Twitter | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Florida Hospital Association SMUG Extension Course

I’m delighted to be in Orlando today for a SMUG extension class, presenting a workshop for the Florida Hospital Association’s Florida Society for Healthcare Public Relations & Marketing (FSHPRM) at their Winter professional development workshop. My presentation runs from 12:30-2 EST.

The slides I’m using are embedded below. I’m told there will be wifi in the room, so I’m hoping many of the participants can take the opportunity to add their comments and questions even during the presentation, either in the comment section on this post or by tweeting using the #fhasmug hashtag.

We’ll see if we can address some of the questions and comments at the end of the presentation, but if any SMUGgles are following along remotely and want to chime in with your observations, you’re most welcome to participate.

FSHPRM Presentation on Social Media

View more presentations from LeeAase. (tags: social media)

A Few Resource Links:

Ed Bennett of the University of Maryland put together this Hospital Social Network List of health care providers and their presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or with blogs. So while health care adoption of social media may have lagged behind other industries — and while the 109 YouTube channels, 73 Facebook pages, 59 Twitter accounts and 14 blogs vary significantly — the fact that Ed has identified 163 hospitals with social media platforms indicates significant progress in adoption.
Read about Dr. Henry Plummer and his medical innovations, and see a multimedia timeline of Mayo Clinic’s history here.
For Mayo Clinic examples, see our Facebook page, YouTube channel, News Blog, Podcast Blog, Sharing Mayo Clinic and the blogs on MayoClinic.com.

Homework

Understanding that we likely have a wide range of social media familiarity among the workshop participants, I’ve outlined some options for your concrete action steps to make your the learning practical for you. I’m starting with basics and moving to more complicated or involved steps. Just go down the list and pick at least one thing you haven’t yet tried.

Join Facebook. Facebook 102 would be a great place to start. You can request to join the FSHPRM group so you can all network and learn together. And of course I hope you’ll join the SMUG group, too.
Get a Twitter account. Twitter 102 will take you through the process step-by-step. I have a bunch of courses yet to be added in the Twitter curriculum, but there are a few there to get you started, and you can follow me (@LeeAase) and/or @SMUG_U to keep up to date.
Start a personal blog. Blogging 108 gives you the guidance you need.
Try Yammer. Yammer is like Twitter for the workplace, and is limited to people who share your email domain. The Yammer curriculum has more background, but Yammer 101 gets you started.

If you’re one of those really risk-averse types who needs to completely scope out a situation before joining, you have two additional options:

Begin the Core Courses, which are kind of the SMUG appetizer sampler platter. They’ll give you a hands-on taste of social media. Or, you can…
Start the Podcasting curriculum, which takes you in 10 steps from an introduction to the podcast to having your own personal podcast listed in the iTunes store, all without spending any money. You can complete the first two courses without having to take any concrete action.

Finally, I hope you’ll enroll in SMUG so you can continue your social media exploration as a SMUGgle.

And if you’re on LinkedIn and would like to connect in that way (or perhaps leave a recommendation for me), that would be great, too. Here’s my public profile on LinkedIn.

RAQ: What Does RT Mean in Twitter?

Here’s a question from Julia:

I’ve seen a lot of tweets that start with RT, like this one

I’m thinking it means “Return Tweet”??? But I’m not sure. Is there a new lexicon of TLA’s evolving as a result of Twitter and do you know specifically what this one means? Maybe this should be a RAQ if you think relevant?

Answer: RT means “retweet” or “re-tweet” and it’s a way for one Twitter user to pass along information found on Twitter to his or her circle of followers.

For example, if Julia sees this recent tweet of mine:

She might want to pass it along to her followers, who may or may not be following me. She would use the following syntax:

RT @LeeAase http://snipurl.com/bovi2 – UW selling students’ personal information for $90 apiece

…and would add any additional comments that fit within the 140-character tweet limit.

By using the RT @LeeAase she is crediting me for finding and originally tweeting this, which alerts her followers that I was the source, and then they might decide to follow me directly.

When I originally responded to Julia via email, she replied:

Ah! That makes sense. There have been times I’ve wanted to pass something along, but didn’t want the person I learned it from to think I was stealing their thunder (so to speak). I love that they’ve solved that issue…

That’s exactly the reason for the RT. The ethos of social media is

to share and pass information along, but also
to credit the original source.

Two little characters – RT – plus the username of your source, meets both goals in Twitter.

Audiconference Discussion

Today I’m participating in an audio conference sponsored by Strategic Health Care Communications, entitled Blogging: Communicating and Marketing to Key Audiences. I’m looking forward to it, and to hearing what the other speakers have to say.

I will be talking about our Mayo Clinic experience, including our podcast blog, news blog, the various MayoClinic.com blogs and Sharing Mayo Clinic, which launched last week.

We will have a Q&A period as part of the audioconference, but one of the great benefits of blogging is that the conversation can continue beyond the time bounds of a conference call. So I hope you’ll share your reactions and questions in the comments below.

If you would like to connect and stay around for the long-term conversation on using social media (particularly in health care), “friend” me on Facebook, “follow” me on Twitter, or otherwise Enroll in SMUG.

If you want to chat about this subject matter in Twitter, you also can use the hashtag #healthstratchat. Might be kind of a fun demonstration during the audio conference.

Twitter 104: Four Steps to Building Your Twitter Network

This is the equivalent of a “lab exercise” to accompany Twitter 103. See that course for the the theory. Twitter 104 gives you the step-by-step roadmap to building your own personalized network in Twitter.

Please note that you probably want to follow no more than 10 new people at a time on Twitter; because of the spammer phenomenon, following tons of new people at once raises alerts that can cause temporary account suspension (at least I’ve heard that’s the case.) I’ve put a tweet out about this and will try to confirm when I get an answer, and will update the post accordingly. So you may need to complete this course over several days (especially Step Three) to avoid this problem.

Let’s get started!

Step One: Invite Friends & Family to Twitter

In a variation on the the old saying, “The family that prays together stays together,” I says “The family that regularly Tweets doesn’t miss a beat.” Click this link and then enter the email addresses of your spouse, offspring, siblings, parents and closest friends. Follow them and ask them to do likewise. Unlike the cell phone providers with their “circles” and “fave fives” you don’t have a limit on the number with whom you can connect through Twitter.

Then, hypothetically speaking, when your daughter drives 250 miles to meet the family of the young man with whom she has become involved, she can just send a quick tweet to let everyone know she made it safely. Not that we’ve had an issues with kids causing us to stay up worrying or anything. 😉

Step Two: Invite 10 Work Colleagues

In like manner, pick 10 people with whom you work regularly and invite them to join so you can follow each other. Then, as you run across interesting articles on the Web, for instance, you can tweet about them instead of sending the group email that typically snowballs into the “reply all” blizzard that overtakes your inbox. (Not the greatest use of metaphors, but it’s early a.m. as I write this.) If you want to have more company-confidential conversation, Yammer is a Twitter-like service for which I have developed a separate curriculum.

If either your family or work colleagues want more information on Twitter and why it’s worthwhile, send them to Twitter 101 for an overview.

Step Three: Follow Your Fellow SMUGgles

Students (and faculty for that matter) at Social Media University, Global are known as SMUGgles. (Here’s an explanation of the term.) You can go here to see a list of your fellow SMUGgles on Twitter. (or at least the ones who have chosen to follow the @SMUG_U feed.) As of this morning, you’ll see something like this:

Just click the “Follow” button next to each name (as illustrated in Twitter 103), and you’ll start to develop a network of like-minded people interested in learning more about social media, and who are tweeting about our discoveries. As of this writing, we have 238 members in our SMUG Facebook group, so I’m hoping our Twitter network will grow rapidly. And because of the velocity of interchanges with Twitter, I’m confident this group of SMUGgles following each other will provide a great platform for connecting and learning together.

Step Four: Join Interesting Conversations

Make sure your notifications are set so that you see all @ replies from those you’re following in your Twitter stream. Your settings should look like this:

This ensures that you “see all of the @replies made by people you follow, whether or not you follow the person to whom the reply is directed.” This is a great way to see one side of conversations that you might find interesting, and that you may wish to join. Just as importantly, you’ll see the people with whom your friends are engaged (see the @JasonFalls example from Twitter 103) and you may likewise want to follow them.

In reply to my tweet about the number of follows per day that sets off spam alarms, @mflinsch suggested mrtweet.net as a good resource for building your network. So I’ve followed @mrtweet, and will update this post if it becomes Step Five.

Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed

This post is part of the SMUG Twitter curriculum, and its prerequisite is Twitter 102: Creating an Account. To successfully complete this course, you need to have established your own Twitter profile.

One of the keys to Twitter is the people you follow, and who follows you.

Some people decide to just follow a few close friends in Twitter, while others follow more broadly, to develop an information-gathering network.

More on those philosophies in a bit, but for starters here is a video tutorial that illustrates the mechanics of how you can get started in finding people to follow to start building your Twitter network:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtn6UP4XC8A]

Now about the philosophies of following and being followed:

You could decide that you only want to follow family and close friends in Twitter. That’s a perfectly valid option. In that way you would be able to stay more involved on a daily basis with those who already are closest to you.

On the other end of the spectrum we have those like @Scobleizer (Robert Scoble) who follow and are followed by thousands (20,852 and 47,828 at present).

I would recommend you find a balance somewhere in the middle. By all means invite your family, friends and work colleagues to join you on Twitter, but you have much to gain by broadening your network. You’ll meet interesting people and learn of news that’s relevant to you, and will be able to participate in interesting discussions.

And when you have a question, you can just “Tweet” it and you’ll likely get lotsof good feedback, as I did when I was looking for Web hosting recommendations.

Assignments:

To avoid making this a two-credit class, we’re going to limit the homework and carry it over into Twitter 104. So for now your assignments are limited.

If you haven’t already, follow my personal Twitter account (@LeeAase) and the SMUG University Twitter feed (@SMUG_U). I will follow you back.
Pick eight more people to follow from this great post from Sam Bradley, bringing the total new people you follow today to 10. Note that if you follow too many new people in one day, it may raise suspicions with Twitter that you’re a spammer. But 10 is a nice safe number for starters.

Coming tomorrow is Twitter 104: Building Your Twitter Network, which will be a “lab session” much like I experienced in my college days getting a minor in Chemistry. It will take you through a process of building the personal Twitter network that’s right for you.