1. Top 10 Facebook Business Uses. It’s kind of wild that a post I wrote in Aug. 2007 would be the most-viewed post for 2008, but this one typically shows up in the top two Google results in a search for Facebook business uses.
2. B2B Facebook: Limited Profile. This one also is from Aug. 2007, and probably pops up high for some of the same reasons. It’s #1 in Google for B2B Facebook.
3. Why Organizations Should Join Facebook Group Land Rush. More gold from Aug. 2007, a few months before Facebook developed Pages as an official presence for businesses.
   
4. 8 Steps to Successful Change – A review of John Kotter’s theory on organizational change that I wrote in 2006.
5. Facebook Business (Page) – A compilation that pre-dates the SMUG makeover. I had been writing a bunch of posts that were related to using Facebook for business, and so I decided to pull them together.
6. Best Buy Using Social Media for Employee Engagement – Finally, something from 2008! This is a post I wrote from an Advanced Learning Institute conference I attended in February. Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling had a great presentation, and the winning video from their employee contest was hilarious.
7. Facebook Group Organization Examples – Another 2007 post highlighting various applications of Facebook groups by organizations. Again, this was from the pre-Pages days.
8. Simply RSS: Add RSS Feeds to Your Facebook Profile or Page. A tutorial from late last year that helped me to start thinking that my niche for this blog might be the kind of educational courses that have become SMUG.
   
9. 12-Step Social Media Program for PR Pros. I wrote this one in conjunction with a conference at which I was a panelist, to give the participants some concrete steps they could take to explore social media. Another precursor to SMUG: in fact, it was subsequently renamed Social Media 101.
10. 4 Tips to Prevent Facebook Identity Theft. This is one I wrote, somewhat in exasperation, during a time when there was some buzz about Facebook being used to steal people’s identities. I believed that the concerns were seriously overblown then, and still do today. But when people search Google for Facebook identity theft, this post comes up #2.

Some more recent posts that finished just out of the top 10 for the full year (but should be strong contenders in 2009):

Facebook 101: Introduction to Facebook

Facebook 109: Uploading a Video to Facebook

SMUG $100 Facebook Hacker Challenge – A response to what I consider overblown concerns about the security of Facebook groups.

Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy – A tutorial on how you can use Facebook for both personal and professional networking.

SMUG exemplifies The Long Tail: The rest of the posts combined got more than twice as many page views in 2008 as these top 15 or so. Once the content is created, the cost of making it available to anyone who wants to find it is zero. And thanks to Google, it’s easy to find. So even a year or more after a post is published, it’s still providing value.

I’m glad you’re among those who have found your way to Social Media University, Global. If you haven’t yet enrolled, I hope you’ll do so today, and begin your journey of hands-on exploration in social media.

I’ll be logging into it regularly (probably increasingly as we progress), and may use Twitterfeed to automatically publish some links to posts from this blog, but one of the key benefits will be that you can see who else is following @SMUG_U, and you can follow them, too. That will be covered in Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed.

For now, just follow @SMUG_U.

If you’re a smarty pants who wants to skip ahead, you can see who else is following @SMUG_U and follow them.

And as you are tweeting, feel free to use the #smug hashtag if you think the item will interest your fellow SMUGgles.

The Task at Hand

At SMUG, the Chancellor also is in charge of Environmental Services.

Anyone for a Picnic?

These lights are called “icicle lights,” mainly for the visual effect they create. In our case, because our new garage doesn’t have gutters yet, we give that term a literal interpretation.

Icicle Lights

And after a half hour of shoveling, I had tamed the rugged driveway, much as my ancestors tamed the prairie. (OK, forget that. They didn’t get to go in and take a warm shower after they went out to chop wood.)

Mission Accomplished!

They also didn’t have wifi on the bus to work (or a bus to work) that they could use to share their morning experiences with the world.

So although we sometimes grumble about having to get up early to shovel the driveway and dig out after the snow plow has passed, we have a wonderful life. We’re blessed with a theater of seasons, and an opportunity to get out and become actors in the play.

So for long-time SMUGgles, you may find some of the upcoming posts a bit elementary, but please bear with us…and take this as an opportunity to “give back” by sharing your experiences in the comments.

I have about 15 courses at the 100 level that I’ve identified by haven’t completed, so I’m going to try to get those finished in the next couple of weeks.

And meanwhile, if anyone wants to develop an official SMUG seal, that would be much appreciated by generations of SMUGgles yet to come.

• Now you can link to a specific spot within a YouTube video. So if you find an interesting spot in a YouTube video that you want to share, you can direct people to that portion instead of making them watch the whol thing (or saying something like “scroll ahead to the 1:45 mark.”) Learn how and see an example of deep linking on  YouTube courtesy of TechCrunch.
• Wikipatterns has interesting thoughts on how to spur adoption of wikis in your organization (and how to eliminate barriers to adoption.)
• TwitThis is “The new ‘share this’ for Twitter.” You can drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar, and then easily share whatever page you’re currently viewing through Twitter.
• And Brian Solis has a helpful post cataloging the Twitter tools (including TwitThis) that are available to make Twitter even more useful for community and communications professionals.

The benefits of a screencast are obvious, particularly for SMUG. Instead of a slideshow of a sequence of static screen shots uploaded to Slideshare.net and synched to a sound file (pretty good alliteration, huh?), we can now show and tell with full motion, so you can see exactly how to do things. Pictures are extremely helpful, but movies should make the teaching clearer and the learning easier.

But how do you (or I) turn my computer screen into a movie?

For Mac OSX, Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X is an excellent screencast software choice. It’s easy to use, and I was most pleased that it not only delivers great movies of my Mac screen, but also my Windows XP partition. You can see that example in this post on social sharing with WordPress.com. Unlike most of what you see in SMUG, Snapz Pro X isn’t free: it costs $69. But I think it’s worth it for the power it gives you.

Just to show how far you can go with this, I decided to do a demo screencast using Flip video of me addressing my fellow SMUGgles from the front porch of Old Main:

Steps involved in this were:

1. Shoot the video of me talking using a Flip on a tripod.
2. Transfer the file to my Mac and open in QuickTime
3. Play the video at half-size, while capturing the surrounding 640 x 480 window using Spapz Pro X screencast software, and then saving to a QuickTime movie file.
4. Open that file and repeat the cycle, creating another QuickTime file that could again be played at half size.
5. After repeating a couple of more times to create the “hall of mirrors” effect, edit the pieces together using iMovie or Final Cut.

The point, besides having some fun showing a movie of a movie of a movie, was to show that through screencasting you can do show-and-tell training demonstrating anything on your computer screen.

Ironically, the only thing I can’t screencast using Snapz Pro X is a step-by-step introduction to using Snapz Pro X!

I still like Slideshare and will use it to some extent (particularly for the Snapz Pro X course), but I think a screencast can be a much more effective way to teach.

If you’re a Windows user, this list from Mashable has some screencast software alternatives.

What do you think? How could you use screencasting for your training programs?

Even though we don’t have our own sports teams (which helps us keep tuition down!), Social Media University Global still needs a nickname for our student body. Referring to the whole bunch as “SMUG students” has an unfortunate connotation, but until a few weeks ago it was the best I could do.

Then, in a comment on this post, Jim Streed suggested “SMUGgles” as the collective shorthand designation. For those who haven’t read the Harry Potter books, it’s a take-off on J.K. Rowling’s name for ordinary mortals, Muggles: those who lack magical powers.

And while “muggles” is sometimes used pejoratively by Harry’s peers, SMUGgles is a label we should all wear proudly. It reinforces one of the founding principles of our institution:

You don’t have to be a wizard to get magical results with these powerful tools.

Everything you see here is accomplished through free or ridiculously inexpensive services like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and WordPress.com, and with no professional IT support. And with SMUG you can work through the learning process step by step, until you feel confident using these tools in your organization.

But having chosen SMUGgle as our “team name,” that still left us with one problem. We all can picture a Cardinal, or a Blue Jay, or a Viking, but what does a SMUGgle look like? What could be our school mascot?

For now, we’re going with something that bears an eerie resemblance to the “I just joined Facebook” avatar that represents all of us on that social networking platform until we upload a picture. Somehow that seems appropriate, because it shows that SMUG is not only open to newbs, it’s intended for beginners.

But with that, I also want to renew the call for those, newb or not, who have artistic abilities and would like to design a new masthead and logo for SMUG. It would be great to have an official seal that incorporates our Latin motto, Suus Non Ut Diffucile, and if we could get an original drawing for the SMUGgle mascot, that would be fantastic, too.

If the Obama campaign can have an official seal complete with a Latin motto, why not SMUG? To borrow a phrase, “Yes, we can!”

I promise that once we select a SMUG seal, we’ll use it a lot longer than Obama did.

Another goal has been to get more “faculty” members, and to have “associate professors” with experience in different areas contributing their expertise. That’s why I’m so excited to have Jan Husdal providing the Blogging 107: Typepad Pros and Cons course. An added bonus is that he’s from Norway, so now we also have two continents represented among the faculty.

I have appreciated learning from Jan through his Typepad vs. WordPress blog; he’s responsible for helping me find out how to add the social sharing buttons you see on some of the newer posts here.

I know you will find his posts helpful, too.

If you see any of the courses in the proposed curriculum that you would like to write, or if you have ideas for class offerings that you think would be helpful and interesting to others, please get in touch with me through the e-mail you see in the Contact the Chancellor sidebar.

A podcast is the perfect vehicle for providing in-depth audio and video information to an interested audience. And not just an “audience,” but a community: if you use a blog to distribute your podcast, listeners can provide feedback through their comments. This post is a recap of Social Media University, Global’s 100-level Podcasting courses, and will take you step-by-step through everything you need to create your own podcast

Best of all, the education is completely FREE. SMUG has no tuition, and all of the tools to create and distribute your podcast used and recommended in these courses are free.

You’ll learn how to:

• Subscribe to podcasts for FREE using iTunes
• Record your audio files for FREE using Audacity
• Use WordPress.com as your FREE server for delivering podcasts (a $20 savings over typical costs, exclusively for SMUG students)
• Enhance your podcast feed through Feedburner so you can get traffic and usage data, and so your users can more easily subscribe, and
• Get your podcast listed in the major podcast directories like the iTunes Store and Podcast Alley.

You’ll do all of this without spending a penny, but just investing your time, assuming you have access to a computer with a built-in microphone. Then, after you’ve experimented with your own personal podcast, you will have the confidence born of first-hand knowledge and hands-on experience that will enable you to make decisions on how and whether to use podcasting in your work or volunteer organizations. Here are the 10 steps to your free podcast:

1. Podcasting 101/Social Media 106: Introduction to Podcasting
2. Podcasting 102: Becoming a Podcaster
3. Podcasting 103: Creating Audio Files Takes Audacity
4. Podcasting 104: Adding ID3 Tags to Your Audio Files
5. Podcasting 105: WordPress.com is My Podcast Server (and Yours)
6. Podcasting 106: Creating an RSS Podcast Feed
7. Podcasting 107: Posting a Podcast Episode
8. Podcasting 108: Subscribing to Your Podcast
9. Podcasting 109: Hotter Podcast Feeds through Feedburner
10. Podcasting 110: Listing Your Podcast in iTunes and Other Directories

Upon completion of these 10 steps, you will receive your non-accredited Associate of Arts in Podcastology and will be added to the SMUG Dean’s List. Then you’ll be ready to explore advanced courses at the 200-level and above, learning about production enhancements like better recording devices, adding music to your podcast without going to jail, conducting interviews remotely through Skype, mixing tracks and adjusting recording levels, and otherwise making your podcast more professional.

Please give your feedback on this 10-step free podcast program, either in the comments below or on the individual courses. We’re always open to suggestions on how we can improve the educational experience.

And if you find the program helpful, please use your blog, Twitter, Facebook — or the buttons below — to share it with your friends and colleagues.

So just how do you go about doing this? Glad you asked! Podcasting 110 takes you step-by-step through the process of getting your podcast listed, and reviews how you can guarantee that your podcast can be found through Google.

Here’s where Chancellor Conversations is listed on Podcast Alley.

Assignments

1. Go through the earlier courses in the Podcasting curriculum so that you will have a podcast of your own
2. Submit your podcast feed in iTunes
3. Submit your podcast feed in Podcast Alley
4. Submit your podcast feed in Yahoo Search
5. Put your podcast feed in a widget on your own WordPress.com blog
6. Post links to the directory listings of your podcast in the comments below

Extra Credit

If you really want to impress the Chancellor with your thirst for knowledge, subscribe to Chancellor Conversations.