Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 28: The Powered Acquisition News

It's always nice when you have a chance to mix business and pleasure. I guess you could say I do that every week on the Quick-n-Dirty podcast show I do with my co-host, Jennifer Leggio. Even though the show happens after work hours for me, I try and take full advantage of putting into practice things I learn at work into the show and vice versa. However, this week in particular, I had the opportunity to invite three of my new colleagues onto the show.

To that end, my company, Powered, announced this week that we had acquired three other social media agencies -- crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. With those acquisitions came 35 new social media smarties including Greg Verdino, chief strategy officer at crayon, Steve Kleinberg, principal of Drillteam, and Kevin Tate, principal at StepChange, the very same three guests that joined us on the Quick-n-Dirty show.

Not wanting to muck things up too much, we did start the show off with our usual "social network or tool of the week." I voted for Boxcar which unfortunately isn't on the Android or the Blackberry platforms (a negative for Jennifer). The bottom line is that Boxcar allows you to surface status updates and messaging alerts to text messaging level on the iPhone. For instance, you can choose to be notified when someone DM's you on Twitter, when one of your friends on Facebook does a status update or when your favorite blogger publishes a new post. The reason I like Boxcar is that I've found the "send to SMS" feature to be a little flukie. It also gives me the capability to set times to turn the alerts on and off (for instance turn the alerts on at 7 AM and turn them off at 11 PM).

Next up, was the guest portion of the show. To keep the new Powered team on the up and up, I agreed with Jennifer to swing around and sit in the guest seat with Jennifer playing the role of interviewer. She asked some engaging questions like, "do you really believe that Powered is the first full service social agency?" Why did we decide to maintain the StepChange and Drillteam names while folding crayon into Powered proper?"and "can Powered really call itself a full-service agency when it's still made up of three somewhat separate companies?" (she pulled no punches!)

Pictured: Greg Verdino, Kevin Tate & Steve Kleinberg

This week's featured "Twitterer" was none other than the fabulous Adele Mcalear (whom we know pronounces her last name "mac-a-lear"). Both Jennifer and I have followed Adele for a while and like her poise, sense of humor and smart thinking about the social space. As a nice bonus, Adele was listening in on the podcast and hung out in the chatroom so we got to interact with her as the conversation was going on.

Last but not least, we did our signature "point / counterpoint" portion of the show which wasn't really much of a debate this time. Our focus was on "real social media leaders" or people that were learning and sharing based on actual experience in helping businesses tap into the power of social media. This was opposed to some of the motivational speaker types that don't have any real business experience but rather are working hard at translating their own personal social media success into a viable business model. No suprise that Jennifer and I were both in strong agreement on this front.

Just a reminder, our live show is every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Archived versions of the show can be found on iTunes (search Quick and Dirty), on BlogTalkRadio or on my blog as a widget in the right-hand column. Write ups from the each episode can be found on this blog or on Jennifer's ZDNet blog.