In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Joe Thornley and I talk with Terry Fallis about how he and his publisher, McClelland & Stewart, are using social media to find and cultivate a fan base for Terry’s novels.

Also up for discussion this week: Social media adoption still isn’t universal among communicators.

In this week’s Terry Fallis, Joseph Thornley and I talk about what makes a good conference experience – and what makes for a bad conference.

Personally, I look for four things:

1. Knowledgeable, expert speakers who will speak from experience
2. Opportunities to meet speakers and other participants from whom I can learn
3. Reflecting the new mobile working environment – lots of WiFi and charging stations for electronic devices
4. Lastly, and crucially, I find that as I attend more and more events, I get less value from the sessions (although they are still valuable) and more value from the hallway conversations – from finding a handful of interesting attendees with whom I can hang out, get to know better and learn from. These encounters lead to lasting relationships for me, so I appreciate events that facilitate that interaction.

Terry Fallis looks for speakers with a fresh perspective on their subject matter and who also are good presenters. Substance plus performance.

Joe wants at least one new good idea from each speaker. If he gets that, the conference is worthwhile. If not, he’ll exercise the law of two feet and head out to do some work.

Conference No-No’s:

• Faulty WiFi
• Slides that don’t work
• Worst of all, speakers who turn to face their slides and read the words directly off them (We can read. We don’t need speakers to read their slides to us. Surely, there must be something more to what they want to say than they could fit on a PowerPoint slide.)

The biggest annoyance of all:

Product pitches from speakers. I’ll walk out of sessions where the presentation becomes a product pitch.

What about you?

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Joseph Thornley and I talk about some of the limitations of the iPad and changes to two of the longest running PR podcasts – Inside PR and For Immediate Release.

Joseph thinks that Steve Jobs has made a mistake with the product by limiting its usefulness for content creation. I think that “Steve Jobs has always done  – what Steve Jobs wants to do.” Terry doesn’t see it as a mistake and expects that Apple will sell a “whack of them.”

Also, after four years and 200 episodes of Inside PR, Terry Fallis and David Jones have given up podcasting.Martin Waxman will carry on with new co-hosts. Why did Terry quit? Partly fatigue. But also a sense that the show needs to be refreshed, that it will benefit from an infusion of new ideas.

We also talk about the changes to the longest running PR podcast – For Immediate Release – as Shel Holtzand Neville Hobson announced that they’ve cut back from two shows a week to a weekly podcast. FIR is a must listen for us and we’re glad that Shel and Neville are carrying on.

In this week’s Social Mediators, Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis and I discuss our take-aways from two recent social media events in Toronto.

I was impressed by presentations given by Brad Buset, Miranda McCurlie and Dave Bradfield at PodCamp Toronto 2010 in late February, highlighting privacy and the impact of what we share online. My take: “Be careful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be out there.”

Terry, Joe and I all participated as student mentors at the recent Personal Brand Camp 2. Each of us has a slightly different take on the term (I preferred to take some of the scariness out of the term by asking to people to think in terms of the reputation they would like to have); in the second half of this week’s episode we discuss our take-aways from the event and some of the advice we gave to students.

What advice would you offer to students starting to think about how to build their own reputation?

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis and I discuss work/life boundaries. Specifically, are you always “one of us?” Should a company have any domain over its employees once they leave the office? This was prompted by a heated debate over our company’s new online communications policy over on MetaFilter recently.

From my perspective, employee guidelines should be considered to extend beyond 9-5 in some part. While a company doesn’t “own you” outside work, your actions outside work do reflect on the company. You might draw a line between work and your time outside work, but consumers and the media don’t. If you do or say something that offends, it’s not uncommon for the story to become about your job.

While the “don’t use social media” rules, which some organizations unfortunately have, shouldn’t apply, it’s reasonable to ask that employees not badmouth competitors (for example) or do anything that would actively work against the company’s interests when they’re outside the office. So, you’re not “always working for us” but you are “always one of us.”

Social media policies (if done well) can be a two-way tool. On the one hand, they protect the company by drawing boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not. On the other, they protect employees by clearly communicating what is acceptable, so people can interact online without any fear of reprimand.

What do you think?

You can subscribe to Social Mediators through this RSS feed.

Sites referred to in this episode:
Marketers Miss the Mark with Twitter, Mitch Joel
TTC Staffer caught apparently sleeping on job, National Post<
Alleged TTC napper under investigation, National Post
TTC union shocked at uncaring response of riders to “sleeping” staffer, National Post
Second photo emerges of another alleged TTC napper, National Post

Today we’re launching the Social Mediators video podcast.

Each week, Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis and I (three guys who, as Joe says, should never be on camera!) will chat about social media and its intersection with communications, organizations and society in general. As Joe put it on his site:

“We’re always on, always connected. How are we taking advantage of the new capablities that gives us? And how is that affecting the way we relate to one another and how we organize around common interests? Finally, what does that mean for traditional organizations – companies, cause-based groups and government?”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

In our first episode this week, we talk about personal branding online. Each of us is serving as a mentor at the upcoming Personal Brand Camp 2, organized by Michael Cayley for students at Humber College. We give our thoughts on the advice we’ll give to attendees there, then get into the topic of the personal/professional divide – a hot topic for us right now as we fine-tune our own new online communications policy.

Check it out here, or head over to the Social Mediators website to subscribe directly.