Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

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!

Avoiding Social Media Indecision

SMUGgle Maddie Grant, the formerly reluctant blogger, makes a good point when she (after her obligatory allusion to my awesomeness) says I made her want to tear her hair out with the Social Media 110 course.

She’s absolutely right: you don’t need seven ways to shrink your URLs. It only takes one. Pick one that works for you and use it. Social Media 110 probably should have been a 200-level course; as you’re starting with social media, it’s not essential that you understand all the different ways you can shrink your URLs.

This reminds me of a story, which I believe was in Made to Stick, about a study of college students and their choices. When given a choice between studying and going to a movie, something like 30 percent chose studying. But if the choice was between studying, the movie and another event (some kind of interesting lecture or presentation), the number of people who chose to study actually increased. More choices made it harder for the students to decide which of the fun things to do, so they were more likely to default to studying.

I hope giving you seven ways to shrink URLs doesn’t likewise create indecision for you, or overwhelm you with options. You surely don’t need to try them all. I like SnipURL because it has a browser bookmarklet that makes posting items to Twitter really easy. So if you’re looking for a recommendation, that would probably be mine.

But any of these services are fine. The main point is to just start using one of them.

That’s also another reason why I do all my posts about blogging with reference to the WordPress platform. Blogger and Typepad are fine, and if you like them, use them. I had visiting professors review them as part of the blogging curriculum.

But my main goal with SMUG is to help people get engaged in social media, using state-of-the-art tools, so I just picked the one blogging platfrom I think is best and most powerful. And I want to be able to go deeper with one platform, instead of saying “This is how you do it on WordPress, but you can do the same thing on Blogger by… and on TypePad by….” I just don’t have the time or inclination to do the same thing three different ways. And I surely won’t be shrinking my URLs seven different ways.

Choosing your blogging platform is a lot more consequential than deciding which URL shrinker to employ, because you could change the latter every day (not that you should) without really affecting anything, but it’s harder to make a switch once you’ve decided on a platform for your blog.

Meanwhile, Maddie’s post gives me further impetus to provide some recommendations on a few steps everyone should be taking — sort of an updated, “new-and-improved for 2009” version of Social Media 101. Instead of 12 steps I will probably have five or six that I would call “must-dos.”

In doing so, I hope to help you avoid the indecision that leads to procrastination, and give you concrete steps that will be fruitful for you personally and professionally.

It’s a balancing act in which the inclination toward research as befits a global university (and one that is nearing the one-year anniversary of its formal establishment!) is in tension with the desire to make things straightforward and simple for beginning SMUGgles. Thanks to Maddie, I’ll try to be more clear when I’m exploring a range of options as a research project, and that I’m not recommending that everyone go forth and do likewise.

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.