Shar VanBoskirk leading a “Next Generation of Media” Panel
Panelists:
Christina Norman, MTV keynote from Forrester Consumer Forum
Christina Norman, MTV – really excellent keynote. Dynamic, engaged – easy to see that MTV gets it. (Of course it isn’t just one person, but she represents well the variety of efforts they have underway).
At MTV, we’re pretty psched – being our fans BFF has always been important to us as a company.
It’s no accident MTV started as a cable channel – youth were most open to the potential of cable.
Together, we define what MTV is – it is the world’s largest brand gallery.
What we’ve learned: Four Guiding Truths that burn in all of us at MTV
- It’s not the medium, but the content that matters most.
- Build an emotional relationship with the users based on content they find compelling.
- Give your audience a place and mechanism to find each other.
- You have to let your audience help you shape your brand.
Living in the age of the Groundswell
Josh Bernoff‘s day 2 keynote from Forrester Consumer Forum.
Key point: Objectives, not technology, need to lead your effort
Don’t build a community just because your competitors do. Don’t just try to “generate buzz” – what is the goal you hope that buzz will accomplish? Figuring out what you’re trying to achieve will let you then measure what you are doing.
It isn’t “how do we get involved in the groundswell” but what problem are we trying to solve or what opportunities are we trying to create.
These are the main objectives:
- Listening
- Talking
- Energizing
- Supporting
- Embracing
Analogies to organizational roles:
Research -> Listening
Marketing -> Talking
Sales -> Energizing
Support -> Supporting
Development -> Embracing
In the groundswell (ie, in the web 2.0 era), each of these needs to be transformed a bit. He went through each of them with some examples, including vendors.
Unfortunately, I didn’t hear a single mention of the use of open source to help deliver on these objectives – each objective ended with a brief table listing approaches and vendors – but no mention of assembling your own solutions with open source frameworks, despite the reality that open source frameworks are often the best solutions in many of these spaces.
I know Forrester hasn’t historically focused on open source and I don’t expect them to – but buying product solutions from proprietary vendors isn’t the entire universe. He also didn’t really cover how you integrate these solutions together – so that you don’t end up with five siloed solutions but a cohesive strategy and integrated set of applications which exchange and share data. [Note: this did come up during the Q & A – see the end of the notes below.]
Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 Day 1
What people learned from day 1 of Forrester:
- Don’t get caught up in the next shiny object: forcus on creating experiences for people
- People ask how much control to give customers – but customers have already taken control and we’ll never get it back
- Twitter (with friends)
- Flickr
Carrie Johnson and Christine Overby just finished the day 2 opening remarks, talking about things carried over from day one – Richard Edelman’s “Windy City Rules” and “Be It, Don’t Buy It” (see Jeremy Pepper’s notes); Christine Hefner on Playboy’s use of new media (myspace, Playboy U) and organizational change (as in, if you can’t change the organization you’re in, change organizations).
Next up Josh Bernoff keynote.
No More Talkin’ Blackjack Bluetooth Blues
Thanks to Jay’s Technical Talk I’ve finally got my Cingular Blackjack working with my laptop (Kubuntu) via Bluetooth.
This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.
I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.
The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.
All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:
- Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
- Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
- On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
- Issue the command: sudo pand -c
, using the address discovered above - Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0
Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.
I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.