We did a online video on strategic blog commenting to help illustrate just how to achieve good strategic blog commenting.

I like how David Origano, netbusinessblog.com, recently wrote a post on Kick Starting Your Network With Blog Commenting, that takes the process of commenting even further.

To his point, the idea of simply commenting is not enough. You need to actively engage in the comment flow after that.

Many blogs offer a comment RSS feed to help in the process of staying engaged. When I'm commenting on others, I always grab that comment RSS feed and drop into my Google Reader and put it the Comment folder. That way, if my comment starts a new thread, or garners a response from the blog author, I'm on top of it and can be an active participant.

More often than not, being successful in social media requires:

• One Part Timeliness. Be there when the conversation is hot and active. Don't show up to the party late. Yes sometimes it's better late than never, but please try to be prompt.
  
• One Part Great Content. Do we need to beat dead horse here. Great content is the equivalent of a Royal Flush in Poker - nothing beats it.
• One Part Responsiveness. Social media hit and runs (commenting and disappearing) are seen as tactless and will most certainly ruin your credibility. If your going to get in the conversation, when someone asks a question or comments back, be there to continue it.

So there's your three-part social media success recipe, now go comment on 10 blogs this week and see what happens.

As someone who loves the internet and spends her entire workday attached to it, the fact that internet is twice as popular as television is no surprise to me--especially considering that the age of people survey went down as low as 15. Younger people tend to be more tech savvy in general and therefore more likely to use internet and other new media as opposed to, say, reading a print newspaper.

As Jordan points out in her post, however, there are questions as to whether internet is truly twice as popular as television. For instance, are people watching TV and surfing the internet at the same time? I know that I often watch TV and chat online simultaneously. Although I have a Tivo, there are times when shows have not been recorded and I've had to watch the episodes online. Does this count as television or internet or both, according to the survey?

Ms. McCollum also notes that there is no distinction between whether these media are being consumed only during leisure time, or other times as well. I would bet that most people surveyed would include work internet use when asked how much time they spend online during the week.

One conclusion from the survey is that "consumers tend to use the media they grew up with." Thus, younger people are more likely to use the internet, and older people are more likely to turn to TV and print media. Although this is an unsurprising find, it does interest me to see how people of different age groups adapt to new medias and how quickly they embrace them (if at all). Although the internet is quickly taking over as a new media source, it is also taking over the old medias such as print, television, and radio. With the ability to get all forms of media online, it is no wonder that the internet beats its other media competitors by such a high margin.

Rand mentions several tasks and experiences we had that will never be relevant again, and will be relegated to those tales of "when I was young we didn't have the internet, and we had to look things up in BOOKS!" and the like. It's easy to take for granted all of the information available at our fingertips and to forget that the data did not always come so effortlessly. It's even more astonishing once you realize that this information revolution has only really spanned the last decade or so.

Now that we are used to the constant barrage of information and being constantly connected, it is often hard to break away. Even more real to some is the sense of panic that comes when they are not able to rely on their computers or cell phones. Take, for example, this clip of a segment that aired a year ago on the Today Show. The Managing Editor of Forbes agreed to go a week without technology, and he broke down in tears and demanded his phones back before he even hit the 48 hour mark.

Have we become too dependent on electronic gadgets for our own good? Or do they serve to keep us more closely connected with family, friends, and colleagues, allowing us to interact on deeper levels than were possible pre-Internet and cell phones?

1. News. I've become an election news junkie and have been watching a lot of online video about the 2008 primaries.
2. Poops and Giggles. Friends sending great video clips, mostly for pure entertainment purposes.
3. How-To or Informational Videos. Vids that will show me how to get something done, or what a product or service does.

I've been cruising around Howcast, a new video site launched to support How-To videos, and I LOVE IT.

What I love the most is the brilliant connection between a video and an associated wiki.

Trying to explain wikis to a lay person, or even a relatively technically sophisticated marketer is a struggle. They just don't get the collaborative power a wiki can bring to a project or community. It'' not that they don't get the concept, they just can't see tangible uses of it.

The Ultimate Wiki Test
So I put the Howcast wiki test to the toughest of them all - my wife. She plays well as I try to show her new technology concepts and she simply gives it a thumbs up or down.

We've been talking about preparing sushi at home, and everyone says, "It's all about the rice," and I've yet to come across a good reference on how to make sushi rice until I found it on Howcast:

Included with the video on the site is an associated wiki, where the author can post notes such as the ingredients or utensils needed. This is awesome for watching a video and then giving the viewer everything they need to do it.

Beyond video notes in the wiki, viewers can add their own input in the form of a Comment, Tip, Warning or Fact. Now this makes it awesome. So for instance (just imagine as there are no current comments in the feedback image below) I live in Boulder, Colo., maybe there is a comment about cooking in high altitude. Or maybe someone puts a warning about avoiding scalding yourself with the steam.



Now there is a tangible and easy to show reference about the great use of a wiki. Nice work Howcast - great videos too.

1. PR firms should be doing this as it's a basic communications and relations function, but they have little understanding of social media and see it as a place to get "hits" or mentions. They are still focused on outreach, rather than conversations
2. Marketing agencies don't know get out of their own way with "marketing speak and messaging" that is blatantly exposed in a social media platform. One whiff of an unauthentic campaign and it's game over and the damage could last for years.
3. Branding agencies can't really think beyond slogans. Don't set me off on how companies drink the brand juice and try to explain how the blue in the logo represents spacious opportunities - barf.

1. The ability to track, analyze and monitor conversations. I've made a plea in my Fire Your PR Firm paper for PR agencies to create a position called a "Communications Analysts" who's role it is to tap into to the current conversations and trends and advise their client on where to engage. The key here is the PR person themselves is not the one engaging in the conversation - they lead the client to water. This hurdle is easy to overcome with some knowledge of RSS readers, or outside reputation monitoring services like Collective Intellect.
2. Understanding how to tie ROI to social media efforts. This is the big one right? Without the ability to track, analyze and apply an ROI model to the effort, then organizations are blindly accepting the advice of the "expert" and hoping for the best. This brings another issue with PR Firms. They are terrible at measurement as most firms still operate in an age old model of Ad Value Equivalency which means nothing. This is a most certainly challenge and requires an understanding of how to baseline the program and implement the tools (web site analytics, RSS subscription data, conversion pages) to capture the data needed.
3. Technical programming capabilities. Based on point two above, this is the one that fragments the decision. Most PR Firms couldn't even tell you where their own websites are hosted. So how are they going to provide expertise to building conversion mechanisms such as form captures, online demo registrations, customizing blog or podcast sites or managing RSS feeds.

In the current state of PR and Marketing agencies, the reality is not good for clients seeking professional and competent help. In order for that to happen these professions need to evolve quickly.

I know of a number of PR agencies seeking to hire Social Media directors and can tell you first hand from participating in intervewing some of these "qualified candidates" myself that competent candidates are hard to find. Unfortunately, someone with minimal social media expertise can talk their way through an interview process with a PR agency, because the agency itself doesn't know what a truly qualified candidate is. I can only imagine the same scenario exists in the marketing profession.

It make take a while to see a victor emerge. In the meantime, we recommend agencies and companies spend the money and time to get their people trained and competent in social media.

He noticed that Twitter allowed conversations to continue outside of class, and not only led to topics directly associated to the "real world" but also allowed classmates to form a sort of community. More than just seeing these classmates twice a week, Twitter allowed the students to get a better sense of who their peers were.

The ability to track a keyword or topic and allow for instant feedback is another plus that Professor Parry discovered when using Twitter for the class. If there was a topic of interest, the student could easily follow it, and if they had problems with an assignment, they could send out a tweet and have their fellow classmates respond with suggestions.

Twitter also serves as a public record of the thoughts that were sent out during the semester, which can be helpful to sort through later. The Professor also noted that Twitter was surprisingly good at aiding in the teaching of grammar. One might think that because of the character limit that grammar would be horrible, but he discovered that the limitations forced students to be concise and to use proper punctuation, in order to avoid having the thought come across unreadable.

I find it interesting that not only has a professor implemented this still somewhat new social media tool in their curriculum, but that he found it to be an unequivocal success. Finding new and unexpected uses for a media tool is exciting--especially when it helps to facilitate and enhance communication in ways that were previously not possible.