Posted by Joseph Thornley on July 13th, 2010 4 Comments
Recently, Terry Fallis found both of his novels – the Leacock Award winning The Best Laid Plans and the soon to be published The High Road – in the top five of the iTunes Literature podcasts. In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Dave Fleet and I talk with Terry about how he and his publisher, McClelland & Stewart, are using social media to find and cultivate a fan base for Terry’s novels.
Also up for discussion this week: Social media adoption still isn’t universal among communicators.
Do you think social media is just a niche expertise or should it be a core skill set for all professional communicators?
Posted by Joseph Thornley on June 15th, 2010 3 Comments
It’s conference season. And we’ve all gone to conferences that we loved – and conferences that we hated.
In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I discuss what makes a good conference experience – and what can ruin a conference.
One good idea and I’m happy
I don’t just attend conferences because I love Las Vegas hotels (I don’t) or seaside resorts (I do.) I take time out of our schedules for much more practical and worthwhile reasons. I want to hear from leading edge thinkers and network with others who share common interests.
I’m happy if one simple need is met: I want at least one good new idea from each speaker. If I get that, the conference is worthwhile. If not, I’ll exercise the law of two feet and head out to do some work.
So, I’m easy to please. Give me great content and I’m a happy camper.
My personal hit list
Now to the other side. Things that detract from the conference experience. As a frequent conference attendee, there are some things that really bug me.
1) The conference within a conference. By invitation-only dinners and get aways for speakers and sponsors that are obvious to paying participants. We pay good money for a conference. We don’t want to feel like second class participants.
2) The conference with an unstated agenda. The worst of these are conferences that bring business together with government. You can get the feeling that you’re merely a prop in someone else’s GR campaign.
3) Panellists who think that they’ve given value merely by showing up. Conferences like SxSW which use a panel picker have seen a real slide in the quality of many panels, as a noticeable number of panelists seem to place their greatest effort into campaigning to be selected, not in preparing their presentations.
4) The biggest annoyance of all: Product pitches from sponsors who become speakers. When I speak, I rarely mention my company name. I’m there to educate, not to do a product pitch from the stage. And I don’t expect others to abuse their time on the stage.
And what about you?
What makes a conference a good experience for you?
What are the things that detract from the conference-going experience?
Eqentia is positioning itself as a team-based knowledge dashboard that can be managed by one or two users, freeing others from the need to set up and refine searches. William hopes that managers will turn to it each day to answer the question, “What’s new that I need to know about?”
Eqentia’s text mining engine promises to deliver content to users in near realtime, providing them with an up to the minute picture of conversations and references to their brands and issues of interest.
William sees Eqentia becoming a productivity tool for medium and large enterprises. Initially, power users can curate the content to ensure that the highest relevance and most valuable content is featured, saving time and effort for the rest of the team. Once the principal user has set up the tool and refined the settings so that it focuses on the company’s specific interests, other team members will have access to the data without the need to manage the sources, relevancies and advanced filters and settings that make all of this possible.
Eqentia will be most attractive to teams that have both power users and executives who don’t care about how to use the tool, but just want to see its output. The power users can publish the information in user-friendly form for the end users – via email, Twitter, RSS feeds, or by giving end users access to individual topics.
Unlike many other social media tools that focus on providing users with the ability to build folksonomies by applying multiple tags, Eqentia incorporates predefined taxonomies to standardize searches and make it easy for end users to find the same data set with a simple search.
Still to come in Eqentia’s development – a comprehensive approach to social media metrics.
The company has some potential client deals in the works and hopes to be able to begin to announce these in the near future.
Eqentia has been seed funded by Extreme Venture Partners, who also funded Bump Top, which was recently acquired by Google. William says that he had the funding to carry on with the development of the product and to explore its marketing potential.
Have you tried Eqentia? What are your thoughts about it?
OK. OK. The iPad is selling like hotcakes. But I still think that Steve Jobs has made a mistake with the product by limiting its usefulness for content creation. Dave Fleet thinks that “Steve Jobs has always done – what Steve Jobs wants to do.” Terry doesn’t see it as a mistake and expects that Apple will sell a “whack of them.” I think that the iPad takes us back to the era of creators and consumers. And I hope that competitors will push Apple to do better.
Also, after four years and 200 episodes of Inside PR, Terry Fallis and David Jones have given up podcasting. Martin Waxman will carry on with new co-hosts. Why did Terry quit? Partly fatigue. But also a sense that the show needs to be refreshed, that it will benefit from an infusion of new ideas.
We also talk about the changes to the longest running PR podcast – For Immediate Release – as Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson announced that they’ve cut back from two shows a week to a weekly podcast. FIR is a must listen for Terry, Dave and I and we’re glad that Shel and Neville are carrying on.
In this week’s episode, Jeremy talks with Terry about the South by SouthWest Interactive conference (SxSW) in Austin and what has drawn Jeremy to attend 7 times in the past 10 years. And for Jeremy, it’s the open culture of the conference – the friendliness of people and the fact that the meetings and encounters in the hallways can be much better than what takes place in the formal sessions.
You’ll hear them talk about the fact that I too would be at SxSW. Well, it didn’t happen. The night before I was supposed to leave, I spilled a glass of wine on my computer and I had to head home to Ottawa to meet the “man from Dell.” He showed up in my office Friday with a new mother board, touchpad, screen and keyboard (yes, the Complete Care insurance was worth every penny I paid for it.) But if you’ve ever tried to get a last minute flight to Austin during SxSW, you’d know why I never made it there. Having missed my originally scheduled flight, I was out of luck.
One more thing. A big thank you to Mike Edgell for recording and editing this week’s episode. Although he’s on the road the entire week for a video shoot, Mike found the extra time to produce Social Mediators. Thanks Mike for service above and beyond.
Posted by Joseph Thornley on March 9th, 2010 3 Comments
In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I talk about government and social media as well as the measurement of sentiment in social media.
Terry suggests that government departments seem to be lagging government agencies, with their narrower focus and specific mandates. Government has found it difficult to leave shed the command and control approach to management. And this holds them back from engaging in the give and take of social media. Dave offers, “Social media is really built on trust and that’s something that is lacking in government.” Terry adds, “Government often moves in geological time and it’s hard to move into social media in that environment.”
We also talk about machine measurement of sentiment in social media. Dave feels that the tools aren’t up to scratch. He offers props to the approach taken by Radian6, who offer automated sentiment measurement, but counsel that it’s just a starting point and that most organizations will want to add a layer of human review to any critical analyses.
We conclude the episode with the idea of running a comparative test of the automated sentiment solutions offered by Radian6 and Sysomos.
Organizations and people mentioned in this episode:
Over 900 people attended PodCamp Toronto. It has become a huge event on the annual calendar. Dave Fleet talks about how Brad Buset, Miranda McCurlie and Dave Bradfield highlighted privacy and the impact of what we share online. We talk about learning from personal experience and the importance of using common sense. Of course, no discussion of this would be complete without reference to Please Rob Me. Dave bottom lines the discussion, “Be careful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be out there.”
Terry, David Jones and Martin Waxman also recorded two episodes of the InsidePR podcast at PodCamp. These should be posted this week and next.
All three of us participated as Mentors in Personal Brand Camp. We all were struck by how the students were struggling with the concept. We advised them to think of their online brand as an expression of who they really are. Not some artificial contrivance. I argue that people should try to find their passion and then to share their views. Everyone has something unique and special to say about the things they are passionate about. Picking up a can of Pepsi, Terry suggested that ” This is a brand. You are a person.” and urged that their personal brand “needs to revealed, not manufactured.”
Posted by Joseph Thornley on February 22nd, 2010 2 Comments
In this week’s Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I talk about corporate online communications polices and then delve into the case of the Toronto Transit Commission’s handling of their social media crisis.
Following my post of the new Thornley Fallis Online Communcations Policy, I received an unusual spike of traffic on ProPR. Over 1,300 pageviews on a Sunday, which is normally my lowest traffic day, followed by an increase the next day to over 1,500 pageviews. This, compared to the couple hundred pageviews on an average day. When I checked my Google Analytics, I saw the source of the traffic: MetaFilter. My post was the subject of a pretty heated discussion, focusing especially on my admonition to employees to be mindful that
Each of us represents the company to the world and the character of the company is defined by our beliefs and actions. We must be mindful of this when participating in social media and any kind of online communications.
You may be active in social media on your own account. That’s good. But please remember that whether you are on your own time or company time, you’re still a member of our team. And the judgment you exercise on your own time reflects on the judgment you exercise at work. There’s only one you – at play and at work.
Terry and Dave weigh in with their own view about this in our Social Mediators discussion. Dave suggests that guidelines and policies need to be closely tied to the prevailing company culture. He likens social media guidelines to a “safety net.” Terry suggest that it goes both ways. If you do something that reflects negatively upon your employer, it most likely also reflects negatively on you as an individual. “Once something bad happens”, adds Dave, “it’s like the toothpaste is already out of the tube.”
The TTC found itself facing a series of citizen criticism that started with a picture of a subway ticket taker asleep on the job and a bud driver who stopped his bus mid-trip for a coffee break. Management sent an email to employees suggesting that “you and you alone are responsible for your actions” and the employees fired back at the public. The damage has been done. We discuss whether it’s too late for the TTC to recover.
Each week, Joseph Thornley, Terry Fallis and Dave Fleet talk about social media, ubiquitous connectivity and their impact on communication, organizations and society.
Each week, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I will talk about social media, ubiquitous connectivity and their impact on communication, organizations and society. We’re always on, always connected. How are we taking advantage of the new capablities that gives us? And how is that affecting the way we relate to one another and how we organize around common interests? Finally, what does that mean for traditional organizations – companies, cause-based groups and government?
In this first episode, we talk about the concept of personal brand. Terry, David and I will be serving as mentors at the upcoming Personal Brand Camp 2 that Michael Cayley is organizing for the Humber College social media students. So, we talk about some of the issues relating to personal branding and our concern that young people not build an artificial brand online, but instead make sure that their personal brand reflects the same person they’d see when they look in the mirror – their real self.
We also talk about how Thornley Fallis’ new Online Communications Policy guides our employees to understand that what they do in their private online spaces reflects on the judgment they exercise in the workplace and, by extension, on the company.
You can watch the podcast here or subscribe to the RSS feed directly on the Social Mediators Website.
After you’ve watched the episode, please leave a comment. Let me know what you think of it. What topics would you like us to cover in the future? What guests would you like us to interview?
You can leave a written comment below or a webcam comment on the Social Mediators video blog.
Posted by Joseph Thornley on January 26th, 2010 9 Comments
We’re just about ready to launch the Social Mediators video podcast. Last week, I posted some images of different settings we’d tried.
Today, we have the opening sequence ready to go.
Each week, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I will get together to talk about the convergence of our online and real world lives and the impact of social media on community, communications and society. Yes, we’ll talk about technology. But technology is only the jumping off point for our real interest. How are new technologies and social media developments affecting the way that people relate to one another, shaping our expectations of institutions and removing the barriers to collective action?
We hope that you’ll subscribe to the feed and join our conversation.
About
Joseph Thornley is CEO of Thornley Fallis. Thornley Fallis helps companies and organizations build relationships with customers, clients and stakeholders by integrating social media with public relations, creative design and word of mouth communications.
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