I’ve been following the online data storage market very carefully, (having worked at a data storage company for 3 years)

The new model of web companies is to minimize technical infrastructure, such as using webservices like a utility like power or water.

Tim O’Reilly is asking for numbers from clients, a case study to show how the web is an infrastructure. The benefits? pay as you go, no need for a sys admin or HW purchase, no upgrading, and hopefully no data loss. Of course, the real risk is worrying about where your corporate data is, Jeff Nolan notes some issues with continuity with databases and storage.

Amazon is not alone, I’ve a list of quite a few enterprise IT vendors that are also entering the online data storage industry, so please don’t forget those companies (who already have a large install base)

The big picture for Online Data storage is the opportunity for effective marketing, (there are other opportunites and disruptions to think about as well). When user data is stored on the cloud, the opportunity to understand, organize, and connect information is at hand. This is why I have the theory that Amazon S3 will eventually pay users (or other online data storage users) to upload data.

Arrogant A-lister? Succesful Entrepreneur? Or a generous knowledge resource?

Guy is never a short of words as he shares how he became one of the top bloggers so quickly (I’ll admit, I was one who is jealous as he skyrocketed to fame in 3 month). His content is often written as a resource, a “how to” be an evangelist or entrepreneur.

Best quote? “Who give a Shitake” about your personal journal. I was the one that told Jennifer not to throw around that “A-list” term, well she asked Guy right up front, pretty cool. Wow, Guy has a nice estate, what an incredible backyard. His goal is to be ranked in Technorati as the top 10, he’s 14 pegs away. Guy says he doesn’t read any other blogs other than his, well he only has about 40 feeds that he reads.

If you can’t see the embedded file above, access the webpage directly.

Here’s a fantastic roll-up from Daniel Riveong Head of Search Marketing of e-Storm International, in which he provides this comprehensive thought piece of Marketing, Social Media, Web Strategy, and Search Marketing.

In this definitive post; “Marketing Changes: CMOs, Evangelist, Social Media Programs, Website Strategy Positioning” He demonstrates the different roles, strategies, programs and changes that are required to be flexible in today’s Marketing world.

Hugh McLeod is coming in this week, a blogger dinner at Gordon Biersch Brewery is going to happen on Tue night if you can make it. Scoble has news, or sign up on the wiki (see who’s going already).

Try to avoid the traffic from East bay, so take BART if possible. Did you know the freeway in Oakland melted from an exploding tanker? Thomas Hawk even took pictures. I got a lot of news from Dave Winer on Twitter, see how I get my news?

What does it take for Hugh to draw on the back of my business card some art or a caricature? Anyone know what I need to bribe him with?

I hope to see you there…afterwards, I’ll be heading to Kris Tate’s new pad in SF, he’s turning “nearly 30″. (not really, but you get the idea)

Dear Speaker,

While I’m honored you read my blog, and think highly of what I publish, I would really appreciate if you would reference me or cite me in your presentations.

It’s a professional courtesy to cite others, especially if they’ve worked hard to get the knowledge that they have. Also, it adds to your credibility, as third party sources can validate your point. Since we’re in a very open community, people talk, and people will find out anyways if you use someone’s work without their permission.

I certainly encourage you to use this information I share to grow, be better, and to improve web strategies, I certainly would appreciate if you would reference me going forward.

Professionally and Appreciatively,

Jeremiah

Oracle Bloggers, I know you’re frustrated in not getting the respect you deserve, here’s an idea, I’m helping out with the Lunch 2.0 community, it’s a community event that different companies host in the web and tech space. There’s been a ton of companies that have hosted this event, upcoming ones will includes LinkedIn, a networking company, and I even hosted one last year for HDS.

Email me (on right nav) if you want details, I’ll help you get it done right, heck maybe PodTech can help you record the event on video, either way time to reach out to the community, meet other bloggers, make contacts and show your human side both on the blogosphere and in person.

Maybe Robert (my colleague) will have time to show up too. My title is “Director of Corporate Media Strategy”, it’s my job to help corporations with social media, I’m reaching here to you.

Update: One Oracle blogger doesn’t think this is such a good idea. Maybe you could swing by his blog and leave a comment. Be sure to read my comment, if you don’t agree, but sure to let me know. This conversation continues to grow, as Dennis Howlett is a guest blogger from Zdnet blogs.

Our newest client Topix has asked PodTech to put together a profesional video surveying folks in the community to find out “What’s wrong with local news” This short documentary hosted by my colleague Rio Pessino asks Rafe Needleman from CNET’s Webware, Adriana G (have you seen her photo shoot? wow!), KQED’s Raul Ramirez, Hooman from Alice 97.3 who recently ripped into Scoble pretty dang good, new buddy Johnny Ham of Ustream, Sarah Meyers, Craig Newmark of Craig’s list, as well as other SF locals.

The Topix crew got together to ask folks what’s wrong with Local News, well here’s my answers:

1) Lack of aggregation of all photos, blogs, images, in my local area
2) I don’t only want the stories from journalists, but I want the opinions of people in the community (without a filter)
3) Traffic, Crime are not the only things that are worthy to me, there’s other things I want to know about.

After spending some time with Topix folks, I learned that if you type in your city name and news (Palo Alto News) Topix will come up above the fold in a Google search, try it with your city. They’re aggregating content to build something new, I hope they take some of my ideas into consideration.

Oh yeah, we’ve made some improvements to our Video player, what do you think? There’s a widescreen version, and you can share and some other features.

I’m excited for Mark Krupinski who has accepted a role as a Community Manager at Rasmussen Colleges. He’s been an advocate of social media and has had a somewhat frustrating experience at his previous company who simply, well, didn’t get it. Apparently Rasmussen is not like that, they encourage him to be creative, reach to the community and want him to experiment with other interaction devices that could increase education results, interactive environments like SecondLife.

While community is nothing new in the collegiate experience, for a the formal web organization of an educational group to start thinking about these tools for education is fantastic. Setting up tools so that students can learn from each other, share information, interact, argue and connect. Since this is the way we’re expected to perform in the future workplace, why should we limit it only there? I’ve seen some tools that Mark will be sure to look at in the Web 2.0 arena focused on Education.

Congrats to Mark, and Congrats to Rasmussen colleges for creating such a modern, interesting, and effective role.

Recently, some colleagues of mine told me my blog is so very “Corporate” and “Strategic”, that’s a nice way of saying I’m boring.

For those that have gotten to know me, I’m not that serious in real life. I’m going to let you peer at it just a bit today. At CES in Vegas, Thomas Hawk, Kris Tate and I went around the city taking photos. We were already delirious from the fun of BlogHaus, and Thomas was on a mission to take 1000 photos and publish them. During one time, we were hanging out on the people movers and I decided to make a bolt for it, I don’t know why, but I just wanted to run on them, a voice told me “Run Jeremiah, Run!, Run like you’ve never Run before”, I did.

Last week, I invited friends on my Twitter network to caption this photo, I now extend this to you. . It’s been viewed 293 times and favorited by four. I look forward to your captions on the photo. That’s me, Thomas Hawk’s friend, Running. Enjoy!

I remembered to hit ‘record’ on the Ustream player, this is the archive of our presentation at AdTech on Tuesday in SF. Panel lead by Rohit Bhargava, Steve Hall of Adrants, Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja, and Karl Long of ExperienceCurve on the topic of business blogging
Great session write-up (funny too) .

This time next week I’ll be at Webvisions in Portland, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you there (I know Jason will be there, he said so on a previous comment). I had such a good time from last year, that I put together an index of all the blog posts, pictures and media that was created. Webvisions is really my element, because it’s web folks. Those quirky, creative, cool, and geeky folks that are doing what we all love.

I’ll be speaking on one of the sessions on Social Media Strategies for your Organization? Connecting the Dots, I’ll also be live streaming (think Joan Rivers, except I’m male, Asian, and younger) from the event floor (Brad the event chair and Kit Seeborg a organizer have been so cool to assist with this), and I’ll also be interviewing a few folks for my Web Strategy Video blog show.

I look forward to seeing you next week at Webvisions, it’ll be great.

I took a ton of pictures of Portland, the event and the waterfalls see this set. Here’s pics tagged “webvisions“.

I’m having a fantastic time at the Customer Reference Forum, at the gorgeous Claremont hotel in Berkeley. Bill Lee (who has an engaging blog) has done a tremendous job as a conference organizer, he really wants to bring a high value conference. He’s carefully screened and selected presenters, as well as issued a survey to all attendees asking them about topics.

What’s a Customer Reference Program? Many corporations are realizing that word of mouth from a customer to a prospect is important. As a reaction, they create collateral that records positive customer opinions, and then they distribute to sales teams. In my Powerpoint presentation PPT, (which I’m making public) I said all that was going to evolve, now as customers use social media to share both positive and negative experiences. I wrote a blog post a few months ago that started it all, the preso is a rough cut of it.

There were a lot of great companies here like: EMC, NetApp, Dell, Microsoft, Riverbed, Insight, IBM, Oracle, RIM, ProjectLine, HP, Navajo, Point of Reference, Metia, Phelon Group, Siemans, SAP, and other great companies.

One of the topics I was hearing from presenters is how they’re incorporating podcasts, video, webcasts. Very few of them are reading blogs (organize customer references). In summary, I believe that the good customer reference folks will evolve, start to work with the community manager, and will have to figure out how to use customer opinions (both good and bad) into their programs.

Steve Ellis of Metia is doing reviews of presentations, (he just posted his review of my session, excellent) I hope he provides an honest review for me. Fun times ahead as every group in Marketing is impacted by Social Media.

LinkedIn has started the online manifestations of it’s community outreach, they’ve launched a blog with friendly pictures of the staff. For a company that’s so widely known and used, it’s an interesting perspective to see them step out into the conversation and join the community. Of course, it’s lead by my bud Mario Sundar who’s doing a fantastic job taking in feedback from the community (including mine) and is helping to lead the charge.

My focus is on how corporations use the web, and I’ve started to meet more and more community folks (as a ‘media guy’ that’s part of my job) and have noticed a wide variety of skills and approaches demonstrated. To me, Community Marketing (A term I’ve been using before many knew what it was) is not just about ‘yet-another-marketing’ tool, but a belief in putting the community (customers and prospects) before the company. It’s also more than just marketing, it’s also about product development, product support, and just being human.

LinkedIn is one of the early social networks (I evangelized it heavily when people were getting laid off at Exodus) so I know they will harness these tools to build a better experience. This is certainly a second step in the right direction, the first, of course, was hiring Mario.

BTW, if you’re seeking a career as a Community Manager, Juniper Networks (one of our clients) has an opening, email me if you want a direct introduction. I’m also glad to see that EMC is realizing the new influentials! Did you see my strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program (Starting internally first).

Update: Here’s the URL where we’ll be streaming from these conferences. I’ll be doing updates from my Twitter profile.

Over the next two days, I’ll be live streaming (I prefer the term Business Casting, as I’m trying to up the production value and interaction) a few things, I won’t be going gangbusters like Web 2.0, but will be a bit more selective, here’s what’s up:

AdTech: Business Blogging Panel: Tuesday, April 24th, 4pm PST
Today I’m speaking on a panel lead by Rohit Bhargava, Steve Hall of Adrants, Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja, and Karl Long of ExperienceCurve on the topic of business blogging today at SF’s moscone center at 4pm PST. If you’re online, I’ll stream it live for you to watch using a steady tripod, and aim the mic towards the amplified speakers for the best possible audio/video I can muster.

Update: This is probably one of the best session write-ups I’ve seen in a while, entertaining yet informative.

Customer Reference Forum: My presentation Wednesday, April 25th, 2pm PST
Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at the Customer Reference Forum, focusing on the Impacts of Social Media on Customer Reference programs (read the post that started it all). I’ve a neat presentation that will be a lot of fun.

Things are sure hectic in conference season, but the networking is invaluable!

Last week, I was invited to speak at Intel, one of the largest tech companies in the world, I gave them some practical advice on how to organize internally. While this is only part of the information I provided them, there’s some good nuggets that I want to share with the world based upon my experience.

For many large corporations being able to manage the many additional voices due to social media in an industry is a daunting task. Many companies are just starting to appoint Community Managers or assign budget and resources for the marketing organizations. Listening to the blogosphere, podcasts, and now video requires time, figuring out how to respond to them is yet another challenge. Being somewhat internally coordinate as many employees communicate is an even larger task.

Strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program:

Recognize the new influencers. Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.

Prepare for all scenarios. Create an internal process or at least discuss how to deal with crises. (such as exploding products, embarrassing situations). Draw from classic PR strategies, but realize that acting quickly in a human way, and not hiding is key.

Don’t shy away. Acknowledge deficiencies, no matter how shameful immediately. If you don’t have the answer, at least acknowledge you see the problem and will respond as soon as you have an answer. As a result you will become the first source of news, and will control any additional buzz. Stay relevant, address the issues.

Human media is at your disposal. Consider using video to humanize communications, during a crisis this could be a big difference. Recently Jet Blue and KFC have done these during crises.

Address the good as well as the bad. In addition to planning for fire drills, be sure to plan for positive unexpected events. If a customer raves about your produce on his blog, learn how to acknowledge and harness. There’s a variety of ways to use this.

Track who’s who. Create an index of bloggers and influences in your industry, consider putting on an internal list, an internal feedreader or even on an industry wiki. Update: Not sure what a feedreader or feeds are? Start with this video.

Appoint and Empower. For especially large organizations figure out who’s on point to respond to bloggers and social media in different segments, product groups or verticals. Teach them, empower them and support them to act without unnecessary political review processes. Let them be human.

Employees will blog, embrace. In addition to creating the corporate blog(s), be sure to recognize the natural employee bloggers that appear. You may find them in the product groups, support, and marketing departments. Have a discussion on how to include them in your strategy, even if it means to let them continue on their own. When it comes to trust, prospects and customers may trust employee bloggers that don’t have the corporate logo on their blog.

The Blogging/Ethics Policy. This depends on the corporate situation, for some companies, this is a requirement, and for other companies, this is already covered in the employee ethics policy. Figure out what’s right for your culture. Ultimately, you should trust your employees, if not, why did you hire them?

Consider creating the “Air Traffic Control Tower”. Just like at an airport, having an internal direction to let know corporate and employee bloggers know what’s happening is helpful. This internal blog could help let bloggers know what’s appropriate to say, what’s not, and indicate what’s happening out on the blogosphere. Use to keep track of advocates and detractors, and use tags as appropriate to create a running history.

Use Social Media as Sales Tools. I’ve found that corporate blogs can be used for sales and marketing three ways: 1) A “living” white paper by your companies thought leaders, 2) A rapid response tool. Think about how long a press release takes to craft. 3) A Conversation Starter: encourage your sales teams to send along interesting or controversial blog topics to prospects and customers to elicit a dialogue –even if they don’t agree. Consider creating sales FAQs and upload to intranet, these are tools that can be used.

Measurement. You’ll need to measure to prove worth in this new arena, get more budget and even get a raise. I’ve discussed this extensively, see all posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

Who am I?
I’m the Director of Corporate Media Strategy at PodTech.net, I help our customers understand social media. Check my profile or this interview conducted by Shel Israel.

Related Topics

The Many Forms of Web Marketing: An overview of all the tools at your disposal, in addition to Social Media.

Social Media Strategies for 2007

Web Theory: Is the Web OS a dream?
I don’t care if I use an Apple or a PC, I just want a working browser. Cnet explores what happens if the Web becomes an operating system. One thing is for sure, documents, profiles and accounts are being pushed in a distributed method around the web.

Media and Interactive: Caress Fairy Tales
Watch ’soap’ style movies and make some interesting choices, you can also create the ‘perfect’ man in your quest for beauty. Interesting interaction of media and interaction.

Library of resources for the Web Designer
From colors, css, photoshop tips, there are a variety of resources centralized for those in user experience.

iProspect Social Networking User Behavior Study (April 2007)
There’s a tremendous report published yesterday from iProspect, it contains juicy bits of information (most of which I’ve read elsewhere or suspected) onto one page.

SEO: Site Maps by Ask
For those that manage the find ability of a website, this is an important tactic to consider, as you want your site easily indexed and found.

The internet as a utility and the Death of a Network Engineer
Like gas, power, and water, The internet is starting to be considered as a utility that can be turned on and off by demand. This impacts both network (pipe) raw computing (processor power) and even data (data storage). What impacts does this have on those that have a career in servicing these companies in the web industry.

28% of all Americans have HD TV
Hey User Experience folks, Want a Nintendo Wii at work? With so many consumers purchasing HDTVs this past holiday season, designers need to start experimenting with other-than-the-traditional broswer for interaction. The Wii itself is a ‘mouse’ and input output device, so be sure to start to planning for the family room as a place to get business information and ecommerce.

PodTech’s Robert Scoble on the cover of Podcasting and Blogger Magazine
Don’t laugh, the whole magazine is available online, be sure to see other articles by Shel Israel, and Chris Pirillo. It’s pretty fun reading a magazine and realizing you know many of the folks in there, cool.

Blogosphere Civility Badges
Just what we all need, more badges. This time, these are just plain silly.

I’m noticing that the questions I raised whether or not live streaming helps or hurts conferences. I certainly want to support conference organizers in helping them have successful events that support the community, although I see there’s some debate on the Shel Holtz blog on whether or not live blogging or live streaming should be allowed.

Even if live streaming caused a decrease in attendance, there’s equal opportunity to extend the knowledge and experience globally, as well as to monetize any live streams through advertising, sponsorships or premium pay.

What do you think?

1) Is live streaming a help or hurt to conferences?

2) Does it matter on the size of conference?

3) What are ways for conference organizers to leverage these tools?

4) Will virtual conferences start being the norm?

5) Will social media tools become some effective that schoomzing and relationships can be built as effectively online as well as in person?

PodTech colleague Irina sent this my way, she’s probably annoyed with me and Robert for all of our low production live streaming hype. Irina really makes me laugh so hard sometimes, and this is one of those times, wait till you see her get out of bed, her grin while she’s riding her bike with the camera is the best. It looks like Scott Hirsch made the final ending sequence.

For the record, I was never “lifecasting” ok Irina? I was “Business Casting” that means that I’m more egotistical and have a tripod facing me and all the other folks!

Also, I’m very impressed with the updates on the PodTech player, we’ve a talented software engineering team, who is also pretty good at chess. Seems like Loren Feldman likes live streaming too.

Important Update:
Irina’s video is beyond just giggles, there’s a point she’s trying to make and I got the message. I’m seeing some chatter on New Tee Vee on the future of streaming, production and online video. Please note when I gave that quote it was in context to live streaming and real-time event sharing “business casting”. There will always be a need for high production edited content that last for a longer period of time. Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go back and see the ustream content unless there’s something really compelling or interesting. For any of those high production folks that I may have offended, I offer my apology, I’m sorry. Ok, let’s move on and figure out how all these tools work together and when to use them.

I’m having lunch with Intel’s Social media champion from the Corporate Communications department, Ken Kaplan. Of course we talked about the great work that Intel is doing (they just launched 3 blogs with multiple authors) and of course the ever passionatte Social Media Evangelist Josh Bancroft (who I’m subscribed to his blog and Twitter). If you’ve been reading my blog we’ve recently interviewed Ken on PodTech’s Marketing Voices.

We’re having an interesting discussion how companies and corporations are waking up to giving equal attention to Social Media (customers, prospects, and others) in addition to Press, Media, and Analysts.

Or vs And
I’ve talked to a lot of “Web 2.0″ marketers who believe that Social Media is the ONLY way to get heard and found, but in reality, it’s not an “Or” but an “And”.

We see on Techmeme how bloggers swarm stories from NY Times about Google’s Financials, and we also see how the SFGate picks up on stories that were broken from bloggers –it goes both ways.

Them vs Us
So please, if you’re crafting your strategy for communication for your company (big or small) please realize it’s an “AND” social media is yet another group to cater and connect with. These tools are being used by not just one group, but many groups.

Thinking a bit more advanced, we also know that Press, Analysts and Media use tools that were primarily started by customers and consumers, so everyone will be using these tools. I attended a conference in Miami a few months ago, although the conference was highly fragmented the name of it “We Media” seems so appropriate.

So let’s all remember that it’s an “And” and a “We”.

Hearing back from customers/users is something I preach about every week on this blog. As you know, I had an experiment to try Ustream at the Web2.0 Expo, I was live streaming every day during the conference; sessions, hallways, interviews, keynotes, and events. For those that didn’t get to come to the event, I was their ears and eyes. There was a chatroom where they told me what sessions to go to, who to meet, and I asked questions on their behalf, even during my own speech!

Michael from Dog Patch Dispatch caught up with me in the halls, he’d been watching me from his Hotel, I saved him time from even coming to the event. Find out if this technology is disruptive to events, and what Michael’s feedback was.

Oh yeah, and if you don’t know what “Business Casting” it’s how Dan Fost of the SFGate quotes me for using Ustream, I don’t consider myself a lifecaster.

Click To Play

Update: Related Video
Colin from Viddler sent me this video that he taped of us chatting on Ustream, I like the “tags” that can be embedded on top of his videos. Thanks Colin for the T-shirts, they’re a high thread count (I’m picky about my schwag!)