I discovered the Social Media Today podcast in May of 2007 while researching the term “Social Media Optimization”, a label coined by Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy Public Relations. He gave a good interview about the topic, and I was hooked. At the time Maggie Fox was at the helm as interviewer, but she recently passed the torch to Douglas Walker, a marketing blogger and entrepreneur among many many other things.
Last Sunday Doug interviewed me via Skype. We talked about some new viral marketing ventures, and label-less online music distribution. Here’s the SMT#26 outline:
1:04 Introduction of Jason Theodor
2:10 Discuss Dove Onslaught
10:08 Discuss Toyota World of Warcraft Viral Video
16:16 Discuss Radiohead’s Pay what you want strategy for new Album In Rainbows
Doug promised to cut out all the ums and ahs and make me sound smart. I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, so let me know what you think in the comments.
Bacn (pronounced bacon) is the term given to electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time. Bacn is email you want but not right now. They differ from Spam (electronic) messages, in that they are not unsolicited and are not necessarily sent in bulk. Bacn messages can be thought of being more useful than spam messages.
No it’s not a typo, but it is a four-letter word. I wasn’t going to post about this, but a few things have changed my mind.
First: I found this great old picture of Pork Cuts at Gutenberg.org and just couldn’t resist modifying it.
Second: I’ve noticed a massive increase in the amount of mail I receive from all the social communities I’ve joined: Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku, Mashable, GetSatisfaction, Flickr, Facebook, even MySpace sometimes. It’s mail I want to read, just not right now. Arguably, it deserves its own term. I usually end up archiving this mail, then going to the ‘offending yet not-offending’ site and blazing through a bunch of notices and requests, then returning to whatever I was doing. Now I’m going to create a new tag/folder called bacn and flow all of these extraneous message into it.
Third: I’m always interested in the latest memes. Even meme’s I can’t stand. I tried to resist the word awesome in the 80s when all my friends started using it, but eventually caved on that one too. Still, it’s fun to see how fast and far these catchwords spread. In just a few days (6 as of this post) bacn has gone from a mention at PodCamp Pittsurgh on August 18th, 2007 to being featured by major news organizations. It is out of control in my feed-reading circles: wikipedia (being considered for deletion, so I’m not the only one questioning this term), boingboing, wired, the uk telegraph, the washington post, metafilter, and buzzfeed.
TiNB (there is no box) marketing would suggest that coining the right new word can generate a LOT of attention, especially if it describes something geeks can identify with. Why geeks? Because they are prone to mass distribution: blogs, microblogs, social networks, and mobile messages. Which terms have you coined lately?
If you’re like me, you use too many social networking sites and applications. At the moment I’m using Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Netvibes, Spock, LinkedIn, Digg, Plaxo, Twitter, Jaiku (which dondy describes as “thinking outloud”), Pownce, Mashable, Ning and probably a few others that I can’t even remember [update: VIRB*, my.9rules]. All this status maintenance and friend tracking is hard work. Enter a Google backed experiment in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute called Socialstream. It can’t be released too soon.
The future of marketing integrates traditional and social media elements. The new mix will include what you know along with the tools to succeed in social media and customer relations.
They can include blogs, social networks, wikis, lifestreams ala Twitter and Jaiku, video, livecasts such as Veodia and ustream.tv, news aggregators such as Digg and Reddit, social media releases, videos, and podcasts. There are also opportunities for companies to participate in virtual worlds, such as Second Life.
Remember, the future of communications introduces sociology into the marketing strategy. The technology is just that, technology. The tools will change. The networks will evolve. Mediums for distributing content will grow.
I discovered the Social Media Today podcast in May of 2007 while researching the term “Social Media Optimization”, a label coined by Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy Public Relations. He gave a good interview about the topic, and I was hooked. At the time Maggie Fox was at the helm as interviewer, but she recently passed the torch to Douglas Walker, a marketing blogger and entrepreneur among many many other things.
