Robert’s up in arms about some private discussions being aired in public then being distorted . Rob, who I had dinner with and others with just a few weeks ago at Podcamp West has taken some private discussions public.
A few months ago, I was speaking at Ragan PR Conference, and Robert, being at Podtech a startup asked if I could share a room with him to reduce his expenses. Heh, at first I was a little reluctant, but ultimately gave in, as it ends up, Ragan provided him a hotel room, (he was the opening keynote after all). Robert’s asking for conference expenses being covered is consistent, he’s not playing an ego card as far as I can tell.
I really hope this gets worked out, I suspect this is blown way out of proportion, and hopefully this can be resolved so Robert can attend Podcamp. One rule of thumb is that private matters shouldn’t be exploited in public.
Update, Nov 29th: There appears to be some closure on this topic. Let’s all get back to work now! 
Heh, Maybe I’ve been working at large corporations too long.
Today was my first day working full-time at Podtech. Although I was at a large startup Exodus (with a git-er-done attitude) from 2000-2003, I realized today how I’ve been trained to think and act a certain way that is nearly opposite from a startup with less than 35 people. Not bad, not good, just different.
I’m taking some pills tonight, they are 500MG of “Fast and Flexible” and 250MG of “Try, Fail, Learn, and Try Again”, and a spoonfull of “Innovation, Determintation”.
In the long run, this is a good thing, as I was asked to help out because of my Corporate deployment of Social Media, I’m just going to need to figure out how to turn it on and off.
If anyone has any other solutions, over the counter or home remedies, be sure to let me know so I can beat this bug quickly. Maybe Holly has some ideas, she just left AOL for a stealth startup.
Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for some upcoming Podtech news, there are some amazing things happening.
My iPod died at 11mos of usage. Granted, I’ve taken it around the world (London, China, Japan and all over the US) and played in my car, it’s seen some miles.
Like David Burden, I made a reservation online, showed up on time and was able to receive a brand new shiny 60 gig Video iPod replacement, no money spent. These things seem a bit fragile, so I may purchase the $60 extended warranty that will last me another year. Given I’m at a podcasting and Videoblogging company, having an iPod will be pretty important to consuming the product.
I asked the ‘Genius’ a few questions:
JKO: “Does Steve Jobs come in here?”
Genius: “Yup, he comes in once in a while and wants to see what it’s like as a customer”
JKO: “I’ll be this Palo Alto store has some of the best service out of all the apple stores!”
Second Volley:
JKO: “What do you know about the upcoming iFone?”
Genius: “Sir, We’re not allowed to speculate on unreleased products, this is a stock answer I’m told to give customers”
Did I ever tell you I think that iPods will be obsolete in 2 years? Why? Because of convergence, in Japan, the MP3 Players are already integrated with cell phones. I witnessed this here, and here. (pics)
GeoWombats found my pictures of some vases I took in Greek town in Chicago and added them to her Passion Blog on Mosaics. Pretty cool. She’s an artist too, and has some works in progress. Check our her categories section on the right nav, you can see there’s quite an extensive taxonomy being built out.
It’s so easy to tell when someone is passionate about a hobby, profession, or topic.
An executive at a Fortune 1000 company sent this article to me, asking if this would be a good use case for Wikis and RSS. The Department of Homeland Defense needs improvement in communications during crisis times, Senators ask for solutions:
“…senators expressed concern that one year after Hurricane Katrina tore into the Gulf Coast, the DHS has done little to bolster “situational awareness” during disasters. As a result, first responders are most likely still unable to provide key DHS personnel with a coherent picture of what’s happening on the ground during a disaster.”
Yes, it would be a good use case, Wikis, Blogs, RSS, and Forums could be the digital version of “Wanted Posters”.
A great example of Social Media being put to good use is Brian Oberkirch. He used blogs to help spread the word and report back to the world what was happening during this crisis, check out the Slidell Hurricane Blog. You can see the hundreds of photos Brian took and put on Flickr, reporting back to the world what had happened. For many homeowners, this was the only way to find out if their home was still standing. Want to know more about Brian, Shel interviewed him a few months ago.
Social Media empowers the citizens (the first hand witnesses) to quickly share their story.
I always thought that IBM then Microsoft would be first. Ross Mayfield tells us in this video interview by Podtech that Small and Mid-Sized offices can obtain this suite has blogs, wikis, tagclouds, and other ‘bottom-up’ driven knowledge Social Software. As an appliance you’ll just need to provide Power and Pipe. The product is called Suite Two, an enterprise 2.0 platform from Intel.
Get more details from Techcrunch:
” Intel will announce SuiteTwo today, a product that brings together a number of Enterprise 2.0 apps into an integrated suite. The four products that are included in the release are MovableType from SixApart, SocialText, Simplefeed and Newsgator.”
It’s about $150-$200 per seat, as far as enterprise software goes, that’s not too bad, but when you realize a lot of this is freeware that was asembled into a single platform you may think otherwise, but who has the time to build what someone already did? Teresa from BBS has some additional coverage. Brian, David, do you see this?
Video: Day 3: The Growth of Social Media – What Does It Mean For Your Search Marketing?
Presenters: Sally Falkow, CEO, Expansion Plus Inc. Chris Heuer, Founder, Social Media Club MODERATOR: Bill Flitter, Pheedo
Presentation Gems
I spent some time listening to this video capture of Search Insiders’ recent conference, I really enjoy dissecting presentations and taking notes, it really forces me to learn. Link via David Berkowitz.
Here’s some key highlights:
- Three times of Media in the past
- Me talking to you, but you can leave comments and feedback
- The people telling the corporations what they want, and talking to each other
- What is Social Media?
- Paraphrased: CGM, and how the audience interacts with each other and brands, using a variety of channels
- Nod to Social Media being very ‘generational’, a common way how folks under 30 are communicating.
- Shane from HP asks, How do you make money? Is it a traditional advertising?
- Chris answers, if you’re searching for short term ROI, it’s not going to happen.
- Those with the best story tellers and relationship builders will win at the end of the day. That’s a long term strategy.
- Chris Heuer
- Benefits: Your content is showing up where people want to see it
- What Robert Scoble did at Microsoft cannot be bought, what he did for the brand was amazing.
- Chris suggests to read the book “The Influentials”: ONe in Ten people influences the other nine.
- Participation is Marketing
- Everyone who is talking about your company, or around your company is influencing others.
- Social Media is about humanizing, rather than mechanizing. (believe me, I know it’s not easy)
- Listening is the first thing to do (Agreed)
- It’s not just about sales, it’s about personal connections
- Empowering your Evangelist with the right tools (I had to do this at Hitachi)
- Refers to Cluetrain Manifesto
- Refers to Edelman Walmart Fiasco
- Sally Falkow
- Think like a publisher
- Mainstream media is losing circulation
- The LA Times is up for sale.
- Ad Revenue Down
- However…online all of these sites are growing
- MySpace continues to grow
- 1/20 hits goes to a social site, a majority go to MySpace
- Sending traffic to banks, travel sites and other commercial entities
- Social Media is the number 1 upstream provider of traffic to google
- Delicious scores high in SEM
- Recommends tagging content with Technorati.
- Provides a case study on Hand Lotion, pretty interesting.
- Key Takeaways:
- Top things to do
- 1) Listen, Monitor (Agreed)
- 2) Participate, once you find them
- 3) Lead: Build Community (Chris suggests they already exist, gave Technorati case study)
- 4) I recommend to measure here…
- Don’t shy away from negative comments
- Edelman waited 6 days to respond, thereby losing credibility.
- Get your keywords and go to Technorati and Blogpulse
- IMPORANT NOTE FROM JEREMIAH: Blogs and blogs indexes do not cover all of the social media arenas, use Google and iTunes as well and consider hiring a firm that does this.
- Chris suggests the communication agencies may be the best to lead some of this
- PR industry is waking up says Sally
- Check out the Social Media Release, so it’s more search friendly
Technorati Tags: Social Media
Podtech Video: ConnectBeam Demo and CEO interview
Puneet Gupta the CEO of ConnectBeam was recorded doing a demo of his enterprise tagging tool with Podtech. Video of ConnectBeam demo. If you want to get some insight from Puneet himself, Robert interviewed him in this video.
Security and Cross Sharing Needed for Corporate Tagging and Knowledge Sharing
While Del.icio.us is great for social bookmarks, employees must be careful in information shared or bookmarked. There are some nice integration features with Google enterprise search. I recently gave some advice on how to use Del.icio.us for Marketing Research. ConnectBeam provides enterprises with the ability to have a richer experience as this enterprise tagging can be shared securely within an enterprise intranet environment. Users can share information via tagclouds, organize by groups and easily find out what others are tagging. There are some other features that are coming, be sure to keep an eye on this company.
ConnectBeam could be used for:
Use cases could include; teams sharing knowledge via links/tags, and overlaying notes on top. Search tagged content by an variety of personal slices (geo, role, project, etc). Develop bottom up controlled vocabulary for Intranet taxonomy. Most importantly, use ConnectBeam to tag your enterprise intranet securely, and away from prying eyes. In summary: ConnectBeam makes knowledge capture within an enterprise easy and more secure.
Disclaimers
It should be known that I’m on the Board of Advisers of ConnectBeam and have a vested financial interest in their success. Oh, and I start working for Podtech tomorrow.
Update Nov 29th: As a member of the Advisory board, I’m careful that there is never a conflict of interest. To ensure no conflict of interest, I did not sign the papers to join the board of advisors at ConnectBeam until after my leave of my last employer.
Compare many video services from one page. Which one do you like? I think blip looks very ‘sharpened’ and Soapbox looks good, although many would be hesitant to use Microsoft.
Although there are dozens of players, how come AOL is not on here?
This in from HDS colleague Julio Garcia, who says Podtech stole me.
Which one do you like? YouTube looks the worst (Although they have the largest community)
I just listened to the latest Podtech Weekly. Every week you can get your news update and summary from Podtech News Weekly. This week covers the following:
Learn about Apple’s iFone
(JKO: I’m sure other OEM cell providers will create MP3 and iTunes integration, my personal prediction is the Apple phone will not take off with the same zeal as the iPod. Apple must get into this space as building an MP3 player will be a commodity feature in future products, and the iPod will be unnecessary. How do I know this? I was in Japan a few weeks ago and observed that Japan phones are already offering mobile video conferencing and contain integrated and converged with MP3 players, as wireless continues to grow, the US will catch up with features, such as embedded MP3 players)
Universal Music has gone after MySpace and YouTube over copyright infringement.
(JKO: It will be interesting to see how ‘traditional’ music entities will work with social sites. The important thing to remember is that it’s not just ‘one’ social site to look at for distribution, by the time Universal and others get situated into this social network, the ‘cool’ kids may have moved on to what’s next. Get over the legal issues and start to figure out how to adapt to this new model.
Video Games are hot for Xmas
(JKO: Podtech reports that the PS3 and the Wii are sold out at brick stores, while you can still purchase them on eBay for $2000 dollars! I took a video of some passionate Wii fans that waited in line all night at best buy in SF. Podtech reports that there are other hand held devices to purchase. I wonder about what happens when we dispose of our previous game consoles, creating even more eWaste. Podtech reports that Digital Cameras, LCD panels are still hot items, if you look at the cnet homepage, you’ll see an accurate reflection of this.)
One of the things I noticed about the Podtech site is the tag cloud is so highly skewed towards the term “technology” it should be broken down into relevant, meaningful, sub-categories.Disclaimer: As most of you know, I start Podtech tomorrow as a full-time employee.
