Twitter 310: Custom URL Shortening Case Study

So you want to get a custom-shortened URL for your Tweets.

How do you do it?

This post builds upon Twitter 210, and provides the answer. By watching the video below and following along with the slide presentation, you will see step-by-step how I created the leeaase.me custom short domain, and how you can do something similar.

It’s not expensive (at least it doesn’t have to be), and you can do it in an hour or so.

So, grab a Slurpee or your other favorite beverage, hit play on the embedded video, and follow along.

Was this helpful? If you use this to guide you in creating your own custom URL shortener, please leave a comment and let me know what short domain you used.

Or if you still have questions, let me know about that, too.

Please also check out my Christmas letter, which I tweeted with this link http://leeaase.me/fRxcCt

RAQ: Recommendations for Webinar and Video Services?

Here’s a recent question from the inbox:

Hi Lee…I attended one of your sessions a few months back – Was terrific and learned much. Wanted to ask you – We are looking into doing webinars where consumers can register to attend, see either video or PPT slides while a moderator is chatting at the same time. Do you have any recommendations of a company or product that would allow us to do webinars? Some kind of webinar host company?

A. First, I’ll give you the MacGyver method, as demonstrated in Twitter 152. Use a video streaming service like Ustream.tv and embed slides using Slideshare.net. That lets you show slides while streaming video from your webcam. It’s all free. A little clunky maybe, but free.

I recently had an experience with my friend Lucien Engelen (@zorg20) in which he showed me a product call VuRoom, which is a plug-in for Skype that allows up to 8 people to be in a video chat together. The same company also has a product called VuCast which I haven’t tried, but looks like it can handle 10,000+ participants.

Other choices are WebEx, GoToMeeting, Windows LiveMeeting and Adobe Connect. I have used all of these as a guest presenter, but haven’t signed up for a contract with any of them. Here’s a chart (consider the source) from the VuCast gang that compares features.

What is your experience with these services? What do you see as the pros and cons of each?

More Good Reasons to Not Protect Your Tweets

For the background on the slide deck below, check out Twitter 135: 10 Reasons to NOT Protect Your Tweets.

After our interaction described above, which brought Lisa Fields (@PracticalWisdom) to the point of open tweeting, she was inspired to use her presentation design skills to turn my blog post into a set of slides, which I have embedded here:

Lisa has a great gift for finding the right photo or illustration to make a point. For fuller amplification of the slides, click this link to open Twitter 135 in a new window and read along as you advance through the slide show.

This leads me to my eleventh reason why you shouldn’t protect your tweets. If Lisa still was using tweet protection, you wouldn’t be able to see this tweet of hers from earlier today:

Now wouldn’t it be a tragedy if sentiment like that had been kept under wraps?

Tweetcamp: Twitter 150

Update: Tweetcamp was a success, and here’s a post on Sharing Mayo Clinic that includes a link to the related story that ran on ABC’s Good Morning America. I’ll be doing a recap post about the whole experience, hopefully later tonight.

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The slides below accompany a crash course, a Twitter bootcamp we’re calling Tweetcamp – I’m leading for some colleagues at work today. The course will be live at 2:30 p.m. CDT, April 15, 2009, and we’re inviting a limited number of external participants to join via phone conference. See below the slide deck for details on how to join.

  1. Anyone can participate, whether live or not, by going through the slides and tweeting comments or questions using the #tweetcamp hashtag. Please begin by introducing yourself and where you’re tweeting from.
  2. We will have a group of participants going through this together at 2:30 p.m. in Rochester, but can accommodate a limited number joining us by phone conference. If you are interested in this, please send an email to me, and my assistant will let you know if we are able to accommodate you live on the call.
  3. Please re-tweet this event invitation to your followers. I hope to use this event as another illustration (besides what you see in the slides above) of Twitter’s power to make connections rapidly.
  4. The beauty of the #tweetcamp hashtag is that the discussion can continue even after the one-hour live session is done, and hopefully you’ll make connections through the introductions with other people who have common interests in social media and/or health care.
  5. See the rest of the Twitter curriculum.

Five Free Follow-Ups For Before 5 p.m.

I enjoy giving webinar presentations like this one, but I often think of slides I wish I would have added, and examples I would like to share, after I’ve submitted the presentation file to the organizers. And sometimes I forget to mention some points that I had intended.

One of the beauties of blogging is that I can share some additional notes and highlights so that people who participated in the webinar can explore on their own. It lets me make sure I covered the key points before the presentation even starts. Some of this may be review for long-time SMUGgles, but you may find portions helpful as well.

The main point about doing this before 5 p.m. is to not procrastinate. Those in the EST time zone will have a couple of hours after the webinar, while the PST gang has the whole afternoon. But since you’re reading this now, why not get started right away?

  1. Observe some examples. Check out our Mayo Clinic Podcast Blog (and particularly this post on Niemann-Pick Disease Type C), our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel, our Facebook page and our News Blog. See this story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that includes a link to a Mayo Clinic Medical Edge video story, and this post from the WSJ’s Health Blog, which included one of our Flip videos from our YouTube channel. Besides providing information directly to consumers and potential patients, “new media” tools like web video and audio can help generate or enhance your traditional news coverage.
  2. Complete Podcasting 101, which is the first course in the Podcasting curriculum at SMUG. In the coming days, as you work through the 100-level courses, you will be able to create your own podcast and have it listed in iTunes for exactly $0.00. It’s all free. Like my podcast, Chancellor Conversations, this won’t have the production quality you would want for your official organization podcasts, but by working through the process step-by-step you will strip away the mystery, and no one will be able to tell you “it’s too complicated.” Then you can spend a few hundred dollars for some better recording equipment, and develop a really solid, low-cost, high-quality communication vehicle.
  3. Enroll in SMUG. The tuition is $37,700 less than Johns Hopkins. If you or your organization spend at least a few hundred dollars on a webinar, or thousands to attend a conference, to learn about social media, wouldn’t it be silly to not take the next step and get some hands-on experience, particularly when it’s free? Besides joining the SMUG Facebook group, you can friend me (be sure to mention the webinar), or follow me on Twitter. SMUG’s mission is reflected in our motto, and our goal is to help you discover what you can do at a ridiculously low cost (or perhaps even for free) and without any support from your IT department. In economic times like this, as Jacopo asked Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Christo, “How is that a bad plan?”
  4. Check out Slideshare.net. I thought Elizabeth Tracey’s point about connecting audio files with Powerpoint presentations was good, and Slideshare is a way you can do it today, for free. Here’s a link to one of my slidecasts from the Podcasting curriculum to demonstrate. Slideshare is like YouTube for PowerPoints; you can embed it in your own blog or site, and also can make it available in the “marketplace” for others to find and embed, increasing your reach.
  5. Complete Social Media 101, which is part of the Core Courses curriculum at SMUG and originally was my “12-Step Social Media Program for PR Professionals.” As in all similar programs, the first step is to admit that you have a problem. Social Media 101 will give you an introduction to the broad scope of social media tools that may have application in your work.

In addition to the five free things before 5 p.m., here’s a bonus you should do after 6 tonight. It’s not free, but you’ll be glad you did it:

Get a Flip video camera.

You can find them for $150 or so at Wal-Mart or Best Buy. If you’re into the delayed gratification thing and want to work through more of the SMUG curriculum, I hear you can get them even cheaper at Amazon.com. Consider it a Christmas gift to yourself. Spend another $15 or so for a tripod. You’ll want to have this for personal use; it’s the video camera you can always have with you, so you never miss those magic moments because you forgot to bring the camera bag. But then take the Flip to work and see how you can use it for business purposes.

I hope you found the presentation (and this post) helpful, and would appreciate any feedback in the comments below.