Twitter as the GPS: Video from @JeffPulver's 140 Character Conference

Last week, I was lucky enough to be asked by my friend, Peter Fasano, of Coke to moderate a panel called "Twitter as the GPS for the Greater Social Media Mesh" at the 140 Character Conference in NYC. The idea was to talk about how Twitter is helping businesses navigate in a "2.0" world. Given the backgrounds of our panelists, we decided to focus on four different vertical industries: financial services, entertainment, advertising and CPG.

My fellow panelists were:

• Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) - Digital Editor at Adweek
• David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) - Emerging Media Director, 360i
• Hadley Stern (@hadleystern) - Vice-President, Fidelity Labs
• Peter Fasano (@pfasano) - Principal/Lead Catalyst, Mass+Logic and Social Media Marketer at The Coca Cola Company

This is only a twenty minute video so I highly encourage you to spend a few minutes listening in. If you have thoughts, comments or feedback that you'd like to share, feel free to do so in the comments below. I have my fellow panelists e-mails so I'm happy to ping them to try and get an answer.

Quick-n-dirty Social Media Podcast: Episode 3 Recap

The third episode of Quick’n'Dirty Social Media Podcast (#qnd) was a little smoother than episodes one and two. For starters, I remembered to set the length of the show for 45 minutes vs. 15 so all the listeners could follow along for the duration. I was also able to play our new bumper music, Bring Back the Bass, at least at the tail end of the show (thanks to Brett Petersel for providing). Next week, I promised co-host, Jennifer Leggio, that our show would go off without a hitch... we'll just have to see!

If you missed this week's show, here’s what we discussed:

1. Featured Social Network: Glue. They are doing some very cool things with social browsing. They also just released a press release that said that they are exposing some of their APIs so that developers can use Glue's functionality in their sites. Jen and I both like what Glue is doing a lot and will continue to keep my eye on them.
2. Case Study: This week's focus was all about the small business. Ever see one of those mobile food carts floating around the city? Yeah, the ones that sell bagels or tacos or sausages? Well guess what. They are starting to use Twitter and the results are paying off. In regard to Korean BBQ purveyor, Kogi, Kate Krader, restaurant editor for Food & Wine magazine says in the background article "That [Kogi's recognizable brand name is] 90 percent thanks to Twitter."
3. Special Guest: Mike Murray, CSIO of Foreground Security was kind enough to join us to discuss true social engineering in social networking / social media. Pretty powerful stuff. If you weren't a little wary about who you "friend" in the socialsphere before, you might be after listening to Mike speak.
4. Executive on Twitter: Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak. I had the pleasure of meeting Jeffrey and hearing him speak at this week's 140 Character Conference. I was pleased to see that he was as funny and genuine in real life as he was on Twitter. Definitely worth the follow.
5. Point / Counterpoint: This week was a little less of a "square off" and more of a recap of Jeff Pulver's recent 140 Character Conference. If you weren't lucky enough to attend, the videos from the event are up. I loved the conference and while Jen didn't exactly disagree with me, she decided that conference producers need to be careful to focus less on the tools and more on the goals of we business folk (think "lead gen" vs. "e-mail marketing" for instance). I agreed but my take was that we needed to ratchet it up a notch and apply that thinking to all social media events, not just those focused on Twitter.
6. Special Bonus: one of our listeners encouraged us to talk a little about Twitter and it's role in the latest Iranian elections. We didn't have much time to cover such an important topic but did manage to spend a couple of minutes opining on the subject.

Jennifer and I are in the process of working on next week's show but we promise it won't dissapoint. At a minimum, Jennifer has a special announcement that should get folks excited. If I say more than that, Jen may disown me as a co-host.

What, this recap wasn't enough? Well go and listen live or download archived podcasts here.

Live Blogging the 140 Character Conference

Photo credit: Jill Hanner

Sorry, I never gave context for this post. I'm at Jeff Pulver's 140 Character Conference in New York City and am trying to provide some running notes from this action

packed event. Today I'm keeping up. Tomorrow might be tricky (speaking at 9:20 AM and then in meetings on and off after that).

Link to conference agenda is here.

Link to the #140conf hashtag is here.

Tim O'Reilly CEO/founder, O'Reilly Media

• realized that at times he was tweeting too much so started capturing/formatting his tweets in a text document. Later he would decide whether or not to tweet those updates.

Fred Wilson (venture capitalist/blogger)

• Links are the currency of the internet.
• Talking about how to make money from Twitter.
• Links to blog coming from Facebook and Twitter are starting to eat into Google referrals.
• One business model for Twitter would mimic the way Overture introduced "paid search"
• Google currently spends a lot of time on environmental remediation i.e. addressing spam, phishing, etc. Twitter is going need to do the same.
• Passed links on FB and Twitter are more "trusted" because they come from someone you know - as a result, they have a higher likihood to convert
• http://tcrn.ch/3y0 (recap by E Schoenfeld)

John Borthwick - Founder of Twitter Search

bit.ly/140/ecosystem

General thoughts from Liz Strauss and panel with Brian Solis, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6 and Brook Lundy of Some eCards

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=aaronstrout+%23140conf

Maegan Carburry - Political Blogger for Huffington Post

• Recommends reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
• Asks, "are we contributing original thoughts to socialsphere?"

[cont'd]

UBER Panel on Twitter as News Gathering Tool

Moderator: Robert Scoble

Panelists:

Ann Curry - anchor of NBC

Rick Sanchez - Host of 3PM Newsroom on CNN

Ryan Osborn - Producer NBC's Today Show

• Scoble is hammering Rick Sanchez, CNN and press in general for not giving more Iran coverage this weekend.
• Scoble also asks if we are evolving the coverage mainstream news gives foreign topics because we now "know" some of the people in these countries and they are more human/touchable to us.
• Rick Sanchez says that social media is pushing CNN to validate whether or not elections were real or not
• Ann Curry (beautiful voice in real life btw, very melodic and soothing) talks VERY passionately about covering Iran. Said that people there were talking to reporters and people were 1) risking their lives to talk to them and 2) were asking if all Americans thought that they were terrorists. Ann also stressed the importances of reporters now treating people in countries like Darfur, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. like they are your mother, sister, brother.
• Rick Sanchez/Ryan Osborn said it is tricky because trad'l news is held to standard of "it's got to be right." They are required to do more fact checking.
• Ann Curry - was doing some real time reporting on Twitter recently because main stream news was covering. Had to be VERY careful to make sure she wasn't passing along any information that was wrong.
• Audience questions - frustration around mainstream media covering "fluff" pieces vs. hard hitting stuff. [NOTE: in theory, this is great but it's not what most people want to watch]
• Rick Sanchez says that it's imperative to use Twitter to have conversations with watchers - not to use it as a gimmick.

[cont'd]

• Rick Sanchez notes that if CNN or other news disappears, it takes away a lot of the content that social content creators can talk about.
• Scoble retorts to Rick, "you DID disappear on Saturday and we got along just fine."

[Side note: had a fantastic conversation with Scoble, Jim Stone (camera man for

NBC) and Ryan Osborn after the panel. They agreed that this is a seminal moment in the history of social media and traditional media.]

Moeed Ahmad - Head of New Media Technology and Future Media Department Technology Division, Al Jazeera Network

• First off, Moeed notes that he traveled 16 hours to get here. WOW! I will never complain
• "If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space"
• "If it doesn't fit in 140 characters, it's not worth saying" - @riy
• Now talking about Twitter's roll in War 2.0 - cites hashtag use of "#gaza"
• Interesting because Al Jazeera team was skeptical about use of Twitter at first. Then @Ev tweeted a link to their site and traffic went through the roof. Now they get it. ;)
• Able to run a page with live tweets with a column next to it that tells whether the news has been verified or not [brilliant idea]
• Challenges: covering a party that is not popular on Twitter who wins an election (when party that lost IS popular on Twitter)
• "Telling the truth is hard. Not telling it is even harder." (see poster below)

Jeremy Epstein - Marketing Navigator, Never Stop Marketing

• Interesting approach to Twitter. Only follows 140 people. Looks for:
  - Experts
  - High signal to noise ratio
  - Constantly looking to earn right to spend more time with people he wants to network with

Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak

• Twitter is changing Kodak (not your father's Kodak anymore)
• 60% of people at company are new
• Looking for new ways to make connections with people
• Worst thing you could say about Kodak is absolutely nothing.
• Said people come on their blog and say "your product is f*cking, f*cking, f*cking, f*cking, f*cking not good" is okay because it's feedback.
• They are listening to their customers - want to make ink cartridges much more interchangeable.
• Jeff is showing his humorous side - he is currently trying to figure out term for someone that is malicious on Twitter. Crowd consensus is "twanker."
• Right now, he's calling out a particular competitor that was anonomously posting and taking shots at Kodak. Also expressing desire for Financial Times to be at 140 Character Conference
• Jeff answers/triages tweets that people send when problems or questions arise. Said that this wasn't possible even a year ago.
• Big moment for Kodak/Jeff - one of Barack Obama's daughters used a Kodak camera. People started tweeting Jeff like crazy. It trended and made the NY Times.
• Interesting thought, what is the "cost of ignoring."

For more live tweets from people beyond me during Jeff's session, go here:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23140conf+jeffreyhayzlett

[cont'd]