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:

  1. 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.)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to Ma.gnoliaAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

SMUG 100-Level Courses on the Way

While our 100-level curriculum for Podcasting has been completed (and we have a strong start in Yammer, too), I’m feeling the need to finish the entry-level sequence, particularly in Facebook.

So for long-time SMUGgles, you may find some of the upcoming posts a bit elementary, but please bear with us…and take this as an opportunity to “give back” by sharing your experiences in the comments.

I have about 15 courses at the 100 level that I’ve identified by haven’t completed, so I’m going to try to get those finished in the next couple of weeks.

And meanwhile, if anyone wants to develop an official SMUG seal, that would be much appreciated by generations of SMUGgles yet to come.

SMUG Reading List 10/27/08

Some helpful recent readings on social media from other sites:

  • Now you can link to a specific spot within a YouTube video. So if you find an interesting spot in a YouTube video that you want to share, you can direct people to that portion instead of making them watch the whol thing (or saying something like “scroll ahead to the 1:45 mark.”) Learn how and see an example of deep linking on  YouTube courtesy of TechCrunch.
  • Wikipatterns has interesting thoughts on how to spur adoption of wikis in your organization (and how to eliminate barriers to adoption.)
  • TwitThis is “The new ‘share this’ for Twitter.” You can drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar, and then easily share whatever page you’re currently viewing through Twitter.
  • And Brian Solis has a helpful post cataloging the Twitter tools (including TwitThis) that are available to make Twitter even more useful for community and communications professionals.

Blogging 305: Domain Mapping

Domain mapping enables you to choose any available URL for your blog, regardless of the physical server you use to host your blog.

So, for instance, I started this blog at leeaase.wordpress.com, but when I decided to convert from a blog to a virtual university I mapped it to https://www.social-media-university-global.org/ (because getting the .edu domain would have been too much of a hassle.)

You’ll note that if you click either of the links above, it will take you to the front page of this blog. The purpose of this course is to show you how you can do something similar for your blog that is hosted on wordpress.com, and how that gives you and your blog room to grow for the future.

Here’s the slideshow that takes you through the process, step by step:


The example I used for the demonstration is a blog I helped my septuagenarian parents and their friends start for their local Republican party volunteers to have a means of expression. It was originally at sixissues.wordpress.com and now is mapped to sixbigissues.com.

If you have started a blog on wordpress.com and would like to get wordpress.com out of your blog’s URL, this is how you do it. For businesses and organizations, it’s an important way to have your URL reflect your brand. Either way, if you think you might just get serious about blogging and want to protect your ability to move your blog to a different server where you would have more flexibility and control, spending the $19.19 for a domain and mapping is a good investment.

If you found this post helpful, please share it on Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or one of the other services featured in the toolbar below:

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to Ma.gnoliaAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

Yammer 102: Your Yammer Profile

This course is part of the Yammer curriculum for Social Media University, Global. It shows you how you can adjust your personal settings to tailor Yammer to meet your communication needs.


After you’ve experimented with Yammer, please share your impressions in the comments.

And if you find this course helpful, you can use one of the buttons below to share it with your friends or the broader community.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to Ma.gnoliaAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine