Welcome to an experiment in social technology.

Sometimes, asking a thought-provoking question is enough to get you on TV

Posted Tue, 12/01/2009 - 12:40

A poster for recruiting bloggers

It's dead easy to set up a blog, and if you commit to a niche, pretty simple to make a living doing it. Want to start? I'll help.

Are bloggers more trustworthy than journalists? That's the question I asked via my Amplify account, and it intrigued Brad Reed, a news anchor for Fox24, enough that he asked me to join him during his newshour to talk about it.

It was originally going to be just an interview with me, but I suggested turning it into a roundtable with Christopher Spencer of Ozarks Unbound and Bret Schulte from the University of Arkansas journalism program. I'm glad that Brad took my suggestion, because I don't think we could have asked for a better six minutes of air time.

I've uploaded the video to Youtube so that I could add annotations and invite people to continue the discussion in my comments section. This video is copyright Fox24, but I don't think they'll mind my posting it now that I've waited a couple of weeks for their initial traffic spikes to subside (though I didn't ask permission). Besides, it's probably fair use to repost video for the purposes of starting or continuing a discussion.

Without further ado, here I am talking about social media on camera. I was a little nervous, talked a little fast with some redundancies, and I still have a lisp (dammit!), but I think I got my points across despite all that.

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I found this list on Scott Monty's website a few weeks ago, and I really liked it. He's the new media guru for Ford Motors, and he's adapted the grief model from psychology to social media.

It's really quite clever, and it reminds me of the social media resolution I brought to the Council near the beginning of the year. In the weeks after introducing the resolution, I watched the public go through each of these stages, until finally the resolution was passed and we entered stage 5: acceptance.

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An image illustrates how social media works.

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