Cowans Make the News

Marlow and Fran Cowan, the elderly couple from Ankeny, Iowa whose piano duet at Mayo Clinic has gone “viral” in the last year (to the tune of more than 6.6 million views to date on YouTube), were the subjects last night of an extended feature on KARE TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul:

The Minneapolis Star Tribune also has a nice article about the Cowans in this morning’s edition.

You can watch and listen to several musical selections from the Cowans’ Feb. 24 return concert at Mayo Clinic on the Mayo Clinic channel on YouTube.

A New Van for Bekah and Ruthie

This evening as I traveled to Winona for the #WSUPRSSA presentation on social media, I got to meet my youngest daughters and swap vehicles with them, so they would have reliable college transportation. Here’s the video I shot when they saw it for the first time. Having video also enables Lisa to get in on the fun, even though she wasn’t able to be there.

This also gives me a chance to show the WSUPRSSA group how easy it is to write a blog post.

Portions, Servings and the SMUG Social Media Pyramid

I appreciate all the positive feedback and re-tweets for yesterday’s post on the SMUG Social Media Pyramid. We even have our first graphical representation (click image to enlarge), submitted by Jason Melancon from the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI).

SMUG-social-media-pyramid

One point that Jason mentioned in his email deserves further amplification. He said “I think the servings on social networks (in my own opinion) should be per week as opposed to per day.” And this leads me to the discussion of portion size and servings.

Have you ever noticed after drinking a 20 oz. bottle of Coke, when you turn it around and read the label, that you’ve just swallowed 2.5 servings? Or when you nuke a bag of microwave popcorn, do you always share it with two other people, as the label would indicate you should?

Welcome to the world of unrealistic portion sizes, at least in America. It likely helps to explain our obesity epidemic, but it also has application when we’re looking at our SMUG Social Media Pyramid and what a “serving” is.

On the SMUG Pyramid, essentially any activity qualifies as a “serving.” The tweet I will do about this post is a serving. A reply to those who re-tweet is a serving. And tweeting a link to another interesting article is, too. Relatively easy to get your 6-11 servings per day.

In the social networking sites, the reason I have 4-5 servings per day instead of per week is because posting a link is a serving. So is interacting with someone who writes on your wall, or uploading a photo, or creating an event, or uploading a video.

At the higher levels, Web Video and Blogs, the criterion for what constitutes a serving is a little higher. You can’t do half a video, and you either publish a new blog post or your don’t. But the interacting you do on YouTube, for instance, actually falls more within the social networking servings. So your 4-5 daily social networking “servings” may include comment activity both on Facebook and YouTube.

The other point to remember is that a pyramid like this is just a general guide, and your situation may call for different portions. I’m 6’6″ and weigh (…well, let’s not get into that!) My food portions are going to naturally be bigger than a 5’2″ female. At least it’s how I rationalize eating the whole bag of microwave popcorn. And despite that, I know I don’t always get the five servings per day of fruits and vegetables that USDA suggests.

The SMUG Social Media Pyramid is just a guide; a framework for thinking about social media involvement. Unlike the USDA, I can’t say it’s based on scientific research. I also have to confess that sometimes I get out of balance with it, both in my personal accounts and at work. Sometimes I overload on Twitter, for instance, and don’t get enough servings of the others.

But just as you’re not going to drop dead tomorrow for failing to eat enough fruits today, there’s flexibility with your social media diet too. You’re looking for balance over time for maximum health.

In a future post I’ll discuss the real key to portion estimation, which is serving with your servings.

Join the Revolution!

When I first saw the video I’ve embedded below, it was via an email link from my department chair at work. It’s really cool when your boss’ boss passes stuff like this along!

The video also includes a neat statistic that has particular relevance for SMUG and SMUGgles, as captured in this screen shot:

OnlineLearningDeptEducation

Sort of tells me we’re on the right track with SMUG; getting hands-on, online training in social media, using revolutionary tools to learn a revolutionary subject.

Oh yeah, and it’s free.

So here’s the video; you may have seen it, or you may feel like you have anyway. The same music track has been used in at least one similar video, and I’ve seen various versions over the last three years.

A previous video of this genre made the comparison of “If MySpace were a country, it would be the fourth largest…” That was so 2006. This newest version has at least been updated to reflect Facebook’s ascendancy in the English-language general-purpose social networking ecosystem.

But don’t let the fact that you may have seen something like this keep you from clicking the “play” button below. This version has some interesting facts and factoids that will help you in making the case for social media in your organization.

If you want to get hands-on experience with these powerful tools, enroll in SMUG and join the revolution.

8 Steps to Sustainable Blogging

Many people are intimidated by the thought of starting a blog. Some of this angst results from misunderstandings: they think a blog is some mysterious creation, when in reality it is an easy-to-publish Web site that allows comments. But some of the trepidation results from a true understanding: starting a blog means you need to regularly update it to keep the content fresh.

The purpose of this article is to provide tips for developing a sustainable blog, not in the ecological sense (though the so-called “carbon footprint” of a blog is toddler-sized), but from the “How can I start small and give the blog a strong path to growth?” perspective:

  1. Start with a hosted blogging platform. I used WordPress.com and highly recommend it. You can get started for free, and for less than $80 a year you can have a blog with the same look as your main Web site that can host a podcast and that is mapped to a subdomain of your main site. But that’s the next step.
  2. Choose your URL and map to it. I mapped my personal blog to https://www.social-media-university-global.org/ and with my work we have blogs at http://sharing.mayoclinic.org/ and http://newsblog.mayoclinic.org/ and http://podcasts.mayoclinic.org/, for instance. By doing this, instead of the default yourname.wordpress.com URL, you preserve your blog’s ability to grow and move later to a self-hosted WordPress installation (as I did with SMUG) without having your incoming links break. That preserves your precious Google juice.
  3. Use Video. I use and like the Flip video camera, which costs about $150 for standard definition and $230 or so for HD. Other cameras are available at similar prices. Particularly if you have busy subject experts you want to include in the blog, you’ll have much more success if you can embed video instead of asking them to write. And if they ask you to write for them, that will make your blog inauthentic. Being able to upload video quickly via built-in USB connector makes it easier for everyone.
  4. Use lots of “tags.” Tags are labels you apply to your posts, which are your way of telling search engines what the post is about. This makes it easier for people looking for your information to find it.
  5. Use descriptive titles or headlines. In WordPress, your headline becomes part of the URL, which has search engine implications. So a cute, human-oriented headline may be less helpful from an SEO perspective. A way around this is to edit the URL for search, but still have the clever play on words in the title.
  6. Schedule posts in advance. You can take a vacation from blogging by using this feature in WordPress, which enables you to set a day and time when you want the post to be published. So you can work ahead and then take off on vacation, knowing that the content will stay fresh even while you personally refresh.
  7. Decide whether comment moderation is necessary. Akismet does a great job in WordPress of weeding out spam comments, and if you don’t require comment moderation your readers will have more immediate gratification for sharing their thoughts, and it will be less work for you.
  8. Use multiple contributors. WordPress and some other blog publishing platforms offer hierarchies and workflows, so you can share the publishing load among many users. Contributors can write, but posts must be edited and approved by, well…an Editor. Authors can write and publish on their own. Administrators can add other users. Multiple contributors also helps with that vacation we talked about in #6.

For more detail on each of these top tips, check out the entire Blogging curriculum.