Today was the first webinar in the Storytelling & Social Media series from NTEN and TechSoup Global.  I’m happy to say that I had the great honor of serving as the speaker for the webinar and had a ton of fun.  It’s always a little weird to talk over the phone and not be able to hear or see those you are presenting to, but everyone was really great with comments and questions and responding online so I knew I wasn’t talking to myself!

If you want to check out the recording of the session or register for webinars that are still to come, check out the full line up.

Today’s webinar focused on the building blocks of social meda; things like tagging, RSS and how to get started finding the conversations taking place online.  Here’s my slide deck:

The questions folks asked at the end were terrific!  Some of them, along with my answers, include:

• How much time a day do you spend reading (RSS feeds)? I used to be quite worried about reading everything that came into my reader.  Until I finally “got it.”  Even if you don’t read the post that comes in your RSS Reader, that content isn’t lost and the knowledge is still at your footsteps.  You can search within your reader and find content that came through that you might be looking for, even if you didn’t read it the first time.
• How do you separate personal and professional contacts or content online? I share a lot of information online, but if it is something I really want to be personal, I take advantage of the settings in different applications and mark things as private or hidden.  Most all of the tools you’ll use online allow for you to show or hide different content for different users or groups.
• What’s the difference between Netvibes and Google Reader? Netvibes is a lot like an iGoogle home page and is designed to have many different widgets or boxes that are customizable.  You may have a weather widget next to an RSS feed of your organization’s blog, a calendar widget and a feed of Google Alerts, and so on.  Google Reader is designed to organize your feeds and let you share them with your contacts/the world – without having boxes and widgets.  I like to use Google Reader most of the time, but keep my Netvibes up-to-date for times when I want to narrow in on certain topics because of the way you can view the feeds.  You can see screen shots of both of these in the slide show above.
• How do you create a tag? If you are using Delicious, for example, you don’t need to create a list of tags or a taxonomy you have to stick to before you actually start saving bookmarks.  You can create a new tag every time you save something if you want to.  When you save the bookmark, you add the tags you want associated with it, and those can be new or ones you’ve used before.  That’s it; once you hit save that tag is created.

There were other questions and some good conversations.  If you were on the call and had a question that didn’t get answered feel free to ask it here in the comments or you can check out the Emerging Technologies forum in TechSoup to join the conversation.

Upcoming events in the series include podcasting, video creation, creating social buzz, and social media ROI.  Check them out and register here!

Download the recording of today’s webinar on Social Media Building Blocks.

Thanks to all those on the webinar today! It was a lot of fun talking with you and I’m happy to keep answering questions and discuss how we can all use social media better to more effectively and efficiently change the world for the better!

NTEN & TechSoup have teamed up to deliver a series of webinars on storytelling and social media – and I’m the presenter for the first one!

First, what’s a web-inar?

Wikipedia says:

A webinar is a neologism to describe a specific type of web conference. It is typically one-way,^[1] from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction, such as in a webcast. A webinar can be collaborative^[1] and include polling and question & answer sessions to allow full participation between the audience and the presenter. In some cases, the presenter may speak over a standard telephone line, pointing out information being presented on screen and the audience can respond over their own telephones…

Social Media Building Blocks

Is sharing really caring?  Well, it can at least boost your internal staff knowledge and your positioning as a resource in the community!

In this webinar we’ll discuss the fundamentals of sharing information with social media tools.  You don’t have to know how to do this already to take part—this is for those just starting out!  We’ll cover social bookmarking, tagging, RSS and more, plus the tools you can start using for free to do it all.

More Information and Register Now!

How you can join

I will be posting my slides on SlideShare and this blog after the event to continue the conversation started during the webinar.  I’m really looking forward to it and have already started putting together some slides and ideas.

If you have questions you want answered, ideas you want to discuss, or tools you want included, just let me know!

Click here for more information about the webinar and to register!