Social Media Clubhouse Podcast #4
March 11, 2007
On Sunday night, our friend Giovanni Rodriguez of HubBubPR, my fiancee Kristie Wells and I headed over to the Community 2.0 reception. In the car on the way over, we discovered that Kristie is a great back seat driver (so am I) and the Red Rock is about 15-20 mins from the house. We also talked more deeply about what we are doing with Social Media Club (Giovanni as interviewer), the challenges that corporate champions face when trying to engage with community models and whether or not this whole thing can be as simple as ‘conversation’. At the end of a long day, there is some good stuff here, but I am really looking forward to the morning and some good community engagement with old friends and new peers…
Subscribe to the Social MediaCast or go to iTunes and search for Social Media Cast in the Podcast Directory.
Is SxSW going to be the death of Twitter?
March 10, 2007
Just about 6 weeks ago, I wrote a post about Twitter being a great evolution of IM, moving to EM, which I called “everywhere messaging”. Well, in the weeks since, I have come to realize it is really about EP, “everywhere publishing” - but not just publishing in the broad sense, but rather, it is a functionally restricted form of micro-blogging. If you look at my Twitter feed, you will see that this is generally how I use it.
Unfortunately, it feels like Fonzi is getting his swim trunks on, and the sharks are looking ferocious. Why would I suggest that this great channel that I have been touting for the last few weeks is about to jump the shark? Because of the amount of focus on the use of Twitter as a communications channel down at SxSW (did I mention how bummed I am that I am not there?). BTW, I am seriously asking the question of whether SxSW will be the death of Twitter? The reason being that we must cross over and bump up against barriers in order for us to realize they exist in new realms - the amount of traffic coming through Twitterific is just overwhelming and causing it to lose its’ intimacy for me.
Tonight, I came back to the Social Media Clubhouse from dinner with Kristie and Tom Foremski to see that my last 20+ Twitters were a back and forth conversation between my friends Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble about Twitter. In fact, Kristie, Tom and I were just having a conversation in the car no more then 60 minutes ago about the same problem. I already can’t keep track of the friends I really care about staying connected to with the increase in usage, and now I am feeling guilty every time someone adds me as a friend when I don’t add them in return. But I can’t add everyone - I just don’t have the extra attention to invest, and to Chris Pirillo’s point
what happens when you have 10,000 followers - and their responses get buried because you can’t reciprocate?
The thing is, the very nature of Twitter, which Kristie pointed out mirrors the addictive nature of Flickr, will lead to a natural increase in the frequency in usage, the scope of usage and the number of people using the service. In the last week, I have received at least 30 friend requests, and I am not really that well known or popular. Scoble is over 1,000 already and climbing fast. Pirillo is right, but he need not go out to 10,000 followers - Scoble is already having responses and more get buried - it has happened in his voicemail where he directs you to email, and even in email and other channels, he is always going to fight to keep up, despite all his very hard work and great intentions.
The thing about Twitter, Flickr and other similarly architected services is that we like staying in touch with the people we care about, the people we WANT to have connecttions with. Unfortunately, and as I have been saying a lot lately - Humans Don’t Scale. Dunbar was really right - I am pretty much putting the Dunbar number in the same category as Newton’s laws of gravity. It is important to note that I am not hoping for its demise - far from it. I am however wondering what can be done about those of us that care about such things in thinking about some sort of guideliness to prevent usage patterns from destroying the incredible value we find in staying connected to the people we care about most.
So what are the limits of Twitter, what are the best uses? Can we put this altogether in a wiki? Am I just crazy? Or is the usage of it morphing in ways that are really decreasing the value of the channel instead of increasing it? Is there any possibility to save Twitter from Twittering itself to death?
Mea Culpa: Occasionally, I do use the dreaded @ myfriend message myself. At this time, I want to apologize to everyone for this terrible, terrible assault on your attention. Direct messages should be sent directly - or if it was/is necessary to build upon a conversational thread, I should have made the slight additional effort to have blogged it myself on my full site. Perhaps Twitter could make a C messageID, or C myfriend feature to redirect some of this additional traffic. But honestly, I think the additional volume, the experimentation and the morphing of this great everywhere publishing must give us all pause, to rethink what works well and what doesn’t - to then start modeling the behaviour we hope to see from others…
Social Media Clubhouse Podcast #3
March 10, 2007
On our way to New Comm Forum’s last day on Friday March 9, I was joined by Debbie Weil and special guest star Tom Abate, of the San Francisco Chronicle. Howard Greenstein stayed at the clubhouse to take care of some Social Media Club business. The first three minutes or so was just fun (and funny) banter about Thursday night, and then Tom revealed his biggest insight to come from the day - that Social Media is indeed the right term to apply to the ‘greater significance’ of what is happening today. From here, the conversation dug more deeply into the transformation that is happening to the mediasphere, briefly touching on David Weinberger’s keynote. We also talked about Craigslist, and whether or not it is a ‘business’. I will let you discover the rest, which is just a terrific podcast - exactly the sort of thing I hoped we would capture in the car ride together.
Subscribe to the Social MedaCast or go to iTunes and search for Social Media Cast in the Podcast Directory.
Social Media Clubhouse Take 2 - Community 2.0 That Is
March 10, 2007
Well, this past week showed us that despite having a great place to hang out (actually an incredible clubhouse with pool table, 180″ projection home theatre and a killer backyard), that it is hard to compete with the Las Vegas strip and the lure of neon, beautiful people and the possibility of winning the big jackpot. But yes, we are having a BBQ tomorrow afternoon at the Social Media Clubhouse from 1-5pm for those people coming in for Community 2.0 - if it is 5 of us, or 50 of us does not matter, because I am going to have a great time regardless, will be beercasting and creating some videos and playing some pool (or chilling by the pool).
So if you are coming into town and want to hang out in the afternoon with some members of the Community 2.0 Community who are not at the terrific Bootcamp being lead by our good friend Deborah Schultz along with Tara Hunt and Kathleen Gilroy, stop on by!
Since we did not have time to find a sponsor, everyone can either bring some food, or you can chip in a few dollars. If you don’t have a place to stay, and are either a member or a friend, we also have a few rooms available this week that are much less expensive than most hotels and resorts in the area at only $125 per night.
We are still talking with the good folks at CMMC about whether or not we are going to hold the “Leaving Las Vegas” party on Tuesday night, so stay tuned! UPDATE: looks like this won’t be happening - too much other stuff to do and need to be awake for WED morning session.
Event RoundUp
March 9, 2007
It is another event packed month for Social Media Clubbers so make sure you note your calendars the gatherings taking place in:
- South Florida: March 14, 2007
- Boston: March 15 2007
- London: March 15, 2007
- San Francisco: March 20, 2007
- Dallas: March 27, 2007 (pending)
- New York: March 27, 2007
- Austin: March 29, 2007
- Washington, DC: March 29, 2007
- Atlanta: April 4, 2007
- Phoenix: April 12, 2007
- Boston: April 12, 2007
- London: April 19, 2007
Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver gatherings are in the works and we are looking into launching groups in Silicon Valley, Denver, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Berlin, and Toronto shortly!To get information on an existing gathering, please visit our
March 9, 2007 After a long day at New Comm Forum, Debbie Weil, Howard Greenstein and I had a nice dinner with a few other bloggers at Maggiano’s and drove back to the Clubhouse. During the drive we talked about some of the issues of the day, but largely delved into our perspectives on Second Life and briefly into David Weinberger’s most exceptional keynote. March 9, 2007 Last night’s meeting was at a new venue, a wonderful room donated by Jobing.com, with screens and projectors, and everything a presenter needs, and although we have had overflow crowds in the past, only twenty people showed up. I guess we didn’t do a good enough job of getting the word out about the change of venue. However, John Paxton of Godaddy recorded the meeting, and you can get the podcast here. It was quite an interesting discussion, as we had BusinessWire there, and Malcolm Atherton started out to give a ten minute presentation on its new alliance with PRWeb and the EON product. He was immediately interrupted, and a wide-ranging discussion ensued about how to make press releases more visible to search engines on the web. That segued into a discussion about whether people would use search engines in the future at all, with many in the room believing that search engines will be replaced by individual communities. That, in turn, led into a discussion about Twitter, and whether it was or was not useful, would or would not become mainstream, etc. It was a wonderful, lively discussion with lots of learning and networking. You might want to listen to at least part of the podcast,which was done live in the room without special equipment (and has all the plusses and minuses associated with that.) Thanks John. March 9, 2007 The idea of MySpace launching a news aggregator is hardly surprising. After all MySpace parent Newscorp is not only one of the world’s largest newspaper and TV news companies but also one of the most creative. (FoxNews changed the tone of TV news forever. I’m certain Newscorp is more comfortable than most with blog-style news that mixes information, opinion and personality.) Terry Heaton, who had the first post on MySpace News, says the service will gather stuff from websites, blogs, and members, combining Google News-style and Digg-style functionality. Om Malik offers the phrase social news. The story comes a day after an enormous thread centering around a Doc Searls’ post recirculated all the old saws about traditional vs. citizen journalism–everyone’s a reporter, its the relationship that matters, etc. Most of the conversation around the impact of Web 2.0 on news focuses on the newspaper’s role as producer of information and the impact of citizen journalism on professional journalism. That impact is real and enormous and barely hinted at by the creeping blogification of newspapers (Chris Heuer wrote about USAToday’s makeover this week). Socially-enabling national newspapers has had an impact on the way newspaper people work. A friend at The Times said that there is competition in the newsroom to be at the top of the daily “most e-mailed” list. That competition is a kind of social feedback. So to are comments (but only when editors and reporters are involved in the conversation). But social news does more than just undermine the news gathering primacy of traditional journalism. It also unwinds the aggregator function of newspapers. Ten years ago technology gave people the power to be reporters of their own lives. Today technology enables community aggregation. That’s what Digg and Technorati and del.icio.us allow–something beyond the self-selected aggregation of RSS feeds. Tagging, ranking and sharing create public hierarchical lists of information. That’s what newspaper editors used to do. The Internet is an enormous, on-going Page One meeting. Can any one aggregation service capture all that? We’ll find out. So far efforts to pull together that kind of grand unified shared aggregation haven’t lived up to the promise. Maybe MySpace News, which will have both the problems and benefits of serving a closed group of members, will show us how it can be done. Will it be to all sources of information or just those with which it cuts deals? How will it exploit it’s members input? And most of all will newspapers feel the influence? March 9, 2007 Guest post by Ronna Porter But so far, we’ve concentrated most attention on video and visual content, and gained only limited benefits in terms of communication, community and distinctiveness from sound and music when it comes to social media. Yes, podcasting is an audio medium, but how many podcasts out there are truely exploiting sound? Research shows that although 83% of all commercial communication is visual, there is a 65% chance that our mood will change when we hear a new sound (see http://www.brandsense.com). I believe we haven’t even scratched the surface in integrating great sound that supports rather than gets in the way of good communication. Involved in the Social Media Club since its creation, and an active member of the London group, I’ve offered to drive the debate on the use of sound in social media, and I’d love to include your input: For those lucky enough to be in Las Vegas – have fun and learn lots! March 8, 2007 Tonight we had a 500% increase in the number of attendees and half of the people who came along can be heard in the podcast we made! I met up with Ronna Porter (who’s going to lead our discussion group meeting next week) in the foyer of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. To show her just how easy making a podcast could be, I set up my gear and she set up the gear that she’d borrowed for the night and off we went. We talked a lot about the use of sound and music in advertising and PR and my views on podcasting. A little way in, we were joined by Lars Plougmann, whose contribution, you’ll hear, was repeatedly interrupted by his three friends ringing him to find out where we were. Sadly there aren’t as many massage parlours in this centre of cultural excellence as Chris, Howard and Debbie found in Las Vegas earlier but then they didn’t have a tango band in the background. March 8, 2007 This morning, we had a great chat for about 13 minutes on the way in to New Comm Forum from the Social Media Clubhouse. Joining me (Chris Heuer) were Howard Greenstein and Debbie Weil. The conversation covered the prevalence of massage parlors in Las Vegas, Mit Romney’s undergarments and the deeper topic of how many people hold onto old protocols instead of holding the deeper purpose and beliefs behind such protocols. For instance, some journalists hold on to the notion of print, instead of remembering that is the uncovering of the truth and communicating it widely. It should be quite entertaining, or at least I hope it is. Subscribe to the Social MedaCast or go to iTunes and search for Social Media Cast in the Podcast Directory.
Social Media Clubhouse #2
Social Media Club Phoenix
A shoutout to Dave Barnhart of Business Bloggers for volunteering to run meetings in the future.
Social Media Now: MySpace to Offer Social News
We live in audio-visual age.
SMC London Making Media
OK, so my bright idea was a little under-attended last week (yes, I was the only one to turn up) but nevertheless I did one of the things I set out to do which was to make some media.
I was the only one who’d any experience of podcasting so I showed everyone how simply the file was transferred to my laptop, edited and put through the compressor in Audacity and then exported to mp3. I wasn’t able to upload it to my podcast server while they watched as the large amounts of concrete in the National kept us disconnected from the ThamesOnline network. Ronna kept her recorder running while we did this latter part so there may be another podcast to follow! There was quite a bit of discussion about discoverability, tagging and allowing users to create the metadata they need, rather than trying to control it as a creator.
So next week we return to the 3rd Thursday discussion group indoors with beers and nibbles format but on 22nd we’ll be out and about again, this time with our video cameras teaching each other about video-blogging - watch the wiki page for details.
Social Media Clubhouse Podcast #1