Ford’s social media efforts from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Scott Monty & team take integrated approach rather than focus on short-term campaigns

Major corporations have begun jumping into the social media pool. One of the biggest success stories this year has been the performance of Ford Motor Co. — they’re making big waves but aren’t splashing around, thanks to the integrated approach taken by Scott Monty, head of social media, who joined Ford only in the summer of 2008.

I caught up with Scott shortly after his keynote chat with the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher at Blogworld Expo. Their BWE conversation was largely inaudible, so this 6-minute interview serves as a quick synopsis of what Ford is up to in the space.

“We don’t think of social media at Ford in terms of campaigns,” Scott says, “because it’s a commitment. It’s about changing about the business model and embracing it day in and day out.”

From top to bottom, Ford has infused the company with the Zeitgest of social media — employees feel a connection with their customers and a sense of having skin in the game. Social media helps put a human face on the company. “It serves to remind people there are real human beings working at Ford Motor Co. who are passionate about great products,” he says.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Given Ford’s strong performance in recent months, including a $997 million third-quarter profit, several publications suggested that social media could be one of the key drivers of the company’s recent success. According to BusinessWeek, the automaker will spend 25% of their marketing budget on digital and social media this year.

Three weeks ago Ford won the Society for New Communications Research’s award for brand of the year for its “innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders.” A couple of the notable social media programs Ford has launched include:

• Fiesta Movement: Ford has given 100 “socially vibrant” people on the Web a Ford Fiesta (including Sarah Austin of @pop17) for 6 months. The Fiesta is a European car that Ford will begin producing in the U.S. in 2010. The 100 “agents” get to do whatever they want — tweet, take photos or videos, blog — and Monty’s team aggregates the conversations on Fiestamovement.com without editing it.

He adds: “At the end of 6 months they return the cars and we get real-time feedback from them that we’ve fed into our engineering team to make tweaks to the North American production version.” It’s a combination of crowdsourcing as well as digital buzz. “Ultimately what we’ve got is 50,000 hand-raisers who have seen the Fiesta online or in person who’ve said they want to know more about it when it comes out.” Fully 97 percent of those people do not currently drive Ford vehicles.

As a result, there’s already a 38 percent awareness of the Ford Fiesta in the marketplace, a phenomenal rate given that they haven’t spent a dollar in traditional advertising, Monty says.

• TheFordStory.com offers vieos, photos and articles about Ford, its employees and customers.

Monty also discusses why it’s important for corporations to get involved in social media if their customers are already talking about your brand, products or services

Related

• Interview with Ford CEO Alan Mulally (Socialmedia.biz)

• Ford’s $1 Billion Q3 Profit: Does Social Media Deserve Credit? (Mediaite)

• Ford’s Social Media Guru Scott Monty: “Social Media Is the Cocaine of the Communications Industry” (Kara Swisher at D)

• Interview with Scott Monty (buzzcast)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ford Fiesta Movement: Can Social Media Sell Cars? (mashable.com)
• A CEO’s social media moment (wheelontheweb.wordpress.com)
• #SocialMedia TweetChat led by Scott Monty-A different approach (directmarketingobservations.com)
• How Ford Made Its Comeback (online.wsj.com)
• Ford’s Fiesta Movement — Brand Ambassadors (viralblog.com)

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

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I just finished up my second day of reporting at ad:tech in New York for ad:tech, a conference about the digital side of the advertising industry. The event happens ten times a year all over the world and I last reported on the event for ad:tech in San Francisco.

At this year’s New York conference I saw many of the same things I’ve seen at ad:tech over the years, and that’s ad networks. I believe they’ve been there since day one of this conference and they’re never going away. They’re the bread and butter of the business.

I was more interested in what’s trending and at this show I saw a really big push towards businesses generating revenue from content. Advertisers are slowly realizing they need to be media companies as well, but not wholly. In fact, there’s a symbiotic relationship between paid advertising and earned media.

Watch the day 2 show report and the day 1 show report for an overview of some of the stuff I saw. Almost everything I mention in the show report videos you’ll find in a subsequent video below. There’s a total of 30 videos.

While I do a lot of live event reporting, understand that ad:tech is a very big conference and there’s no way to feasibly see it all, so these show reports should be titled, “What David got a chance to get around to see in his two days at ad:tech.”

	Show report, Day 1: ad:tech NY 2009
	Mogreet: Send videos through SMS to reach the largest audience possible
	Coin magic from Acxiom
	Advertisers are having a new found respect for the consumer
	Weaving a better relationship between paid and earned media
	FTC’s crackdown on paid bloggers was also a crackdown on paid celebrities
	No matter how cool a new media property is, if it isn’t easy to buy it can’t scale
	When marketing to the Hispanic community, be wary of cultural sensitivities
	Sysomos: Understand the ins and outs of the buzz around your company
	Will advertisers be liable if a blogger doesn’t disclose that they’re being paid?
	Pangea Media: Target your audience better with fun quizzes
	Talk Ahead: Sponsor comments on your blog
	Email Data Source now tracking competitive offers via Twitter
	Elephant Traffic: Renting space on unused domains
	AOL’s display ad network reaches 90% of Internet users
	AcrossAir: Augmented reality iPhone applications
	Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP: Retail is leading the way in new media advertising
	Lyris: Improve messaging management with email, social media, and mobile triple play
	Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP: Success is a function of branding and innovation
	Ad network tip: How to reduce churn with local small businesses
	Afilias: You’ve got back up of your data and your web services. Do you have a back up of your DNS?
	Looksmart: Save money and increase ROI with tiered PPC advertising
	WPP’s Martin Sorrell: ad spending online isn’t keeping pace with people’s time online
	Afilias will help you get your own top level domain name (e.g. .info, .org)
	Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP: The need for country managers for worldwide internal communications
	Mobile is not a mass shared experience. It’s an individual experience
	Hispanic media: Everyone follow what telco is doing
	Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP: Doing good is good business for building brands
	CoverClicks Media: drive more traffic with social media and holiday traffic

More articles from ad:tech:

• Jonathan Miller of News Corp on the state of the advertising industry
• Digital Moms: How to Reach and Harness this Consumer Marketing Force
• SMX@ad:tech: Search Engine Optimization Tactics
• The State of Search
• Building “The Great Barrier Reef” Brand
• Marketing 3.0—Building Great Brands in the Digital Age
• The Art of Conversation: Are You Listening?
• mail 3.0—The Rise of Social Media and Integrated Video
• Not All Booth Babes Are Just Eye Candy

David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below.

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Improving your presentation skills from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

If you give presentations or speeches in public — ranging from a workshop panel appearance to a keynote lecture — chances are that you could benefit from sharpening your presentation skills.

I met Danielle Daly, co-founder of Rexi Media, at Blogworld Expo last month and was immediately impressed with how she and the Rexi Media team are helping to enhance the communication and presentation skills of executives and managers at Fortune 500 companies. In this 6-minute video interview, Danielle discusses 5 ways to make your presentation skills more effective.

This week Rexi Media is releasing an update to its already popular iPhone app, Presenter Pro, which lets you bone up on your presentation skills during your spare time (cost: $1.99). Presenter Pro focuses on 5 areas for enhancing presentation skills:

1) Body language: This covers areas such as effective gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, cultural gestures, use of passion, visualization, descriptive gestures, and others.

2) Vocal variety: How to add interest to your speaking style, how to sound more confident, how to add ingredients such as articulation, inflection, rate, pauses, changes in inflection and volume, and so on.

3) Structure: How to plan and structure your talk, how to hook listeners with an effective opening, how to manage time and enlist participation, how to end on a high note.

4) Visuals: How to think in pictures, how to marshal facts visually, how to use visual aids, use of color, balance and contrast, use of repetition, and so on.

5) The words you use: Think carefully about the contents of your talk — be human and accessible, know your stuff, relate real experiences, be persuasive, be economical and descriptive, avoid condescension and apologies.

Danielle emphasizes the importance of a strong beginning. “In the first 30 seconds of any presentation, people decide whether they’re going to tune you out,” she says. “It’s not about you, it’s about the audience,” and all too often presenters start out weakly by talking about themselves.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Rexi Media coaches on the delivery of presentations but also coaches on how to make the content of your presentation more effective. The Bay Area-based firm typically works with Fortune 500 companies, helping managers in large sales and service business divisions with an on-site visit followed by coaching them on virtual presentations and finally offering guidance through its mobile app, Presenter Pro.

Related

• Presentation Secrets for Social Communicators (chrisbrogan.com)

• Own the Crowd With Better Speaking (chrisbrogan.com)

• A Guide to Public Speaking (ismckenzie.com)

• Two important speaking tips (chrisbrogan.com)

• The 3 Keys to Good Public Speaking (CenterNetworks)

• How to Give a Great Speech, Part 1: Preparation (lifehack.org)

• More effective presentations (Ontech)

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

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We all complain about public transportation. It’s slow. It’s crowded. It’s delayed. It’s boring. Public transportation can be miserable, but for me it’s not anymore. It’s not because San Francisco MUNI and BART got any cleaner or faster, but because they provided me with some information. They told me when the next bus is coming.

Using the NextMUNI or the Transit.511.org service, I can find information about when to expect the next bus. While it may be very costly or impossible to make trains and buses move faster, by letting me know where they are and then calculating an estimated wait time, it provides me with information to plan accordingly. I could take another bus line or grab a coffee and wait somewhere a little more comfortable than a bus stop. I actually enjoy taking public transportation because it gives me a chance to listen and watch podcasts on my iPod.

Restaurants do this as well when you put in a reservation. If they say 10 minutes before you’re seated, you’ll wait. If they say an hour, you’ll move on to another restaurant. By providing that little bit of information, restaurants are delivering great customer service. They’re empowering the customer with information to make an informed decision. They’re not leaving them in the dark.

If you can’t deliver service quickly, you have to let them know when you’re going to deliver it

I recently had a technical issue with my HP computer. I contacted HP, paid $59 for tier 2 level service, and then proceeded to wait a total of TWO HOURS for a technician. I was never informed as to when I would be connected to a technician. I simply listened to the same recording repeat itself over and over for TWO HOURS.

During that time I called in on a second line trying to connect with someone on the routing system to give me some information. Nobody knew. I desperately asked them to connect me with a manager. They said they would, but didn’t. Everyone just connected me to the same line that I sat on for two hours. The battery on my phone was draining. I didn’t know if I’d have enough for my tech call once it finally connected. I went to the website and tried to connect with someone in online chat, but their chat system was completely broken.

Over that two hours I had built up an anger toward HP that I don’t think I’ve ever built up toward a brand in my life. If there was a way to stick my hand through the phone and punch someone, I would have. I was that angry.

I’ve been on phone systems before that inform you of your wait time the second they put you in queue. It’s very valuable. It allows me to make a decision as to what I’d like to do. I can stay on the line or hang up. Without timing information, you’re placing the customer in the dark. It’s like not knowing when the next bus is coming.

When I was finally connected the tech support person, he solved my issue. The service was great. But the two-hour wait irrevocably tarnished the great service.

Overbooking and canceling appointments

I’ve had similar experiences with Sears refrigerator repair, which consistently canceled appointments because they were overbooking their technicians. Three times I booked appointments that were canceled at the last minute. I waited for someone to show up who never showed up. Once the technician did show up, he was professional and did excellent work.

Sears doesn’t seem to consider the booking of technicians as part of their customer service as evidenced by their follow-up survey email, which didn’t ask a single question regarding the timeliness of the technician. They did ask me questions about his appearance, though.

Put transponders on your service

If San Francisco can make me love public transportation simply by putting transponders on their vehicles, how hard is it for you to place some type of beacon on your customer service system to just inform customers as to when they’ll receive service?David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below.

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The brilliance of Twitter lists and suggestions for making them more powerful

In my opinion Twitter is the best tool we have today to engage with others, spread a message, network, meet other likeminded people, and stay on top of the news, in any industry. The only aspect I’ve always found problematic on Twitter was the impossibility of organizing information. This is something that’s changed now with the new Twitter lists, which allow you to organize people in any sort of list you like.

So how have you been using lists? What sort of names have you been giving your lists? It’s quite interesting to see what lists people have put you under and how you have been “categorized.”  With Twitter lists, I can put people I am following into specific categories. So for example, I have created lists of “bloggers,” “social media,” “brands,” etc.

Twitter lists are going to change the way we network and socialize. No longer are we going to have a list of journalists’ emails to send a press release to but rather we’ll have a Twitter list of all these journalists with their Twitter handles. Patrick Kitano writes in his post titled Twitter Lists will Organize the social graph: “It takes an individual an hour to build a 200-person Twitter List in comparison to the days / weeks it takes to attain a 200-fan FB page. This will make Twitter Lists the prolific standard for organizing the social graph.”

Each of us is organizing his/her own “following,” or rather social graph — basically  helping twitter organize its database for them. These lists will become invaluable to us both professionally and socially. However, please note that one Twitter account can create only 20 lists and each list can only contain 500 members, so choose your lists carefully and who’s in them even more carefully. Robert Scoble wrote  an excellent post describing the limitations, bugs, impact and brilliance of Twitter lists.

The feature itself, I think, is revolutionary. The interface and usability? Well, not as great. So here is my top 10 list of suggestions for improving twitter lists:

10) Include a “Featured Lists” section each day/week for each member, based on the user’s interests/preferences

9) Ability to invite people to a private list

8 ) Ability to combine lists

7) Ability to search within specific lists

6) “Ability to build lists by search across following/followers and automatic list creation. For example, I could build an instant list of Berkeley real estate agents by searching “Berkeley real estate” across my following, and clicking a presumed button called “Automatic List” (credit: Patrick Kitano)

5) Allow special features for lists. For example: Being able to send a message to all the members of a particular list

4) Allow the ability to decide which lists will display on your sidebar

3) Allow to easily search for people while adding them to lists

2) Ability to add more than 20 lists (perhaps a premium feature?)

1) Ability to add more than 500 members to a list (another premium feature?)

As Scoble writes, what will be the impact of this brilliant feature? “You’ll follow a lot more people. Why? Because you’ll find someone who has done a really great list, say, of programmers, and you’ll add the whole list. I’ve already done this a LOT and found that Twitter has gotten way more interesting because of it.”  

Barak Hachamov, founder of My6Sense, a startup that learns users’ behavior over time and prioritizes their information streams for them, tells me: This feature is so simple and yet has the potential to have such a huge impact on how people consume and discover real-time information.

I tweeted this week: “It’s no longer about how many followers you have. Now its about how many Twitter lists you’re on.” And I stand behind what I said. It doesn’t matter anymore if 100,000 people are following you if you’re not on any one’s list. LindsayT tweeted me saying: “Why does this matter? why isn’t the question-how many friends you interact with through this social medium? quality over quantity.” So I answer LindsayT in the most personal of ways: The more lists you’re on, the more you interact with others. People put you on a list because you specifically interact and made yourself a name in that particular category.  Twitter lists are the new measurement these days. Twitter lists are awesome. We will soon enough ask ourselves how we ever lived without them.Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a consultancy specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter or leave a comment below.

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Joanna Lord on SEM and social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

This summer I had the chance to sit down, on a sun-splashed day in Santa Monica, with Joanna Lord, a colleague at Socialmedia.biz who’s a leading industry expert in search engine marketing (SEM).

Joanna is co-founder and chief marketing officer of YourJobStop (formerly TheOnlineBeat), one of the top job search services, and last week she announced plans to move to Seattle (we’ll miss you in California, Joanna!). Seattle is where she presented at Search Marketing Expo (SMX), a search-heavy conference that tackles subjects like SEM, pay-per-click (PPC) tactics and search engine optimization (SEO).

In this 9-minute video, she talks about how brands should be using Twitter to identify strategic contacts and push your content out, the use of SEM, the importance of monitoring and tracking your brand’s reputation, and some of the things that companies need to take into account in an era of social media and empowered consumers.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

A few highlights from our conversation:

• Joanna: You have to sit down as a brand and ask yourself, what do you want to get from all the time you’re going to put into social media? more traffic? more sales? rehabilitating your brand’s reputation?

• Make smart use of the tools at your disposal to build out new connections and measure your success. Backtweets, for example, lets you measure how viral your article, video or other media has gone and what is its reach. “Twitter applications have become almost a full-service suite of trackable information,” she says.

• Brands’ activity in social media is really picking up. “Now you’re seeing brands that never really had an online presence jump online and jump into social media. You’re starting to see local people embrace social media and how you can be found locally.”

• Overwhelmed by all the new tools and platforms? Join the club! “We’re all drowning a little bit” given all the fast-changing developments in the field, she says.

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• Blog Link Building 101 — Part 2: Social Bookmarking (bloggingot.com)
• Best Organic SEO Quick Tips for Startups (techstartups.com)
• Seminar Search Engine Marketing (slideshare.net)
• Is Social Media Marketing a New Requirement of SEO? (bruceclay.com)
• 12 Tips for Search Engine Optimizing your Press Release-How to (seowithfries.com)
• Google Paid Local Listings — Coming Soon to a SERP Near You! (boneheadseo.com)
• Article Marketing Vs. Pay Per Click, What To Choose? (ronmedlin.com)

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

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Xsights is a new start-up that has just come out with its Light app for the iPhone, which enables its users to bring print to life. Xsights makes it possible to transform static printed items that can be captured through the cell phone’s camera into an interactive multimedia experience. (Disclosure: Xsights is a Blonde 2.0 client)

Xsights empowers its users and lets them add a creative, personal touch to their printed items. While using Xsights’ advanced technology, users have the ability to take any printed object and connect it with links of their choice. With the free Xsights Light app, these printed images become a door to endless opportunities of content. Users can “attach” a YouTube trailer, a 3D view of a specific street via Google Maps, a Wikipedia page, a Facebook or Twitter profile or any other link to invitations, greeting cards, photos, maps or business cards.

In addition, with Xsights, users can now also view movie trailers of the top 100 movies showing in US theaters currently by taking pictures of any of the digital images in the “More Things to Capture” section on the Xsights website: http://xsights-services.com/Movies.aspx. Your iPhone will then summon up trailers, reviews and related links.

All of the images that appear in the “More Things to Capture” section are already uploaded to their servers, and so users can take a picture of any of these movie posters, games or logos when they appear in magazines, wall posters, bus stops or anywhere else outside and view their relevant clips moments later.

“See it. Capture it. Bring it to life!” is Xsights’ slogan. The Xsights solution enables users to take a picture of any pre-defined object and receive immediate relevant and interactive online data. Xsights encourages its users to imagine a future world where soon everything they see around them will be considered “clickable” ‐ from landmarks, wall posters, street signs, ads, theater listings in magazines to book covers or billboards. Clicking on the item with their mobile phone’s camera will allow users to receive additional layers of information and open up doors to rich interactive content. The technology that Xsights specializes in is known as augmented reality.

Key differentiators of Xsights when compared to its competitors: Only the Xsights application can identify minute objects — even a small icon or text. In addition, Xsights also works in any condition – even if the printed item is wet or crumpled.

Xsights has just launched its iPhone app and will soon launch its BlackBerry version. Other selected J2ME handsets will also get Xsights soon.

Download the Xsights Light application from the iTunes Apple Store here: http://appsto.re/xsightslight.

Want to create your own interactive message? Watch the video below to learn how:

Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a consultancy specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter or leave a comment below.

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Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer.

Social networks becoming more relevant to offline lives

I have been to every Web 2.0 Summit since its launch except for one (when I had a speaking commitment in Toronto), so it was good to be back at the venerable technology conference in San Francisco this week. This year’s event was not a somber affair, but it was considerably smaller in attendance: probably 50–60 percent off its high of a couple of years ago (that’s my estimate, not official). Just look at the Flickr stream: probably one-tenth the size of a couple of years ago.

Here’s my Flickr photo gallery of the summit — that’s Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, above. I briefly got to meet him backstage. (Disclosure: I was admitted with a press pass.) His deputy, Andrew McLaughlin, dissected dumber-than-dumb U.S. regulations — in effect preventing Government 2.0 from taking place — at the Web 2.0 Expo last spring. I asked Chopra about this from the floor and he talked animatedly about the progress his office is making in cutting the red tape to ribbons.

If there was a theme this year, it was this: Content is getting increasingly social. We see that through the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter), through news organizations that are struggling to find a business model (the social journalism-friendly Huffington Post is expanding its staff), and through a panpoly of new “social search” and “real-time search” results rolled out by the major search engines.

The tech press has already covered the newsworthy items coming out of the Summit (a sister event, Web 2.0 Expo, is held each spring in SF and will be held Nov. 16–19 in New York). Chief among them: announcements that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will now offer results from the real-time Web via Twitter updates (at bing.com/twitter) and, soon, public updates on Facebook (no money was exchanged), and Google will now offer a deeper set of Twitter updates, including something called a social circle (social search), due to debut early next year.

So here are some snippets of the scene at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit:

Some highlights of the Summit

• Bing got a publicity bump from its new agreement with Twitter. But Google’s Social Search (above) is exponentially more interesting. It indexes content from your social networks or social tools, such as Yelp, Gmail or one of your social networks, like Twitter. (You’ll need a Google profile and account, and it’s strictly opt in.) Look for it on Google Labs. So if you search for a good restaurant in Boston, at the bottom of your search results you’ll see recommendations from your friends.

• The Huffington Post’s social news feature — letting you follow news that your friends recommend — is proving extremely popular, said CEO Eric Hippeau.

• OK, I really do love Bing’s visual search, released a month ago. Do a search on digital cameras, narrow it down by megapixels using a slider, choose an optical zoom of over 10x, and bingo! See a handful of good choices. “It changes the way you do search by pulling that data to you,” a Microsoft rep said.

• Newest interesting site to cross my radar: Answers.com. It’s already one of the largest sites on the Web on the basis of its simplicity. Ask a question, or enter a phrase, and get an answer. I thought I’d trip it up by asking Who is the president of Mauritania, but it spit back this. Nice.

• Aardvark, at vark.com, is another search start-up, but with this twist: It will comb the most knowledgeable people in your social networks to come up with an answer (“Tap the knowledge of people in your network!”). Personally, I wouldn’t want to impose on my friends by submitting dozens of search queries a day (as I do on Google), but for an offbeat recommendation, this could work. Aardvark founder Max Ventilla says 90 percent of all queries are answered, and 50 percent of all queries are answered within 5 minutes.

• Audioboo.fm, an iPhone audio blogging app, launched a week ago, consultant Amy Webb told me. Worth a look. Peter Guber talks about monetizing content.

• The climb back to respectability for MySpace is a long one. John Battelle polled the large audience: How many are on MySpace? About 10 percent shot up their hands? Facebook? Nearly 100 percent.

• Facebook stats: 45 million status updates per day from 30 million individuals. Users spend 8 billion minutes on the site every day. Over 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week. Over 2 billion photos are uploaded each month, with a total of over 20 billion photos stored on facebook.com.

• MySpace is launching a music aggregator and player. Think Hulu for music videos. Try it here.

• Stats on Guitar Hero: 40 million units sold in five years, making it the sixth most popular game sold in history.

• Handheld devices like the Kindle “will be the next great platform of innovation for us,” said Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president, digital operations for The New York Times Company. About one-quarter of the Web 2.0 Summit audience owns a Kindle, by a show of hands.

• Nisenholtz, smartly, on the business woes of news organizations: “You have to innovate your way out of it.” And: “By 1998, anyone with a brain could see that classifieds were history. It’s not Craig Newmark’s fault.” And: “Nobody has a right to exist in business. It’s that simple.”

• My sympathies go out to Carly Fiorina, recovering from breast cancer. If she runs for the U.S. Senate, though, I hope she gets squashed like a fruitfly.

Related

• Google launches social search (Telegraph UK)

• CNET coverage of the Summit

• Web 2.0 Summit: Fed CTO Talks Healthcare IT (Information Week)

• Media Brawl at Web 2.0 (Contentinople)

• Web 2.0: Facebook’s challenges in scaling to 300 million users (Digital Beat)

• 2006 Web 2.0 Summit: Jason Calacanis on social news (Socialmedia.biz)

• Coverage of Web 2.0 Summit 2006 (Socialmedia.biz)

• Web 2.0 Summit 2008 Day 3: Political roundtable, Al Gore (Socialmedia.biz)

• Day 2 of Web 2.0 Summit 2008: GoodGuide and Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• Web 2.0 Summit 2008 Day 1: Google.org (Socialmedia.biz)

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

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Anthony Edwards of “ER” fame did his first tweet — to raise funds for the first children’s pediatric training hospital in Africa.

Bloggers, journalism, celebrities and what the future holds

There was a little bit of a SXSW vibe at the just-ended Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas — a communal feeling where the goings-on in the sessions (on the whole, consistently engaging) were overshadowed by the face time and first-time encounters between longtime Twitter friends. To be sure, BlogWorld is a smaller affair than SouthBy — one official told me 1,500 people turned out for the Causes/Activism track on Thursday, 5,000 for the next two days — but from my vantage point, it seems that the social media phenomenon has rejuvenated ones of the world’s oldest and largest new media gatherings.

Twitter was front and center throughout the affair, both on screen — where rolling tweets of each session’s hashtags were displayed (though not consistently) — and as a way for conference-goers to figure out evening social plans. And cameras and recorders were everwhere — here’s my Flickr set of BlogWorld.

Below is a recap of the highlights in my field of vision (see after the jump). In addition, I just posted 8 tips for raising funds online — a recap of the Tools for Nonprofits panel that I moderated at Blogworld — over at our sister site, Socialbrite.org.

Journalists vs. bloggers: Can we please move on?

As regular readers know, I’ve been blogging about journalism, blogging, and the need for journalists and bloggers to love each other and use the best elements of both worlds since 2001, when I started this blog (then called New Media Musings). http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=101042 See, for example, Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other in Harvard’s Nieman Reports in Fall 2003.

So it’s now irritating, and not merely tiresome, to attend a new media conference where too many of the sessions veered into hostility toward traditional news organizations. The audience questions to and reaction to CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon (below), was a case in point.

Why should bloggers want to work with CNN? Lemon should have more artfully worded his reply — “The plain truth is that my platform is bigger than your platform” — but, with the exception of a few outliers like iJustine or cross-over Twitter celebrities, that’s still true. It’s not about CNN, it’s about reach and bringing value to more people.

The notion that crowdsourced amateur journalism can supplant professional journalism, and actually do a better job — which many in the audience truly believe — is not only ludicrous but potentially dangerous to our democratic institutions. Journalism that ferrets out corruption, that takes the pulse of a community, that sheds a light on international events is hard work, something that the crowd tends to avoid. Just ask anyone toiling in overworked, understaffed independent journalism publications like Spot.us, AliveinBaghdad, Pro Publica, or the just-launched Oakland Local.

Similarly, I’ve finally found a fundamental disagreement with my friend, colleague and fellow Traveling Geek Robert Scoble. I tweeted my dismay at the bottom-line premise of his panel, How Social Media Is Changing the Definition of News: that news sites should pass along rumors and second-hand reports without fact-checking them. “The old world was i fact-checked before I published, in this new world i can correct it after the fact,” Scoble said.

Immediately after the panel, he cited TMZ’s early report on the death of Michael Jackson and the fact that no one remembers who reported it second. “It’s over. It’s over,” he told me, referring to journalism’s authentication function.

Well, no.

A rumor can circle the globe before the truth can put on its pants, and we’ve already seen examples of discredited reports cascading across our social networks (Twitter, Facebook, email) from people who should know better. (Snopes is a good place to start to fact-check rumors.) It’s a trend that will only get progressively worse in the years to come, and readers need a place to go for separating truth from rumor. I’ve long advocated that news organizations implement a widget-like tool to report on what trusted news outlets have reported, what second-hand sources have reported, and what are flat-out lies, so perhaps Robert and I are on the same page on this. But I’ve seen few implementations of this approach.

There is, to be sure, a growing tendency among the Twitterati and young people to embrace all things real-time and dismiss the hard work involved in actually picking up a phone to find out if something is true or not before passing it along. Passing along a rumor isn’t journalism, it’s what Matt Drudge usually does. Vetting a secondary report — picking up that phone — isn’t as sexy or easy as tweeting “Have no idea if this is true or not but …”

Still, fact checking will always remain a fundamental part of news reporting — whether you’re a professional journalist or a blogger looking to maintain your reputation.

Note: At Friendfeed, Robert says I misconstrued his comments.

Highlights from BlogWorld Expo

I haven’t had a chance to sort through my three days of note-taking, but here are a few snippets:

• It was great to meet Anthony Edwards, star of “ER,” after his general session. (I got several nice shots of him in my Flickr set.) We talked for a bit about how we might be able to apply social media to advance his new cause: Shoe For Africa. He did his first-ever tweet on stage — @anthonyedwards4 touting the #shoeforafrica hashtag. (Nicely done, sir!)

• Wisdom from Anthony Edwards: “As we communicate in this medium, let’s do it as if we’re seeing each other face to face. … Don’t do it with just your thumbs. Do it face to face, person to person.” That received a round of applause.

• Wisdom from Chris Brogan: “Amazing difference between building an audience and building a community. An audience will watch you fall on a sword, a community will fall on a sword for you.” I may add that to my Facebook favorite quotes.

• More Brogan, who spoke a lot about finding the heart in social media: “It’s OK to let a blog die. It’s not a kitten.” … “Tell stories. Take your ideas and make them small and compact and portable.” … “Build armies, make superfriends, equip and embed them.”

• Heard from the folks running the Chicago Tribune’s new network of Chicago area bloggers called ChicagoNow. A praiseworthy effort, with 115 local blogs, 10,000 registered users and 3.2 million page views per month. Here’s why the Tribune launched ChicagoNow.

• Cameron Sinclair: “Don’t spend your life running after Ashton Kutcher” for a social media campaign. Any fleeting bump of interest in getting a celebrity endorsement (if it’s not a sustained effort) will quickly fade.

• Hugh Hewitt on the journalism education program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism: “totally irrelevant.” I suspect he’s right.

• Ted Murphy, founder of Izea (formerly Pay Per Post): “The FTC is saying, Value is value. Whether you’re receiving product or cash, you have to disclose it.”

• Tim Sanders was quoted often: “Love is the killer app.” And good to see the #beatcancer hashtag so prominently featured on Twitter and CNN over the weekend.

• I love everything about Leo Laporte. But a keynote that says “Podcasting is dead” and “We are all now the media, congratulations!” needs some work.

• The Huffington Post surpassed the Washington Post in traffic on Thursday, Robert Scoble reported.

• One word for Thursday night’s dinner at the Italian restaurant Piero with some luminaries from the social good movement: Wow.

• There were some additional outstanding presentations, including SEO/SEM and by Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) on where enterprise trends and where social media is taking us. I’ll be referencing and incorporating those into future blog posts here on Socialmedia.biz.

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

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Dia de Los Muertos dancers, photo by Kwan Booth

Today, after months of planning and programming, a new community news site went live: Oakland Local. And while there are now thousands of hyperlocal, city– or region-focused citizen media sites around the world, Oakland Local is one of the few that offers a blend of nonprofit underpinnings with a staff of independent, professionally trained journalists.

My friend Susan Mernit — we’re two of the founders of the Public Media Collaborative — is the founder of the community news and information hub, which she describes as “a site for Oakland focusing on social justice issues, including climate change, air quality, food access, arts as activism, and identity, race and ethnicity.”

Susan adds: “Oakland Local is launching in partnership with 35 local nonprofit, neighborhood and community organizations. We combine postings of their news and information with blogging and with reported stories from a top quality news team (Susan Mernit, Amy Gahran, Kamika Dunlap, Kwan Booth, Ryan Van Lenning and others). We are media partners and collaborators with Spot.us, Newsdesk.org, The Center for Investigative Reporting, New America Media, Endless Canvas, Youth Rising, Youth Radio and Youth Outlook. Our site offers forums, a directory of 320 local nonprofits and a blog directory of 180 active local bloggers.”

The site’s launch was financed with a New Voices grant from J-Lab, funded by The Knight Foundation, which has been leading the charge to find innovative business models for news enterprises around the country. (Disclosure: I received a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007.) See the site’s About page for more info about the site’s mission.

Follow @oaklandlocal on Twitter. Its Facebook fan page is here.

Oakland Local holds promise as a template for other community-focused ventures. I’ll be watching the site’s progress in the coming weeks and months, and hope you will, too.

Cross-posted to Socialbrite.org.

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

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