10 classes down this past Thursday. I can’t believe how quickly it’s going. Two of the students did a presentation on Naked Conversations, a book by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble. The book focuses on how blogging is transforming businesses and they used the online tool Prezi for their presentation (below). Pretty cool collaborative, presentation tool. They reviewed the book chapter by chapter and the class understands that the rules for Facebook fan pages and Twitter all come from the rules of blogging. They’re different venues with different focuses but the basic rules are the same. Speak with a human voice, be honest and post frequently. They also talked about the three stages of items that become accepted as truthful. (truth = transparent)
- It is ridiculed
- It is violently opposed
- It is accepted as being self-evident
The team covered examples of how blogging has transformed businesses such as Microsoft with its Channel 9. (Google and Apple don’t have an open blogging policy.) We talked about the death of journalism the futility of trying to be objective; this is the strength of blogging. You get to know the person because they share their perspective. We’ve already reviewed WordPress and the class definitely understands how easy it is to create content. They also understand how hard it is to get anyone to read it!
We also talked about an email I sent out that contained a thread from a LinkedIn group called Red Chair. This was one of the best threads I’ve seen about social media. The focus of the thread was that the biggest challenge to getting a business to utilize social media was realizing that it will change their culture; assuming it’s not in their DNA to start with. Three of the students work in businesses where using social media would be a huge challenge. One because of the size of the organization and the other two because of the vertical/culture they’re in. Social media forces a company to look at itself from a new perspective.
Next class we are reviewing user generated video sites (Yes; YouTube’s not the only one), how to customize videos and their impact on SEO. We will also be talking about LinkedIn.
