A week-long feast of knowledge opportunity awaits you next week in over 20 cities around the world when Social Media Week kicks off on February 13.

This bi-annual professional development event offers you a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries. The organizers say it attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.

One of the cities involved is London where over 150 events are taking place during the week, most of them free to attend (thanks to sponsors).

I’m participating as a speaker and presenter in three of those 150+ events, all of which look as though they’ll be fully booked any minute now – if you’d like to be there, this is the moment to check availability and sign up:

Wednesday February 15

1. 08:30 to 12:30: Social Business Immersive by Like Minds
   One of seven presenting; my topic: “Brand communications in a social world: the rise of open and transparent dialogue to manage your reputation and drive opportunities publicly to do business.”
2. 15:00 to 17:00: “The Future of Social Business” panel discussion with JP Rangaswami, Euan Semple, Jon Ingham, Neville Hobson and Delphine Remy-Boutang. This will be a moderated open discussion and debate on social business current trends, best practices and how social media is driving change in the way organisations will do business in the future.

• Location: Like Minds Club, 8 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5BY.
• Details and Register: http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1135 (morning); http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1130 (afternoon) (Both events free to attend.)

Thursday February 16

1. 08:30 to 17:00: Making Social Part Of Your DNA by Klaxon Marketing
   Presentation (at 11:50) jointly with Kerry Bridge of Dell UK titled “The long haul; top tips learnt over the years on how to really make social work for your business.” Especially useful if you’re a small or medium-size business.

• Location: 6-7 Great Newport Street, London WC2H 7JB.
• Details and Register: http://www.socialmediadna.co.uk/agenda/ (This is a not-for-profit event so your full ticket price goes directly to the event’s charity partners CRY and Mind.)

These are but three of the London events you can experience. Among the many others available, these five – one from each day – look like standout sessions:

• Monday Feb 13: Mind the Gap: Avoiding a Social Media Skills Crisis (13:00-15:00)
• Tuesday Feb 14: Ogilvy Keynote: The Insidious Plot to Socialise The Enterprise (11:00-13:00)
• Wednesday Feb 15: Me! Me! Me! The Battle for Attention: Brands, Publishers and Social Networks (13:00-15:00)
• Thursday Feb 16: Social Media, the Olympics & BBC – Preparing for London 2012 (17:30-19:30)
• Friday Feb 17: Google / Google+ What’s going on and how it impacts your business! (09:00-12:00)

And if you can’t physically get to any event, you can enjoy many of them via live video streams by Livestream (who will be streaming events from other SMW cities as well).

There are also hashtags for each city – London’s is #smwldn – so you can join the conversations on Twitter.

Enjoy your week of perspectives!

• 62% of customers are looking for more support through social media
• 23% of companies actually provide it that way on Facebook

Simple action: pay attention to what your customers want and deliver on that.

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The future of customer service and social media: infographic
According to Zendesk’s new infographic, 62% of customers are looking for more support through social media. Compare that to research by MarketTools at the end of 2011 which shows only 23% of US compan…

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• Procter and Gamble embraces Facebook

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For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report for February 6, 2012: A 73-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links to websites, blog posts and other content we discuss in the show are posted as Delicious bookmarks to facilitate your connection with the discussions and sharing of that content.

• FIR #637 bookmarks on Delicious

Names of blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Notes pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute time stamps – see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #637 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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So, until Monday February 13…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

Christopher is Senior Vice President, Global Programs for Voce Communications, a Porter Novelli company. Before arriving at Voce, Christopher was director of global social media at General Motors, building the company’s social media program and leading its presence across multiple social networks.

His work to repair GM’s reputation in the social web earned him PR News’ “Social Media Leader of the Year” award in 2010. Christopher also previously managed social media initiatives and corporate communications for IBM, where he was designated “Blogger-in-Chief.”

Christopher’s book, The Social Media Strategist, was reviewed on FIR.

This podcast was recorded live on BlogTalk Radio.

Get this podcast:

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Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future reviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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This FIR Review is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

“Every year, between one and two million Americans work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand newsrooms, congressional offices, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, build the human genome, and pick up garbage. They are increasingly of all ages, and their numbers are growing fast – from 17 percent of college graduates in 1992 to 50 percent in 2008. A huge and increasing number of internships are illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and this mass exploitation saves firms more than $600 million each year. Interns enjoy no workplace protections and no standing in courts of law – let alone benefits like health care.

Ross Perlin has written the first expose of this world of drudgery and aspiration.

In this witty, astonishing, and serious investigative work, Perlin takes the reader inside both boutique non-profits and mega-corporations such as Disney (which employs 8,000 interns at Disney World alone). He profiles fellow interns, talks to academics and professionals about what unleashed this phenomenon, and explains why the intern boom is perverting workplace practices in locations all around the world.”

Get this podcast:

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Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin

Publisher: Verso
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published May 2011
ISBN-10: 1844676862
ISBN-13: 978-1844676866

Purchase at Amazon US, Amazon Canada, or Amazon UK. (No Kindle editions available.)

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Review is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

If you’ve done a Google+ Hangout video chat before, you’ll be familiar with the format and this was no different. Except, of course, it was the President of the United States plus five lucky citizens chosen by +The White House to hang out live with the Pres in a carefully-controlled setting. Plus the millions of people worldwide who tuned in, as it were, to YouTube to watch and add text comments. Plus those doing the same on Google+, Facebook, Twitter… wherever they were online.

‘Tuned in’ is an apt descriptor as the immediate thought I had when I did just that on Google+ was “This is TV.”

If last year’s Royal Wedding that was broadcast live on YouTube was a demo of YouTube as a TV channel – a global one at that – that captures imaginations with a compelling event (content, in a word), then yesterday’s presidential Hangout is surely a clear sign that the channel just changed.

Why watch TV on a TV any more when you can immerse yourself, interact on the net, share your experiences and the recorded content itself, via any capable device that connects online?

Talk about disruption! No wonder the US entertainment industry – and that includes mainstream media like TV – likes things like #SOPA and #PIPA, to which +Clay Shirky‘s call to “pick up the pitchforks” is so compelling.

Reshared post from +The White House

Missed the Hangout with President Obama? Check out the full video here and let us know what you thought.

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Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (29.2Mb, 72:55)
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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir; and TemboSocial (formerly Pollstream): helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report for January 30, 2012: A 73-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links to websites, blog posts and other content we discuss in the show are posted as Delicious bookmarks to facilitate your connection with the discussions and sharing of that content.

• FIR #636 bookmarks on Delicious

Names of blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Notes pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute time stamps – see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #636 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday February 6…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

It’s continuing good news for Apple and its iPad and for the myriad Android tablet-makers; and for satisfying consumers’ desire to own the latest affordable tech that gives them the freedom to get at information whenever and wherever they want it.

According to one recent report I read by Research and Markets, the expected growth of the tablet market in the UK over the next few years will be driven by features such as ease of use, long battery life, mobility, ability to multi-task, instant on/off and the large number of applications available.

Such predicted expectation drivers – no doubt valid in most if not all markets, not just the UK – keep the pressure on vendors where those that build better mousetraps are likely to be the ones that dominate in the market, either overall (like the iPad) or in a niche.

Such predictions and opinion are probably welcome news to a UK niche player like Storage Options, maker of the Scroll Excel 7″ tablet they loaned me and that I’ve been taking a look at over the past few weeks.

Just over six months ago, in June 2011, I reviewed Storage Options’ predecessor tablet, the Scroll 7″ Tablet PC (Capacitive). As I mentioned in the review, that device while competent had some significant issues that made me reluctant to consider it a product to recommend to anyone.

But that was then, and this is now with a new device that offers a much better experience and makes it a worthy offering in an increasingly-crowded market. You can see what I make of the Scroll Excel in my first-look video report that runs at just under ten minutes.

(If you don’t see the video embedded above, watch it at YouTube.)

Overall, I think this is a very good device, certainly a far superior product compared to its predecessor. It’s well specified; the device I’ve got includes:

• Android 2.3.4 operating system
• Cortex A8 1Ghz single-core processor
• 512Mb DDR3 RAM; 4GB internal storage memory (of which 2Gb is used by the operating system); slot to add a microSD card up to 32Gb
• Capacitive 7-inch touch screen, 16:9 (screen resolution) 5:3 (pixel resolution), 800 x 480
• 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
• Mini HDMI socket for connecting to, eg, a TV to play HD video (you’ll need to buy a cable, one isn’t included)
• Mini USB port for connecting to a computer for file transfers and to to connect peripheral devices: keyboard, flash drive, etc (and a cable is included)
• Plays 1080p HD video, supports MPEG2, MPEG4, AVS, H.264, WMV, AVI, MP4, RMVB, FLV, MKV

I like the build quality, the speed of operation (on a par with most devices I’ve used and matching your expectations in how quickly something happens when you tap on the screen), the screen’s great resolution, and long battery life (with my moderate use so far – exploring the device, video watching, news reading, a bit of email – it’s days between charges).

Storage Options offers the Scroll Excel 7″ at a pretty keen price – currently, £129.99 is mentioned on their website although I see Amazon UK has it at £139.99, a discount of £10 off the original price. And they reported earlier this month that it was selling very well indeed.

There is a negative about the device, although how big it is depends on what’s important to you. The Scroll Excel 7 doesn’t come with the app you commonly find on many Android devices that lets you connect to the Android Market to download and install or update your apps.

Storage Options say this:

Due to licensing restrictions, the Scroll Excel cannot officially be used to access the Android Marketplace. It does however come with a number of pre-installed apps including Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Aldiko Book Reader, Amazon Kindle, BBC iPlayer, BBC News, es_file_explorer, Evernote, Facebook, MSN Talk, Quick System Info Pro, Slider Me Market Place, TuneIn Radio, Twitter, WildTangent Games and YouTube.The Scroll Excel also comes with access to the Slide Me Market Place where most major apps can be downloaded to the device without issue.

I mention this in my video review. If ease of use for you includes installing or updating your apps with just a tap or two on the screen, then this could be a big issue. There are workarounds, though, as Storage Options mentions (and includes reference to in the device manual). There are also some extreme ones.

I discovered a way to get to the Market, by accident I think, when I installed the Kindle app for Android from Amazon directly, which took me to the Market. I did that today, after I recorded the video review yesterday, and it opens up some interesting usage possibilities I hadn’t considered – the Scroll Excel 7 makes a pretty good Kindle device alternative with a better screen reading experience than the Kindle itself (and it’s in hi-res colour), and the price between the two devices isn’t far apart. The Excel is about the same size as a Kindle, too.

That’s an extra although one you may find as appealing as I do. But as a ‘mainstream’ Android tablet, this Scroll Excel is worth considering if you’re looking for a good-quality and good-value device and you don’t want to venture into iPad-like pricing territory.

This market is evolving very quickly, though. For instance, Dell may be getting into the consumer tablet market later this year (not to be confused with it’s abortive efforts in the business tablet market with the Dell Streak). There’s also Amazon’s Fire rumoured to be coming to the UK in a few months and at a price that will bring pressure to budget-device makers

Still, for a penny under £130, the Scroll Excel 7 is a very nice product at the budget end of the market.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) launched a social media newsroom on January 23. In  their words, it “integrates announcements on our website with our Twitter feed, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and with the CIPR Conversation.”

It’s a good example of an organization evolving how it communicates information about itself (and, in this case, about a profession and its membership) and how it enables easier sharing of its content in ways that are measurable, eg, social-share buttons, and linking content in diverse online places.

I heard about the newsroom yesterday when I was out and about in London. I’d just finished a meeting so a moment to check email, Twitter and Google+ on my mobile device. No wifi at that moment but a good connection via 3 UK’s cellular network. A note on G+ from David Philips had the news. Naturally, I clicked the link and headed over in my mobile browser to take a look.

What a disappointment! What I got was the desktop website squeezed onto the 4.3-inch display on my Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone.

The news site – indeed, the entire CIPR website – doesn’t offer a version that’s designed for use on a mobile device. As you can see from the screenshot, the site is, in essence, unusable on a mobile device like a smartphone.

Yesterday on Twitter, the CIPR’s Andrew Ross said that they haven’t yet made the step to a mobile site. Matt CIPR added that a mobile version is in the pipeline, “but it should still display ok on most smart phones.”

Hmm, I guess that depends on how you define “ok” in this context. In my initial experience, definitely not ok.

Think about it: you’re out and about, you want to see something on the CIPR’s website – read a news announcement, check some information, sign up for a course, maybe add a comment on The Conversation – but you get only the desktop website on your mobile. And that gives you the desktop experience – not really workable on a mobile device like a phone.

Just try the screen-pinching, squinting, “precision” finger-tapping and swiping in a busy Starbucks, never mind on a crowded bus. And if your cell connection isn’t that good, it will be like watching paint dry as the page attempts to load in all its graphical glory.

Not something you want to do more than once.

Undoubtedly the experience will be better on a larger-screen mobile device, eg, an iPad or one of the myriad Android tablets with their seven- to ten-inch screens. But display is only one part of the picture, as it were – great to be able to clearly see what you want, it’s then how you use that content on a device that you touch to interact, not point and click or hit an enter key.

Whether or not we’re embarking on the “Post PC Era,” there is no question that the “Mobile Era” is here.

Smartphones have become an integral part of people’s daily lives wherever they are: we use smartphones as an extension – even a replacement – of our desktop or laptop computers these days as we multi-task and, whether it’s for business or personal, consume and quickly share other content.

I do hope a CIPR mobile-optimized site comes very soon. In the meantime, enjoy what is a good resource on your desktop.Just don’t expect much if you try it on a mobile.

Related posts:

• Time to get with the mobile program
• Are you really ready for the mobile consumer?
• Compelling reasons to mobilize your website

[...] She argued that we’re living in the midst of a revolution and said that social media has resulted in three key trends:

1. the shift from anonymity to authentic identity,
2. the shift from wisdom of the crowds to wisdom of the people, and
3. the shift from being receivers of information to being broadcasters of information.

“This is a revolution that touches every aspect of our lives,” Sandberg said. Social media, she said, is word of mouth at scale.

Sandberg’s comments came in a closing keynote speech she gave at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich today.

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Facebook added $15.3B and 230k jobs to European economy in 2011
Facebook added $15.3 billion in value to the European economy in the past year, COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Tuesday.

Sandberg, in her closing keynote……

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