Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

7 Lessons on Contemporary Journalism

Perugia hosted the 2009 International Journalism Festival from April 1-5. Speakers listed journalists and editors from Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Serbia, the Gaza Strip, Africa and South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and the US. These are some choice quotes I pulled from the event's video interviews. This is the creator of Fifty People, One question. One simple question to fifty people stopped at random in the street: what would you like to happen today? The answers and above all the facial expressions and body language of those 50 people are surprisingly moving. For a news reader, the question may... Read more →

How do You Become an A-Player?

An A-Player is not a person who went to Harvard, I echo Auren Hoffman's sentiment. Still according to Hoffman, an 'A-Player' by definition is incredibly productive and smart and has that 'it', that rockstar-esque factor that makes everyone want to work with her. Ben Zander talked about the concept of leading from any chair - he's contagious in his enthusiasm and love for being present to what he does. Building on that post at The Blog Herald, I wrote about marketing lessons we can draw from his body of work. They can also be applied to the characteristics that distinguish... Read more →

Your Friends May Vary

Depending on the social network you're in, the number of friends you have may vary - and so will your mileage. Connections and collaboration, which are the currency of modern times, especially when it comes to relationships with customers, depend on your ability to thrive not just as an individual, but as part of a group or community. In other words, they depend on your friends. What is the definition of "friend" online? Does it change depending on the context? Perhaps it's different depending on the tool? You're someone I follow on Twitter, but we're not LinkedIn because we've never... Read more →

The Agency Side of Business: Lee Odden, TopRank

Hiring an agency today can be a daunting task. There are so many out there - how do you know which one is a right fit for your needs? This series was hatched when I wrote if I were an agency today. That's when I set out to discover notable agency blogs. Among the many practitioners I met in the last couple of years, a few stand out for their consistency, generosity, and good work. I met Lee Odden when the PRSA conference was in Philadelphia a few years ago. We had a chance to get to know each other... Read more →

The Conversation Index

Author, listener, speaker, practitioner, futurist, trend setter, friend. This post is the result of a collaboration with Brian Solis, Principal of Future Works and author of PR 2.0. Brian just published another book - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, which I highly recommend to anyone who's even remotely connected with public or customer relations. Brian and I have shared similar views on content marketing, customer conversations, and how companies can learn to identify new opportunities in the marketplace by listening to their customers. Social media is an environment where companies can educate, engage, and evaluate the value of... Read more →

The Case for Customer Communities

You're probably familiar with the concept of Dunbar's number. The Wikipedia entry defines it as a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. This number is set at 150 connections. Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable... Read more →

Could the Fourth Estate be an Ecosystem?

On March 29, 2009, The Huffington Post announced the creation of a $1.75 million fund with various donors to pay for investigative reporting. This is similar to what ProPublica is doing - a nonprofit independent newsroom funded by The Sandler Foundation. Headed by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica works with a $10 million budget. According to Jeff Jarvis, news come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. The move by the Huffington Post... Read more →

50 Content Ideas that Create Buzz

I've been reading The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited by Emanuel Rosen, courtesy of Rosen himself. The book is a treasure trove of ideas and case studies on the way people share information and how ideas spread. Rather than give you a review of the book, which you can find on Amazon, I thought it would be useful to share some ideas and take aways that apply to content creation - the new business of marketing and communications. 1. Simplify someone's life. That's the appeal of Tim Ferriss, for example. 2. Evoke strong emotions about the art of marketing. Guy Kawasaki... Read more →

Write a Corporate Blog That Matters

Perhaps your company is considering a blog as part of their marketing strategy for customer acquisition or retention or maybe it’s as simple as your management thinks it’s the “in” thing to have one. Or, perhaps your existing corporate blog has stalled due to the time-demand of generating content. Today at the Online Media Bootcamp, I will talk about how to get started with a corporate blog and how to keep it from stalling. The key take aways from the workshop will be Why start a blog and who the best corporate bloggers are Best practices for blogging 3-easy steps... Read more →

Angel Investors, Meet Caroline Di Diego, Film Narrator and Entrepreneur

It's a small step from the About You page to the front page. And it's yet another example of the power of social media as a set of tools that can help us connect with people and their ideas. I followed up with Caroline (alias CASUDI), who was among the first to post a comment. After reading about one of her recent projects, I thought there could be opportunity for angel investors to connect with this entrepreneur. Why are you online? Caroline: I had been following Internet technology for several years prior to 1993, when an entrepreneur I was mentoring... Read more →