This is a more philosophical follow-up post to “7 Steps to Getting the Most Out of YouTube.” While the former gave you some practical steps, this one looks at how advances in video equipment and the Web make it possible for anyone to be a worldwide broadcaster

Let’s take a minute to reflect on how the world of video has changed in just a quarter century (or to fit my personal example below, it’s more like 27 years.)

In 1981, most local television markets had three commercial network affiliates, and in some major metro markets there would be a PBS affiliate and occasionally an independent station. Station owners paid millions of dollars for FCC licenses, cameras, studios, transmitters and staff to create programming and pass it along to local viewers. Sometimes they had to pay fees for the exclusive right to broadcast events. Then they had to hire commercial sales staff to sell ads to car dealers, furniture stores and other local merchants, so they could interrupt your viewing pleasure with messages hawking their wares.

Today, by contrast, you can

• buy a Flip video camera for $150 or less,
• use a computer you already have (there are a few hundred million computers in the U.S. today) and free video editing software, and
• create and upload programming that can be seen not just locally but worldwide, for free.

And frankly, a lot of what is being produced by amateurs today is of better quality than the professional grade of the 70s and 80s. For example, here’s some video from the 1981 Minnesota High School Boys Basketball Tournament:

The vintage video has degraded somewhat over the decades (as has your Chancellor’s physical condition), but if you compare the professional-grade graphical titles from ’81 with what comes free in iMovie today, and the clarity of picture from today’s $400 camera with what we used to see from cameras costing tens of thousands of dollars, it’s amazing to see how far technology has come. Also, the fact that I even have this historical footage is due to a friend who recorded the action with his $1,000 VHS VCR (which would be about $25 today!)

Here as a more recent example is your Chancellor’s daughter, jumping center at Target Center in this year’s Minnesota Girls Class AAA Tournament:

Of course, the even better thing is that you don’t need to get to a state tournament in order to see yourself “on TV.” In fact, here’s the Facebook group I set up for my daughter’s team, where I uploaded videos from almost every one of their games from this past year.

And thanks to Facebook and YouTube, the members of the team (and their parents) will be able to share highlights of their special season with family, friends and descendants for decades to come.

Our friend and WOM guru Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar in Chicago July 30 and Sept. 4. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth that there is.

Use the code “welovemayoclinic” when you register and you’ll get a $250 discount.

This is a very practical, hands-on course. In one intense day, you will:

• Master the five steps of word of mouth marketing
• Construct an action plan that your company can start using the very next day
• Get the same training that big corporations (Microsoft, TiVo, eBay) have received — for a fraction of what they paid
• Know how to translate word of mouth marketing into real ROI
• Participate in an active, intense day of practical brainstorming (not boring theory)
• Learn from Andy Sernovitz, the guy who literally wrote the book on word of mouth marketing

Andy promises you will learn a repeatable, proven marketing framework that is easy to execute, affordable, and provides measurable results within 60 days.

In a way, this course isn’t completely necessary because:

1. You’ve undoubtedly watched YouTube videos
2. The interface in YouTube is so well designed that most people “get” it

In fact, my daughter Rebekah just said, “Dad, you’re such a nerd. Seven steps to getting the most out of YouTube..who needs that?” But SMUG exists to provide background, explanation and training in social media even for those of the 30+ generation who aren’t so-called “digital natives.” So here are seven ways you can get the most out of YouTube.

1. Share a Video. Suppose you’re out surfing through YouTube and you come across this interesting one from Mayo Clinic on Coblation Tonsillectomy, which is a cool (pardon the pun) alternative to cutting out tonsils.

After you’ve watched this, you may think, “That’s just what my nephew Justin with the raspy voice and chronic sore throat needs.” Just click on the “share” button, enter your sister’s e-mail address and a personal note, and hit “send.”

2. Search for Videos. If your interest is organ donation or transplant, for instance, you can find hundreds or even thousands of related videos by searching on those terms. Or to find videos specifically related to the Transplant Games in Pittsburgh, you can search for transplantgames08 to find videos with that tag.

3. Get a YouTube Account. This is free (all it takes is an e-mail address, and you can get one of those free from Gmail.) Whether you upload your own videos or not, this will make it much easier for you to share videos with others, because you’ll be able to save and store their e-mail addresses in your YouTube/GMail address book. You won’t have to remember their addresses in order to pass an interesting video along.

You also can use Facebook (as you see in #1 above) as your all-purpose tool to share neat web pages, including videos, with friends. But it’s worth it to have a YouTube account, especially since it allows you to take the next steps described below.

4. Subscribe to Channels. Maybe then you click on the mayoclinic link on the Coblation Tonsillectomy video and see that Mayo Clinic produces some other interesting videos, and you’d like to be notified when new ones are available. You can Subscribe to the Mayo Clinic channel (or any other channel, including the LeeAase channel, for that matter) either from an individual video or from the main channel page.

Then when people visit your channel, they will see the channels to which you have subscribed, which can help spread the word about causes you care about or just channels you find interesting.

5. Rate Videos and Select Favorites.

When you rate a video, it makes it more prominent within the Google/YouTube universe. And when you select favorites, they are displayed prominently on your personal channel (which we’ll discuss in step 7.)

6. Become a Video Friend of another user or channel.

This lets you share your channel video with others, and is a way (along with subscribing) for you to display channels you like on your channel.

7. Create Your Own Channel. You actually did this in Step 3 by creating an account, but this really comes to fruition when you record and upload your own videos. In some ways you can have a channel simply by sharing your Favorites or Friends, but when you upload a video (using the Flip video camera, for instance) you become a worldwide broadcaster.

As you explore YouTube further you will discover even more ways to use it to accomplish personal and professional goals. But now, it’s time to get started with your homework.

Assignments:

It doesn’t do much good to have a “Seven steps to getting the most out of YouTube” class if you don’t actually apply those seven steps.

So try the steps you haven’t taken (and if you add me as a Friend I will reciprocate.)

I had an interesting experience in my 6:15 a.m. flight on Northwest Airlines (NWA) from Pittsburgh to MSP today. When I had awakened at 6:20 yesterday (without the alarm) after having arrived in Pittsburgh just before midnight (and not getting to sleep until 2:30 because of some remaining work to do, such as this blog post), I hurriedly logged on and checked in for my flight because it was within the 24-hour window, and I knew that frequent-flyer upgrades on NWA are offered in part on a first-come, first-served basis within a given Elite (Platinum, Gold, Silver) category. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?)

It seems I wouldn’t have had to do that, as you’ll see in the video below:

Note to self: Fly at ridiculously early times on Saturdays (at least if you’re not starting at a hub city), and you have a lot better chance of getting a First Class upgrade on Northwest Airlines. Even if you’re only Silver Elite.

The games haven’t even started yet; today was just the first half-day of registration and setting up our Mayo Clinic booth.

I heard some great stories, both from organ recipients and from donor families (as well as some from families in which one member had donated to another) and we uploaded them to the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel.

Here’s one that was especially touching for me, because it involved a Dad (about my age, or maybe a bit younger) with five kids (I have six), none of whom had been born when he received his donated kidney.

Here’s a photo taken on the medal stand in the Mayo Clinic booth, of Katie Schnell and her father, who was her kidney donor.

You also can listen to Kati tell her story on YouTube.

There were lots of other moving and inspirational stories, and you can see them by clicking here (more will be uploaded soon) or by searching for transplantgames08 on YouTube. More videos will be shot and uploaded tomorrow, and I hope others who are staying for the entire games will shoot videos, and upload photos, and write blog posts giving them the transplantgames08 tag, so we can see and hear more about the difference transplant can make.

Kay Kosberg and Kristin Eggebraaten are two representatives from the Mayo Clinic Transplant Center who are staffing the Mayo Clinic booth this weekend at the U.S. Transplant Games in Pittsburgh.

Here’s a bit from Kay telling why she’s excited about the Transplant Games:

And here’s a brief interview I did with Kristin:

Here’s a photo of the Pittsburgh skyline they took yesterday when they arrived, and we uploaded it to the Mayo Clinic Flickr account.

Update: Here’s a photo of the three of us staffing the booth, taken just before I left last night (they’re on the  medal stand, and I’m on the floor). Kay and Kristin are taking care of the booth today. I’m sorry I won’t get to see the opening ceremonies.

I’m in Pittsburgh for the 2008 Transplant Games, an event sponsored by the National Kidney Foundation “to demonstrate the success of transplantation, honor those who have given the gift of life, and call attention to the need for more organ donors.”

I am accompanying a couple of staff members from the Mayo Clinic Transplant Center in our Mayo Clinic booth. They’re the experts in transplant and medicine, and I’m helping them work with the transplant recipients, living donors and their family members who are here to promote organ and tissue donation through social media.  Here’s a description of what we’ll be doing.

More than any type of patient I know, transplant recipients seem to be especially grateful for the opportunity at a new life they have been given through transplant. Whereas some patients may want to keep the fact of their medical conditions private (which is absolutely their right), my experience with transplant patients is that they have an evangelical zeal to let people know how important organ and tissue donation is.

It seems to me that social media, whether it be networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, or through sharing videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr or via a blog, present unique opportunities for transplant advocates to spread the word. Here’s why:

I work with mainstream media as part of my job, and in some ways transplant stories suffer from what I call “The Space Program Syndrome.” NASA has been so successful with its Apollo and Space Shuttle programs that now going into outer space has become a “ho-hum” event. The only time mainstream media pay significant attention to space flight is after a Challenger or Columbia disaster, or on a local/regional basis, when someone from the community is part of the shuttle crew.

That gives a clue to how social media sites are particularly well suited to help promote transplant, as my friend Scott Meis (who works with the Donate Life Illinois program) has found.

The difference between mainstream media and social media is that mainstream media have to try to command a large audience in order to be economically viable. Reporters, editors and other gatekeepers tell a story professionally, but to pay their salaries there needs to be a certain level of widespread interest so the advertisers who support the programs or publications can reach a critical mass of individuals.

As Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody (full review coming soon, but described briefly here), mainstream media are built on the scarcity model. The number of FCC licenses to use the finite broadcast spectrum is limited, and there is a significant expense involved in creating a newspaper (reporter/editor salaries, printing presses, paper, delivery, etc.)

With social media, the content is largely created by amateurs as a labor of love, and the rewards are psychic and spiritual rather than economic. Almost anyone can participate in these media and can create and distribute content for FREE, or at least at a ridiculously low cost. So they don’t have to reach a large audience to be successful.

Mostly they reach people they know, and who know them. I read somewhere that the average blog has something like a dozen or fewer readers, most of whom know the author.

That’s the other reason why social media can be so powerful in promoting transplant and organ/tissue donation. It can be moving to read a newspaper article or see a TV story about a transplant recipient being given a new chance at life; it’s immensely more intense to read or see and hear first-person accounts from people you know, telling how transplant saved or at least radically improved – their lives.

So, if you are participating in the Transplant Games, here are seven steps you can take to promote awareness of donation.

1. Stop by the Mayo Clinic Booth and have your picture taken or have your video testimonial recorded. Your photo will be uploaded to Mayo Clinic’s Flickr account, and your video will be on Mayo Clinic’s YouTube channel. One of the “tags” associated with your photo or video will be transplantgames08. More on that later.
2. Join Facebook and find or invite friends. You will be able to use Facebook to share your video or photo with your friends, and also to tell your story in writing if you want, which is Step 3. For more background, take the Introduction to Social Networking course, and Facebook 101.
3. Join the Organ Transplant Patients, Friends and You group in Facebook. You’ll be able to connect with others involved in transplant in a virtual support group. Write your transplant story on the group’s wall, or on the Mayo Clinic “fan” page, which you also can join.
4. Get a YouTube account, so you can more easily share videos (including your transplant testimonial) with your friends. Then you also can subscribe to the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel. If you take videos during the Transplant Games, give them the transplantgames08 tag, too.
5. Join Flickr so you can upload photos from your Transplant Games experience, tagging them transplantgames08.
6. Consider starting a blog. One of my friends, Bob Aronson, received a heart transplant at Mayo Clinic in Florida last August. I had gotten to know Bob through my work at Mayo Clinic. He helped us train physicians and scientists in ways to most effectively communicate technical science stories through mainstream media. So it was a delight for me to introduce Bob to “new media.” He started the Organ Transplant Patients, Friends and You Facebook group, and also launched a blog. I helped him name it, and I think it’s pretty clever (although to really get it you probably need to be over 35): Bob’s NewHeart.
7. Encourage other Participants to take Steps 1-6. As you are meeting many new people this week, invite them to get engaged with these social media tools, to tell their stories in their circles of influence.

As I mentioned earlier, all of these services are FREE. The only investment required is your time to learn to use them, and to tell your story. And with our free courses in social media basics, blogging, podcasting, Facebook and Twitter, Social Media University, Global provides the step-by-step instruction you need to use these tools effectively. So I hope you’ll enroll today.

Finally, a word about tagging. Tagging is a way for users of social media sites to label their videos, photos and blog posts. So if everyone participating in the Transplant Games uses the transplantgames08 tag, that will make it easy for people to find all of the related resources.

And hopefully after the Transplant Games are done, we will see that the power of thousands of transplant recipients and advocates communicating through social media can exceed what might be accomplished through traditional media, by telling powerful stories through these simple but powerful tools.

Last week I got a note from Chris Heuer asking me to serve on an interim board of directors for the Social Media Club, the formation of which was announced today. This is an exciting project, and I was delighted to accept his invitation. Here’s what Chris says about what our charge will be…

According to Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and Partner at The Conversation Group, “The Social Media Club is honored to have so many accomplished and well-regarded industry evangelists come forward to lead the organization. While the interim board will focus on charting the organization’s future direction, our core mission will remain the same: promotion of media literacy; support of industry standards efforts such as Creative Commons licensing, Microformats, Data Portability and OpenID; discussion and promotion of ethical behavior; and sharing our knowledge among our members and the industry community at large.

I’m honored to be included in this group, and clearly the interim board membership roster is in alphabetical order instead of by any measure of industry prominence. But then again, maybe I’m the only university chancellor.

I look forward to engaging with the Social Media Club, which is “A community for the champions of Social Media and those seeking to learn.” That’s what SMUG is all about, too.

Note: This post is part of the Podcasting curriculum for Social Media University, Global.

In Podcasting 105 through 108 we demonstrated how you can use a WordPress.com blog as a server to create an RSS feed for your podcast, and can subscribe to your podcast by cutting and pasting that feed URL into your iTunes program. But using the native RSS feed from WordPress.com has a couple of disadvantages:

1. It doesn’t give you feed statistics, so you don’t know how many people are subscribing. That’s fine if you are doing a personal podcast just for fun, but if you’re doing this in a work environment your employer will likely expect better statistics so you can determine whether the podcast is worthwhile.
2. Cutting and pasting is a little clunky for your users. They have to know how to subscribe manually in iTunes, and it would be a lot better if there was a nice interface to guide them through the process.

“Burning” your feed through Feedburner.com provides solutions to both of those problems, as you will see and hear below:

Homework Assignments:

1. Go to Feedburner and set up an account. You will be able to use this to burn your RSS feeds for your WordPress.com blog as well (to be described in a future post in the Blogging curriculum), but it all starts from having a Feedburner account (as Toby Palmer now does).
2. Go back through the earlier courses in the Podcasting curriculum so you can record an audio file and launch your own student podcast. As you will see in Podcasting 105, we have a standing offer for any SMUG student to  create a free podcast hosted from the SMUG Podcast Blog (and thereby avoid paying the $20/year additional fee to WordPress.com in order to experiment with your own podcast.)

After you’ve learned how to do a personal podcast, you’ll be ready and confident in your abilities to launch one for your business or non-profit organization. You’ll probably want to spend a little money on better recording equipment, and at that point paying the $20 to be able to podcast from your own blog will be well worth it.

But our goal at SMUG is to let you experiment with all of these tools without spending even a penny of your own money, only investing your time in the on-line education process. So please take advantage of the opportunity and start your own podcast today.

My daughter Ruthie experienced emotions at Bible Bowl 2008 that ranged from despondency to delight, and we who joined her (with her brother and teammate, Joe) for the five days of competition all got to experience those same highs and lows with her. It was quite a dramatic week that started with great difficulty.

I’ll get to the story in a bit, but first here’s a little background. Bible Bowl is a competition similar to the now-defunct College Bowl or Quiz Bowl, but with subject matter taken from selected books of the Bible. This year the text was the Gospel of John as well as his epistles (1 John, 2 John, 3 John) and 1 Peter and 2 Peter. The strongest players have memorized and can recite the entire text (1,178 verses). More demonstration of that in a bit.

Bible Bowl is sponsored by the Church of Christ, and during the school year there are monthly regional “round robin” contests that cover a portion of the text and help the players get familiar with how the game is played. Then, during June several of the denomination’s colleges host preliminary competitions. These provide the first extended opportunity for teams from around the country to play head-to-head against each other, and help sort teams into “pods” for the round robin play at the national tournament.

How the game is played. In round robin play, games last 14 minutes or until 15 “toss-up” questions have been asked, whichever comes first. When a toss-up question is read, the first player to hit the buzzer locks the other team out and has the opportunity to answer. This makes memorizing the text a significant advantage, and particularly knowing which words are used only once or twice in the entire text, so players can buzz early. If they buzz and answer incorrectly (which is called “bouncing”) the remainder of the question is read for the other team. Answering a toss-up correctly earns the team 10 points and the opportunity to answer bonus questions for 20 to 40 additional points. There are a total of 600 points available in round robin games, and usually if a team wins 8 of the toss-ups they will get the 300 points they need to win, but it is possible to get more toss-ups and still lose if you fail to get all of the bonus points or if you get all of the 20-point bonuses while the opponent gets the 40-pointers.

Round robin play “seeds” the teams for the double elimination tournament. These games are played in brackets like the College World Series and have 20 toss-ups in two 10-minute halves. If you lose a game you go to the one-loss bracket and keep playing until you lose again.

As this year’s competition began, there were 112 teams sorted into 12-team pods for round robin. Because our Austin, Minn. team had finished fifth once and third twice, and had won the final college tournament (at Johnson Bible College), they were placed in the top pod, which meant that they could get no worse than the 12th seed for double elimination.

This is where the despondency started on Tuesday morning, as Ruth’s team lost their first three games by 8 toss-ups to 7. After a couple of wider losses, she regathered her composure and played two more tough games, losing both 8-7. So Tuesday she went 0-7, but we told her Wednesday was a new day, and besides, everyone starts with a clean slate for the double elim.

Wednesday wasn’t appreciably better, as Ruthie and Joe’s team lost their remaining round robin games to finish with a record of 0-11 and a firm grip on the 12th seed, although she lost 7 of the 11 games by a single toss-up. In the afternoon, though, she started her comeback through the Quote Bee. I’ve written about this competition previously, and it’s frankly amazing. It’s one thing to memorize a long passage (and quite impressive in its own right), but to pull out a single verse by its reference (e.g. John 15:19) and quote it verbatim is astonishing to me.

Ruthie made it through the first six rounds, and then missed in the seventh.

Thursday morning started the double elim, and Ruthie’s team won a shaky second-round game after their first-round bye, but in her next game Ruthie bounced six toss-ups to the other team and lost by one question. That sent them to the one-loss bracket, where Ruthie started a great run. They won two games Thursday afternoon to earn a spot in the top 24, and then won 4 straight Friday morning before losing a tough one by a 345-280 score. In the fifth-place game Austin beat the Valley View, TX team 515-230. Later that day, Ruthie and Joe (and teammates Billy and JImmy Blanshan) received their medals:

Bible Bowl also has an individual achievement test which the players took on Monday evening, before the start of the team competition. It’s an extremely difficult 400-point test, and the margin between first place and fifth was just two points, from 371 to 369. Ruthie was third at 370, having tied for second but losing the tie-breaker. Last year she tied for first, but took second based on the tie-breaker.

Congratulations to the Southeast Christian Church (Louisville, KY) team on its national title, and to Christian Kelley of the Southeast team for his first place on the individual test. One of the things Lisa and I appreciate about Bible Bowl is the strong friendships the kids make through the college tournaments, and Christian is one of Ruthie’s best friends. We also got to spend a lot of time with his parents, Rick and April, this week, so we were happy for the Southeast team.

That’s the other thing we appreciate about the Bible Bowl competition: Everyone works hard and plays to win, but is genuinely happy for the other team’s success. And when Ruthie was going through her 0-11 start, the encouragement she got from other teams and coaches meant a lot. They were happy to be winning, but kept telling her she would be fine once she got to the double elim.

We were proud of how Ruthie responded to adversity, even though there were tears of frustration as she was a little bit off her game early in the week. When you’re playing among the top dozen teams in the nation in any competition, if you’re not at your absolute best it’s going to be a tough road. We were glad she persevered and made the top 5, which was in keeping with what she had accomplished in the June college tournaments.
We also enjoyed having my parents join us for this family vacation to Atlanta, and that they got to see Ruthie at her best much as they have seen her sister Rebekah in her volleyball and basketball competitions.

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for indulging your Chancellor in this personal aside to our regular coursework, and I hope you have found it interesting. I’m back to work at my real job tomorrow, and plan to be finishing the 100 level courses in the Podcasting curriculum in the next few evenings. Meanwhile, this has been an example of how you can use social media to tell your story and document your family vacations for posterity.