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.

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Social Media 302: Barack Obama’s Social Media Strategy

In Social Media 301, we examined the McCain campaign’s use of the Web, and invited an associate professor to provide a similar analysis for the Obama campaign. Scott Meis, a SMUGgle from Chicago, has risen to the challenge with Analyzing Barack Obama’s Social Media Strategy. Here’s an excerpt:

Visit any of Obama’s networking tools and you’ll find a donation widget. He’s engaging target audiences on their own turf and using these tools and platforms to motivate others to donate and help drive others back to his website. All these tools are serving as key extensions of interaction and user involvement but centered around a clear call to action. It really is brilliant. You see a great video on YouTube that inspires you to participate, whamo, the donate button is a simple click away.

One could definitely argue that Obama is just trying to see what sticks, but let’s remember, this is the presidential election. Technically, his audience is everyone. The Washington Post has even gone so far as to title Obama as the “King of Social Networking.”

Check out the rest of Scott’s analysis on his Social Media Snippets blog.

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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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.