(download)

Thank goodness for Ed Bennett. He maintains a master list of all hospitals and healthcare systems that are involved in social media. Nearly a year ago, he posted a Top 20 Hospitals on YouTube list. Ever since he posted that, I've used it as a measuring stick for my own healthcare system on YouTube. I think it's a good idea to do so, as I certainly wouldn't want to be comparing what my healthcare system is doing on YouTube versus, say, Lady Gaga.

Unfortunately, we haven't broken the top 20 yet. Yet!

What you'll find is a full list of hospitals and healthcare systems on YouTube and ranked in order based off subscriber count. Knowing this isn't the full picture, I've also included channel views and total uploads. Also be aware that some hospitals don't list their subscriber counts, so those ended up at the bottom of the list.

This is based off of Ed Bennett's master list of hospitals. The numbers may not completely match up though, I found some links to hospital's YouTube accounts had been discontinued, were ghost accounts or were a playlist off of another account. Those were not included.

Also know that this is based off subscriber count and secondly, channel views. About three quarters the way through I realized that "total upload views" would be a better evaluation, so I'll include that next time to replace channel views as the second evaluator.

Ed Bennett's last update to his master list was on June 20, 2010 and I gathered the information on July 17, 2010.

How often are you spending time digging into your Google Analytics and checking your website's performance? This is the stuff you know, as marketers, you need to be doing, but can be tough sometimes with everything going on.

But you can't forget about this stuff. Knowing how well your campaigns are performing is essential to making informed decisions regarding your online marketing adventures.

The more time you spend in Google Analytics, the more complicated or more involved it can become. But, of course, you'll also be getting more out of it. For those of you who just can't seem to consistently find the time, let Google Analytics work for you.

There is a somewhat new "Intelligence" feature (still in Beta) that you can find in your left menu upon entering the program. I've attached a few screenshots to give you a sample.

The second image is what Google Analytics thought I would want to know about my website in a glance. As you can see, good thing I checked it. The numbers appear to be falling fast, I need to figure that out!

You can create custom alerts at daily, weekly and monthly intervals. That's what the last screen shot is. Whether you want to get quick updates on goal conversion or something as simple as pageviews, I would recommend this new Intelligence feature to get the snapshot view with easy setup.

Some of the photos from my experience this year at the SXSW Interactive 2010 conference.

Some notes from the Social Media Marketing for your Business session on Friday, March 12, 2010 at SXSW Interactive. Hashtag for this event was #socialmediamarketing.

Why get involved in social media:

• Achieve recognition with a wider audience
• Create/improve reputation
• Enhance credibility
• Attract evangelists
  
• Public relations
• Link attraction
• Web traffic

Locate your audience (traffic sources). Where are they coming from?
Check your analytics (how are people finding you?).
Find out where your customers are:

• Ask them
• Trusted ones
• Polls/incentives

Create google alerts
Get a leg up on your competition

• Do the same thing for competitor and you'll discover more about yourself.

Niche social networks
Online video
Components of successful viral video:

• Short and sweet
• Little to no marketing message
• Funny & cute

Forums (overlooked and one of most powerful)
Yahoo! Answers
Social news and bookmarking
Find out actual sites your audience is involved in and get yourself highly involved

Jump on news and trends
What's relevant to current times (recession, saving money)
Create humorous and outrageous content
Use digg, stumbledupon, reddit!

Key takeaways:

• Use social media to obtain visibility.
• Don't use social media just to use social media.
• Understand ROI - you're still a marketer.
• Set goals and create a plan to achieve those goals.
  

This post is part of series on Podcasting, beginning with Podcasting 101: Turning an audio file into a podcast ready audio file.

Warning: Technical post

This article will cover creating your very own podcast feed; which is to say, creating an XML file which will be your RSS feed. What I will not being covering, however, is recording the actual audio.

With that being said, let's make sure we're on the same page and define exactly what a podcast is. A podcast, is simply an audio file with an RSS feed attached to it. So, in other words, a subscribe-able audio file.

Now, let's dive into how to create your XML file.

Ideally you''ll use a web authoring program, but you can also use a simple text editing program such as Notepad for Windows or Text Edit for the Mac.

Here's an example of the code you'll use within the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Enter the title of your podcast</title>
<description>Enter general description of your podcast</description>
<link>Enter the URL for the website of your podcast</link>
<language>en-us</language>
<atom:link href="Enter the full URL for your XML file" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<copyright>Enter current copyright</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>11 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>11 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<webMaster>email for podcast owner</webMaster>

<item>
<title>Enter title of your individual podcast</title>
<link>Enter URL of your podcast</link>
<guid>Enter the URL to your mp3 file</guid>
<description>Enter the description of your individual podcast</description>
<enclosure url="Enter the URL to your mp3 file" length="15389705" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<category>Podcasts</category>
<pubDate>11 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Red text is information that you need to enter for yourself, black can be copied. Now for some explanation behind some of the tags.

<description>
When this is used closer to the <channel> tag, then you want to enter a general description of your podcast as a whole. When it is used later on under the <item> tag, then this is where you would describe the individual podcast you are uploading.

<atom:link href="Enter the full URL for your XML file" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
Enter the URL of your xml file. Example: http://www.zzz.com/rss.xml, inside the quotations.

<copyright>Enter current copyright</copyright>
Such as "Copyright 2010"

<lastBuildDate><pubDate>
What works on both of these is entering the date and time of the last time you updated your XML file.

This must be entered in the exact format you saw listed above.

day = "Mon"  / "Tue" /  "Wed"  / "Thu" /  "Fri"  / "Sat" /  "Sun"
month  =  "Jan"  /  "Feb" /  "Mar"  /  "Apr" /  "May"  /  "Jun" /  "Jul"  /  "Aug" /  "Sep"  /  "Oct" /  "Nov"  /  "Dec"

<webMaster>
Email address for the person responsible for the technical piece of the podcast.

*With that you have completed all the information needed for the <channel> section, after this, begins the first <item> section. Outside the dates and times, this information shouldn't change much. The <item> section will be about the individual podcast you are adding. Each time you add your new podcast, you will add another <item> section.

<title>
Title of your individual podcast.

<link>
Here you enter the URL to your podcast. Some people keep links and show notes for each individual podcast, if you do that, enter that URL here. If not, you can just enter the podcast's website that you entered earlier.

<guid>
Enter the URL to the mp3 file for the individual podcast.

<description>
Enter description of the individual podcast.

<enclosure url="Enter the URL to your mp3 file" length="15389705" type="audio/mpeg"/>
The <enclosure> tag is unique in that there is no closing tag to match it. Enter the URL again for the mp3 file inside the quotation marks. Next, enter the "length" (actually size of file) in bytes. You can find this by looking at the properties of your mp3 file by either right-clicking (PC) or ctrl-clicking (Mac).

<pubDate>
The last <pubDate> tag is for the publication date/time of that particular individual podcast. Each time you add a new <item> with a new podcast, this should be updated as well.

Now, save that file as .xml, and that's it. You have your XML file. Note that iTunes has many specific tags that you will want to add into this XML file for publication in their system. I'll post more on those later.

Each time you want to post a new podcast all you do is add a new <item> section.

Unfortunately, you'll still not done with your XML file though. The last thing you need to do is validate your feed. There a few different feed validators out there but here is probably the most common, Feed Validator. Validating your feed simply means that you are going to run your feed through a program that scans it for any errors. If you have some errors, it'll let you know. Once you've got a validated feed, you are now through with Podcasting 102.

Look for more posts coming soon taking you the rest of the way through publicizing your podcast.

This post will be part of series of podcasting, beginning with Podcasting 101: Getting your audio file podcast-ready, I will do taking you through the process of converting your audio file, to creating an RSS feed and publicizing.

In this post, I will cover how to get an image associated with your audio file. This image will then be used in iTunes or whatever you use as a podcast player.

This is isn't a difficult process at all. In this video tutorial I use Garage Band (part of iLife) and iTunes for the mac.

My supervisor, Steve Widmann, and I had the pleasure recently to be interviewed for a For Immediate Release podcast interview with Shel Holtz.

The subject for the interview was the communication and social media efforts that went along with the recent Fort Hood tragedy.