New Podcast with Jean Foster, VP Marketing at BT Americas

Hi all, I want to share with everyone a podcast I did this morning with Jean Foster. Jean is the VP Marketing for BT Americas, a division of global telecom powerhouse British Telecom. She shares best practices on marketing strategy, competing against bigger rivals (Verizon! AT&T!), merging marketing departments from acquired companies, integrating social media into a large enterprise B2B marketing and sales strategy and how to sell social media to internal audiences.



Full disclosure: Jean selected my employer, Strategic Communications Group, to develop and execute targeted campaigns to support her marketing and sales initiatives. Check out BT America's sustainability blog and their managed security services Twitter feed.

How do you think BT is doing?

Marvin Gaye Commercial

I've was watching the Olympics last night and saw a commercial from Nike featuring Marvin Gaye singing the National Anthem. It's a spectacular version and I blogged about it earlier in the year after seeing it referenced on a Twitter feed.

Here is the link to my earlier post that has the full length version: http://majka.blogspot.com/2008/04/marvin-gaye-sings-national-anthem.html

Check out the the video and tell me that's not the best version of the national anthem ever.

Here is the Nike Version:




Anyway, it occurred to me that the advertising agency and/or Nike must have come across this video in the same way I did, via social media and only then decided to make a commercial around it. It would be very interesting to learn how the creative ad types sourced their idea- an interesting case study on the impact of social media and the long tail.

What do you think?

So, am I a prosumer?

Lately, I've been struggling with the conflicting demands on my time. Participating in social networks is a key part of my job and how I present myself professionally, and even socially. However, since the key to effective participation is the creation of interesting valuable content, how do I participate when I prefer to voraciously consume content, rather than spit new stuff out.

For example, today I read:
washingtonpost.com
nytimes.com
RCRnews.com
economist.com
chrisbrogan.com
three slide shows on fastcompany.com
slate.com
(and yes, I read a story about Brett Farve too)
Chris Parente's blog post about Black Hat
socialtimes.com
(usually I'm perusing my twitter, facebook and friendfeed accounts too)

I've read ten or so emails that required a reply, skimmed another 50 or so (ignoring at least another 100).

I was in a two hour plus meeting as well.

I worry about all the marketing and technology people toiling away at corporations that are being forced by over eager consultants to blog, blog, blog, twit, twit, twit and comment, comment, comment. Is it a reasonable expectation that these folks, who haven't been required to write large amounts of compelling content, will be able to do it? Is there anyone developing remedial classes on how to be creative or how to communicate? Are some folks going to be permanently at a charisma disadvantage in the Darwinian social media world? Is part of the value of PR consultant recommending who should blog and who shouldn't?

I don't lack for personality, and I still have moments when I stare at the empty white box and wonder what to write about. Maybe my problem is that it's August. What do you think?

I'm a spam blogger! No, wait...

I woke up this morning to find an email from Blogger that this blog had been flagged as spam. Nervous that the email was a phishing attack, I logged into my Blogger account separately and found this post on the Blogger blog:

You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

First, this is kind of a rookie mistake, eh? Second, this is a pretty well written, effective message that takes responsibility. Third, an email to accompany and negate the first one would have been nice and saved me some freak out time.

What do you think?