Social Media

Occasionally I'm lucky enough to connect to someone who shares a lot of similar interests (marketing, podcasting, entrepreneurship) for one of my interviews. For this podcast, I found just such a kindred soul in Marcus Couch, the Director of Online Marketing for Entrepreneur Media, the publishing company behind Entrepreneur.com, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Entrepreneur Press.

John Cass of IMO Wireless, my 12th interview and one of the first people to believe in my 1,000 podcast project enough to spend some time with me, has recently written a great book (

Most blogs have a fairly small readership, usually a handful of friends, peers or family members. But there are the occasional standouts that achieve 1,000s of readers through some combination of hard work, luck and the right niche. TechCrunch's 300,000 plus is the common example. Recently, I was lucky enough to interview a sharp entrepreneur named Collis Ta'eed who took his new blog/community (FreelanceSwitch) from 0 to 4,000 RSS subscribers in under 30 days.

There is certainly no shortage of media in this world. From the "old school" media channels of magazines, newspapers, books, TV & radio to the "new school" world of blogs, podcasts, vlogs & social networks, we're all drowning in content. Today, I was lucky enough to chat with a man who is seeking to span those two worlds with a new publication - Larry Genkin of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine.

One of the interesting questions hanging around the social software/media world is when and how (even if) businesses (especially large ones) are going to embrace these new technologies. In the past, I've done research on business adoption of social media and discussed it among past podcasts (Ynema Mangum of BMC is a notable one) but my next interviewee provides a whole new level of insight.

Public relations is one of the fields that will certainly be most affected by social media. Rather than working with a handful of media outlets, PR pros now must also deal with the millions of blogs, forums, social networks, online videos and more. For this podcast, I connected with Phil Gomes, one of the sharp minds at Edelman focusing on the changing face of media.

Phil was nice enough to talk about the social media release, who's tackling social media right, the state of research in the space and more.

With all the buzz and hype, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that social media is young. And due to that relative youth, both leading practitioners and researchers are still just starting to sink their teeth into the subject. This morning I was lucky enough to interview a Phd student from the University of Maryland's ebiquity Research Group who has been researching social media longer than most (i.e. 2 years!).

For this interview, I hopped the pond (aka the Atlantic) via Skype to chat with an expert on new media, online marketing, and eBusiness named Chris Garrett. A web addict from the early days (1994!), recently part of the Performancing team until it was acquired, and now an independent consultant, Chris helps companies sell more online.

Yes, I too did a double-take when I saw his name for the first time. But John Payne's company CircleUp had me at first glance. CircleUp makes a social messaging service that allows you to send an email or instant message to a "circle" of your contacts (from 2 to thousands) and get a single response back with everyone's answer. How cool is that?

For this podcast I was lucky enough to sneak into the packed schedule of Ted Rheingold, the founder of Dogster and Catster, two online communities built around people's passions for their pets. The networks have grown dramatically since they were founded in 2004 and now feature over 1.5 million pictures of 300,000 different pets.