When you can’t broadcast, why not podcast?

A funny thing happened on the way to the radio station this week.

We had a great guest lined up, but were informed a day before that that time slot –7 PM Arizona time — was being preempted because the station, KFNX, had a prior commitment to carry the University of Arizona basketball game.

Rather than take a hiatus, I decided to pull out my trusty Zoom H4N and record a podcast with my co-host Derrick Mains. It happened to be a fitting week to talk of the launch of a baseline study by his company, GreenNurture and Miller Consultants. (More details here at the show web site.) This podcast also includes a report from Heather Clancy, our second on-the-ground correspondent.

• Listen to the Podcast here:
• Or find the podcast on iTunes: http://bit.ly/itunesyour3bl

The irony of this is, the radio show grew out of a weekly podcast! So, using social media-based format to broadcast a ‘show’  is more than a fall back. It’s an integral part of what I’m doing in radio in the digital era.

 

Social media driving you to distraction?

The jury is still out whether social media is making us more distracted or not. I’ve met many people who claim that the best way to ‘work’ (and it’s within quotes for a reason) is to turn off the wi-fi and stop mult-tasking.

Like that’s easy!

But forget external communication for a moment. Could socially interactive apps make us more productive when we collaborate? I could give you five reasons why (and a few good books to read on the subject). But for now, here’s a presentation my colleagues at GreenNurture just posted to SlideShare.

I would use it for any ice-breaker, or at the start of a discussion in an organization!

Is Social Media Distracting Your Employees?

 

My new weekly radio show!

I almost forgot to break the story here. I started a radio show last week, focused on business. It’s called Your Triple Bottom Line.

Yes, it’s around the ‘Three P’s’ –People, Planet,Profits. I’m more into the first and the last Ps. (I leave the middle P to my wife, a small business owner, whom you would call a ‘deep green’ person.)

But it’s a great experience, being on radio. I trained at the BBC in London many years back as a producer, and have been a closet radio person all my life. Which is odd, being also into digital media. But I still maintain that radio is the true real-time medium, the first channel that brought communities and conversations together. The Internet simply borrowed the language and the model!

Derrick Mains and I co-host the show. There’s a social media angle here! I host and produce a podcast for GreenNurture, and Derrick has been a co-host of that show. Why radio? Have we got it backwards? There’s no short answer for this, but you will understand if you listen to the kind of guests we bring on every week.

• So here’s a link to last week’s inaugural show: htp://bit.ly/9bHEC8

• The show is streamed live, here: http://bit.ly/Your3BL
  (7 PM Pacific, every Wednesday)

• On-air, it is at KFNX1100 AM

 

‘Print Grows Trees’ debate opens a fresh debate

Print has always been dinged hard by those promoting digital communications as the green alternative. And why not? We’ve seen excesses that are so revolting –boxes of glossy annual reports that have to be tossed, multiple-page bank statements etc.

The Print Council has been very sensitive to that in their PR, and has a talking points document called “The fine print” to rebut those arguments.

So this campaign is not surprising. Called Print Grows Trees, it attempts to communicate some aspects of the print industry and its relation to forests. Specifically “to show that print on paper actually helps to grow trees and keep our forests from being sold for development.”

Let’s face it: Many of us who have gone digital are big fans of print; it’s not a simple either/or choice. We buy newspapers and magazines, but avoid picking up brochures and flyers whenever we could download them and read them as a digital file. We encourage people to ‘think before you print’ but we do carry business cards (GreenNurture uses Quick Response tags on business cards to avoid brochures) using recycled paper, printed with vegetable inks.

Print on demand, and Personal URLs (‘those ‘PURLs’) are some of the solutions that almost every printer now offers. PODI, the Print On Demand Initiative, educates members and everyone else about print and social media, QR codes etc. So yes, the print industry has done some good things to erase the dead-tree stigma. This campaign though seems to push the envelope (bad choice of word?) a bit.

It definitely –deliberately–frames the debate as an economic problem-solution and not just an environmental one. Is it a dangerous myth, as Jay Purdue and others suggest, one that “has significant environmental and economic consequences” to say that print kills trees? If you haven’t run into the seemingly oxymoronic term ‘digital deforestation‘ be prepared to hear more about it in the next few months.

Or is Print Grows Trees a symptom of ‘tree guilt’ felt not just the print industry but by all of us when we forget to turn on the double-sided feature before hitting Control-P?

 

Podcasts and Slideshare – a cool way to distribute ideas

I’ve been dabbling with Slideshare and love how it lets you create and embed content.

So when my friends at GreenNurture began creating a series of presentations, we experimented with not just regular presos, but wondered what if we package a media kit as a SlideShare? What if we published a Press Release in this rich format? What if…..

We tried a few, and guess what? Our presentations were so popular that SlideShare contacted us to say that they were featuring GreenNurture on the home page.

Today we have moved beyond that, and turned podcasts into a presentation. See below. I think it’s neat not because it pulls the format into a new skin, so to speak, but for anyone who does not want to download it to an MP3 player, but likes to listen to it on a computer, it adds a new experience. The forward buttons help you get back to a part of you missed.

And yes, there’s a word for this hybrid format –it’s called Slidecasting!

How Climate Gate is Leading Us to True Sustainability

View more presentations from GreenNurture.

 

GreenNurture podcast with Jay Baer

In my podcast series with GreenNurture, I often feature people with disruptive perspectives, from companies that are redefining business as usual in their segments.

So it was an honor to have Jason Baer, fellow Arizonan and someone I have been following (check his blog Convince And Convert) for as long as I’ve been working as a mashup of writer, marketer, communicator.

For those of you who don’t know him Jay has founded five companies, consulted for more than 700 companies and brands worldwide. But he’s best known for three words: Social Media Strategy. Just Google those words and see what I mean!

• Download the podcast here

• Listen to it here at GreenNurture

Enjoy!

 

Crowd-sourcing as internal communication tool

Smart mobs, crowd-sourcing, citizen journalism –have you noticed how these waves of outside influence keep crashing on our shores?

Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, uses a powerful analogy of human intelligence and computers. If you consider thousands of computers in a building as heaters running at full capacity, he says, only a small part of the heat generated is being used to warm the building. The rest of the energy leaks outside. It could easily be distriuted to other parts of the enterprise.

Now consider the ‘leakage’ of intellectual capital in your office every day. Employees arrive at the workplace, power-up, and are left to run, but vast amounts of  knowledge and ideas are untapped. The occasional survey, the large meetings where no one wants to raise their hand only scratch the surface.

Crowd-sourcing (despite books like this on the future of business) as a driver of big ideas, or as an  internal communications / HR function has not taken off. When it has been attempted –in a controlled environment such as focus groups — the costs and time involved make it a very expensive nice-to-have.

So how do you connect the internal circuits of your human resource that occupy the building? I’ve come across voting tools, idea-generation apps and feedback systems. Here are a three:

• IdeaScale – for community-level conversation tracking
• ConceptShare - for teams of designers and Creatives to collaborate and generate ideas
• GetSatisfaction -a tool for customers and employees to gather ‘social knowledge’

Feedback widgets are here –and coming soon to a mobile device near you. Many of them only go so far. Some experts even warn of getting entangled in intellectual property problems. But the big hurdle to consider is motivation. Engagement goes hand in hand with incentives -the old WIFM concept.

My client, Arizona-based GreenNurture has takes the concept of feedback and employee engagement further. Deeper! 

Here’s how it works: In a company that wants to deploy a sustainability program, employees login to a social media-like app, come up with ideas, start comment or conversation threads, make pledges and vote on each others ideas. When hundreds of them start talking to each other, some idea gets refined, tossed out or voted up. The cream rises to the top, so to speak. There’s more granular information, including an assessment tool, deep reports etc –making sure no ‘heat’ is lost.

If you are interested, check the demo here!

 

GreenNurture debuts social media app at DEMO this week!

Happy to be associated –embedded?– with a company like this. As some of you know, I manage the social media for GreenNurture.

This was under wraps until today. We were selected to be at DEMO — a premier tech conference known as ‘the launchpad for emerging technologies.’  Take a look at the very cool company we are in.

Later tomorrow (Monday) I will be updating this blog and GreenNurture’s blog with more details.

For now, here’s the official statement from DEMO

 

Podcast: All waste equals lost profit

As most of you readers know, I’ve started podcasting at GreenNurture, where I handle social media strategy.

In this podcast I asked Derrick Mains to talk about something that we don’t think too much about –how waste that literally ‘travels through the supply chain’ can be eliminated. In fact many businesses that are now monetizing it. I came across a statement that inspired this conversation, that there is no such thing as trash, just misappropriated resources.’

No doubt, these images of a temple in Bangkok (built with one million empty bottles) are an extreme example of that, but on a micro level using things ready for the trash or recycle bin have value, and work like currency. I am a big fan/customer of Bookmans, and have saved hundreds of dollars on books, magazines, software and music by ‘exchanging’ unused resources.

Get more details here.

Download the podcast here.

 

Quotes for the week ending 6 March 2010

“This may be one of the largest experiments ever conducted on the web.”

Ben Parr, at Mashable, in the introduction of auto-captioning to YouTube videos

“Blogging success is a slow march, not a mad dash.”

Jason Baer, at Convince and Convert, on the 10 key success metrics for a blogging strategy

“The idea that content is king is true, but some people miss out on reading that great content because there is nothing interesting in the headline that represents it.”

Alex Fraiser, in a post about headline techniques for blog posts.

“Every defective part is like a dead body…To figure out what killed it, we need to duplicate the crime.”

John Smith, a member of GM’s Red X team of engineers who study bad auto parts

“So What”, you say? So there are no pilots or even air traffic controllers to guide us, what does this mean? In the Web 2.0 skies, organizations are gliders who must reacting to their current environment.”

Rick Spratley, at the Employee Engagement Network

“We live in an age in which ideas and arguments fly across the globe almost instantly … Assaults on those rights, like “libel tourism,” tell us just how rare, and fragile, they are.”

Editorial in Arizona Republic on foreign nationals suing Americans for libel in foreign and US courts.