Social Media

My new weekly radio show!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I almost forgot to break the story here. I started a radio show last week, focused on business. It’s called Your Triple Bottom Line.

Yes, it’s around the ‘Three P’s’ –People, Planet,Profits. I’m more into the first and the last Ps. (I leave the middle P to my wife, a small business owner, whom you would call a ‘deep green’ person.)

But it’s a great experience, being on radio. I trained at the BBC in London many years back as a producer, and have been a closet radio person all my life. Which is odd, being also into digital media. But I still maintain that radio is the true real-time medium, the first channel that brought communities and conversations together. The Internet simply borrowed the language and the model!

Derrick Mains and I co-host the show. There’s a social media angle here! I host and produce a podcast for GreenNurture, and Derrick has been a co-host of that show. Why radio? Have we got it backwards? There’s no short answer for this, but you will understand if you listen to the kind of guests we bring on every week.

Commuters and ad-hoc networks

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Why is it that people who ride public transport don’t do a lot of talking? But give them a wi-fi connection and they’ll be chatting with a lot of others.

So when I saw a post  (from Barbara Gibson) about London cabs using Twitter, it got me thinking.

What if Twitter becomes a conversation starter on subways and trains? Already, there’s a head start in this direction among FourSquare users. It’s easy to discover like-minded users in a restaurant or public event.

But to get back to cabbies. If branded cab companies are letting customers order a cab with a  tweet, it’s not too difficult for cabbies such as @cleanaircabphx or even new services such as RideCharge @taximagic to create ad-hoc networks so that passengers might find some common interests within a certain geographic region.

Buses and Subways could be even better in this, considering they have fixed routes and predictable (and well segmented) passenger demographics.

The point of all this is not to encourage more commuters to ignore each other because they could have some wonderful conversation with someone in another bus, another cab. But the ideal situation would be if commuters start connecting with people in the way it used to be –by finding common, topical subjects worth having a conversation about.

But this one’s more of a directory of blogs.

  • London bloggers organized by their location on the Tube map. It’s called London Bloggers.

And getting back to micro-blogging, here is a parallel. An aggregation of Tweets from Tube commuters.

Dell’s social media strategy shines –just watch this!

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To “inform, sell, engage and support.” How much simpler could anyone have put it?

There are many questions that could be addressed with this answer. Such as:

  • “Why in the world should we mess with social media?”
  • “I hear Twitter is a total waste of time. Give me a few reasons why it isn’t?”

Lionel Menchaca has put up this schema that I wish I had a few days back. It’s outlines how Dell uses social media in Brand Reputation Discussions, Customer Service and Segment Discussions.

But here’s something that bears watching –and I am certain it will end well.

In a response to this post by Menchaca, a customer going by the name of Maria posts a looong comment. It’s very reminiscent but not as harsh as the infamous Dell Hell post. She goes on to state that:

I believe I have given Dell every reasonable opportunity to make this right, but I cannot afford to lose any more time and valuable productivity because of a defective product. I would like to send the computer back for a refund.

As a big fan of Digital Nomads, I’ve been watching -and dissecting –Dell’s engagement across many social media channels. I can be sure this is going to come to one more grand denouement.

Fan or Friend? Here’s that handout for the webinar

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve been conducting a series of webinars on social media, and we reached the halfway mark last week. The series was called Passport To Digital Citizenship.

The topics have been:

  • “Hit the Ground Blogging!”
  • “To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?”
  • “Facebook as your Hub”

In this webinar we talked about fans and friends –especially the difference between ‘lower case’ friends and ‘upper case friends.’ How do you engage your network? How do you turn on your hub? And most importantly, how do you get ready for an increasingly mobile user?

If you attended the 3rd webinar, here are two handouts. you may find useful.

I had one participant suggestion –to create a discussion group on Facebook.

“Stuff you need, all in one place” seductive, excessive

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I’m a sucker for using applications that feed the content I like to get to, through one big funnel. You know, those aggregators, and hubs and portals that promise to deliver all of your interests in one clean dashboard?

Trouble is, I realize I often have too many funnels.

  • I use Bloglines for keeping up with the most interesting content.
  • I use Hootsuite (when at my desk) for those tweeps I like to follow
  • I have Seesmic on my phone for the same thing, thought only when on the move

So I’ve been very interested in how Flipboard works for the iPad. It promises to reign in “the stuff you care about all in one place.” Content aggregration, in other words.

What’s more interesting than the aggregation, however, is the layout; how it re-organizes various types of content and pulls it into a reading experience. No wonder they call it ‘your magazine.’

Which brings me to the idea of what a magazine means to us now, as we seek out knowledge in a multi-media, social-media enriched world.

  1. Is it a aggregate of  everything you really wanted to get to but had no time to visit individually?
  2. Is it a smart filter that chooses (or is set up to select) knowledge we never knew existed?
  3. It it the experience of time spent reading, commenting and digging deeper into topics in a way that the fleeting newspaper experience does not entertain?
  4. Or, it it a form that opens up little slits of light into our cloudy world?

    I’ve said it before: I’m a magazine junkie –the printed kind. If I had to choose one, I’ll go with #2 above. The filter. Incidentally, that’s how I choose my online content as well when it comes to RSS readers or search tools.

    What’s your idea of a magazine?

    Quotes for the week ending 24 July, 2010

    / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

    Resuming my snapshot of the best quotes from around the world on communications, marketing, media and social media.

    “An increasingly addictive activity”

    SocialMediaAtWork on a recent Experian study that says social networking may be addictive.

    “The future of infographics will be about telling stories. Telling them in an interesting and compelling way.”

    Charles Apple, on the use of info-graphics

    “the journalist isn’t a writer; he is a technician.”

    Jolie O’Dell in a gret long post on ‘How to tell a journalist from a blogger.”

    “When people feel they have some kind of social relationship with others in the company, there tends to be greater collaboration between them.”

    Human Resource Executive, on the potential and perils of social networking in the workplace.

    “The $35 iPad lookalike from India”

    The rage about the Indian tablet developed by the government of India.

    Blurs the Lines Between Online and Offline.”

    Guest post by Yael Davidowitz-Neu at Convince and Convert, on the ‘Six degrees of influence’ in C to C programs.

    Fragmented Vs integrated? How do you share content?

    / Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

    Fragmented or integrated?

    It’s easy to pick the latter, because it sounds like the right thing to do. Depending on what you are trying to achieve it’s not that easy though. Here are two scenarios:

    Scenario A: You are launching a new service that is relevant to 30 percent of your audience. You’ve got the usual suspects –um, channels — in place with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, a blog and two Twitter accounts. Do you make spread your content across all of these?

    Scenario B: You a teaching a class, and most of the attendees use Facebook rather than email, but you also have a series of video updates. Do you stick with Facebook, or add a blog to the program which will feed Facebook embed YouTube videos?

    I don’t want to say I know the best answer. (It may take a bit of digging deeper into the usage patterns of the audience etc.) But I often lean heavily on closing the gap between communication channels. It takes some planning ahead, but you only have to connect the dots once, and thereafter, it’s easy to pick and chose the channels you like to integrate.

    I pointed this out toward the end of the webinar I was conducting last Monday. To demonstrate it…

    Continue reading here.

    Blogging and micro-blogging, joined at digital hip

    / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

    I can’t stress enough how easy it is to connect the dots between your communication channels using digital media, if you plan ahead to do so.

    Passport To Digital Citizenship
    To “Tweet or Not To Tweet?”  |  2nd Webinar in the 6-part series on Social Media

    I pointed this out toward the end of the webinar on Monday (it was Sunday night here in Arizona) as Steve England, Gary Campbell and I were presenting at the second webinar on social media.

    While Steve was presenting I took this photo of one of our screens (the one bringing in a Skype video feed from the venue in Colombo). Here’s what I did:

    Notice the attendees who had logged in –visible on the bottom left of this photo. Also, on the right is Tweetdeck, through which we were monitoring the hash tag #USELK2010 that we were using for the event.

    Cross-posting this from the webinar blog.

    To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?

    / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

    Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? Especially for many people still wondering if there is any value in jamming conversations into 140 characters of less. I tend to tell people that just as sending post cards, or having non-stop IM chats with six different people throughout the day have different value for different people, so too Twitter.

    But — huge BUT here — it’s time to consider Twitter as less of a marketing device, and more as a listening tube.

    In the second of a 6-part webinar series I am conducting (check previous one) this one will be appropriately called To Tweet Or Not To Tweet.

    Here is my co-presenter, Gary Campbell on the subject.


    Are you more social today than you were two years ago?

    / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

    Questions like this come to my mind as I walk into any office, and see people slouched over their iPhones, BBs and laptops. I get a passing nod and try to not butt into what’s apparently some very exciting Twitter chat.

    Or when you watch teenagers in a room chatting while multi-tasking, infatuated by each other’s screens.

    I advice people on how best to balance digital and analog, so I come across these complaints and concerns a lot. Which is why I am anxious to see how Social Media Day, today pans out.

    We are meeting  up -um, tweeting up — in Tempe this evening, at Madcap Theater.

    I highly recommend this contrarian idea about today, if only to help you think about what the social part of social media is really about.