This week, Paul and David return to the airwaves and talk about the new wave of question-and-answer sites. The soaring popularity of Quora, the new social network that has people scrambling to deliver the best answers to each other’s questions, has created new interest in a tried-and-true metaphor. LinkedIn and Yahoo both have had its Answers sections for quite some time now. You can use these answer sites to build your professional credibility and visibility in the smallest of niches, but how do you know where to place your chips with so many options from which to choose? The duo discuss this growing trend.
Customer Conversations – An Interview with Mzinga Founder Barry Libert
November 24th, 2010 · interview, podcast, socialmedia, socialnetwork
Barry Libert was just getting back on its feet again after six months in a wheelchair when Paul spoke to him recently. Two back surgeries had rendered the founder of Mzinga nearly helpless to accomplish some everyday tasks, and Libert had learned a lot about the helpfulness of others. Upon regaining his feet, he had bought shoes from Zappos, a company that is legendary for customer service. This was a good jumping off point for a discussion about the importance of customer care and the value of communities.
Libert knows a bit about this. Mzinga manages two billion conversations monthly for 15,000 communities on behalf of 300 well-known companies. Libert believes that customer input is absolutely essential to business success, but he acknowledges that many companies struggle to internalize and act upon honest feedback. In his new book Social Nation, he talks about the essential attributes of customer-driven social media success. In this interview, he talked about the importance of customer support as a differentiator in a globalized world, which companies do it well, his amazing Ducati experience and other topics.
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108: Podcast Daddy
September 15th, 2010 · interview, podcast
Doug Kaye is a podcasting pioneer. A successful software entrepreneur whose love of audio engineering dates back to his teen years, Doug launched IT Conversations in 2003, when the word “podcasting” didn’t even exist. He caught a break when his early recordings of O’Reilly Media conferences actually helped boost registrations for that company’s events. Since then, the Conversations Network has grown to encompass recordings of thousands of speeches and interviews about topics ranging from artificial intelligence to smart cities to brain surgery. The 2004 presentation by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is still one of the most popular programs and one of our favorites.
Audio continues to be Doug Kaye’s passion, even though the promise of podcasting never lived up to some early – and probably over-optimistic – forecasts. Once billed as a replacement for terrestrial radio, podcasting has settled into a niche that primarily serves people with intensive information needs and limited time. Asked whether podcasting has under-performed its potential, Doug points to NPR, which podcasts nearly every radio program in its portfolio. Hundreds of other radio stations also podcast their audio programs in order to serve fans who are too busy to listen to scheduled programs.
Podcasts are a great medium for people who need to consume information while they’re busy doing something else. Perhaps that’s why regular podcast listeners have some of the best demographics of any social media consumers, according to eMarketer.
As the Conversations Network has grown, Doug Kaye has turned his attention to an ambitious new project that aims to organize the world’s library of recorded spoken information into a single card catalog. SpokenWord.org is an experiment in what is being called “curation,” or the organization of assets from other places into a master directory. Curation presents a whole new set of challenges to people who are accustomed to creating original content, Doug explains, but it may well be the great new opportunity on the Web. He tells us why podcasting has quietly revolutionized audio, its limits as a shareable medium and the great new opportunity for curation.
Paul first interviewed Doug in 2006 for The New Influencers. That recording is mainly of historical interest, but you can listen to it here.
Listen to our Sept. 8, 2010 interview with Doug Kaye or Right-click here to download
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107: Are Google’s Best Days Behind It?
September 6th, 2010 · Uncategorized
Has Google’s time passed? A recent article in Forbes Magazine suggests that it may have. Google has been unable to combat the Facebook threat with a social strategy that has captured users’ fancy, despite its recent attempts to acquire knowledge in this area.. The company’s stock has been stagnant for nearly three years and its growth rate is slowing. Does this mean Google is over the hill?
Our hosts don’t think so, but they do think Google is good at a few things and social media isn’t one of them. Google is a great provider of productivity tools, which isn’t surprising for an engineering-driven culture. However, engineers are not the most social people and it’s not surprising that Google has struggled to figure out that business. Our hosts believe the company still has plenty of growth, but it is probably better off sticking to its knitting than trying to become another Facebook.
David and Paul also discuss the striking differences between their Android and iPhone devices and talk about how those contrasts embody the differences between Google and its rival up the road: Apple.
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106: Freelance Destruction
August 11th, 2010 · commentary, journalism, publshing, trade journalism
As recently as a couple of years ago freelance writing was a popular way for journalists to make a living. The pay wasn’t great, but the work was interesting and most professional freelancers could make a reasonable income.
Today, things are very different. Freelance rates have fallen through the floor as publications have shriveled and community journalism operations like Associated Content and Demand Media have brought legions of writers into the market working for pennies on the dollar. They produce a lot of content, but is it any good?
David and Paul are all for media democratization, but they also believe the quality of some of the information we get today has declined precipitously over the past few years. One example is product reviews and analysis. While more people than ever are beating on the new iPad and documenting their experiences these days, few of them apply the methodological rigor and discipline of professional reviewers. It’s easy to get opinions now, but not necessarily opinions you can trust.
Hands-on technical reviews have been a major part of David’s business for a long time, and he’s adjusting to the new world by self-publishing and finding new sponsors for his expertise. Our hosts tackle the pros and cons of freelance destruction. Are we really better off?
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105: Identity Crisis
July 20th, 2010 · PR, Twitter, commentary, crisis, socialmedia
If the cap on the Gulf oil spill holds, BP will be grateful for more than one reason. In addition to ending its $4 billion nightmare, it will no longer have to contend with @BPGlobalPR, a Twitter account set up by an anonymous critic who has been skewering the company’s efforts to manage public opinion about the disaster.
“Attn: BP Employees- Office supplies do not belong to you. Please have some respect for other people’s property. #bpcares” is just one of the more than 400 scathingly funny barbs the prankster has posted over the past three months. On the day the cap was finally put in place, the author wrote, “Well, that wasn’t so hard.”
@BPGlobalPR has amassed a following 10 times larger than @BP_America, which is the oil company’s real Twitter account. What’s more, it now overwhelms BP’s real Twitter presence in search results.
This isn’t the only case in which Twitter squatters have embarrassed major brands. @ATT_Wireless_PR is doing the same thing with less success, at least so far. We discuss what challenges this creates for public relations departments and debate whether the world needs an independent authority to regulate user IDs as well as domains.
Play:
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104: The Joy of Geocaching
April 18th, 2010 · publshing, socialmedia
Paul and David return to the podcasting airwaves with a special show this week and an odd twist. Paul and his wife Dana have just published their latest book called The Joy of Geocaching. The couple, who have enjoyed the sport for many years, took time to interview dozens of cachers, as they are called, from around the world to tell their stories and provide a very readable guide to beginners. In the book are tips to get started, what equipment to purchase and Web sites to use, and other practical information. But the real treasure is how the common bond of caching has created this strong sense of purpose and trust among fellow cachers, and Paul and Dana tell some of the more interesting tales.
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103: Considering crowdsourcing
November 30th, 2009 · interview, socialmedia
We talk with Brent Frei of SmartSheet.com about the growing trend of crowdsourcing, the ability to farm out a series of tasks to a group of unknown contributors. Frei has put together a comprehensive report on the crowdsourcing industry that you can download here. He talks to David and Paul about some of the logistics of hiring these experts, how they are vetted and accounted for by their networks, the types of outsourced work that you want to consider for crowdsourcing, some of the companies that specialize in this area and the different types of crowdsourcing projects.
Here are some links to his published works:
- Lead into Gold – the math related to your cost and the crowd worker’s earnings
- PR, Internet Intern – do all kinds of research that just takes lots of time
- Small Business Will Inherit the Earth - small businesses have to outsource lots of components of business that require specialties or time they don’t have
- Entrepreneurial Shock – earn more doing less by outsourcing mundane portions of research
- Grasshopper Case Study – build a custom list to an exacting spec for very little cost
You can download our podcast here (20:10):
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102: Social Media at IBM
November 18th, 2009 · Twitter, blogs, interview, socialmedia, socialnetwork
Anyone who was around the computer industry during the 1980s remembers IBM as a buttoned-down, almost paranoid company. In the years following the Justice Department’s antitrust suit, IBM became so tight with information that virtually no one other than designated representatives was allowed to utter a word in public without fear of retribution.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. Today IBM is one of the most prominent adopters of social media. Here are the numbers on usage of different tools by its 400,000 employees:
- Internal blogs: 17,000
- Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
- Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
- Participants in its four Innovation Jams: 500,000
- IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
- IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
- IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000
Big Blue applies social media both to internal and external communications. Because more than half the employees work outside of a conventional office, media like blogs and podcasts have become essential elements for tying teams together on projects.
Adam Christensen is Social Media Communications Manager at IBM. In that capacity, he helps define policies and best practices for dissemination across IBM’s global workforce. Not surprisingly, he’s also an active blogger, tweeter and member of multiple social networks. He tells David and Paul how IBM’s embrace of social media is opening up the company and making it more efficient.
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109: Social media tools, tips and techniques
October 21st, 2010 · commentary, socialmedia
This week Paul and David answer some common questions from their audience, and cover a wide range of suggestions on such things as their favorite add-on tools for Twitter and other social media sites. Specifically they discuss:
There is a lot more suggestions from both hosts. You can download the podcast (21:05) here.
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