socialmedia | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Obama, Biden and a Call for a SMUG Associate Professor

It turns out that mainstream media still got the scoop on Sen. Obama’s choice for VP, despite the campaign promise to break the news to supporters first via SMS and e-mail. Here’s the AP story:

Obama’s decision leaked to the media several hours before his aides planned to send a text message announcing the running mate, negating a promise that people who turned over their phone numbers would be the first to know who Obama had chosen. The campaign scrambled to send the text message after the leak, sending phones buzzing at the inconvenient time of just after 3 a.m. on the East coast.

I guess if you’re a strong enough supporter to give your cell phone number to a political campaign, you’ll probably forgive both the broken promise and the 2 a.m. CDT message disrupting your sleep.

I hardly ever get into politics on this blog, but I was a political science major and worked for 14 years in politics and government. It’s hard for me to fathom that an announcement like this — the most important one of the campaign — would be leaked accidentally to the media after the campaign had made such a big deal about texting the choice to supporters first.

Disclosure: My political background is on the other side of the aisle, and I’ll be voting for the “Wrinkly, White-Haired Guy.” And I’m thinking our Minnesota Governor, Tim Pawlenty, will be his running mate.

I have been interested, though, in how Sen. Obama’s campaign has used social media, but I haven’t wanted to give my e-mail address or cell phone number to the campaign to experience it directly. You can’t even get into his Web site without providing your e-mail.

So this is a call for someone to join the SMUG faculty as Associate Professor and do an analysis of the Obama campaign’s use of social media. I’m sure that among our 150+ SMUGgles we have several who received that early-morning SMS. If you’ve experienced the on-line Obama campaign first-hand and would like to write a post about what strategies and tactics you think have been most effective, you can become an Associate Professor in the SMUG Department of Political Science.

If anyone else wants to write a post about Sen. McCain and the RNC’s use of social media, or any of the other campaigns’ activities (such as Ralph Nader’s or Cynthia McKinney’s), those would be welcome, too.

Ground Rules: This will not be a discussion of the merits of candidates or their policy positions. There is no lack of sites where those debates are already taking place, both on the right and the left. The SMUG discussion will about how the campaigns and their supporters are using social media tools.

Apply for a Associate Professor position via e-mail at the address listed in the “Contact the Chancellor” sidebar item.

If you just want to share your brief impressions of the campaigns’ use of social media, you can put those in the comments below. Same ground rules apply.

Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups

Sites like CarePages and CaringBridge have been developed to meet important needs for hospitalized patients and their families and friends.

But Facebook, as a powerful general-purpose social networking site, may prove to be an even more useful alternative to these dedicated patient communication sites.

I will start by describing the very real needs CarePages and similar sites meet, and then discuss how Facebook can meet those needs.

Continue reading “Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups”

Blogging 114: Categories vs. Tags

It’s fun to work with people who are new to social media, because they often have good, fresh questions that aren’t colored by familiarity with these tools. And they make me take a minute to think through some basic explanations.

For example, I was helping a colleague get started with a blog yesterday, and he asked me:

What’s the difference between categories and tags when I’m doing a blog post?

Great question! And it gave me a chance to combine two SMUG courses (I had planned to cover these topics separately) into a single post.

Category Coolness

Categories are internally focused for your blog, to help users navigate and find posts on similar topics. Once a user has found your blog, categories provide organizational structure to help them discover what your blog is about and to navigate efficiently.

So, for example, I have categories for Blogging, Facebook, Book Reviews, Marketing, Advertising, News Media, Conferences, Personal and a few more. So if people want to see all the posts I’ve live-blogged from conferences, they can click “Conferences” under the Category heading. Or they can click the Book Reviews category to read about all the books I’ve highlighted on SMUG.

A post can belong to more than category, but generally you would want to limit the number of categories you have and how many categories are selected for each post. One category I don’t use much any more is Social Media. Ever since I renamed this blog “Social Media University, Global” it hasn’t made much sense to put posts in the Social Media category; almost every post would belong there, and if the whole blog is about a topic it doesn’t makes sense to use that as a category.

This particular post, as you can see below, is in the Blogging category.

Categories are like the Dewey Decimal System for your blog: they’re your way of organizing content in a way that makes sense to you and hopefully your users. Except you don’t have the funky numbers like 330.94 for European economics. And while there’s no limit on the number of categories you can have, I would advise you to limit them. If you can’t see yourself doing several posts that would fit a category, use a broader one instead. So, for example, I have a News Media category instead of having separate categories for Radio, Print, and TV. That’s because the major division in this blog is between traditional, mainstream media (what I categorize as News Media) and Social Media. (But again, since most of the posts are about social media, I don’t use that category very often.)

After you’ve done a few posts, you might discover some themes emerging. Then you can go back and apply whatever category labels seem to make sense, like the apocryphal college that didn’t lay down its sidewalks until it saw where students had worn paths through the grass.

Tremendous Tags

Tags, by contrast, are externally focused. They’re aimed at the people who haven’t yet found your blog (and the search engines that guide them.) So instead of trying to find the one or two labels that best describe your post (as you do with categories) you can and should apply multiple tags to a post, based on words others might use to describe your post…or words they might be searching on to find relevant content.

So for this post I used not only the tags blog, blogs and blogging, but also social media, socialmedia, tags, tagging, categories, vlog, vlogging and others. While social media isn’t a particularly useful category for this blog, it is a good tag (and so is socialmedia, because some users doing a Technorati, Google, Blogpulse or WordPress.com search might leave out the space between social and media.)

If you click on any of the tags at the bottom of this post, you will find a list of blog posts on WordPress.com that used that tag. This is really helpful to users exploring a topic, because they can easily find a group of relevant posts. And if you use several related word variations, you’re not requiring users to choose your exact tag (e.g. blogs vs. blogging) in order to find your post.

So, within reason, with Tags it’s a case of “the more, the merrier.” If you add tags like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Justin Timberlake or other famous names to your posts in hopes of attracting more visitors, it won’t do you any good. Unless, of course, you happen to be doing a post about one of those people. If you “trick” people into visiting your blog by using irrelevant tags, they won’t stay long.

Another benefit of Tags is that you can use a “tag cloud” (see example above or in the sidebar at right) to graphically show visitors to your blog the main topics you cover. The most frequently used tags are bigger, and if people click in your tag cloud (at least on WordPress.com), they get a list of all your posts that included that tag.

Assignment:

Write a post on your own blog, and assign it to one or two categories and add multiple tags.
Include a sentence at the end (with a link to this post) that says something like, “I sure am learning a lot from Social Media University, Global…including how to add tags and categories for my blog posts.”
Following those two steps will create a comment on this post (via Trackback, to be discussed in a future course), so that your fellow SMUGglers (the phrase Jim Streed coined) can follow it back and see how you’re doing in applying what you’re learning about categories and tags.

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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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I know you will find his posts helpful, too.

What’s the difference between categories and tags when I’m doing a blog post?

Assignment: