From the monthly archives:

September 2008

Here’s To Knowing Your Audience

by Jason Falls · September 30, 2008

The first rule of communications, and thus the first rule of social media, is to know your audience. While I can draw anecdotal conclusions about you from comments, reaction, in-bound links and more, I don’t really have a whole lot of information about you.

Because I’m going through the thought process of a reorganization and redesign of Social Media Explorer, I’d like to zero in on you and your expectations of the content you find here. Feel free to offer as much or as little as you’d like in the comments, but please take a moment to answer this question so I can get a better understanding of what type of content we should focus on:

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11 comments

Advice For Social Media Consultants: Escape The Echo Chamber

by Jason Falls · September 29, 2008

As much fun as I had at Blog World & New Media Expo last weekend, I came away thinking I was talking to the wrong audience. Not that the people who took the time to attend the panels on which I spoke didn’t energize me, or that I didn’t serve as a valid speaker for what they were hoping to explore or learn, but blogging (read: “Social Media”) conferences, to a degree, are a bit of an echo chamber. A bunch of social media folks got together to yuck it up about how social media is cool and, “here’s how I do it … how do you do it?” Yes, some new to the game learn a good bit. Yes, we challenge each other with some critical thinking and feedback, but we’re essentially selling snake oil to the snake oil industry.

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140 comments

Weekend Fun With Sarah East And The PopCrunch Show

by Jason Falls · September 27, 2008

We spend a good deal of time talking very seriously about social media, the social web and how businesses and individuals can use it here at Social Media Explorer. But the core of social media for a lot of people is fun. PopCrunch.com is one of the most well-trafficked and well loved celebrity gossip blogs on the Internet. It’s popularity has grown at an accelerated rate since the site added a web-TV element in The PopCrunch Show, an edge-pushing, bawdy take on weekly celebrity news featuring the lovely Sarah East. Sarah makes distasteful humor digestible because you don’t expect those kind of punch lines out of such a sweet looking lady.

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2 comments

Will Social Media Change the Political Process? Has It Already?

by Kat French · September 26, 2008

Kat wrote this post.  Just so you don’t think Jason is referring to himself as a “foolish woman” three paragraphs down.   

On this day in 1960, the first televised debate between presidential candidates aired, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.  

At the time of this writing, it’s still up in the air whether or not there will be a similar debate between the current presidential candidates today. 

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12 comments

Talking Downloadable Media And Podcasting With Susan Bratton

by Jason Falls · September 25, 2008

Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media and I caught up at Blog World & New Media Expo last weekend. She was there promoting the Association for Downloadable Media of which she is vice-chair. It is a professional organization working to solidify advertising standards for downloadable media like podcasts, web-TV shows and the like. We spent a few minutes chatting for an episode of SME-TV.

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0 comments

New Book On Blogging Pushing Ethical Standards For Bloggers

by Jason Falls · September 24, 2008

When One Nation Under Blog by David Wallace comes out next month, the national publicity push, catchy marketing gimmicks that pose questions like, “Will bloggers decide our next president?” will probably sell a few copies during election season. With blogging still a relatively new and hot topic to the mainstream and political blogs constantly making the news because of breaking scandal stories and scoops on traditional media, people will probably buy this book.

Its framework is a call to action for bloggers to adhere to a code of ethics – 15 items Wallace suggests in the subtext of each chapter heading. They are solid proposals and serve as a nice framework for the discussion of a formalized standard for bloggers.

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36 comments

Photrade Makes Photography Contests Easy

by Jason Falls · September 22, 2008

Photrade, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based photo sharing and monetization site for photographers of all kinds, has unveiled an interesting tool for users that makes conducting online photo contests easy. With ad-supported or white-label options, Photrade’s contest creation tool is intuitive, easy to use and so easy to set up it takes about two minutes to build it.

Despite the fact I’ve known Andrew Paradeis, Photrade’s CEO, and Krista Neher, their marketing director, for almost a year, and they live just an hour or so up the road in Cincinnati, I caught up with them in Las Vegas at Blog World & New Media Expo to see the tool in action. Neher showed us how it works for an episode of SME-TV.

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14 comments

Old School Social Media Pt II: Podcasts

by Kat French · September 22, 2008

A while back, I threw out the idea that message boards are the unsexy, old school workhorses of social media.

If it’s true that message boards and forums were doing “online community” before “online community” was hot, then it’s probably equally true that podcasts were making media portable and doing “pull” marketing well before everyone went widget-crazy last year.

As a former radio announcer, and a former podcast cohost, podcasts are another older social media format that is near and dear to my heart, and one of which I think we’re only beginning to tap the potential value.

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4 comments

Putting Social Media In The Newsroom

by Jason Falls · September 21, 2008

The early feedback from my Blog World Expo panel, “Putting Social Media In The Newsroom: How Social Media Can Help Traditional Media Maintain Relevance,” is very positive. Of course, few people will tell you it stunk to your face, so we’ll see. The slide show:

Putting Social Media In The Newsroom

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bwe08 social)

My fellow panelists, Jeremy Pepper and Daniel Honigman, were the stars of the show of course. Both a brilliant guys and it was an honor to have them there as our expert opinion leaders.

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12 comments

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