On the most recent “The Social Nerdia Show!” I had a conversation with  Angela Natividad and Bill Green, the podcasters behind AdVerve.

Angela’s Twitter profile tells us that she is “VP-Marketing, hypios. Ad scribe, Culture Buzz. Hostess, AdVerve. And yes, still the wholesale purveyor of The Sass™.” Bill Green blogs at MTLB (Make the Logo Bigger), a personal favorite, and  has worked with lots of great brands. You might also know them from their work with AdRants and their appearances on The BeanCast.

Listen to the entire conversation with A &B on the Flash player below. Please subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming LIVE shows on blogtalkradio.

Angela and Bill told me that they started AdVerve because they wanted to take ad podcasting in a new direction, to a place where every topic is welcome. “Every topic is about advertising. Advertising surrounds everything, all of the nuances from our culture,” Angela told me. Bill added that they wanted to have a “conversational (podcast) and see where things go, the way ad agencies are, the way creatives actually talk about situations.”

While the show is quite open-ended, both of them emphasized the importance of honesty and respect. “We’re careful about what we talk about on the show. We’re honest but respectful of anything that is confidential,” Bill explained. He told me a story that reflects just how much some advertisers and marketers are still not sure what do do with bloggers and podcasters: “There was an incident on the BeanCast where one of the guests on the show was fired, even though he didn’t say anything incendiary.. It was just a very nervous employer.”

Angela and Bill met through AdRants, a blog and email newsletter that provides “marketing and advertising news with attitude,” published by Steve Hall. “I knew Angela had a style that could transform into a different form,” Bill explained. Today, AdVerve already has 15 shows and its first episode was downloaded over 2,400 times. Regarding the future of the show, Angela told me that they “do see an opportunity for AdVerve to expand.” (more…)

I believe we should all seek to do something meaningful with our lives. While paying the bills is essential, we should try to pursue something that we truly get excited about and enjoy doing on a daily basis. We should try to impact the world in a positive way, even if in a small way.

I’m personally passionate about the convergence of technology, marketing, and the social web. I feel like a huge nerd reading the sentence I just wrote, but it’s true. I like to think, learn, and talk about those three things as much as I enjoy playing sports and listening to music. It’s how I’m wired. If you’re reading this, you might be wired like that too.

So this is a short version of the story of how I went from being a social media participant to a social media content producer to a social media manager, in less than one year…

Up until two and a half weeks ago, I was a tech and business consultant. For the three years prior to that, I had been a consultant with a promising career. I had worked on challenging and interesting projects concerning innovative mobile web sites, IT cost-reductions and, my favorite, identifying social media opportunities for communications service providers.

It was going pretty good. However, my interest in social media was growing. I found myself thinking about the rapidly changing social web on a daily basis. I read blogs like TechCrunch and magazines like AdAge. I listened to podcasts like Buzz Out Loud and kept up with the latest in social media thanks to people I had started to get to know as friends (instead of followers) on Twitter.

I was fascinated by all things social on the Internet and I wanted to further explore the future of the web. I needed a creative outlet. I needed a new “home base.” (more…)

Becca Taylor is a Social Media Manager at HP’s Enterprise Business, which focuses on servers, storage, business and IT software/services, and other B2B technologies. On the 32nd episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!,” I had a conversation with Becca and she told me about her role at HP, what the company is doing in the social media world, and her thoughts on community, participation, and personal branding.

Listen to the entire conversation with Becca on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

HP is a very large company with over 150,000 employees. “The larger the company gets, often, the more difficult it is to really get authentic social media engagement running,” Becca explained. She added that the benefits of social media in business-to-consumer offerings is much more clear than it is in the B2B realm, but her team is helping change that within HP by identifying the value to the company and its customers.

Her team is called “The Social Media Enablement Team” and consists of 6 people with different roles and in different locations. “Our goal is to work with different teams within the division to get them up to speed on the tools, and most of all, understand from a business perspective that they need to approach social media marketing as they would approach any marketing program, with deliberation, responsibility, and objectves,” Becca said.

Becca has been with HP for 10 years. She actually started at Compaq (which was acquired by HP) doing web documentation. She then transitioned into marketing where she “focused on customer advocacy, on how to best use the internet and various tools to enhance the customer experience.”

About a year ago the Enterprise Business division created a team that focused on social media, and Becca was one of the few who joined the team. “I’m thrilled I did,” she told me, “because I love my job. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.” (more…)

Cathy Brooks is a journalist, creative media strategist, and host of the Social Media Hour live podcast. She blogs at Other Than That, which is also the name of her consulting firm, and she has worked for companies like Tech TV (now G4) and Seesmic. In last night’s The Social Nerdia Show! I spoke with her about media, journalism, newspapers, technology, business, and much more. Cathy is not only highly entertaining, she is also incredibly insightful and thought-provoking.

Listen to the entire conversation with Cathy on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

Cathy’s tagline for her podcast is ‘it’s not about the tools, it’s about what you do with them,’ and it very well reflects her views on technology. She has much appreciation and enthusiasm for “the way that technology is used or not, successfully or not, and the impact that has on the way we buy things, share information, communicate with each other, and just evolve as carbon based life forms.”

The Two Medias

The fact that Cathy has much experience in traditional media led me to ask her about the now very widely use ‘social media’ term. She responded that there are two kinds of media, “media with a capital M and media with a lower case m.” The first one is ‘the media,’ and it includes outlets from large organizations like News Corporation and The New York Times Company, as well as blogs like The Huffington Post and Tech Crunch. “Lower case m (media) are the platforms, the technology, the things we use, the social networks, the real-time stream things like Twitter, Blogtalkradio, Facebook, YouTube, and the list goes on and on,” she explained.

While some would argue that the concept of media is not much more than a channel or a means to deliver some form of content, Cathy think that media has always been social. “Social media to me is a rather redundant term as opposed to an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp. Media is by its nature a social thing and it has become more so in its interactivity, crowdsourced nature, and user generated contributions,” she told me.

The Case for Journalism

There has been much talk about the death of the newspaper and the traditional media organization in the last few years, but Cathy thinks this has been “greatly exaggerated.” She continued to say that while “some of these types of media outlets, some of the mediums, may either die or change greatly, the need for journalism has never been more important.” (more…)

Web 2.0 tools and technologies, things like blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS, are changing the way companies communicate and collaborate, both internally and externally with customers, partners and suppliers. In last night’s The Social Nerdia Show! I was able to speak with Michael Chui about how companies can successfully leverage Web 2.0 and social media. Michael, a McKinsey & Company consultant serving technology and telecom clients, has been co-leading research on emerging long-term technology trends and their impact on clients and some of this research can be found on studies published by The McKinsey Quarterly, including “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Michael on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to our shows on iTunes, stream from mobile phones on Stitcher, and listen LIVE on blogtalkradio.

For the past 3 years, Michael and his McKinsey team have been surveying over 2000 executives on their use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. “There has been an evolution; the number one thing that has changed over the years is continuing adoption and usage,” Michael explained.

As more and more enterprises experiment and deploy the tools, it seems like more of them are starting to realize their real value. Michael explained that the results are impressive because “two thirds of respondents actually reported driving real business benefits from the use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, which is quite a powerful result.”

Some of the benefits discovered include an “increase in speed to access knowledge and expertise, increase in cost-savings related to communication and travel, increase in employee satisfaction, and increase in the effectiveness of marketing and customer satisfaction.”

(more…)

Doug Aamoth is the Reviews Editor for CrunchGear.com, a TechCrunch blog that covers gadgets, gear, and computer hardware. TechCrunch started in 2005 and CrunchGear was added to the network in 2006 when Michael Arrington expanded the site to include a blog that focused on gadgets. Doug has been with the CrunchGear team since 2007 and he now also hosts the CrunchGear live podcast on Wednesdays at 3pm Eastern.

Doug spends a lot of his time reviewing products so I asked him about some of his favorites. He mentioned the Acer netbook 751h and he also told me that he just got iPhones on a family plan with his wife. “It’s hard not to talk about the iPhone. It’s still so far ahead of other phones.” But not all of his reviews are about phones and computers. I’ve noticed that he often writes about random things and deals, from sandals with metal detectors to left-handed underpants. “We try to have something up at the very least every half other so it’s hard to fill a day some times.” CrunchGear as a site does about 50 posts and Doug writes about 5-10 per day.

A lot of Doug’s work is reactive. 10% of the time Doug contacts a company, while they will contact him the other 90% of the time. Doug wakes up every day without really knowing what he’s going to write about because about 90% of what goes up on CrunchGear is reactive. And reactive can mean hard work. “It’s not the picture that most people get of bloggers waking up at noon. I wake up at 7am and work full steam.. until about 9 at night.” (more…)

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins is the Managing Editor for SiliconANGLE, a collaboration blog that was founded by entrepreneur and PodTech founder John Furrier. I had a great time speaking to him about blogging, podcasting, old and new media on yesterday’s The Social Nerdia Show!, which you can stream below, stream on blogtalkradio, and subscribe to the iTunes podcast.

Before the term “blogging” was conceived, before Blogger became a huge success, and before WordPress was even an idea, people used to manually post updates on web pages full of animated GIFs, FastCounters and guestbooks. Regularly updating text on a web site on a regular basis, without the use of a CMS, is how many “bloggers” got started in the 90′s. Mark, who has been blogging at rizzn.com for about 11 years (check the WayBack Machine if you want) is one great example. Mark told me about his personal road to becoming a professional content producer, which included taking breaks, moving cross country in the age of desktops, and the fact that he became “addicted to the process… It’s more of a compulsion than a hobby.” AdSense is of course “not exactly a pay check” so Mark spent some time trying to figure out how to increase traffic and eventually live from his love for creating content.

Mark started podcasting after watching some Christian Slater movie (“Pump Up The Volume” maybe?). But, just as with blogging, it wasn’t really podcasting back then, unless you want to consider DIY recording of audio on a computer and distributing it with CD-Rs a podcast. Once the iPod came out and actual podcasting made it possible to easily distribute audio to the masses, Mark had already figured out the recording part of the equation. “The same show that we had 300 listeners across 7 different stations, we started putting it into podcasts and the first week we had 700 downloads. Nobody knew about it except for the people that happened to be in the podcast directory.” With daily shows and peaking at 300,000 podcast listeners, Mark’s podcast provided some income for him (even if it took 90 days to get it), but in today’s market, he believes it might be better to focus on text and video content instead of audio (at least from a monetizing point of view). Still, if someone really wants to podcast, sites like BlogTalkRadio and TalkShoe have made it much easier (and cheaper) than it used to be back then. (more…)