As some of you know, I entered a partnership at the beginning of the year with friends who had a well-established marketing business. Together we formed ZEST Digital, a social media consultancy demystifying social media for Australian companies and executing campaigns that include podcasts, blogs, wikis and other emerging media.
I’m delighted to say we were busy from the moment I set foot in the office in North Sydney, which is why it’s taken us a while to get our website up. It is up now and that’s where I’ll be blogging — I’ve taken all of the posts from this blog over there with me, so you’ll be quite at home.
And there’s a new podcast series, too (feed here). When I’m talking to clients about social media, I want to be able to point them to case studies and there aren’t enough good ones out there. That’s why we’ve launched a series on great examples of companies using social media (whether they’re our clients or not). Please check out the ZEST Digital Social Media Case Studies Podcast and let me know what you think.
I hope you’ll move over to the [New] Social Media in Australia blog with me.
[And please excuse whatever’s happened to the formatting over here. It all went wrong when I had to upgrade WordPress to move everything over. Things are much prettier in the new space :)]
Apologies for the problems with the blog today. I’m moving it and there are some teething troubles. As soon as I can give you details of it’s new location, I will — hopefully tomorrow.
Many of us host the MP3 files of our podcasts with Libsyn. We do that because Libsyn specialises in hosting podcasts and maintaining download statistics for same. They’re so good that in March they served 70,000,000 podcast episodes (via MWG Blog).
The drawback of their being so good is that an IT department looking to save bandwidth has only to block Libsyn to prevent employees listening to many (most?) podcasts, as Shel Holtz found out when investigating why some clients couldn’t get his podcasts to play.
The point Shel makes is a great one:
Is this IT’s decision to make? Considering the number of business-oriented podcasts, it makes sense to allow employees to take advantage of the medium to improve their professional skills and, by extension, their value to the organization. I understand the potential bandwidth concerns, but IT should raise this issue in response to a decision to allow employees to get and/or listen to podcasts at work (as long as they are mostly work-related). The decision-makers at the business level can then decide whether it’s worth improving bandwidth.
This strikes me as a business decision, not an IT one.
This translates to YouTube, Flickr and other sites that an IT department not conversant with social media could decide are purely “recreational”. There are fantastic business-orientated uses of those sites.
I just received an invitation by email from Glen Frost of frocommaustralia to a Climate Change Summit. I don’t remember how I ended up on the mailing list and I wouldn’t normally have opened it but the headline caught my eye: “Al Gore Aust. Ambassador to speak at Climate Change Summit”.
I read that as eliptical for “Al Gore and Australian Ambassador” to speak, which still didn’t make much sense unless “Aust. Ambassador” was shorthand for US ambassador to Australia. I had to get some way into the email to work out that what was missing was an apostrophe: “Al Gore’s Australian Ambassador” to speak. Yes, it is his “ambassador” to the Commonwealth of Australia, Caroline Pidcock, who will be addressing the $600/head gathering. Interesting that her attendance is the subject line of the email + she is the only speaker named in the text yet she’s listed ninth in the speaking order on the website.
For those of you who also have no idea what it means to be Al Gore’s plenipotentiary on these shores, further digging reveals that Ms Pidcock is “one of only 84 Australians to be personally trained by Al Gore to deliver his presentation on climate change.”
Only 84 of them? It’s a wonder the US government makes do with but one ambassador to the commonwealth when Gore’s fielding almost a century and still considers that an “only”.
I hope not but, bless her cotton socks, she’s trying it. Hilton faces 45 days in jail for violating a 36-month probation order received after a DUI last year. The little minx was doing 70 mph in a 35 mph zone at night with her headlights off and some crazy judge thought that was beyond the pale, especially as she’d failed to meet other conditions of her parole.
Hilton’s MySpace blog shows no contrition — being rich and famous means never having to say you’re sorry, I guess — and calls the sentence an “injustice”. She makes the following plea to her legion of fans:
My friend Joshua started this petition, please help and sihn it. i LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!
NLINE PETITION CREATED TO SUPPORT PARIS HILTON
The spelling and punctuation alone warrant a 45-day sentence. The petition, however, is even better. It calls on California’s governor, The Terminator, to pardon the heiress.
If the late Former President Gerald Ford could find it in his heart to pardon the late Former President Richard Nixon after his mistake(s), we undeniably support Paris Hilton being pardoned for her honest mistake as well.
It goes on in that vein at some length. If there’s any hope for the planet, it has to have been written as a joke.
Reading through my blogs this morning, I see that Pepsi is revamping its website in the UK. The new site will include user-generated content (although not a lot, from what I saw on brief look and Laurel, who took a deeper look, is extremely unimpressed with what she’s seen).
Techcrunch reports that Europeans outnumber Americans 3-to-1 in Second Life, something Sky News can report on from its new Second Life newsroom. Neville has the details.
Virtual rape might also be something for a virtual news service to report on. For companies with an interest in Second Life, it might be time for the forward-thinkers in HR to start defining what will constitute sexual harassment in a virtual space.
And finally, not a social media issue, I grant you, but when will politicians learn that voters really, really care how much they spend on their hair? Cherie Blair charged the Labour Party £275 a day for a month (nearly £8,000) to keep her hair in shape during a general election. Now John Edwards has scandalised the US with $400 haircuts that he charged to campaign contributors.
Here in Australia, prime minister John Howard sits in the front of his chauffeur-driven car to let us know he’s just one of the people, which is nonsense of course. It does show, however, that he understands most of us can’t afford that kind of extravagance and we’re going to question how well we’re understood by someone who can (and still wants to charge it to us).
I get asked this all the time at social media presentations or – more often probably — my audience assumes that if audio is good, video must be better. It isn’t true and trust Donna Papacosta to have a podcast episode on this very topic.
Here’s the answer I give when asked:
One of the great things about podcasting is that people can listen when it suits them and that’s often in the car. They can’t watch your video while they drive.
Podcasts address the shrinking amount of time people have to read by letting them listen while they do something else. With video you have to stop and sit still — it’s the same time demand as reading.
To justify the expense, bandwidth, time and other considerations of video, you have to have great pictures. Normally it’s enough to hear what the CEO has to say, pictures of him saying it don’t add to the message.
Audio is intimate: someone is talking to you. Video isn’t intimate, it’s much more likely to feel like someone talking “at” you.
There are fewer devices able to play video on the go than there are are portable audio players.
Television has been around for 50 years and radio is still here. There’s room for both.
As some of you know, I entered a partnership at the beginning of the year with friends who had a well-established marketing business. Together we formed ZEST Digital, a social media consultancy demystifying social media for Australian companies and executing campaigns that include podcasts, blogs, wikis and other emerging media.
I hope not but, bless her cotton socks, she’s trying it. Hilton faces 45 days in jail for violating a 36-month probation order received after a DUI last year. The little minx was doing 70 mph in a 35 mph zone at night with her headlights off and some crazy judge thought that was beyond the pale, especially as she’d failed to meet other conditions of her parole.
