Jennifer Jones, who hosts one of the top ongoing social media marketing podcasts, interviews Emmanuel Brown of Nike Jordan. I saw Emmanuel at the last Marketing Forum in L.A. he told us that employees are encouraged to work out a couple of hours every day. Actually, it’s more than encouraged, it’s mandatory. He discusses their Breakfast Club interactive program, which helps customers track and improve their daily sports routine, and recently won a Groundswell award for their efforts.

They aren’t the only sports brand leaning on social media to reach customers. New Balance has a ’studio’ type site, and Nike has launched an online community platform.

Update: Forrester has published a video of Emmanuel Brown at his recent presentation at the Marketing Forum, including other videos. (a quick registration is required)

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If you’re reading this in email or a feedreader, come visit this post to watch the embedded video.

I was lucky to be at the very first BlogHaus at SXSW in Jan 2007, and was really pleased to return to yet another version at SXSW this week. Stephanie Agresta interviewed me, and we talked about SXSW, and what I’m watching as an important technology.

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Jennifer Jones the host of Marketing Voices continues to improve in quality, with her strong background in broadcast TV, she continues to bring professionalism by interviewing the top leaders in the marketing industry.

Her latest guest, who needs no introduction is famed Guy Kawasaki. Featuring his latest project Alltop a preset bookmarking service organized by verticals.

Every day, I’m seeing new companies that are pushing technology to meet business needs, and in my honest review, I gave Guy a great review on the marketing of his services, but a less than steller review on innovation.

Initially, when I did that review, there were only a few sites available (egos, sports, etc) recently, he’s launched one that may have more value to my focus area called social media. I’m taking the ‘Kellogg’ challenge and am starting each day with this site, to see if it can enhance my information collecting, so far, so good.

In a fun and metaphorical way, Guy gives me a real good lesson that I’m going to take to heart, and positions me as the young, naive samurai.

Damn, I guess I need to buy Jennifer a new table.

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Jason Lopez, former colleague/friend/journalist from PodTech’s newsroom interviews me on the phenomenon we know as Facebook, I also discuss how the web will be distributed, move offsite, and ‘fly’ around the web. I hope you find this insightful.

If you need other information see my tags on Facebook Strategy, or for a broader view, see social networks. If you’re seeking a weekly digest of this space, I go to great lengths to watch this space, and publish a weekly digest of the social networking space.

On a related note, I’ve made some predictions on the crowded white label social network space (over 60 vendors) I’ve made some predictions to CIO magazine, White-Label Social Networking Set for Shake-Up? Yup, a shakeout will happen.

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I had a chance to connect with Jennifer Jones, the hostess and MC of Marketing Voices Podcast yesterday. She’s one of my former colleagues and will be a long time friend. I learned that her podcast, which helps marketing leaders understand social media is continuing to take off. Although I made a list of the many marketing podcasts, as I understand it, the listernership is up to 100,000 downloads in the last month, that blows away almost any other podcast that I know of. Apparently some big name brands have noticed too, she’s now sponsored by Webex AND Intel, both companies want to reach marketers and the social sphere, respectively. Her show is also syndicated by MarketingProfs, one of the top communities on the web, and of course on PodTech.

Here’s why Marketing Voices is getting traction:

1) She gets top name guests: many authors, speakers, thought leaders, and most importantly, practitioners that have done it in the workplace.
2) Expectations: She’s consistent with her weekly release, format, questions, and length, she screens the guests, preps them with questions. Her background in TV broadcasting and as a PR executive helps her all around the show.
3) Brevity: The shows (mainly audio and sometimes video) are short and concise, she’s respecting media snackers. Most are 10-15 minutes, each very ‘tight’ in content.
4) Her passion: She’s truly very, very fascinated by the social media world, as a “digital immigrant” she wants to explore how these tools change the world, we’ve had many, many conversations.
5) Shelf Life: It’s not a show on ‘what’s hip’ but really on strategy and many leaders share case studies and examples, you can go back into the archives to listen and learn.

To be fair, I can’t just throw roses, but gave her a few suggestions to improve the show, all minor: 1) set the audio levels so the speaker and host are always at the same level 2) Just once, the show was duplicated twice on iTunes, but a very minor nitpick. If you’re a listener, I’m sure she’d be curious to hear your feedback.

So if you’re a marketing executive, (or work for one) and you need to know how social media impacts your world, I recommend you subscribe to MarketingVoices on iTunes (will prompt iTunes), or check out the website, while you’re reclaiming time in the car or on a jog, stay learning with high quality content.

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I’ve been gone from PodTech for nearly a month, and can really be objective in remembering the experience.

You never realize how much something matters to you until you move away from it. Sadly, John Furrier has moved away from PodTech yesterday, and steps onward. John, who I often refer to as a visionary, recently had dinner in Palo Alto, I told him I was thankful that he hired me, and I would have done it all over again.

Aside from the many friends I still have at PodTech, I learned some really important skills. I got an informal dose of media training as I learned from some of the great producers, editors, stars, and creators. I became more confident on camera, and as I learned from Rocky, who gave me lots of pointers, and showed me his vision for what shows could be like. Darold taught me how to be strategic in client relations, and Jennifer shared her wisdom when it comes to PR, and strategic marketing. Jason Lopez and his team are master story tellers, and Steve Gillmor’s meta views, and pushed me to another level of thinking. I observed Robert, a true trail blazer, as he quickly adopted and discarded tools, and his amazing ability to consume information on a daily basis. There were a lot of influential forces that shaped me, it was amazing.

While not everything went perfect, the training you get from doing is amazing. I agree with Shel, PodTech is one of the innovative companies, a pioneer in a new medium.

Wishing John Furrier and all the PodTech family the best as we all continue to trail blaze forward.

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I wasn’t able to attend Dave McClure’s Facebook conference, but am enjoying the different opinions from the A-List crowd, they never fail to entertain. Fellow panelists Robert Scoble, Rodney Rumford, and Dave McClure had to fight their way into the conversation. Thanks Tom for the video.

Be sure to watch the final minutes where you hear Dave rant about open vs closed, and finally Calacanis rip on some poor soul, be nice guys. By the way, does anybody know if Mark Zuckerberg showed up to the conference?

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I had the opportunity to interview Joseph Loong of AOL’s Community Connection (which has blogs, forums, photo galleries, social network features) at Miami’s WeMedia conference at the University of Miami. He’s one of the community folks at AOL Blogs and helps the community become more efficient bloggers and communicators and shares with us the challenges to big media corporations like AOL and what the future holds.

Thanks Rocky for editing!

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I’m so honored and pleased to have met Jennifer Jones, my former colleague at PodTech. We’ve become fast friends over the past year, I remember when we first met in person during my interview, we hit it off immediately! Jennifer draws from great experience crafting the first PR industry, and has worked with many of the greats, including CEOs of companies we all know in Silicon Valley. She’s well connected to the VC industry, and I continue to learn a lot from her insight and experience. Yes, she’s been a major influencer on me to understand and appreciate better the PR industry and strategic marketing.

If you want to hear our discussion about Facebook, you can check out this discussion. I’m glad to be on her show, Marketing Voices, where we discuss Facebook as a new tool for marketers. Rocky, our producer did an excellent job working with the environment (and kept it real with the falling leaves), thanks bud.

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Damn Rio, you rock.

Rio sits on the other end of the floor from me, but his passion for gaming can be felt from all the way over to my side of the building. He’s launched his new show called “The Reboot” that’s about what’s happening in gaming. PodTech’s stepping up to building better content (we heard you, Andrew of Rocketboom) and here’s hopefully a very great looking show, that has useful information.

Which game do I want Rio to cover? Starcraft 2. I’ve been a big fan of real time strategy games (duh, it’s Strategy) but I don’t think my wife will let me buy it. At least if Rio covers the game, I’ll be able to experience it from a distance.

And yeah, we have a new studio at HQ, ask Robert for a tour.

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I’m pleased to have the opportunity to interview a real Web Strategist in the field, Intel’s Internet and Marketing Strategist in Portland at the ISF conference. It was pretty unique opportunity, I had colleague, friend, and famous blog/vlogger as my cameraman (you should know who that is). I’m able to ask Bryan Rhoades a number of questions, from concept, practice, to best practice on business blogging and what it means to a Fortune 1000 company.

Intel has deployed a few blogs, most uniquely the IT @ Intel blog, Intel Software Network, and community evangelist, Josh Bancroft, in the spirit of an organic blogger (it was just something he did).

Although Intel is my client, I wasn’t directly involved with their blogging strategy (we help with audio and video podcast), so they’ve really started to embrace social media as part of their culture. Why is social media important to Intel? We should look at it the other way around. The products that Intel creates power and fuel my laptop, 3G card, my modem, cell phone, camera, video camera and all the other digital media tools I use to build my online brand.

If you want to learn more about Bryan, I’ve done a text based interview with him a few months ago, check it out. If you want to see other Web Strategy Video shows (these are 10 minute video white papers) use the tag called “Web Strategy Show“

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I’m not sure how many times we’ve heard in the first wave how online pornography was the driver for innovation during the first wave. I worked at Exodus Communications from 2000-2003. I distinctly remember hallway chatter of the executive staff finding out that a major portion of the content that was hosted at Exodus was adult related. Apparently, the CEO decreed that we remove all porn related customers, apparently when the financial analysis came back it would have destroyed the business. Exodus, of course was an amazing bankruptcy (Chapter 11 –twice) but that’s another story.

It’s now 2007 and I’m seeing a tremendous amount of innovation being done from Presidential candidates who know to reach a wide audience that’s influential, online and educated, that having a solid social media strategy is more important.

Barack Obama, John Edwards have a stronger social media presence than many of today’s Fortune 100 companies.

With last week’s YearlyKos presedential debates we’re seeing an incredible amount of innovation as they adopt live video streaming for the debates, John Edwards has live video chats online, the YouTube debates and many other strategies for the presidential election (see my ongoing list).

It’s pretty clear that these mobile and active organizations are using the tools of information (I suspect they’ve many college interns) that know how to use these tools effectively.

[The American Presidential candidates are adopting social media as a core communication strategy, much faster and more effectively than most Global Fortune 1000 companies]

I need to credit to colleague Jennifer Jones for the insightful conversation that yielded this blog post, she’s been covering this topic from her podcast series. Also worth noting her latest blog post on Marketing Profs about Strategic Marketing is worth a read –I learn from her.

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I got the rare opportunity to be camera dude for the ScobleShow, (and Robert reciprocated for me, the gent) we were at the Internet Strategy Forum last week, and interviewed many of the speakers in our own private room. Learned a lot.

Eric shares with us a broad view of online media, Cnet’s one of the most successful online media brands, and has over 30 sub-brands. Learn from Eric about the emerging media, online advertising, marketing, and the future of all this to come.

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John Furrier interviews Cammie Dunaway, the CMO of Yahoo. She suggests that companies spend 20% of their budgets on experimentation. She also addresses the recent changes of CEO at Yahoo. Great video interview of one of the internet’s leading strategists.

Cammie will be a speaker at the Internet Strategy Forum, where PodTech is a media partner, Robert and I are heading out tomorrow to interview many of the speakers at the conference, hope to see you there.

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You are NOT allowed to join the PodTech group in Facebook if:

1- You think we’re perfect
2- You don’t like people
3- You’re an internet troll
4- You’re from planet Xenor35
5- You’ve got no personality

If you don’t meet any of those criteria, Thank Lord Beshoobo! We’ve just created a group in Facebook for the PodTech community, you’re elligable.

It’s a place to talk to us, tell us what you think, and meet others with simliar interests. We’ll also be posting news and events up there, and there’s already some discussion in the forums.

You’ll also get to meet some of our employees, who have been made “officers” in the group. They have some unique titles, which you’ll get to find out what they mean. Some of our best employees aren’t very public, so this is a great place to meet them. They’ve all had their shots so don’t worry!

I live what I preach about Social Media for companies, so here’s a tool that will help you and us to communicate so we can build better products and services for you.

I’ve already asked people what they’ve thought about some of our shows, and they’ve responded. Even the scobelizer is in there asking what we should do within Facebook

PodTech Network Facebook Group (If you’re signed up for Facebook, you won’t be able to see this group, so sign up).

We’re eating our own dog food, as we’re listening using these tools, talk to us!

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My CEO of PodTech, John Furrier, is a charter member of the Association for Downloadable Media, (ADM) a group of companies and thought leaders that have come together to build standards, and further increase the effectiveness of this growing ‘podosphere’ industry. You can learn more about the mission of the ADM, whose purpose is to:

To support the momentum around advertising and sponsorship of audio and video podcasting to create revenue for all groups in the ADM constituency

To establish terminology, standards, guidelines and best-practices that make downloadable content easy to justify, buy, scale and measure both in advertising efficacy and audience metrics

To support and provide a network through which the industry can share knowledge and educate advertisers, agencies, press and analysts as well as content producers and distributors in understanding the unique attributes and value of portable media

To be an advocate for everyone from individual podcasters to major media companies who deliver content in a downloadable format across multiple platforms

Every technology industry, from Data Storage to Images evolves and forms a group of folks that want to further the industry mission, provide standards, and to even unify communities. There’s a huge lineup of companies that involved, such as: Apple, PodTech, Personal Life Media, Kiptronic, BlogTalkRadio, Feedburner (now Google) PodShow, LibSyn/IndieFeed, Podtrac, NPR, Podbridge, Nielsen/NetRatings, Rev3 (Digg), Porter Novelli, Vogel & Associates

Todd suggests that video on demand should also be included in this mix, seeing that video can also be streamed, either live or archived, could offer a larger scope.

Learn more about today’s announcement direct from the website.

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When I met Neil Patel at Searchnomics, I knew he was something special. Check out this podcast interview of Neil on Marketing Voices with Jennifer Jones.

Who’s Neil? He’s one of the top Social Media Optimizers and Search Engine Optimizers, in fact he’s even offered to help improve my blog, and we’ll demonstrate a change by making my analytics public. I’ll let you know more as I get closer to that project.

In any case, listen in and learn from Neil, he’s helped TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki, and Jason Calcanis (after Jason said that SEO was a fraud, Neil took on the challenge and showed a 30% increase from organic traffic) What’s the secret to being a top blogger? Neil says it’s about having great content.

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Part of being a community guy or gal is to listen to your community and serve them. I saw that Thomas was needing a quick tip on embedding the PodTech player, I have Google Alerts setup for “podtech”, and saw it come in at 6ish am this morning. (Before my morning swim and workout), I responded about 30 minutes after Thomas published his post (sometimes Google alerts are a tad delayed) and gave him some tips.

He responded with this pleasant thank you, a thumbs up, what a grateful and cool post! He even posted some additional helpful tips on embedding the player. Thomas asks what they feed me at PodTech, it’s a dose of hyper active community passion! That’s what we do to keep “the man” off our backs.

Communications are moving faster and faster
Communication from corporations happens fast now, at Hitachi I set up global teams to watch the forums around the world, this way we could have eyes on the forums 24/7. I use to watch them on the weekends, and when I was out of town, I would have colleagues volunteer to watch. Remember, things are going near real time, so the faster you can respond, the faster you can get ahead of potential product problems. Even if you don’t have the answer, let your customers know that you see the issue, and you’re working on it.

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I asked my colleague Steve what is “Bad Sinatra”, his rhetorical response “Well is there any?”. I replied “well no”. “Exactly” he said.

This is the inside circle of tech, from Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Marc Benioff, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor.

The opening clip? Steve marching right into the office of Mark Benioff, the founder of Sales Force.com, camera rolling live.

I’d link to Steve, but he tells me that “links are dead”, so nevermind.

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Brian Solis gets interviewed by Jennifer Jones on this latest Marketing Voices show. Brian’s a good guy and we’ve shared quite a bit of knowledge at the conferences we attend, and also as co-speakers at Social Media Club’s Workshop In this podcast interview (which is great to play and start to do other multi-tasking) Brian talks about what it means to start the conversation.

What does Brian recommend? Step away. Understand the realm in which you are participating. Understanding personas.

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