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New Voices of Experience: A New Comm Forum Alumni Panel

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Last year after New Comm Forum, it was crystal clear that the most popular sessions were the ones that featured case studies and people’s personal experiences. Of course, a certain amount of teaching-type panels and workshops are necessary at any conference, social media or otherwise, but once we get past the 101 level, we really want to know, what have other people done? What works? What doesn’t?

And it’s even better to hear from the people themselves, not just about them and their projects.

A common criticism of conferences is that it’s always the same speakers,  the same material. I don’t think that’s true of New Comm Forum by any stretch, however, we do have a certain number of repeat players every year because one of the first speaker pools the Society for New Communications Research draws from is its Fellows. Most of whom are great speakers who deliver new content every year.

But…. thinking about both of these dynamics — case studies and new voices — I suggested to executive director Jen McClure that we do an alumni panel at the 08 conference. Recruit speakers who had attended a previous Society event but had never spoken at one, and who had a project from the past 18 months that they would be willing to share.

New Voices of Experience, the panel that resulted from our discussions last spring, will be the Wednesday April 23rd luncheon session at New Comm Forum 08. I’ll be speaking with Doug Bardwell (Forest City Enterprises), Wendy Harman (Red Cross), Bob Siller (Altera) and Chris Turner (Christian Lifeway Resources) about what they learned and how they applied their new knowledge once they were back in the office.

I spoke with the panelists in a conference call last week and am excited about their stories.  Whether you work for a non-profit, B2B or B2C organization, there’s something for everyone. We’ll be talking about everything from social media in internal communications and lead generation to what’s involved when you are trying to introduce social media into an established culture. There will be plenty of time for questions from the floor, and we are  looking forward to an interesting conversation.

As a speaker, I have a very limited number of deeply discounted registrations. Three. If you are interested, email me. First come, first served.

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Shifting gears completely, I’ve decided to move one of the topics I occasionally talk about here to my personal/photo blog Snapshot Chronicles. Specifically, my obsession with certain science fiction television programs — currently Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood and Stargate Atlantis. I’ll still talk about sci fi here when there is a marketing, communications or social media angle. But I’m feeling the need to rant (and rave) more about the programs themselves, and that’s really content that belongs on my personal blog, not my marketing blog. So, never fear, if you are interested in my thoughts on sci fi marketing, you’ll still find them here. If you want to know why I think the PTB made a dreadful mistake in dumping Torri Higginson from Stargate or my speculation on who the final Cylon is, you’ll find that over on Snapshot Chronicles.

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Bloggers & Customer Service: Do blog complaints make a difference?

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"Conventional" social media wisdom would have it that companies need to pay attention to the blogosphere, or risk their brands. For proof, out trots the example of Jeff Jarvis and Dell Hell. Jarvis’ complaints about Dell customer service percolated up to mainstream media and are oft-cited as the impetus behind Dell’s *big* move into social media about a year ago.

Now, you may sense a certain cynical undertone in the above paragraph, and you would be right. While I absolutely believe that companies should be listening to what bloggers — their customers — say, I am regularly provided with proof that either companies aren’t listening or they are, and have no bloody idea what to say, or how to say it, when faced with blogosphere complaints, or compliments, about products and services.

My most recent proof:

Ike Pigott has been tracking the response, or lack thereof, to a post on his blog complimenting Blockbuster on its customer service. He also divined that Canon saw, but did not respond to positive comments about its products.

While I haven’t made quite such a science of it, I have written about customer service on this blog on more than one occasion. Most recently about AAA’s piss-poor performance with my flat tire before Christmas. Any word from AAA? Nope. And I’ve also mentioned my general, and unexepected,  pleasure with Verizon’s support of its cellular customers. On every occasion that I’ve had to call, I’ve been treated well. Most recently by a lovely young lady named Amy who offered a credit on something that had gone wrong before I asked. Any response from Verizon? Nope.

Not to mention my friend Mary Schmidt, whose interactions with American Airlines prove without a shadow of a doubt that the airline just doesn’t get it.

This is by far a scientific survey, which is why I am so pleased that the Society for New Communications Research is working with corporate partner Nuance to understand the extent to which bloggers think their opinions are, or are not, impacting companies. Please take the survey and let us know whether you think Corporate America is listening. SNCR is offering a special discounted registration to New Comm Forum in April for those that complete the survey. Direct link to survey here.

And that, my friends, is well worth it. There’s a great roster of speakers and opportunities to network with other communicators at New Comm Forum. I’m moderating the luncheon keynote on the first day, a panel of conference alumni coming back to tell how they applied what they learned at the conference at their organizations. More on that next week.

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Client News: Maxwell Street Documentary is doing a T-shirt giveaway at the blog Notes of the Urban Blues. It is a very cool shirt. Just tell us about your favorite Blues artist and you can be entered to win.

And please check out the new podcast Business Forward, strategic advice for small and medium businesses, that I am producing for client GuideMark.

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Everything you always wanted to know about podcasting

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Well, not really. But I launched a podcast for a client this month and in the process, have learned more about what can go wrong with a podcast than I ever thought possible.

The good news is, we’ve got no trouble coming up with guests or topics for the podcast. What has been killing me is all sorts of little technical crap. My husband and the designer who coded the blog are both quite technical and I’m no slouch either, but we were all pulling our hair out last week and this over a series of little things that just kept going wrong.

So, in the hopes of sparing you our fate, here’s what we learned.

1. Don’t use Podpress with self-hosted WordPress to burn your feed. The code for the player in the post works fine, but I could NEVER get a feed out of it. I eventually purchased FeedForAll and am burning and uploading the feed manually. The Podpress support docs were not helpful. Quite frankly, you are probably better off using Libsyn or some other podcast publishing host, but we’ve got a hosting account for the blog and can serve the files from there as well, so we chose to not do so.

2. Wait until you’ve worked out all your feed issues before submitting to Apple iTunes. Unless of course you want to understand every frakking line in the feed so you can troubleshoot it. Like I do now. Of course, if you follow the advice in number one above, you won’t end up with weird directories that break your feed like we did.  I’m sure some of this was operator error but man, it should be easier than this. The key thing to remember is: you can’t edit the directory submission to iTunes. Any changes have to be done in the feed itself.

3. Podpress and the Database Backup plugin for WordPress are incompatible. At least with my hosting set-up. They each require too much memory. So we have to do the backup manually right now. Luckily I only publish once per week. When I have time, we are going to research another player plug-in as that is all I am using Podpress for, and I’d prefer the automatic back-up.

4. When you record your podcast, if words drop out in the playback, it is due to the buffering of the sound data. If you don’t have enough memory, your podcast will sound like it was recorded by a drunk. Options: more memory, increase the page file size or record at a lower bit depth You do not want to know how long it took me to figure this out. Let’s just say the take of Marketing Tips now up on Business Forward was well-rehearsed.

5. How to do everything with podcasting by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson is a terrific resource. On Amazon.

Finally,  I still can’t figure out how to use the Noise Gate in Sound Forge. Anybody want to talk me through it? And please don’t tell me to RTFM. I’ve tried that and am still confused.

In other news, Battlestar Galactica returns with new episodes on April 4th and <spoiler alert> Carson Beckett is back on Stargate Atlantis tonight. These, my friends, are my silver linings.

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Mommy bloggers, New Comm Forum & Business Forward

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Hopefully next week, I’ll break free from the technology hell I have been in to write a bit more here.

For now, though, please check out the article I wrote for Media Bullseye, Some Advice on Reaching Out to Mommy Bloggers and my client GuideMark’s new podcast for small to medium businesses, Business Forward. Preview: next week’s episode is marketing tips from yours truly.

Also, early-bird discount for New Comm Forum in April ends tomorrow, Friday February 15th.

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I am woman, hear me speak

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“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” – Rabbi Hillel

Diversity at business, and especially social media, conferences. Still a concept more than a reality, and quite frankly, it feels like we’ve been pushing this rock uphill forever. This week, Lena West started the ball rolling again over at Lipsticking, and Jeremiah Owyang and Elisa Camahort both joined the fray. And now me.

As we all have before. More times than any of us wishes.

Read their posts. Read the comments. There are so many people speaking eloquently on this subject… again … that I don’t have much to add.

Except the following: VOTE WITH YOUR FEET.

Stop going to conferences that do not embrace diversity. And not just gender. A conference full of white faces, whether they are male or female, does not embrace our population. Online or off.

Tell the organizers why you won’t attend … sponsor … exhibit.

It will not change if we do not stop talking about it and start doing something.

For all these reasons, and many more,  I embraced BlogHer from the beginning and am so proud to be part of that community. Man or woman, I urge you to attend BlogHer Business this April in NYC and BlogHer in San Francisco in July.

One of the sessions I’m part of at BlogHer Business is a panel on "Improve this Pitch." We will be focusing on pitches to bloggers  that are ok but could stand some improvement.  No worries though, we promise to share some really bad pitches for your enjoyment as well. Including the crappiest pitch ever. Really.

I’m also doing a case study with Victoria Naffier from HP and Liz Gumbinner, Mom-101, about the blogger outreach programs for HP Photo Books last fall. 

Another conference I urge you to check out is New Comm Forum in Santa Rosa, California at the end of April. I’ll be moderating the luncheon keynote on the first day, a panel of alumni from the conference coming back to share how they used the knowledge gained at the conference in their organizations. Planning to come to New Comm? Next year, it could be you.

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