Feedburner: Dress Up Your Feeds

Chancellor’s Note: This is part of the SMUG beautification project, cleaning out some of the underbrush of content originally published at the “page” level but that needs to be demoted.

This content was first published on October 22, 2006. Since then, Google bought Feedburner. But Feedburner is still a great way to add functionality to the RSS feeds from your blog.

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Thanks to Shel Holtz for his advice on how to incorporate “Digg This” and “Add to Del.icio.us” links/badges into blog posts, using FeedFlare, a free service that is available through Feedburner, another free service.
Feedburner
That’s also where I got the badges for My Yahoo, Google Reader, and others that you see at right. Shel explained that Feedburner adapts and enhances your site’s existing RSS feed and provides great reporting on subscriptions and click-throughs.

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Feedburner is definitely still a service worth exploring.

6 Reasons Your Organization Should Get a Twitter Account

Nancy asks:

I’m trying to convince my boss we need to start a twitter account and she’s not convinced. My main argument has been that it would increase our exposure on the web through our links on twitter. Can you help me make a better case?

I saw your slide presentation on slide share on Making the Case for Social Media but it didn’t get to exactly what I need (or I missed it).

And on the slight chance that we do get to start twitter, what can I do to build a following?

Here are my top six reasons why organizations should have a branded Twitter account:

Brand Protection. If you claim your organization’s name on Twitter, others can’t. One headache you don’t want is having someone impersonating your organization on Twitter. Claiming your Twitter handle is a good step, even from a purely defensive perspective.

Scalability. You can have a Twitter account without putting a lot of human resources into it. It’s reasonable at first to use a service that converts the RSS feed of your news releases into tweets, without any additional human involvement. You do have RSS feeds, right? If not, see the Social Media 102 course, and also my third reason.

Serving stakeholders. A non-human Twitter account connected to an RSS feed isn’t ideal, but like RSS it does at least provide a way for people interested in your news to get it in a way that’s convenient for them. And as you become more familiar with Twitter, it can lead to a much better use, Listening and Engagement, which I list as my last reason.

Increased News Coverage. Journalists are increasingly involved in Twitter, and looking to it as a quick way to identify sources and story ideas. Here’s a portion of an email one of my colleagues got in late October from @KimPainter, a columnist with USA Today (click to enlarge):

KimonTwittersource

Kim had seen one of our @MayoClinic tweets connected to our #mayoradio program called Mayo Clinic Medical Edge Weekend. We got her in touch with Dr. Richard Hurt, who was the guest on that program, and here is Kim’s column in USA Today in which he was featured.

It’s Free. Nothing I have mentioned above involves any cash. Your Twitter account is free. Twitterfeed to convert your RSS feed to tweets also is free. But even if you have to manually send tweets about your news, and including a link to your news releases, the time investment can be minimal. It doesn’t involve incremental cash outlays. If you’re like most organizations, you probably pay EurekAlert or PR Newswire or BusinessWire to distribute your news releases. If you are paying for those services, why wouldn’t you take advantage of a free tool like Twitter?

Listening and Engagement. The preceding reasons provide more than enough justification for getting a corporate Twitter account, but engaging stakeholders and listening to them is the best use for Twitter. For that reason, whether your boss approves a corporately branded Twitter account or not, I strongly suggest that you get your own personal Twitter account. Just dive in and start making connections. As you are using Twitter personally, you will see applications that are relevant to your work.

If you have questions about how to get started with Twitter, we have a whole Twitter curriculum here on SMUG to take you through the process. To answer your last question about building a following, see Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed, and Twitter 104: Four Steps to Building Your Personal Twitter Network.

Alltop Releases New Top Hospital News Site

 

Alltop Top Hospital News Page
Alltop Top Hospital News Page

In response to suggestions raised in the #hcsm group discussion on Twitter, Alltop has created a new site, hospital.alltop.com, that aggregates RSS feeds of news releases from several top hospitals. You might want to bookmark or “favorite” it.

For people working in healthcare public relations, it’s a good way to see at a glance what kind of news your peers are releasing. It’s also a good news source for others interested in healthcare news. Besides Mayo Clinic, other institutions featured at launch include University of Maryland Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, Sutter Medical Center, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Aurora Health Care and about 20 others. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Alltop, check out my earlier post, “Alltop: RSS without the RSS.”

Thanks to @guykawasaki and the Alltop team for creating this site, and to Tom Stitt (@tstitt) for his leadership in helping to make it happen.

Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets

In response to this post about how you can put a “Follow Me” Twitter badge on your WordPress.com blog, budgallant says:

that’s interesting, but definitely not at alternative to actually displaying the twitter updates…. what is up with wordpress? do they have a bias against twitter?

It’s not an anti-Twitter thing; it’s about WordPress.com stripping any javascript that you attempt to paste into one of its widgets. They say it’s a security measure, and I’ll take them at their word. I suppose if you have several million blogs on one server domain, you don’t want one with malicious code to bring the whole platform down. So the easy way out is to not allow anything but straight HTML in sidebar widgets.

Thankfully, there is a way around the problem, that lets you both have a badge people can click to follow you, and also display your latest Tweets.

badgeandtweets

You do the first part by following the instructions I had in the previous post.

Putting the latest Tweets in is actually easier, because Twitter provides an RSS feed that you can pull into an RSS widget in WordPress.com.

Continue reading “Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets”

Changing RSS Feed Address in iTunes Podcast Directory?

I ordinarily would have just tweeted about this, but it’s a little longer than what I can explain in 140 characters. I hope the SMUG community (and the broader world of what Shel Israel calls Twitterville) can provide the answer.

We have some podcasts listed in iTunes, and would like to be able to change the feed address in the directory. We’ve switched to a better way of publishing the podcasts, and also are using Feedburner to enable us to get better statistics.

So in essence we want to be able to update our iTunes listing for these podcasts to have the new RSS feed addresses instead of the old ones. We would prefer to not have to create duplicate entries for the podcasts in iTunes, and we want to completely switch over to the new RSS feeds without losing our existing base.

We don’t see any way to do this in the iTunes directory. Is it even possible?

I had done a quick Google search with the question and got this result; no answer here, either. So I’m turning it into a SMUG research project.

Here’s my hypothesis: I’m thinking it may not be possible to update the feed in the iTunes directory because when you subscribe to a podcast feed using iTunes, what really happens is your iTunes goes to the podcast directory and grabs the feed URL. Then when you launch iTunes again, it goes directly from your computer to that feed address to look for any new episodes (without checking back to the iTunes store/directory). So even if you could update the feed in the iTunes directory, your subscribers’ desktop clients wouldn’t be notified.

Does that seem like a reasonable explanation? Does anyone really know whether that’s the answer?

Has anyone successfully migrated from an older RSS feed to a new one, in iTunes and in other directories? Do you have recommendations on how to do this?

This is a new kind of Chancellor RAQ: instead of questions for the Chancellor, these are questions from the Chancellor.

I would appreciate any answers the community can provide. And once we get the answer, hopefully we will have definitive guidance that future Googlers will find high in the rankings.