Facebook group, so I’m hoping our Twitter network will grow rapidly. And because of the velocity of interchanges with Twitter, I’m confident this group of SMUGgles following each other will provide a great platform for connecting and learning together.

Step Four: Join Interesting Conversations

Make sure your notifications are set so that you see all @ replies from those you’re following in your Twitter stream. Your settings should look like this:

This ensures that you “see all of the @replies made by people you follow, whether or not you follow the person to whom the reply is directed.” This is a great way to see one side of conversations that you might find interesting, and that you may wish to join. Just as importantly, you’ll see the people with whom your friends are engaged (see the @JasonFalls example from Twitter 103) and you may likewise want to follow them.

In reply to my tweet about the number of follows per day that sets off spam alarms, @mflinsch suggested mrtweet.net as a good resource for building your network. So I’ve followed @mrtweet, and will update this post if it becomes Step Five.

Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed

This post is part of the SMUG Twitter curriculum, and its prerequisite is Twitter 102: Creating an Account. To successfully complete this course, you need to have established your own Twitter profile.

One of the keys to Twitter is the people you follow, and who follows you.

Some people decide to just follow a few close friends in Twitter, while others follow more broadly, to develop an information-gathering network.

More on those philosophies in a bit, but for starters here is a video tutorial that illustrates the mechanics of how you can get started in finding people to follow to start building your Twitter network:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtn6UP4XC8A]

Now about the philosophies of following and being followed:

You could decide that you only want to follow family and close friends in Twitter. That’s a perfectly valid option. In that way you would be able to stay more involved on a daily basis with those who already are closest to you.

On the other end of the spectrum we have those like @Scobleizer (Robert Scoble) who follow and are followed by thousands (20,852 and 47,828 at present).

I would recommend you find a balance somewhere in the middle. By all means invite your family, friends and work colleagues to join you on Twitter, but you have much to gain by broadening your network. You’ll meet interesting people and learn of news that’s relevant to you, and will be able to participate in interesting discussions.

And when you have a question, you can just “Tweet” it and you’ll likely get lotsof good feedback, as I did when I was looking for Web hosting recommendations.

Assignments:

To avoid making this a two-credit class, we’re going to limit the homework and carry it over into Twitter 104. So for now your assignments are limited.

If you haven’t already, follow my personal Twitter account (@LeeAase) and the SMUG University Twitter feed (@SMUG_U). I will follow you back.
Pick eight more people to follow from this great post from Sam Bradley, bringing the total new people you follow today to 10. Note that if you follow too many new people in one day, it may raise suspicions with Twitter that you’re a spammer. But 10 is a nice safe number for starters.

Coming tomorrow is Twitter 104: Building Your Twitter Network, which will be a “lab session” much like I experienced in my college days getting a minor in Chemistry. It will take you through a process of building the personal Twitter network that’s right for you.