I am the mayor of NBC News Washington on Foursquare

Late Development

Foursquare testing analytics dashboard for restaurants.  Details appeared in The Next Web after surfacing in  restaurant trade publication  Nation’s Restaurant News.  Next Web US editor Alex Wilhelm posted the news on Twitter.

If Twitter’s raison d’etre is  “what are you doing?”, then location based social network apps like Gowalla and Foursquare refine that to “where are you doing it?”  And as SXSWi fast approaches, people like Robert Scoble are dubbing this years’ web-geek spring break “the location based SXSW” Until recently, I’ve been reluctant to jump into these networks, letting others find utility before I take the plunge.  When Twitter first began to percolate up in the public lexicon, many thought it was dumb, and back in 2006, I was a skeptic as well.   I’m operating under the premise that if you’re reading this, you don’t doubt Twitter’s importance.  But now, why check in throughout the day and share the geographic details of your travels with your various social networks?  What precisely is the point? Still somewhat dubious myself, I polled my Twitter network.  How important are place based networks like foursquare and gowalla to businesses and users? What are their impact on  the social web? Are they moving the dial?  My always savvy and diverse Twitter friends came up with some very interesting answers.  What unfolds is a tale of risk, reward, and redemption.

Redemption – Opportunites for Consumers and Business with Brand Loyalty Programs.

The social storefront.

As Gowalla investor Chris Sacca pointed out to me, these apps are a big deal to brands.

sacca @newmediajim With @gowalla we’ve seen that brands are thrilled an app can finally show them if consumers show up somewhere. That’s huge.

Brand loyalty programs are a no-brainer for these mobile social network apps.  Remember those cards you’d get from your favorite coffee shop?  They’d punch or stamp the back, and after a certain number of visits you’d get a free coffee.  Now with these apps, the business gets your repeat traffic, plus the added benefit of their brand being promoted and amplified to your networks.  Win Win.

Web strategist Nate Riggs calls this a “low hanging fruit” strategy, emphasizing how this one just stares you in the face.

Serious potential falls into the lap of small businesses who are motivated (and brave enough) to begin experimenting with how they can utilize the application to tap into their mavens – the loyal customers who visit often and tell their real friends about the experience.

He outlines a strategy to drive customer retention, foot traffic, and return customers here – simple and useful.

Caitlin Thayer of the Mark Twain House and Museum plans on starting a Foursquare effort for the historic landmark.

CTinCT @newmediajim I’m just starting to promote/push @foursquare usage with @TwainHouse visitors. Excited about the possibilties!

CTinCT @newmediajim encouraging visitors to check in, I have a sign at the front desk with that, Twitter name and FB link. Thinking now about..

CTinCT @newmediajim ..giving free admission to whoever is the Mayor, or something similar. Haven’t advertised that yet. Great opp for brand recog.

Reward – You Have to Play to Win

The social gaming aspect of apps like foursquare,  silly to me at first, is a narcotic to me now.  I’m currently the mayor of nine venues on Foursquare – my jewel in the crown – my “mayor of the White House” crown.  Now, while no executive powers confer with this mayorship, it sure is a nice little feather in the cap.  Of course, now that it’s public that I’m the mayor, I’m sure to be ousted.  Incidentally, I ousted @Daroff from the White House.  He and I are now locked in mortal combat to be mayor of our local Starbucks.  Game on!

But frankly, people lose interest in games.  These platforms will only retain users if brands implement reward redemption programs for their mobile, networked consumers.

Risk – Are We Opting Out of Privacy and Safety?

In an interview with Gigaom’s Liz Gannes, Google’s engineering director David Glazer posits “Everything is better when it knows who I am,” – which immediately brings to mind this scene from Minority Report.

A potential, and even more nefarious risk of oversharing and geotagging is tech savvy, networked crooks.  By now, most of us who use Foursquare and Gowalla have been hipped to the Rob Me Now web site.

Moving Forward

Still, all of this is just an indicator of the explosive growth of the mobile web and apps that support it.  While everybody was crowing about Facebook’s patent of their news feed, there was not nearly as much fanfare for Google’s patent on location based advertising.  Gowalla and Foursquare are the two new shiny players in this space.  Brightkite has been around for a while and is currently developing a universal, location based checkin app that will allow you to update all three platforms.  Here’s how they shape up traffic-wise.

Ultimately, as with Twitter, success will be directly linked to mainstream adoption, which as in Twitter’s case required mainstream press, celebrity adoption and the like.  We’ll see if this years SXSWi conference will give these apps a bump.

So is this the time for these location based social networks to take off?  What do you think?

Further Reading

How Local Businesses Can Benefit From Mobile Social Networks

The Socialization of Small Business

You Are Now the Mayor of Starbucks!

A Few Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare

Restaurant Owner Increases Sales by 110% with Foursquare Swarm Badge Party

Foursquare Introduces Minority Report-Like Analytics

Foursquare Introduces New Tools For Business

The Writing On The Wall

Social Network, Tv News trends

Social Network jobs | Tv News jobs

See that blue line on the graph? That represents jobs data for the TV news industry according to Simply Hired. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a network news cameraman by trade, still clinging on to rapidly diminishing fortunes. The more appealing green line represents job data results for “Social Network”. So as that downward job trend continues across legacy media, I still believe there is tremendous opportunity in social media.

The New Television

About a year ago, I came across an interview with August Capital’s David Hornik. In this interview, Hornik refers to the sum of all of this social media as “the new television” and that “we will see increasingly specific social networks”. Both of these notions really struck me, and in my own post then, I hinted at a venture that incorporated those ideas.

The State of Social Networking Today

Since then there has been a lot of hype about social networking. From that hype has sprouted numerous white-label social networking platforms prompting this article in TechCrunch and this follow-up.
In the second post, Tech Crunch writer Mark Hendrickson looks ahead:

It will be interesting to see over the next few years whether this demand further intensifies as potential customers realize the value of niche social networks, or whether it slackens as people get over the hype surrounding this aspect of Web 2.0.

Many of these companies are targeting large, well-established organizations with deep pockets. Scan the chart and you will see big-name media companies, educational institutions, and corporations
-Mark Hendrickson, TechCrunch

Well a year later the results are in, and it doesn’t look good for corporate social networks. A recent Deloitte study, featured in the Wall Street Journal showed that the vast majority of them had failed to attract people.

One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.
-Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal

The article goes on to cite some staggeringly bad statistics and is pretty gloomy, but appears to put the blame sqaurely on the corporations, who just don’t get the community spirit thing. Marhsall Kirpatrick has his typically droll take on all of this, pointing to a social network built around a cat litter brand, that is emblematic of these failures.

Social networks where a brand name product is what everyone rallies around are a dumb idea. They are stupid. No one should submit themselves to the indignity of creating a user profile and friend connections based on cola or cat litter.
-Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web

Hehe.. I like Marshall. Kirkpatrick also appears to be bullish on niche market social networks.

Building A Community Around Passionate Fans

As some of you know, I’ve been working on something along these lines for some time with a business partner. We are perilously close to unleashing it upon the social web. We feel we have built the foundation for a strong web community that celebrates the passions of a creative constituency. But simply because we aren’t a corporate site, doesn’t mean that we won’t face our own EPIC FAIL. It’s all in the execution. We have partnered with white-label social network developer, Pringo, to design and develop this space and are currently in PRE-LAUNCH beta. (leave a comment here if you’re interested in taking a look)

What we’re discovering in this pre-launch phase is that the community won’t adapt to the platform, the platform has to be right for the community. As we move forward, we must be able to adapt to the needs of our community or we will share the same fate of many of these corporate social networks. Similarly, those white label social network platforms listed in the Tech Crunch post must have the flexibility and agility to keep up with how people are using the social web, or as I’ve come to call it…”the new television”.

NBC’s Local Media Initiative

In a move that acknowledges the diminishing influence of one-way communication channels, NBC has renamed the Television Stations Division “Local Media Division”. There was a great deal of coverage in industry blogs. Media Week and Lost Remote have both framed the change as a fundamental shift in business.

NBC Local Media better reflects the full scope of our capabilities, as well as our ability to offer clients a fully-integrated, local media solution across the full portfolio of our assets.-John Wallace – President, NBC Local Media Division, from press release

As marketers continue to shift ad dollars from traditional media to online, it’s vital for companies like NBC to take the brand where the people are. Increasingly, that means web and mobile. As newspapers and TV move to build online, the distinction between the two becomes meaningless. Right now local “newspapers” appear to be winning online.

Creating an Engaging Experience While Building a Business

The static web sites of most TV and Radio stations have been eclipsed by the more interactive offerings of newspapers. Perhaps the economic imperative of the dying newspaper industry has forced print publishers bring online innovations to market faster. So the challenge for local media is to build an engaging, imersive, media platform that actually becomes something the community can’t live without – at the same time scaling the user base to a point where the enterprise is economically worthwhile.

What would that platform look like? What key elements would satisfy both the community and the media company? I took that question to my very smart Twitter posse and they came up with some great ideas. Here’s a small sampling:

All very smart ideas from early adopters of social web technology. Smart ideas about the evolution of local media can be found in practice and in theory, but ultimately big media companies are looking for the ones that will generate increased traffic and ad revenue. I do think it is vital for those in charge of any local media initiative to get input from outside the corporate meeting rooms. They should be talking to the local blogging, tech, and social media communities. They should be sponsoring conferences, discussions and meetups with the pioneers of the social web in their local communities.

I strongly feel that media companies need to discover and encourage the brand champions within their own organizations to use social media. While there may be some who grumble about already burdensome workloads – and believe me, TV news is a pretty thankless sausage factory – standing by and hoping that the sales and promotions departments will save careers is not a good career strategy. I’ve discovered that meeting and listening to people on the social web, through platforms like Twitter, blogging, Facebook, and meetups, has enriched my life both personally and professionally. It’s also allowed me to bring the NBC News brand into this space.

Envisioning Local Media

Mel Taylor outlines the key points of a recent speech by former CBS News chief Andrew Heyward. In it, Heyward outlines the current problems with the state of TV news, and discusses some forward-thinking approaches to building succssesful online platforms. Don Dodge, while blogging about newspaper strategy, puts forth ideas that are equally resonant in television’s web efforts. Essentially he says be local, be a marketplace, and be the best local search engine out there. A good example of very useful local search platform is the Boston local search platform Citysqaures.

I think the key to success in transforming local media is to build a platform that people can’t live without. It should be a place where people can connect around ideas and affinities, build their own social netowrk profile, network and create events, have a robust mobile component, and should recommend content and events based on the users profile. People want to share and create content and links. Making that easy and customizable, in a locally relevant way, is key to getting the Facebook generation passionate about local media.The bottom line is, of course, the bottom line. But while media companies have to focus on profits, they should not look at their web presence as a secondary effort, or simply repository for recycled newscast content.

For local media platforms to be successful, they will have to implement imersive, relevant, engaging, and useful experiences for the community. So my assembled readers, how would you build a successful local media platform? What are some good examples of ones you’ve come across?

Greg Cangialosi over at The Trend Junkie has tagged me with the “measurement” meme in a post entitled “Metrics, Measurement, and Social Media”. In the same week author, entrepreneur and marketing strategist Geoff Livingston included me in a “DC Area’s Top 12 Social Media, Marketing, and PR blogs” list. So I’m scratching my head here. I’m a cameraman for a major network news organization, right? I’m not a marketer… or am I?

In my journey with social media, my blogging, and use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, I’ve discovered that I’ve become somewhat of a personal micro-media brand. I’ve been able to measure the tangible results of my personal brand building in terms of hard data, and in terms of harder to measure, yet deeply enriching professional and personal connections. The hard data is readily available and demonstrates that listening to the very smart people in this space, and engaging them in meaningful conversation goes a long way in building your brand. By hard data, I’m talking about Google search ranking and analytics, Technorati ranking/authority, blog traffic data, and friends in my circle of influence on various social networking platforms.

That more difficult to define measure of my social media involvement is how it’s enabled me to connect with incredibly smart, visionary, driven entrepreneurs. With fourteen hundred Twitter friends, I have a knowledge base of deeply engaged, early adopters drawn from the ranks of venture capital, PR, marketing, social and traditional media, web strategy, and technology. Social media enabled CC Chapman to connect me to my first professional speaking engagement and meet Geoff Livingston and Valeria Maltoni. People like David Eckoff of Turner Broadcasting cite me as a case study of how to use social media on panels at Streaming Media West. I use Facebook to organize events and affinity groups. Recently, I hosted a breakfast for Seesmic CEO, Loic Lemeur here in Washington, DC. In short, I’ve become relevant in this space. None of this would have been possible without my deep engagement in social media. I see TREMENDOUS value in all of that.

Talking Twitter to marketers, Photo courtesy of CC Chapman

Twitter is my most front-facing social media tool. I post frequently every day, much of it on assignment for NBC News. People tell me they find this behind-the-scenes look into the news fascinating. Many have told me that I put a human face on “the media” that they would otherwise have no real connection with. So I think there is a real value here in being a bridge between the Facebook generation and traditional media. Those type of fuzzy metrics, while interesting, aren’t enough for corporations. They want ROI – and whether you define the “I” as “investment” or as Valeria Maltoni prefers “involvement” – a social media effort should produce measurable results. So it’s not enough that I’m the “crazy uncle” running around NBC evangelizing shiny new social media platforms. Big companies, like my current employer, want real definable results.

Kami Huyse points out that you should begin any social media effort with well defined relational objectives.

One of the things I will stress is the importance of having well-defined objectives. By definition, objectives have to be measurable, “What would you like to see happen and by when as a results of engaging in social media?”- Kami Huyse

John Bell, of Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence practice, helps us further define some of the nuance of social media measurement, exploring the distinction between influence, authority, engagement, and impact.

So, dear readers, how do you measure your social media activity, or in fact, do you measure at all? How are you defining reach, influence, and impact? Frankly, I’m still much of a noob at all of this. At the end of the day, at the core of my being, I’m just a cameraman..right?

A few weeks ago CC Chapman connected me with DC area author, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur, Geoff Livingston. Somehow these two got it in their heads that I’d be a great speaker at the “New Media Marketing Day – The Era of Conversation” session that the DMAW is hosting. So I’ve got some ideas about discussing personal branding, avoiding missteps when using social media, video as conversation agent – and I plan on referencing the usual suspects: Robert Scoble, Connie Reece, Chris Brogan, and Chris Heuer to tee off some “big ideas”. I just want to make sure I’m not missing any important thoughts. Here’s my track from the DMAW website:

Track 1 – Sponsored by Executive Biz
New Media Basics: Hammers brass tacks into some of the more popular social media tactics. Forget the exotic. We’re talking about the everyday activity your organization needs right now to enjoy immediate success in the emerging social media/web 2.0 elements.
from DMAW website

This is where I need YOUR HELP. Do YOU think I’m using social media successfully? If so, why? How can big companies better use social media? What are important points that I should draw from our collective experience in social media? As always, your comments here MAKE this blog. I’m looking forward to your insights! Thanks.

Uh oh!Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis yesterday detailed a very compelling IBM study on TV and internet use. The complete study results are available for download here. For folks like me, currently a foot soldier of traditional TV, his post header – “TV Explodes” – merely fuels our worst fears and suspicions. (I wish he’d stop saying “explodes” though!) Quietly, and off the record, my sources tell me high level executives at a certain network have been heard saying “TV is dead.. the future is the internet”. Parts of the IBM study seems to buoy that belief, and outline several key shifts in how we are consuming, creating and particpating in media. Some of the results are promising for Television though, so don’t count us out just yet. The survey is very informative and I’d encourage readers to download the entire study.

Consumers are seeking consolidated, trustworthy content, recognition and community when it comes to mobile and Internet entertainment. Armed with PC, mobile and interactive content and tools, consumers are vying for control of attention, content and creativity. Despite natural lags among marketers, advertising revenues will follow consumers’ habits.         

To increase usage of new channels, consumers ask for consolidated content and thoughtful recommendations.

Users reported significant incidence of user contribution and interactivity.

For those respondents who contributed content online, they did so for recognition and community.

Consumers are increasingly contributing to online video or social networking sites: nine percent of German and seven percent of U.S. respondents claim to have contributed to a user-generated content site; 26 percent of U.S. respondents reported contributing to a social networking site.

Looks like a lot of people want to be more involved in, or have a stake in their content. Folks are looking for dialogue and community, not just content. Sab Kanaujia, NBC’s VP for Digital Product Strategy, recently participated in an online Wall Street Journal discussion with Revver chariman and founder Steven Starr entitled “Is Web Video a Threat to TV?” and posted excerpts on his blog. There’s interesting back and forth between Kanaujia and Starr and it’s worth checking out.  

To me, that isn’t the question. The question is: “Is online activity a threat to TV?” Clearly the answer is yes. I left a comment on his blog, which has yet to clear moderation, which essentially pointed out that smart media makers are creating content, conversation, and community online. Video alone isn’t enough, it’s simply the icing on the cake.Of note to me in this study was the question: “What would increase your use of mobile and Internet entertainment?” to which 21% answered “Niche site that specialized in genre or category content” (IBM Study). So as I continue to operate from the unique perch at the intersection of old and new media, I’m both buoyed and concerned by these revelations (or merely statistical support for what many of us have suspected for some time). Many of these findings spell the end of many a television career, but at the same time, create huge opportunities for those who can capitalize on it. This is the time to strike.

yours truly… multitasking

What’s in your business communications toolkit?

Hi, I’m Jim and I’m a Twitterholic. My addiction to the very popular, multi-platform SMS tool is mentioned with a quick quote from me, tech evangelist Betsy Weber, and consultant Cathryn Hrudicka  in a smart piece by Podtech rock star, Twitter Hall of Famer, FastCompany.com contributor, and blogger Robert Scoble. I’ve blogged about Twitter’s value as a branding tool, and have encouraged big media to empower their employees to be brand champions with these tools. Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook are also used as examples of these new tools in the business communications aresenal. Scoble adds an interesting twist, pointing out all the behavioral data made available by seemingly mundane posts. Scary or promising depending on where you stand.

given what it and other companies spend acquiring new customers, there’s an untapped gold mine in Twitter and Facebook because we’re volunteering so much information about what we’re doing right now.Learning how to tap it correctly–both to sell to me directly and in seeing major trends in the millions of daily public posts–will be the next major challenge for these companies.
Robert Scoble, on Fastcompany.com 9/07  

He sums up the piece with a look in to the future:

If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and they’ll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to participate in the heartbeat of business.  

Besides Twitter, what social media are you using to promote your brand (read what should be using that I don’t know about!)? What are you using to learn more about your community? What will be the next killer tool? In addition to Scoble’s Twitter presence, check out his Twitter link blog.

Capricorn, Community, and Craft

Just before boarding a flight to the Craft Hobby Association show this past Friday, I gave one last check on Twitter. Twitter friend and resident astrologist @KrazyKritter had just posted Capricorn. Now look, I’m not normally superstitious, but the outlook for Capricorn resonated with me.

“Today is finally the right time to embrace a new idea and work on fleshing it out”horoscope for Capricorn, 7-20-07

I was energized by this message as i flew to Chicago to cover this huge crafting industry trade show for Crafty Nation our new media venture.

The show was a huge success for us, by way of coverage and for getting our brand out there. We met wonderful people working in this space who were very excited about what we are creating – folks like Margot Potter, Candie Cooper, Katie Hacker, Cari Clement, Debba Haupert, Nicole Mumma, and Amy Romano. Why build a social network and content channel for crafters? Well for one, it’s a natural for social networking. Crafters are passionate about what they do and love to share their ideas and their work with others. They truly are a community. Even at the CHA, which is a decidedly commerce driven event, the community was vibrant and energizing. Craft and Hobby is a 30 billion dollar industry and there are many brands out there looking to associate themselves with the online craft conversations.

promoting the Crafty Nation brand during an education session at CHA

Fleshing Out the Idea

Now it’s time to tackle the most important part of Friday’s horoscope: “work on fleshing it out”. This means listening to our “board of advisors”, the early adopters of CraftyNation’s social media platform. How do we build it and make it better? A drop dead simple, stare-you-in-the-face, idea about how to do that came from Margot Potter. She told me that crafters like to customize their profiles because they’re, well, creative. Thank you Margot!! @conniereece, @AnnOhio, @WickedStepmom, @Uavery, @brendajos, and many more “Twitter Knitters” have been tremendously helpful in pointing out usability issues. What we’ve done with our phase one beta launch is to take an idea that only a year ago was a discussion over coffee, between myself and business partner Toni Lyn, and turned it into a strong start for something that will only grow. As we build out Crafty Nation, it’s the feedback from our community that will drive the direction and growth of this space, so that we can help create real value. We want to give voice to the vibrant fabric of the craft community, and create a place where we’re merely custodians of something much larger than the site itself.

Niche Market Video Content Engaging Your Target Audience

Here’s a link to the programs we’ve created. We also did some quick turnaround daily dispatches from the conference. Video is a very big part of Crafty Nation. Our video content celebrates the creativity and spirit of crafters, and our hope is that it acts as a springboard for conversation and community on our site.

At a dinner on Monday night with Lee Aase and Dennis McDonald, that was supposed to include Jeremiah Owyang, we discussed social media, niche market content, and the evolution web video. Dennis and Lee both have tremendous insight into this space, and are lovely dinner companions. Great food and conversation. Jeremiah’s absence led us to wonder if he was in fact a real person, or just an avatar.

The real value proposition of social media is that it connects people on a deeply human level with hundreds, thousands, even millions of networked people across time and geography. Social networks, empowering core constituencies of passionate users around targeted, niche market content, are emerging as a powerful media marketforce.

As I googled around looking for evidence to support my belief, that vertical market social networks, that combine video content with social media, will be the drivers of future web growth, I once again went back to the well of Jeremia Owyang’s blog, WebStrategist. Web Strategist is a tremendously valuable repository of thought leadership on all things Web 2.0. Of particular interest to me has been Jeremiah’s posts on social networks. For anyone interested in dipping their toes in the water, he has a huge list of “white label” social networking solutions for you budding (like me) web entrepreneurs.

Earlier this year, August Capital’s David Hornik was featured on Web Strategist in Jennifer Jones’ audio podcast Marketing Voices. In it he
said a number of things that resonated with me.

This is the new television.

huge numbers of like minded people are getting together to engage in a conversation.

i think we’ll see increasingly specific social networks.

-David Hornik of August Capital

You’ll find the entire audio podcast at the end of this post.

He goes on to speak about how marketers need to associate their brand with
the meaningful conversations taking place on these social networks,
specifically vertically oriented networks. This brings me to two very
exiting developments in my transition from old media work horse, to new media
entrepreneur, that build on this rise in niche market content and social
networks.

Vertical Market Social Networks and Video, Telling Your
Community’s Story

I’m happy to announce that, last week, I joined the Board of Advisors for
BluChipz.com. I also came on as an investor in a now closed friends and
family round of funding. BluChipz CEO Craig Ridley is developing a social
network for athletes that gives voice to these young rising stars. Craig understands
that for a social network to be succesful, you have to give people the tools
to connect on a meaningful human level. Here’s Craig Ridley in his own
words.

Click To Play

While I’ve demonstrated my confidence in Craig and his executive team with a significant financial investment, (suffice to say Craig HAD to buy lunch that day!) through my company Verge New Media, I’ve been investing time, money, energy, and all of my mental towards CraftyNation.com CraftyNation is a place where passionate, creative, crafty people can connect, share ideas, showcase their projects, and keep up on the world of craft. People who scrapbook, knit, bead, quilt, design and make beautiful things will be inspired and empowerd by each other AND by fun, converstaional, episodic video content. We’re designing CraftyNation so that the users are participants. We want members of CraftyNation community to have a stake in its development. We soft-launch a beta version this week just before our trip the the Craft Hobby Association show in Chicago this weekend!

Click To Play

Video As the New “Lingua Franca” of Online Content, Finding the Best Video Storytellers

A niche market social network that i frequent is b-roll.net, which has recently updated, adding teriffic video sharing capability, with rating, embedding, and bookmarking features. B-roll.net is sort of a neighborhood bar for old news cameramen like me. These are the best of the best folks, so check them out. Folks on this site will generally have shoulder, back, and knee problems from carrying professional TV cameras around for years (18 for me).

Kevin Johnson started the site as a place to share his personal stories from his overseas news assignments. Dissatisfied with one way communication, Johnson quickly realized the value of creating a place where TV news photogs can share ideas, often in a “vigorous” fashion. Here you’ll find the likes of “Lenslinger” Stewart Pittman, and video journalist proponent, and consultant, Michael Rosenblum. And, of course you’ll find me! If video is part of your web venture, b-roll.net is where you’ll find the best storytellers in the world.

So if social networks are in fact, the “new television”, what will the new channels be? And who is out there building them?

Today the Newseum sent a crew and producer to interview me as part of a much larger interactive video exhibit about new media. Some of my Twitter friends suggested I video blog the goings on. I’ll let the Newseum team introduce themselves (cameraman Tom Haller and I go WAY back and his wife is an extraordinarily talented producer at NBC)

But wasn’t Jaiku supposed to kill Twitter? Haven’t we been down this road before? And while Mike Arrington stacks up the functionality of both in a chart, the buzz around Pownce seems to have subsided down just a bit. I ‘m not seeing as many pleas for invites on Twitter lately.

I was reading business writer Jill Konrath’s thoughts about value propositions and asked myself “what is the value proposition of social media?”. At the end of the day, isn’t it that it connects people on a deeply personal level across time and geography? Twitter friends are people who rely on each other, and genuinely care about what their friends are doing.

Today, Marc Nathan, or marc1919 as he’s known on Twitter, announced the birth of he and his wife’s daughter Naomi, live from the delivery room, and we all CHEERED on Twitter!! In my recent round-the-world trip with the Secretary of Defense, a woman who goes by Sprite or BlondeByDesign on Twitter, gave me an assignment.

Blonde By Design

Sgt. Danny Allman in Kandahar

Find a soldier in Afghanistan who she could “take care of” by sending care packages. I met Sgt. Danny Allman in Kandahar and he told me about how life can be rough there for “his guys”. I took down his email and connected Danny and Sprite. Another Twitter friend, who goes by WickedStepMom, got Danny’s email from me and is sending care packages along with children’s artwork.

This is the real human connection I’m talking about. No API, or coding, or killer functionality can trump that. There’s no doubt Twitter CAN be frustrating. I was recently poised to have the best Twitter day EVAH!! I was covering a John Edwards campaign speech before a big aircraft labor union for NBC News. I had plans to Twitter his remarks and actually did go up and tell him I was his Twitter friend. Sadly, Twitter was puking that day. But we keep coming back because that’s where our friends are. Friends like Connie Reece, who uses Twitter, like many of us, to drive traffic to her blog.But like i said in Susan Reynold’s blog: “Twitter is like the neighborhood bar where the waitress is a grouchy and the food isn’t terribly good, but everyone knows your name. Call me old fashioned, but I like Twitter even though it drives me crazy sometimes.”

I got some terrific responses from my Twitter friends (Twitter is also a great quick SOS platform) on the value of Twitter and Pownce. Here’s a sampling:

i still like twitter better and they’ve gotten it right with their mobile integration. few apps do it right presently
Sean Scott

Twitter wins; Pownce KO’d. marc1919 is live-twittering baby’s birth from delivery room
Connie Reece

Pownce is better due to file sharing, better link display in note, and a good reply mechanism, you can reply to specific note.
Steven E. Streight

i notice that people use multiple services to serve different needs. For me mobility is the key and twitter has it.
seekground

Twitter: does one thing well, Pownce: cluttered/missing metaphor; language needs an audience and the more open “talk” the more trust.
Chris Judson

Twitter randomness. Pownce engaging conversation. Twitter sponteneous. Pownce measured feedback.
Michael Sommermeyer