wordpress | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

30 Ideas in 30 Minutes: My Ragan Panel Contributions

I’m serving on a panel to close the Ragan conference hosted by SAS in Cary, NC. The goal is to give participants a list of actions they can immediately implement as practical steps when they return home to work.

I was asked to provide six suggestions, and the other four panelists also are responsible for a similar number. We get a minute to describe each idea, so I’m writing this post to provide links to mine. I’ll likely add links with some of the other panelists’ suggestions after I hear them.

I’ve also included more than six ideas because I don’t know what the others will be offering, and if we have duplicates I don’t want to be left without something valuable to recommend. Besides, I can’t limit myself to just a half dozen.

1. Get a Flip video camera. This is the only recommendation of my main six that costs anything. You can get a Flip today at Wal-Mart or Best Buy or some Target stores. The Flip provides miniDV quality video and is completely portable. You copy files to your computer via the built-in USB instead of having to digitize tapes. And you can have video uploaded to YouTube within minutes, as I did with the David Pogue musical parodies. The cost of buying a Flip is less than a quarter of the cost of hiring a professional videographer for a single day, and you can use the video you shoot to pitch stories to journalists. Even better, you can make the video available directly to consumers.

2. Become a SMUGgle. In the Harry Potter books, a muggle is an ordinary mortal without magical powers. A SMUGgle is also an ordinary mortal, but one who wants to accomplish really amazing feats using social media tools. You become a SMUGgle by enrolling in SMUG. This will be a gateway to your learning about lots of other social media tools you can apply to your work.

3. Try Yammer. Yammer is Twitter for the enterprise. It offers a way to take advantage of the functionality of Twitter, but to limit the participants to employees of your company. The big value is trying before buying, so you can see whether you get user adoption before you sink a lot of money into a tool that people may not use. It seems to have potential for powerful collaboration, allowing coworkers to opt-in for e-mails about subjects they find interesting, and also can serve as a massive General Reference database of facts, links and other information employees have found helpful. I did a Yammer 101 course and expect to be doing more on SMUG.

4. Start a WordPress.com blog. It’s free and you can do it in 5 minutes or less, as my Dad did. If you’re a coward, you can make it a private blog invisible to anyone except users you invite. Then just invite your communications colleagues to have access. Getting this hands-on experience will show you how easy it is to publish content to the world. You also could use WordPress.com to publish your Web site, having it serve as your content management system. The SMUG blogging curriculum will help you learn.

5. Create your own free personal podcast. The SMUG Podcasting curriculum takes you from the very basics to having a podcast listed in iTunes. When you’re familiar with the process, you will have complete confidence to recommend doing podcasts for your organization with higher production values, better microphones, etc. The mystery will be eliminated.

6. Join a Social Network such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Or both. It’s essential for professional communicators to understand how social networking sites work.

Bonus Items

Build your own on-line newsroom. See our Mayo Clinic News Blog for an example.
Get a YouTube account. If you’ve only watched YouTube videos, you haven’t understood full potential. And if you work for a nonprofit, starting a branded YouTube channel is a no-brainer – it’s free. A Flip camera makes it easy for you to produce and upload videos
Get an iPhone. This is another one that’s not free, but professional communicators need to understand potential of phones and applications.
Try Dropbox. Its main purpose to sync files across multiple computers, letting you store your precious documents and files “in the cloud” so you have safe backup. The neat feature, though, is that it is a way for you to have the equivalent of an FTP site without the annoying hassle of log ins and passwords. You get two GB of storage free, and the paid option is something like $50 a year for 50 GB.
Read a good book. Here are three must-read books that will change the way you work and live, and you could perhaps read one by the end of the weekend.

Rules to Break and Laws to Follow – Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. I haven’t reviewed this yet, but plan to do so soon. I have been listening to it through Audible.com. It’s an excellent book about how a focus on short-term results can’t be the only measure of business success, because you may be draining or harvesting customer equity, and therefore actually reducing the value of your business.

Getting Things Done – David Allen. I have several related posts about the GTD subject matter.

The Reason for God – Tim Keller

Updated: My fellow panelists are

John Mims, Altyris
Becky Graebe, SAS
Bruce Johnson, Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP
Mark Ragan, Ragan Communications. CEO@ragan.com

Here are some of their ideas:

Becky – Embrace individual customization on the intranet. Let employees upload and display their own photos instead of the staff photos.
Bruce – Look for Alliances. AP came from this concept. Use a similar approach to find like-minded sites with which you can share.
John – Have interns start a blog. “Outsiders’ view from the inside.”
Mark – use LInkedIn journalistically. Send out requests for quotes or sources.
Becky – Don’t overlook interns. They understand these technologies naturally and can give you insights. SAS has a student intern site.
Bruce – Anonymity is dead. Make identity work for you on the internet.
Customize your name. There are 266 John Mims in the U.S. The guy to my left uses his middle initial to identify himself. Good thing Lee Aase is relatively rare.
Mark – Sign up for Google Alerts on your name or your company.
Becky – Google your stuff to see if it shows up. If not, use titles and tags to optimize your content.
Bruce – Get blog aggregator/RSS reader.
John says you should have your posts published on days when people are reading. Write on the weekends, but set them to post on the weekdays. Here’s how.
Becky – Use blogs to come together during difficult times. UNC Chapel Hill with student body president being killed. Created a blog to share special memories. Print all the comments and share with the family.
Bruce – Create a wiki approach to document creation. Bruce had a colleague create a wiki certiori petition in the 9th Circuit.
John – Comment on other people’s blogs. Make meaningful comments which will get people to visit your blog.
Mark – Try Blog Jamming. Spend 48 hours in intense blogging about a particular issue. Then have the blog go away.
Becky -Hand over the reins for Web 2.0 video. SAS hands employees Flip cams. Let them duct tape to handlebars during bike to work day.
Mark – Search for Bloggingheads on NY Times.
Use RSS feeds for internal news, just as you do for external.
Mark – Check out everyblock.com. Everything that has happened on your block. It’s in beta now in 6 cities. News at the block level.
Bruce – Beware the privacy trolls that may require encryption through legislation that is being adopted in various states. This will slow down all of your on-line transactions on your Web site. So what can we do about it?
Mark – If you’re an editor, use Bullfighter or mystery matador.

As I count it, that makes for 34 ideas including my two extra books, which means we exceeded our quota by 13.3 percent. And I know I didn’t get all of my fellow panelists’ ideas recorded. I hope you see some things here you can apply immediately in your work.

I’m happy to have participated in this event, and would love to connect with others who are interested in these issues. You can get in touch with me on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

I’d also welcome any comments you have, or other ideas you’d like to share.

Blogging 112: Pages vs. Posts

The great thing about blogs is that the newest and freshest material is always right at the top.

And the bad thing about blogs is that the newest material is always right at the top.

So you can write a great post, but over time it gets pushed further away from the front page, accessible only through the monthly archives and via Google.

That’s why Pages are a helpful alternative to Posts.

Pages become the overall high-level structure of your blog. So, for example, on this blog the Pages are

The Curriculum page is the “Parent” page for the Blogging, Core Courses, Facebook, Podcasting and Twitter curricula.

Then each page can have links to posts that have been done over time. So, for example, the Podcasting page has links to courses from Podcasting 101 through 110. These posts were written between March 31, 2008 and July 29, 2008. During that same time, I probably wrote a couple of dozen other posts, and I didn’t write the podcasting posts in numerical order.

By creating the Podcasting page, though, I could bring links to all of the podcasting-related posts together in one place, so that people stumbling upon SMUG (or one of the podcasting posts) can work through the related posts in a sequential manner.

As I write this post (part of the Blogging curriculum), it is Sept. 30, 2008. Soon it will be part of a previous month’s archive, and within a couple of weeks will be off the front page. But several months from now, when someone is wanting to learn all about blogging, she will start at Blogging 101 and work her way through.

Creating Pages is easy. In your WordPress dashboard, click the Write link:

Writing a Post is the default, but if you then click the Page link, you’ll be able to write a Page.

From that point, it’s just like writing a post, except a Page becomes part of your overall navigational structure.

Use Pages with care; once you start them you shouldn’t get rid of them. But if you need to bring order to your blog, Pages are important tools.

Blogging 110: Private Blogs

This course could have been called Blogging for Cowards. It’s a way of test-driving WordPress without letting anyone else see what you’re doing. But there actually are some legitimate reasons why you might want to consider a private blog to accomplish your goals.

First, I will show you how to create a private blog. It’s really simple.

Start a WordPress.com blog. If you already have a WordPress.com blog, it’s easy to register another one.

Then go to your dashboard and click the Settings link,

Then choose the Privacy Tab,

and select the “I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose” option.

It’s that simple.

So why would you use this option?

In addition to being a risk-free way for you to experiment with blogging and learn how to do it without anyone else seeing, it could also be a way to have the equivalent of an intranet blog for your organization, but without needing IT support to install blogging software on your servers. You just need to have everyone who wants to have access to the blog sign up for a wordpress.com account. They don’t need to have their own blogs; they can simply get an account.

Then, on your blog’s administrative dashboard, click the “Users” link (which is right next to the “Settings” link) and scroll to the bottom, where you can “Add User from the Community”

Just enter their e-mail addresses and choose what level of access you want to give them (Contributor, Author, Editor or Administrator) and they will be able to participate in your blog. But no one else can.

I’ve used this method as a way to introduce colleagues to blogging so they could get hands-on experience. It takes away the mystery and fear of the unknown.

But particularly if you work for a small organization, it could be a way to in essence create the equivalent of an intranet if you don’t already have one…and without any IT expense.

So you can use this approach either to take away your own trepidation (by creating a private blog that only you can see) or to allay the fears of others in your organization or workgroup who don’t want to be blogging out there on the internet for all to see. And you can have up to 35 users (I believe) for your private blog on wordpress.com without paying for an upgrade. The upgrade to allow unlimited private users is $30 a year.

If such fears have been keeping you from experimenting with blogging, start a private wordpress.com blog today. And if you later overcome your blogophobia and want to make your blog public, it’s as simple as going back to the dashboard and changing the privacy settings.

Get started today!

YouTube Playlists: Embedding and Promoting

I don’t know whether this works or not, so I’m giving it a try. That’s the great thing about a blog: You can experiment and see what works, and then modify your approach based on what you learn. And so that’s why I’m doing this as a SMUG research project, so that later I can add a fully cleaned-up post to either our Mayo Clinic News Blog or Podcast Blog. And by doing this learning in public, hopefully I’ll get some additional ideas from the SMUGgle community. I hope you’ll share those in the comments.

So here’s the issue: Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center has created a series of three Stop Smoking videos, such as this one I’ve embedded below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ewwzazHfq4]

I created a playlist too, which we’re going to feature for a time at least on the front of our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel.

But I also wanted to see whether that playlist could be embedded within WordPress.com blogs. I tried embedding below using the standard “Add Video” button, but at least in the preview it wasn’t visible.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F65A784F26782AF6]

If you still can’t see it in the space immediately above now that I’ve published it, that means it still didn’t work.

YouTube does have embed codes for its playlists that would work on Blogger or Typepad (and I expect for WordPress blogs that aren’t hosted on WordPress.com). But for security reasons, WordPress.com doesn’t allow Flash widgets on its blogs, because it doesn’t want someone to upload malicious code that could bring down millions of blogs. So your users can’t view the entire playlist unless you embed each video individually.

So what’s the workaround?

I would suggest that if you’re on WordPress.com and want to highlight a YouTube playlist, you should embed one of the videos (and probably add some annotations) but then just say something like:

“Check out the whole Mayo Clinic Stop Smoking playlist on YouTube” and have it open in a new window.

YouTube playlists also can be shared directly from within YouTube by e-mail, and individual videos also can be shared through Facebook and MySpace. I guess that probably makes the annotations even more important, because they can include links to the playlist, so people who find one of the videos will also have links to the others.

I also have featured this playlist on the wall of Mayo Clinic’s Facebook page, and then I Tweeted it. I also shared on Facebook by posting it to my personal profile. I suppose I could send an update to Mayo Clinic’s fans on Facebook, but I want to be pretty judicious in how many of those I send.

I have, of course, added the Get Social series of buttons at the bottom of this post so it can be shared easily via Facebook, StumbleUpon and other networking sites. I suppose that in the post I do on the News Blog, adding these would be a good way to spread the word.