Ustream: The future of communication

I am becoming a huge fan of streaming my thoughts with various technologies and will be mainly updating this blog via embeds.

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Micropodcast: Barcamp 2010

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Micropodcast: iPhone Application Development and CU’s

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Micropodcast: Twitter and Autoresponders

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Micropodcast: Trading Services

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Silicon Valley Tweet Up or Shut Up – 2.0

On August 26th at the Hotel Valencia in San Jose at the Silicon Valley Tweet Up 2.0, I had the opportunity to socialize with some of the great thinkers in Social Media – next time I am bringing my mobile podcasting gear!

Some of the cool conversations I had were with some really cool Cisco Systems folks that discussed the topic of Social Media and reputation management in regards to employment.

The story goes like this…

A prospective employee of Cisco “tweeted out”:

“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

To which a manager at Cisco who instantly saw the Tweet via an alert replied:

“Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

It instantly went viral throughout Cisco and the web and needless to say there was no fatty paycheck to be had.

The offending tweeter will sport the Cisco Fatty moniker for quite sometime.

The folks at Cisco were big proponents of Social Media and the discussions were awesome!

Here is a video from the event:

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From Here to Tweet-ternity

I am such a huge fan of the conversations happening in the Credit Union Social Media Twitter-cosm that I literally walk around with my iPhone running the TweetDeck application faithfully churning out the tweets of the people I follow.

It is a lonely addiction.

There is no enclosed wifi, hotspot, bus-shelter type structure located outside of the offices for the Twitter addicts like myself to “drag” on the electronically fueled devices for communications from our friends in the industry.

Nope.

Those of you that are allowed to access Twitter from behind your corporate network undoubtedly enjoy the creature comforts of a large monitor screen to view and compose your Tweets.

In contrast, the “Guerilla Tweeters in the Mist” like myself must not only confine the conversation to 140 characters, but also do it discretely, and often mistakenly Reply to something we meant to Direct Message or worse yet, incorrectly link to or misspell something due to our genetically inferior “Twitter Thumbs.”

Can you imagine what our descendants would look like if Darwinism went into full effect and the hands of our relatives became these tiny stylus-like crab fingers because it was deemed a necessary trait for “survival of the fittest.”

So if my future offspring end up with mutated hands and fingers, I am going to blame some these folks I like to follow on Twitter:

• @mmpartee Morris Partee – Great speaker and Web 2.0 genius (blog, website).
• @Visible_Banking Christophe Langlois -Self-professed frenchman who lives in London, loves the US, passionate about social media & online advocacy in Finance, tracking 1,000+ initiatives in 30+ countries (blog).
• @SonyaJMills Sonya Mills – Community Manager for Continuity Engine and super smart – I dig her tweets! (website)
• @spurdave David Svet - Marketer with great links to everything social media – I always find something valuable to Retweet (website).
• @CurrencyTim Tim McAlpine – True CU innovator and brilliant (blog).

Pay it forward and link to some of your favorite Twitter Friends on your respective blogs and #FollowFriday on Twitter and oh yeah, join my future relatives for Sushi – they’ll be using their fingers

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What’s Your Social Mojo?

Head over to the Yahoo’s Know Your Mojo site and analyze your Twitter persona.  The site is obviously a promotion for Yahoo’s new homepage but be forewarned,  you may or may not like the outcome.

If you protect your updates as I do, it will come back with an “oops!..” message, but you can still have hours of fun entering in the usernames of your favorite Twitter friends.

Here are the possible results:

• Headliner – You’re the star of the Twitterverse, have tons of followers, and have retweets the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Perez Hilton
• Crowd Pleaser – You use lots of hashtags and are in on all the hot conversations
• Cheerleader – Retweeting is how you roll
• B.F.F. – Your volume of @replies makes you everybody’s best bud
• Party Animal – With so many followers, you’re the life of the party
• Private Eye – Like any good investigator, you’re following a boatload of people
• Concierge – You live for links and sending people to the best stuff
• Word Whiz – You’re a natural wordsmith and make the most of your 140 characters
• Lone Wolf – You’re more of a low-profile type (some might even accuse you of lurking)
• Name Dropper – You use lots of @names when you tweet
• Matchmaker – You pass along lots of URLs to make sure everyone’s connected
• Wall Flower – You don’t tweet much but you’re still in on the party
• Novelist – You have a lot to say and tweet with a lot of characters to prove it
• Shadow – You follow lots of people like a good shadow would
• Scenester – If there’s a hashtag conversation happening, you’re there
• Tweethead – Your high number of retweets shows you like to spread the good stuff

Check it out!

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Fake Social Media Marketing Experts

I am growing very tired of  the Fake Social Media Marketing Experts out there who are using social media buzzwords in blatant self-promotional pieces – either online, in the press or at every opportunity someone brings up the subject.

Am I alone here?

So how can you spot the “Fugazzi?”

First of all, this so called expert will start talking about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to every organization or person that will listen to them – but this is far as they go.

The will claim that they are “deep into social media” and yes, they may have a Facebook profile with their professional headshot (ick!) and may have a few lost relatives as friends (maybe a high school or college friend as well) – but their profile will be most likely broadcasting their age! <blink> <blink>

As deep as they claim to be into social media, they haven’t done one very essential thing – they haven’t spent the time to participate in the conversations that make up the very essence of this truly powerful medium.

We know who the experts are – we’ve followed them for years and talked with them informally through blogs, meetups, BarCamps, and yes, Twitter.

The “Fake” will try to use other crafty ways to steal ideas and presentations and write them off as their own and may even try to attend online webinars on the subject and regurgitate the material at us like they had written it.

They’ll talk about blogs but if you ask them what platform they prefer or what their favorite plugin is – you’ll get the deer in the headlights look.

I could go on – anyone else like to pick this conversation up?

Please comment freely!

Maybe we should start something like, “You Know They Are A Social Media Marketing Expert Fake When…”

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