CP

Thanks! As you know companies seem to struggle with the personal side of social media & online communities. Getting the software installed is the easy part; using it effectively to engage with people can be much more difficult.

However I am stll unclear on why would a company use a social networing site like Facebook to talk about it? A company looking more for local or national clients might not find this kinda social networking sites of any use. Am I missing something here? How is the social networking sites actually helping any business?

I have a personal blog of mine(http://composedvolcano.blogspot.com/). I have yet to start a company blog. Also we dont have any presence on sites like facebook etc.

Something that I’ve found interesting are niche sites that graft some social networking features onto it. PreCYdent is a free legal research site that has profiles built into it. I can see niche sites having more staying power than universal sites and thus having more value to service providers in those markets.

I’d be very interested on how you work through your slides. I hope to start placing podcasts and videos on the small business sites that I run. I hope to find to coherently edit the talks into smaller, more digestable amounts. Although I find podcasts very interesting, anything over 10 minutes and I’ll start working on something else while playing it in the background.

Kevin,

Great Questions.

Part of the difficulty with videotaping presentations is that the screen doesn’t come out at all on video. Especially if the slides have light backgrounds, you usually end up with a glaring mess. I tend to focus the camera more on the speaker when I am running the video knowing that I can always overlay the slides over the audio. On integrating audio with slides, I know I’ve done it in iMovie before. I’m getting ready to edit one with a few slide overlays, so we’ll see how it goes, and maybe I’ll post with a few tips with instructions on how to overlay slides on top of audio. Alternatively, you can just record the audio in some digital format and import it into iMovie. Ideally, I would use something like iShowU (Mac) or Camtasia (Windows) to do a screencast where you record the audio as you show a presentation or demo on the screen. You can even pull it into iMovie or another video editor to edit out any mistakes.

On Facebook, I would encourage you to focus on the individual and not the company. Even lawyers and advertising consultants can benefit from having individual profiles on Facebook or other social media sites to connect with colleagues, potential clients, future employees, and more. I agree that you wouldn’t want a corporate presence in those cases, but individual profiles can still benefit you professionally. With that said, if an individual isn’t comfortable with a site like Facebook, they shouldn’t try to force a fit. As I mentioned sincerity is important, and if it isn’t comfortable, try something else that is (LinkedIn, Plaxo, Biznik, etc.)

I’m very interested in the idea of podcasts right now. In many ways it seems like it would be the best form of client education. A 5-10 minute audio file over some slides would have a broad appeal.

Seeing that my 10 O’clock appointment canceled, I was looking at the developer interviews that you posted on Jive. Perhaps I’m not the target audience, but I found myself more interested in the powerpoint slides behind them than looking at them while they were talking. Is there a good way of integrating the audio from a conference with the slides that were used?

Lastly, Phil Bernstein posted on the post I made on PortlandSmallBUsiness.com, that Facebook would be out of context for the work he does. I would have to agree with him for my line of work. Consumer brands will probably benefit greatly from building their presence on Facebook. However, I don’t see people interacting with a advertising consultant, lawyer or any other professional service the same way they would with CocaCola or Apple.