Tag: Social Media

Podcasting 105: WordPress.com is My Podcast Server (and Yours)

Note: This post is part of the Podcasting curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG). SMUG provides free, hands-on training in applied social media, so enroll today.

Once you have recorded your audio files using Audacity, and added ID3 Tags in iTunes, your next steps in becoming a podcaster are to find a server to which you can upload your files, and to create an RSS feed that you can post to the iTunes store and to other podcast directories.

Fortunately, you can do both of these things in wordpress.com for just $20 a year by purchasing the 5GB space upgrade for your wordpress.com blog. But for SMUG students I have developed a way that you can experiment with developing your own podcast, and create your own podcast feed, absolutely FREE.

I have set up a separate blog called the SMUG Podcast Blog and have paid the $20 fee that enables me to upload mp3 files. But I have more space now than I could possibly use, so for anyone who is enrolled as a SMUG student, I will add you as an author for that blog, and will create a category you can use for your podcast posts and to set up your RSS feed. The steps to get started are in your homework assignment for this course.

Homework Assignments:

  1. If you haven’t started your WordPress.com blog yet, do it now. You will need a WordPress.com account to be added as an author for the SMUG Podcasts blog.
  2. When you have your WordPress.com account, send me the e-mail address you used to create the account. I need that to find you on WordPress.com and add you as an author.
  3. Tell me what you would like as a name for your podcast. Mine is Chancellor Conversations. Whatever you decide, we’ll create a category on the SMUG podcast blog.

In Podcasting 106 and 107 I will show you how to set up your podcast feed and create a post.  And if anyone wants to volunteer to be the “guinea pig” for those courses, please send me a message and we can use your podcast for a class demonstration.

Ragan Social Media Workshop Slides

For those who attended the Ragan Communications Workshop led by Shel Holtz yesterday, here are the slides I presented for our case study, sharing examples of what Mayo Clinic is doing in social media.


I hope many of you will enroll in SMUG today. It was great offering an extension class, and I appreciated all the comments and questions. Stay in touch!

Managing for Excellence Presentation

Today I’m doing a presentation to the Managing for Excellence meeting at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. This is a meeting of all Jacksonville supervisors, and I get a chance to tell them about what Mayo is doing in social media.

On our internal blog I did a post with links to some of our projects (many of which I had previously highlighted here), but I’m closing my fast-paced presentation (I only get 15 minutes) with a little more “show” to go along with the “tell.”

I’m planning to show:

I will be updating this post during the meeting today, embedding a video, for instance.

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3vfIgfTVI]

If you’re interested in learning more and getting information on topics from Flickr to Twitter to RSS to Wikis, check out the Enroll Now page for your continuing education options.

Making it Easy to Enroll

It just occurred to me (maybe because I’m too close to the content of this blog) that I need to make it clearer how people can enroll as SMUG students. So we have a new page, Enroll Now, to simplify the process. You have enrollment options, but now you don’t have to find your way to this post on the SMUG page, which was kind of buried.

There’s a difference between being unstructured and being disorganized. Hopefully now we’re back on the unstructured side.

Social Media University, Global doesn’t have any financial barriers to entry, since we charge no tuition; hopefully now we’ve eliminated a site navigation barrier, too.

Blogging 108: Starting Your WordPress.com Blog

Note: This post is part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

This may be a case in which our course sequence is out of order, since Blogging 109: Experimenting with WordPress.com should perhaps logically come before this one. In Blogging 109, I offer a chance for you to do practice posts on a Training Wheels Blog that isn’t your own. So you can feel free to experiment and make mistakes there, before starting your own blog.

But in another sense, it probably makes sense to at least start your blog here in Blogging 108, then go and experiment a bit in Training Wheels before coming back to start your own blogging in earnest.

As I describe on this page, which was my first effort to give a step-by-step intro to starting a blog on WordPress.com, the process is really simple. But I didn’t show exactly what it looks like as a first-time user, because the screen shots you see are from me starting a second blog, when I’m already logged in to my first one.

So now it’s time to update and enhance as part of the SMUG curriculum, and I’m making it a SMUG Podcast and putting it in the form of a Slideshare.net presentation.

Since everyone should have a blog, I’m going to start by creating a blog for my nine-year old son, John. Of course, I’ll need to start by getting a Gmail account for him. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the presentation:


Homework Assignments:

As indicated in the presentation, your homework assignments are as follows:

  1. Go to John’s blog and leave a comment on this post about what a great Dad he has. (And by the way, A Grand Start was really the title he chose for this post.)
  2. Start your own blog on WordPress.com.

It’s fine if you want to leave your blog in that initial condition for a few days. Send me an e-mail or a message through Facebook with the e-mail address you used in signing up for your WordPress.com blog, and I will add you as an author for the Training Wheels blog. Then you can experiment and learn how to do posts before you start doing it for real on your own blog.