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28 Jul This post is from from my other blog here I'm not sure how many of you subscribe to Chris Brogan's RSS feed or his "traditional" email newsletter. I've always found Chris to be a common-sensical, well thought out source of information on social media trends, tools and tips. His latest newsletter was a valuable source of info, as always. Feel free to sign up for it here.In his latest issue, he listed a bunch of podcasting tools, some of which I've used and some I have not. With Chris's permission, here is his list: Again, sticking with my goal of making all podcasting content for this newsletter, let's give you five podcasting tools to check out.
There you have it. Five for the podcasters. (Sure, if you're already podcasting, you probably know about all these. What would an ADVANCED 5 tools be? You tell me!) As some of you know, I started a quasi-podcasting series of interviews and events with marketers last year and conducted interviews into this year. You can search YouTube, GoogleVideo and BlogTalkRadio, or find them on my company's website. I'm starting up a new list of people to interview over the next few months, as I'm intrigued by the impact of social media on marketing budgets. Social media, as I'm sure most of you know, has shifted from a plaything of nerds to a seriously powerful tool for business communications.Two questions:1) are there other tools besides the ones Chris listed that you find valuable?2) after listening/viewing my interviews, it occurred to me that a year ago all of them admitted to reviewing social media tools but none had funded any programs. What new questions do you think I should ask senior marketing executives? How many social media programs do you think have been funded...and at what budget level? Should PR and social media be integrated or kept separate? How about social media efforts and the sales team?
25 Jul This post is from from my other blog here Yikes, it's Friday and I haven't posted this week! We all know that one of the keys to social media success is meaty content delivered frequently. Boy have I been falling down on the job. So, other that pointing out that my Facebook page is "all new" and stuff, here are a few interesting links I found this week.Check out the new layout of Facebook (feel free to friend me).Dennis McDonald has another compelling post about the impact of social media on the association world.Mary Fletcher Prince shares her thoughts about a PRNews survey that shows that senior marketers are planning on increasing budgets for digital marketing in the next year while ad spending falls and traditional PR remains stable.My firm announced a partnership with Market Wise, a Internet marketing consultancy, in order to more close tie-in and align our PR/social media activities with our clients' online marketing, lead generation and sales cycle management programs.And finally, a big shout out to Geoff Livingston as he sold his firm, Livingston Communications, to the Social Media Group earlier this week. Congratulations, man!
15 Jul This post is from from my other blog here Here is the now famous post on Twitter's blog: Twitter Blog: Finding A Perfect Match.A few quick thoughts: I think this is a good move and I think there will be a lot more matching, merging and acquiring in the months to come. There are a lot of really interesting social media tools out there but none are perfect and/or as fully featured as we'd like. Rather than spend money to develop these features, its becomes smarter to buy them.
15 Jul This post is from from my other blog here Google is rolling out a new service that should be interesting. It's a video search tool that parses the text of political speeches and makes it searchable. Here is the link to the announcement on Google's blog:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-their-own-words-political-videos.htmlHere is a snippet of what they say:Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look:  Kind of cool, eh? I mean, if you are really big political nerd, that is...
09 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
Looks like our Air Force is being run by idiots. It's probably not their fault that the current war has no need for strategic bombing or air supremacy fighters. But you'd think that they'd at least take the free time this generates to improve themselves. You know, streamline procurement regulations, develop new strategies and technologies that are actually useful in defeating our enemies, stuff like that. 
07 Jul This post is from from my other blog here I've noticed for a long time now that it takes me longer to get certain things done nowadays than it used to. Writing and reading online are frequently interrupted by emails, cell phone calls, Twits, etc. I've spent the better part of the last two weeks writing, and re-writing proposals for work. In order to get this process completed, I've had to shut down Twitter, turn off my cell, avoid my blog, and log out of Google Reader. I think I'm an info-addict.I read Wikipedia voluntarily and with no real purpose. A simple Google search for research on e34 BMW's will send me on a half hour mindless trip through the blogosphere clicking here and clicking there and ending up on a graduate student paper on political intrigues between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in the Twelfth century Holy Roman Empire. Clearly, I have a problem.We all do, really. Technology has been designed to get us all the information all the time. We don't need it, but it's there now. It's inescapable.Gordon Gravitz of the Wall Street Journal has an article about information overload and some of the steps being taken to deal with it. Here is a quote: Warning: On average, knowledge workers change activities every three minutes, usually because they're distracted by email or a phone call. It then takes almost half an hour to get back to the task once attention is lost. So if you're trying to read this column at the office or within range of your mobile device, what should be a few minutes can take much longer. Consider the rest of this article an 800-word test of your ability to maintain attention. A decline in our ability to focus is a side effect of the otherwise powerful tools we use to gather and analyze information. A new organization has just been launched, the Information Overload Research Group, whose founders include executives from companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and Intel. These are the very companies that have done the most to create the information tools that undermine our ability to focus; indeed, an initiative from them to address too much information could be compared to video-game programmers launching a line of Zen meditation centers. Still, it's encouraging that the most information-intense companies are trying to overcome their own overload. I know now that there is no way I can absorb all the information provided for me. Even bookmarking and crowd sourcing websites are of limited value- I see too much "majority rules" bias in them. I have to be very disciplined about what I read, and why. I don't think that a software filter will be able to do this very human task. Many human beings aren't going to be able to discipline themselves, and will still have a need for trusted authorities.
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