Quick'n'Dirty Episode 45: Facebook Privacy Anyone?

As we close in on putting a year of Quick'n'dirty podcasts under our belts, my co-host, Jennifer Leggio and I are always looking for ways to bring added value to our listeners/readers' lives. We'd like to think that we continued that streak this week with social app, Mobile Roadie, Twitterer of the week, Greg Narain aka @Gregarious and special guest, Alex Plant, of NetApp. Oh yeah, we also managed to squeeze in a few minutes at the end to talk about Facebook privacy. Maybe you've heard that there is a little brewhaha about their latest moves?

First up was our social app of the week. I first discovered Mobile Roadie at a recent SMASH Summit in San Francisco during the social media lightning demos. You know when someone can convince you in five minutes that there is some "there" there, that the company is on the right path. In this case, the "there" was a DIY platform for the iPhone and and Android apps (iPad and more coming this summer). While I haven't had a chance to play with the app-builder yet, they have already helped create mobile presences for several Fortune500 Companies and entertainment moguls like Taylor Swift and Ashton Kutcher. While I'm sure the resulting apps aren't necessarily going to win any awards for innovation and style, they are a great for speed to market.

Next, we talked about our featured Twitterer of the week, Greg Narain. While I've known Greg for a while, I've only recently learned more about his social media product expertise (he's the VP of product for Klout and co-founder at LilGrams.com). Greg is of course funny in addition to being smart but he's also well connected and in constant search of "what's next." If you don't follow him already, I'd strongly recommend that you do.

Out of order and all (Alex had a little telephony trouble), our featured guest was Alex Plant, head of social media for B2B tech giant, NetApp. During the show, Jennifer and I dug down on how social media was different in a B2B2B environment. We also peppered him a little bit on using social for customer service and even had a little fun with him asking him why (at the time) he had the Twitter n00b badge up for his avatar picture (for those that don't know what this is, it's when someone leaves the default image of the Twitter bird up for their Twitter profile pic). Fortunately, Alex was a good sport and fielded our questions fearlessly and elegantly.

Last but not least, Jennifer and I spent a few minutes on the latest hot topic du jour namely, Facebook and privacy. While we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to do this topic justice, we did cover off on some of the overarching points of what we think Facebook is trying to do and what it really means for businesses and consumers alike.

As always, you can find archives of our show here. You can also read re-caps of the podcasts on Jennifer's ZDNet blog or my Stroutmeister blog.

2010 Predictions from Social Media Breakfast Austin

Earlier this week, my friend, Bryan Person, invited me to be one of ten speakers to offer a prediction up for 2010. Bryan wisely segmented the group into categories (see below) so that you didn't get the same prediction several times.

Wesley Faulkner | fundraising
Dara Quackenbush  | education
Sheila Scarborough | travel/small biz
Lisa Goddard | nonprofit
Mike Chapman | public policy/politics
Tim Hayden | media & events
Kathy Mandelstein | B2B Marketing
Aaron Strout | brands
Deirdre Walsh | B2B marketing & community
Jen Wojcik | recruiting

My prediction (branded online communities) comes about three quarters of the way through but I strongly recommend that you listen to all ten as you'll find some interesting and useful insights.

• Blog post wrapping up the breakfast (including PPT presentation of photos and memorable tweets)
• Blog post with embedded Scribd document of the predictions
• SMB Austin Ustream page
• SMB Austin 11 presentation: Photos and Tweets (Slideshare.net)
• Event photos by Callie Richmond

What are your predictions for 2010?

Photo credit: Callie Richmond Photography

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 19: Live from BlogWorld Expo

Wow! What an amazing last few days it's been at Blog World Expo. It was tough to have to leave before the festivities were over but I enjoyed a whirlwind of great panels, content and podcasts while I was here in Vegas at one of the top 2-3 most important social conferences in the country.

As you can guess, one of the podcasts I got to do was with my pal and co-host of the Quick-n-Dirty show, Jennifer Leggio. The beauty of this episode was that Jennifer and I got to do the show live from the expo floor of Blog World. Even better, we were able to grab PR/social studs, Doug Haslam* of SHIFT and Steve Rubel, of Edelman and Micropersuasion blog fame.

*note: do I need to disclose that Doug works for my company, Powered Inc. in a PR capacity -- after all, we're paying him vs. the other way around? No? Good, I didn't think so. Just checkin'.

Rather than doing our regular format of:

1. Social network
2. Guest/case study
3. Featured twitterer of the week
4. Point/counterpoint

we went freestyle and discussed Jen's and my panels at the show. Highlights included:

• A recap of the fact that we both agreed that her "sponsored content" panel could have been a seminal discussion but instead just ended up being really good (not a bad thing). Part of the problem was that Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester and now at Altimeter Group worked hard to *protect* the panelists. While this was likely the right thing to do, it did prevent some of the sparks from flying that the crowd really wanted to see. For what it's worth, Jeremiah and I discussed this over drinks the night before so don't think I'm talkin' behind his back. ;)
• Jen's review of her featured morning session about not letting the bad guys "Jack your brand." This connected more with Jen's security roots (day job) vs. her ZDNet blog (spare time) focused on social business. I suspect that Jen will do a recap on her blog but what I really liked was that she allowed audience members to come up and co-present with her reinforcing her "social" side.
• We also did a quick review of my morning panel on "Gaming Twitter" and why it's not a good idea. To get details, head over to hashtag #twitgame as several of us in the room (myself included) live tweeted this event and caught a majority of the salient points on Twitter. For what it's worth, I was blown away but the smarts of fellow co-panelists Reem Abeidoh, Lucretia Pruitt, Micah Baldwin and Jesse Stay.

As I mentioned earlier, we did stray from our normal show format. However, we were able to bring some fresh insight to the podcast via our special guests. The fun part was that due to our limit of two headsets, Jen interviewed Doug Haslam and I interviewed Steve Rubel. I strongly encourage you to listen to this part of the show [about 20-25 minutes in] but here is the gist of what we discussed:

• Jennifer and Doug talked about the fact that PR wasn't dead but *evolved*. PR firms that weren't doing it right risked becoming irrelevant. As a client of SHIFT's (there goes that disclosure again), I can tell you that he and his team definitely get it. There was one other topic that they covered but because I couldn't hear them real-time, I'll need to go back and listen to [FILL IN THE BLANK].
• Steve and I rehashed his panel yesterday on life streaming [recap on my blog here]. In particular, I asked Steve how easy it was (knowing the answer was, "not very) to take clients form "you should be doing social" to focusing on his three pillars of "create spoke and hub content/destinations, become ubiquitous/ searchable and be sure to diversify." We also touched on whether or not it was a good idea to turn off comments on Youtube.

All in all, Jen and I were probably a little less scripted and buttoned up than usual but it was a hell of a lot of fun. To that end, a great big hat tip to Deb Robison for being the sole active chat room attendee. She rocks!

For past recaps of the show, you can always bounce back and forth between Jen's and my blogs. And of course, you can always catch an archived version of the show here or over on iTunes.

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap (Yup, I Drew the Short Straw Again)

Somehow I managed to draw the short straw again this week...  So it's my turn to do the recap of the Quick-n-Dirty podcast show again this week. Fortunately, I think this was one of our best yet -- top three at least -- so I really don't mind taking the time to be the scribe for show number fifteen.

Before I dive in, I have two housekeeping items that I'd like to cover:

1. We are giving away another free pass to the upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit so be sure you call into this week's show. The number is (347) 308-8632.
2. There is a survey on the effectiveness of hashtags that my co-host, Jennifer Leggio, and friend, Deb Robison, have put into the field that needs more respondents. Please vote if you get a second.

With that said, onto the recap!

• Featured Social Network: Threadsy. Well, this one's still in private beta so unfortunately you won't be able to see much of Threadsy first hand. But you can read more about it over hear at TechCrunch. Jennifer saw their demo via streaming video from the recent TechCrunch50 event and was impressed enough to want to cover it. In a nutshell, they "take all of your online communication and shove them into a single service." Note that I have already requested an invite!
• Special Guest: Michael "Britopian" Brito. Yup, he's the guy that focuses on social over at this little chip manufacturing company in Silicon Valley called Intel. Oh wait, you've heard of it? Yeah, I thought you might have. Anyway, during the show Michael dropped some serious knowledge on how he/Intel look at engaging their customers through social. In fact, Michael was kind enough to share a pretty cool example of his efforts here.
• Featured Tweeter: Chris Penn. Just read his Twitter bio... Financial aid expert, Edvisors.com CMO, PodCamp co-founder, MarketingOverCoffee.com co-host, speaker, author, USF marketing professor, actual ninja, unholy DK." How can you not like this guy? Seriously though, he creates some serious value both in person, on his podcasts and in his Twitter stream. Follow him. NOW!
• Point / Counterpoint: I liked this one because Jennifer and I actually kind of disagreed on this one. She whined about argued the fact that with so much noise out their in the blogosphere, it was hard for new and/or quality voices to get a say. My counterpoint was that if content isn't good, people eventually vote with their feet (she used Mashable as an example of an organization that may have lost their way). I also chimed in that people who have good content need to be better advocates for themselves. If a tree falls in the woods, nobody hears it if nobody knows the tree existed.

Onto next week's show. Our featured guest will be the lovely, Laura Fitton. You know her as Pistachio. I know her as one of my teammates on Team Shuckri. You will soon know her as the CEO and co-founder of exciting new startup, oneforty. And as I mentioned before, we'll be giving away another free Inbound Marketing Summit pass so you can't afford to miss it! Just ask last week's winner, Bill Johnston (he's a good guy so Jennifer and I were both psyched that he won).

To listen to the show, you can either click play on the BlogTalkRadio icon on my blog or head on over to BlogTalkRadio (we're also on iTunes).

Q-n-D Recap: Kodak's Tom Hoehn and Why Plurk Sucks

14

That's right, this was the 14th Quick-n-Dirty podcast that Jennifer Leggio and I have co-hosted. I guess you could say that we've moved beyond our "pilot" phase and into the real world of podcasting. To that end, we have some exciting things to note:

1. Jennifer is now doing her recaps on her Feeds blog over at ZDNet. That's not to say that "Stroutmeister" or "Mediaphyter" aren't kick ass blogs... it just means that we don't have anywhere near the pull that ZDNet does. This is a good thing.
2. Our show has been selected as a "featured" podcast on BlogTalkRadio. I don't know how many shows BTR does this with but let's just assume it's a good thing.

So onto the recap from this week's show...

• Featured Social Network: Plurk - first up, we did some trash talking about this "Twitter wannabe." Jennifer and I both joined late in 2008 but found very little value, especially when you compare it to Twitter. Jennifer and I remembered that friend, Mack Collier, was a heavy user back in the day (we won't hold that against him). We also found out that regular listener, Deb Robison, still uses Plurk. She likes the threaded conversations. To that end, Deb and I have agreed to do a joint "point / counterpoint" post. Stay tuned for that one.
• Special Guest: Kodak's Director of Interactive and Convergence Media, Tom Hoehn, joined us for an extended session during the show. Our conversation focused on the way Kodak is tapping into the power of social to revolutionize one of the oldest public companies in the country. In particular, Tom talked about how Kodak CMO, Jeffrey Hayzlett and lead blogger/twitterer, Jenny Cisney, are helping him push forward with a social agenda, not just for the benefit of Kodak's customers but for their business partners as well. In fact, Tom was able to point us to their AWESOME new booklet of social media tips that Jeffrey, Tom and Jenny put together (definitely a MUST read). For additional background, see our aforementioned friend, Mack's, interview of Tom.
• Featured Tweeter: Adam Cohen. Partner at interactive agency, Rosetta, Adam was one of the first 25 people I followed on Twitter (as I close in on 9,000 people I follow, that should tell you something). The reason Jen and I chose him as our "feature" was his blend of being helpful, funny and continually able to deliver great content. Viva la Adam!
• Point / Counterpoint: To retweet or not retweet, that is the question... okay, so we didn't get all "Shakespeare" about this one but we did agree that some retweeting is okay, as long as you don't overdo it AND you add a little color commentary about why you are passing that info along. I personally like retweeting because I think if people are using me as a filter, they can see what types of blogs, videos, articles and podcasts I like. Jennifer was 1/2 sold on this.

Onto next week's show. Our featured guest will be Intel's, Michael Brito. Be sure to tune in. We'll also be giving away a pass to the upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston. Oh, and be on the lookout for Jennifer's interview on Bub.bilicio.us -- it should be coming out next week!

To listen to the show, you can either click play on the BlogTalkRadio icon on my blog or head on over to BlogTalkRadio (we're also on iTunes).