You can see @jamiegangel’s interaction with the Twitter community here.  I’ve added some of the comments to my favorites.  As part of that story, Jamie spoke with David Gregory who has really embraced the spirit of dialogue and smart community on Twitter.  I’m guessing my most quotable soundbite from the podcast is:

“We’re Moving From Meet the Press, and Now We Can Meet the People”

Follow Meet the Press moderator @davidgregory and you’ll watch it happen.  He understands the value of tapping into the collective intelligence of the very smart group of people on Twitter.  Twitter is a tremendous equalizer.  The community there will give corporate titans, rock stars, Hollywood celebrities, media notables, and politicians one chance to listen and contribute, and get it right.  If they fail in those areas they get called on it. In a recent Howard Kurtz article, ABC newser Terry Moran crows about how Twitter counters:

the whole notion that newscasters speak from Olympus

- Terry Moran, ABC News

I really don’t think the folks on Twitter ever suffered from that misapprehension.

i’m really sad that I’m not able to make SXSW this year,  because it’s a great conference to discover where much of this is heading.  But last year at that very conference I witnessed first hand the challenge faced by traditional media.  As I ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant a waiter - transfixed by the talking head on the cable news show, and apparently at odds with the pundit - began shouting at the TV.  It occurred  to me that this was a rather inefficient feedback loop.  Social web tools like Twitter now give mainstream media the opportunity to do something they haven’t always been in a position to do that well.. LISTEN.  But as Twitter friend Adele McAlear put it, traditional media must understand this is about  JOINING the conversation, not controlling it.

Did you ever have control of the conversation? No. It always went on in people’s living rooms. Difference: Now you can hear it

@adelemcalear via Twitter

Still, these are turbulent times for media. Part of my motivation for embracing social web technology is precisely because it has shown to be a tremendous disruptor of traditional media and I need to watch where all of this is heading and determine where I fit in.  And as serial consultants like Michael Rosenblum, the architects of what may be the sunset of my craft, engage in schadenfreude tinged rhetoric on the web,  I’m left feeling both hopeful and fearful of what lies ahead for media workers like me.

Being asked to sit aside a panel of very savvy media influencers is a very great honor indeed.  I just hope I live up to the billing.  At the end of the day, I’m just a news cameraman try to stay relevant in a rapidly changing media landscape.

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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”.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Let’s operate under the premise that Einstein was right about this. Why then, do I, and nearly everyone else on Twitter continue to keep coming back to this infuriatingly unstable platform to connect with our communities? It’s likely because, for now, that’s where the people are, and while most users are getting frustrated with nearly daily outages, no one is taking that first step toward migration. That seems to be the million dollar question - why do we keep coming back? To be more precise, it could soon become the $250 a year question if Jason Calacanis holds sway with the folks at Twitter. Recently there has been a chorus of people from Om Malik to Pat Phelan calling for some type of metered/pay service.

Om Malik’s post is essentially an indictment of the users, “extreme users” specifically. Let me get this straight… it’s the users “fault” that Twitter keeps going down?? This is how you want to introduce a pay/metered system on Twitter?? I have a difficult time reconciling Twitter’s desire to scale with imposing a fee structure on those who help drive growth in order to solve underlying technology issues that they didn’t anticipate. This smacks of hubris to me, the kind of hubris attendant in a brand that thinks they’re the only game in town (think cable company only with hipsters at the helm). This has already driven to a contest to build a better mousetrap and in the interem, I wonder if folks will simply migrate to an equally useful existing platform like Jaiku or Pownce. If Twitter offered added value and created REAL pro accounts, offering tools to organize friends, send messages to groups etc, then I’d consider paying.

Under the Om Malik plan I would pay around $60 a month. It’s important to note here that none of this discussion has come directly from the Twitter team themselves. But given the uniformity of the this pricing structure amongst the bloggerati, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this turd in the pool has been floated with at least the implicit aknowledgement of Twitter and/or their investors. Now, $60 may not seem like much to some people. But let’s get real for a minute, as our buying power diminishes daily $60 is not insignificant to me. That’s a weeks worth of gas in my Honda Element. For that $60, all that is being currently discussed is platform stability.

Imagine buying a car, driving it off the lot only to find that the engine routinely dies. Imagine taking the car to get fixed over and over again until the dealer finally tells you he’ll fix it for good for an extra $5000. What chaps my hide a bit here is that the early adopters (I joined in Nov. 2006), helped grow Twitter’s mainstream adoption. Nearly everyone on the service has evangelized the platform by either word of mouth, blog posts, mainstream media mentions, or workplace use. In many respects they wouldn’t be where they are today without the very people that proposed fee plans would penalize. Perhaps if I try to glean as much potential financial/professional benefit from every Twitter post, I’ll soon grow more tiresome than I already am. Then people will drop me in droves leaving Twitter more affordable to me. That should make Twitter AWESOME! It’s the people that make Twitter what it is. It is CLEARLY not the platform in and of itself.

Over the weekend, I engaged in an ideological video tete a tete with Seesmic CEO Loic Lemeur on the topic of paying for Twitter. The videos are short, but it’s clear that I don’t come at this unemotionally.

Drops in ad spending forecasts for social networks are likely drivers in the push for pay-for-use and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this in places other than Twitter. Overall, I have no problem with paying for something I find useful, or that simplifies my life. I do take issue with the suggestion that Twitter hold stability for ransom. So to those forced with re-examining revenue models and premium” plans, I would humbly suggest creating an added value transaction, not penalizing the community that has helped build your brand.

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gathering the lunch gang with Shel. (photo courtesy of Lunaweb)

On the eve of my trip to the 2008 New Communications Forum in Sonoma, CA, I’m looking back at a couple of inspiring and energizing conferences that I’ve had the opportunity to attend in the past month - South By Southwest Interactive in March, and Podcamp DC this past weekend. Both very different events, by way of scale and influence, but both great forums for sharing ideas and connecting face to face with the trailblazers of emerging, participatory media. Looking ahead to Sonoma, I’ll be sharing a stage with Shel Israel and Tom Foremski as well as a panel with Steve Lubetkin.It’s encouraging to me that there are many people who see value in the story of my journey into disruptive media, from the eyes of this old media footsoldier. Yes, i know.. “disruptive” is just more conference-speak. Look, let me assure you… ALL of these social media are very disruptive, and there are real economic and human consequence of this disruption. And while social media creates kool-aid drinker evangelists, and very vocal, antagonistic, contrarian detractors, the fact of the matter is that social media simply ARE.They are just communications tools that can be adopted by many - those with useful, meaningful things to say, and those with very little value to bring to the enterprise.So it’s worthwhile to me, as an “old media” dinosaur, to examine how and why these disruptions are taking place and to see where there may be areas where these worlds collide. That, I believe is where very extraordinary things can happen, right at that intersection. At the end of the day, I come at this from a guy witnessing upheaval in the industry that pays my mortgage and feeds my family. You better believe I want to get out there and meet these agents of change.

South by Southwest Interactive

NBC News sent me and two colleagues to Austin to attend SXSW interactive back in March and our team really came away energized and inspired. There are some really great platforms out there that are built on participation and community that are very eager to integrate with traditional media companies. From a strategic standpoint, there are some very smart firms like Forrester Research that are advising big media on how to develop their social web strategies. Forrester’s Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang are a formidable team in this space and Charlene’s SXSW presentation is well worth examining, and is outlined here.A very fun, kind of “rock star” moment for me was being interviewed live on Qik by Robert Scoble. We talked about the impact of this technology and how audience interaction becomes the real game changer here. Pictured below the video is me, CC Chapman and Rocky Barbanica. Love both of those guys, and Rocky, like me is tasked with keeping the talent like Scoble in check. ;-)The photo was taken by friend and very savvy Canadian marketing pro Adele McAlear.

Podcamp DC

Certainly smaller in scale than SXSW, Podcamp DC makes up for it with enthusiasm, knowledge base, and grassroots community. I had an opportunity to speak with NPR’s Andy Carvin about social media tools being used as a “new journalism”. We were able to cite the Midwest earthquake of last week, where people on Twitter were sharing pretty dramatic first-person accounts of the tremors. These messages caught the attention of NBC Nightly News, and were included as an element of our coverage.I wish I’d been able to spend more time at Podcamp DC. I want to extend special thanks to Tammy Munson and Joel Mark Witt for pulling this terrific event together. Fortunately, the very savvy DC blogging community provides excellent coverage of the un-conference.Helen MosherThursday Bramcaseysoftwaretechrepublicanwireless musejoelogonIf I’ve missed any please leave links in the commments! Looking forward to connecting with people in Sonoma, and feel very enriched to know some very smart trailblazers in this field.

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your humble blogger in Iraq

Just on the heels of a trip to Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, I’ve got a moment to reflect before I hop on plane for South By Southwest Interactive. As we traveled to places with names like Hawijah, Kirkuk, and Jalalabad, I observed a recurring theme. Young battle hardened commanders in both Afghanistan and Iraq were passionately, perhaps with a certain evangelism, speaking about their work there. They weren’t talking body counts or offensives though, they were talking about micro-finance, road building, infrastructure, reconciliation banking, and grass roots governance. It occurred to me that their formal military training prepared them for precious little of this. And as I spoke with a General there, he said these soldiers were learning this stuff in theater, as he put it “at the speed of the network”. The speed of the network.. that concept really stuck with me.

Media is certainly evolving at the speed of the network. New web technologies and and platforms have ushered in a new era of personal publishing. These widely available tools are evolving faster than most traditional media companies can keep up with. I really enjoy experimenting with these technologies as a way to connect with very cool, interesting people on Twitter and Facebook, among others. Like those soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, employees of companies, including mainstream media, are adopting these new technologies as a way to engage in conversation. Any more, media is how we shake hands, it’s a how we define ourselves. A nifty little Pew research study echoes these observations about early adopters (us).

These days they are just as likely to produce material. One common refrain is that they think more change lies ahead and they are eager to watch and participate.
Pew Internet and American Life Project

That’s kind of where I find myself. I LOVE how social media allows us to connect with one another across cultural, professional, and social boundaries. Recently, I was on assignment in Africa and used the Qik platform along with my Nokia N95 to do a LIVE to web video interview with Sir Bob Geldof from Ghana.

As Jeff Jarvis points out in his post dubbing me the “human satellite truck”, the cool thing about Qik is the live chat function. As you watch the video, you’ll notice that I interrupt Geldof and my producer to take a question from Twitter friend Mike Neumann. So in addition to Meet the Press, now we can have “Meet the People” To Geldof’s credit, he didn’t miss a beat and answered Mike by name. Incidentally, he seemed fascinated with both Twitter and Qik. As powerful as Qik and a Nokia N95 are, they don’t replace, nor should they in my mind, the tools that traditional broadcast media use to gather the news. It’s important to note that my Nokia’s wifi connection was coming off the US TV Pool satellite. There was no mobile data network to be found in Ghana’s capitol city, Accra. Take a look at all of this gear.

one meter uplink dish in Arusha, Tanzania

interview gear in Arusha, Tanzania

This is what it took, along with the skills of an immensely talented NBC News team, to produce this live Today show interview with Ann Curry, the President and the First Lady.

I LOVE that I can finally embed NBC News video in my blog now! That aside, I don’t subscribe to zero sum notions of one type of media replacing another. What traditional media does is still, and I suspect always will be, relevant. Simply from a technical standpoint, there isn’t wifi or mobile data networks in many parts of the world. Sometimes it takes the knowledge base and technical expertise of seasoned pros to get the story out. Social media can complement it’s traditional older sibling in tremendously useful ways though, creating a rich experience for both traditional media and its fans. The interactivity of platforms like Qik not withstanding, the fans of your media brand, given an opportunity, want to be part of the process. They want to help!

When Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager stepped down, a wire service errantly captioned a photograph of the staffer. Many sites, including MSNBC.COM ran the picture. I was one of my Twitter friends who pointed out the mistake, and after a quick google image search to confirm, I called our desk to have them alert the the web folks.

So this correction came lightning-fast, and it was all because my friends on Twitter have an open social communication channel through me.

The Conversation Agency blog excerpts this very interesting Virginia Heffernen piece in the New York Times about the demise of the critically acclaimed show “Friday Night Lights”. In it she emphasizes the imperative on media companies to give people a means to participate. While she specifically mentions “art and entertainment”, this applies to all media, including news.

art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.
New York Times, “Art in the Age of Franchising” January 20, 2008

The “how” of all this participation, and social media engagement is what leaves many companies, including media firms, scratching their heads. I think a good “un-strategy” is to to let employees who are already “operating at the speed of the network”, just keep doing what they’re doing. These people are your best brand ambassadors. Web strategist and Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang outlines three “impossible” but absolutely necessary conversations corporations need to have if they take social media seriously. He breaks them down to the following: ask for feedback, say positive things about competitors, and admit when you’re wrong. To me, the feedback conversation can reap huge rewards and social media allows for an open channel.

I’ve been ruminating these thoughts from Austin, Texas where I’ll be attending the South By Southwest Interactive festival. NBC News has given me this very unique opportunity, and I’m eager to walk amongst the new Saronoffs and Marconis of modern communication. Technology and web platforms allow people to speak with each other like never before. The question is, how do we fit in to these conversations, or foster them ourselves. This is what I’ll be asking some very smart people here in Austin. Stay tuned.

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Dateline: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - covering President Bush from inside “the bubble”

Here in Riyadh, we’re wrapping up a trip with President Bush, which the administration hopes has jump started the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, while at the same time, building support with Gulf region states to apply pressure on Iran. As with all of these trips with the President, we’ve been working long hours, and enduring relentless travel schedules. In nine days we will have traveled to Israel, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. My job with NBC News allows me unique access to history and I take advantage of these moments to share what we’re covering with friends on Twitter. There are so many behind-the-scenes moments I like to share, that if you follow me there, you’ll know I can get a bit breathless with my dispatches.

So it came as a bit of an unwelcome surprise to see this in Abu Dhabi:

We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.
- page that loads when attempting to access Twitter from UAE

For me this was a little bit of a shock. I’ve been to a number of restrictive countries before, but as we are still in a somewhat nascent stage of the social media lifespan, I believe many of us are pushing the edges of what types of communications are acceptable to employers, and in this case, governments. A Facebook friend and social media champion, who works for the administration, had noticed that in my profile that I had been unable to Twitter from Abu Dhabi. It was an interesting contrast to see this person’s take on the draconian speech restrictions placed on web conversations here. Ultimately though, it was just a bit of a nuisance for me - causing a few hours of Twitter “blackout” - and i was able to resume posting from Saudi Arabia.

brutal realities of restricted speech

The entire thing gave me pause though. What about the people who have to live under such restrictions, often enforced at the end of a gun? I can’t begin to imagine what that life would be like. I’ve had tastes of it, if only fleetingly, ultimately to return home where I wonder sometimes if we take free speech for granted. As I sit here in Riyadh, Saudi blogger Fouad Alfaran has been held in Jeddah’s Dahban Prison since December, just for speaking freely on his blog. In China, blogger and construction company executive Wei Wenhau was beaten to death by local authorities for shooting video of a protest. And as our journey takes us next to Egypt, the courage of Wael Abbas - an Egyptian blogger who exposes tyranny and corruption in that country - must be recognized.

We work very hard to cover the President of the United States, and work very hard to do it as fairly and accurately as humanly possible, but never does it require the personal moral courage of the people listed above. As I Twittered away the hours late into the evening in the Riyadh workspace, one of my Twitter friends challenged the coverage of the White House by my colleagues and contemporaries.

us news + white house + editorially independent is a mirage so far this century… good luck managing the hypocrisy there.
- http://twitter.com/chesspark

While that stung a bit, and I don’t entirely agree with the premise, I do know that our jobs don’t require the courage of Wei Wenhau, Fouad Alfaran and Wael Abbas. So maybe I won’t take our abiltiy to speak freely quite as much for granted anymore. I only hope that faced with similar challenges, I’ll be as brave as these bloggers.

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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?

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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?

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I just booked my travel to the fall Video on the Net Confernence in Boston. I’m very excited because the spring conference in San Jose was a great opportunity for me to connect with key players in this emerging ecosystem. Once again, looks like the best and brightest will be attending this one too. For those of you who missed it, here’s a look a back at VON ‘07, San Jose.

It was fun meeting my neighbors last night and explaining “I have a TV station in my pocket.” That got wonderful stares.
Robert Scoble - Twitter/@scobleizer

Meanwhile, CBS Interactive’s purchase of online show Wallstrip has validated internet video as a vital component of a web content business model. That deal has received a lot of attention, as more and more content creators look to ink agreements with big media companies. So it’s no surprise that once again, VON will be well attended by reps from companies like NBC Universal (my current employer), AOL, Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, Turner Broadcasting, Spark Capital, Akami.. and the list goes on. Video on the Net will be another huge opportunity for me, and for anyone in this space, to network with key industry leaders and get a better idea of what’s on the horizon.

“Digital” media initiatives vs. listening, conversation, and the social web

I often hear about this media comany’s “digital media initiative”, or that this person is in charge of “digital efforts”. If you’re just thinking digital, I think you’re missing the point. I recently attended a seminar at my alma mater American University entitled: PHOTOJOURNALISM: Surviving the Digital Challenge. Overall, there was great discussion, but I heard no mention of engaging audiences in conversation and using video as the starting point. Hosted by the White House News Photographer’s Association and AU’s School of Communication, it was a useful and informative discourse on the imperative for photojournalists to think of themselves more as content creators and less as media workers, and an examination of the internet as a key distribution channel.

Video journalism messiah and media raconteur Michael Rosenblum keynoted, and with no hyperbole, described shifts in media today as world-changing as Gutenburg’s printing press. He and I may not agree on everything, but on this, he’s dead right.

Michael Rosenblum “weighs” the merits of specializaton

While talented, smart media makers can hope to define themselves as bridge-builders between old and new media - integral to a media company charting a course into new territory - I’m personally not banking on it. I’m smack in the middle of this sea change in media, as the diminishing value proposition of a career as network news cameraman thrusts me into the empowering, enriching world of social media. While the “digital challenge” is an important discussion, nothing was really mentioned about video as conversation agent on the Social Web. The “social” part of this is often more of a challenge for traditional media companies. Social requires what VON organizer Chris Brogan deftly outlines as listening.

I think video can and should be an important part of a media company’s SOCIAL web efforts. That’s precisely why I’m attending Video on the Net, to build my personal brand, measure my media strategies with , connect with key industry leaders, and re-connect with the rock stars of internet video.

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