This is the first of a series of new blog posts covering the Get Social! Radio Show topic and guests.

Our guest for the next Get Social! Radio Show will be Dan Harris, founder of Taste Casting. Our radio show listeners have been learning all kinds of new vocabulary thanks to our guests and this show will be no exception.

Taste Casting involves the invitation of socially networked individuals by independent restaurateurs to a complimentary food tasting. In exchange, this Taste Casting team broadcasts to their collective network of friends, followers and linked connections via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, etc. Their cameras, flip video, camcorders, and smartphones tell the story of their experience at the restaurant. They communicate the story of the menu, smells, tastes, specials and overall ambiance that makes up the venue.

I am fascinated by Taste Casting not necessarily for the opportunity to glom onto some free eats, but rather to gauge for myself the interest of small business owners in participating in this new social form of marketing and advertising. The concept for me is interesting because it teams up the act of what is natural and understandable about public socialization (eating food and then chatting with others) with the new social media tools that can share opinions, photos and video in a lightning fast manner with hundreds or thousands of others.

Restaurant owners that invite a “Taste Casting” team to their establishment have already stepped out of the box because if they had any concern about the food quality or cleanliness of the establishment these are exactly the WRONG folks you would want to have in your restaurant. Their voices of the Taste Casters are loud and resonate in all sorts of social media platforms. This adds a level of credibility to not only the Taste Casting team, but it also demonstrates for consumers that the restaurant is prepared for a critical review. Unlike a major metropolis, cities like Dayton, Tipp City, Vandalia, Centerville don’t have culinary reviewers or critics coming in to check out the establishments.

A bit about Dan Harris

Dan is an Idea Guy. He is full of energy, ideas and resolves to make those ideas happen. This critical trio of skills makes him a force to be reckoned with. Dan is also a serious marketer who likes to say “We are not making mistakes fast enough” Yep, mistakes. Dan believes that you should make them, learn from them and then do not repeat them. “That’s how you become the best.”

So now you know why a guy like Dan gets on the Get Social! Radio Show, Wednesday August 26th at 9PM. He fascinates me and I know he will do the same for you!

Millions of Americans oblivious to politics, probably don’t know what district they reside, and probably don’t know who their legislators are; now seem to be standing up and voicing their concerns about the proposed National Health Care Bill. They are finding out concerning details of this proposed bill through their email, facebook, twitter and other social media tools and you can certainly not turn on the news without some coverage of the upsetting situation.

For those of us political pundits out there, all of this is distressing. No one wants to see Americans reaming our legislators for something that they may or may not have had anything to do with. Yet the information coming out about the bill is understandably concerning for even those who have chosen to not participate in politics. With trillions of dollars being added to the debt each year under the new plan, and massive new taxes to be applied to everything.. Including healthcare services! Folks that have never been behind a microphone are voicing their opinions, and thousands of new blogs are cropping up authored by those both for and against.

My question, is how will the US government deal with this new sort of grassroots vocalisation? There is talk now about a national referendum by some. I personally am concerned about our legislators calling protesters of this bill “KKK” and “Dirty Mobs”.  While I am not publicly swinging a bat for or against this particular legislation, I fear what happens to our democracy and freedom of speech when those who vocalise their concerns are diminished, arrested and (some) jailed. I would hate to see something very bad occur thanks to the acceleration and distribution of information via social media.

While businesses are quickly identifying the benefits of using social media tools to listen to what people have to say about them, and then participate in the discussion, governments have been almost completely absent. In fact, many are spending thousands of dollars building up “electronic walls” to block the use of these tools. But why would a city not want to have a conversation with it’s residents?

I firmly believe that government has always trailed public sector concerns in technology and most things by 10-15 years. Local cities and municipalities are literally just getting around to putting up firewalls that protect sensitive data and privacy concerns. The consultants that government officials customarily rely on are much older as a demographic and not entirely in-tune with current technologies. And finally, government learns from its mistakes, if it has ever “over-shared” information in the past, more rules and regulations are quickly developed to prevent sharing that information anymore. All of these components have created a less-than transparent government that has difficulty understanding what is truly important to its constituencies. Many times government  has to guess what is important, or even more disastrous and costly, hire a public relations consultant to tell the city officials what causes residents to be so adversarial and untrusting of their government.

My suggestion to cities that find these complexities within their council chambers, city management or municipal services (police, fire, water) would be to introduce cost effective, and policy driven social media. This campaign would have a single goal of creating an “open and transparent” government that brings together open dialogue, open content and open data.

• Build blogs and wikis, as well as facebook and twitter outposts to initiate and then foster a two way communication between City Council and the community.
• Encourage community contribution of local knowledge to collaborative spaces such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap.
• Releasing City Council materials, when possible, under a Creative Commons license “to promote the use and dissemination of Council’s materials while retaining Council’s rights of authorship”
• Building of an application programming interface (API) to that information so others can use it. (to build iPhone apps, economic development tools, etc.)

To support these commitments, the City must encourage and train councilmen and women to use these internet tools in their official capacity. The City should also support and mentor community members who are active online or who wish to be and to provide training and support for less digitally-engaged citizens (using the City’s social media champions to provide peer-led training). Likewise, senior staff, managers and key professional officers will be kept abreast of the outcomes of online community engagement strategies.

If you wish that your City Government would begin engaging the citizens of your town using the most powerful and cost effective tools available to them today, you should contact your City Council or County and municipal leaders and let them know.

If you are seeking professional support in starting a community engagement strategy for your city, please contact me for guidance and training support.

Today I challenged myself to write down my elevator pitch for my company, Bash Foo Social Media.
I didn’t want any pretentious chatterworthy buzz that receives the requisite head nods from the unattentive masses. If you are looking for corporate buzzwords and traditional marketing spin-doctoring with a nice warm and fuzzy feeling to it, you need to move along. You’ll find nothing of the kind here.
Rather, I wanted to first peak curiosity and then deliver a relentless choke hold that you can’t get out of.
Was I able to deliver the goods? You be the judge!

Bash Foo Social Media constructs strong business strategies.

Our uncompromising and unconventional analysis of a clients business needs maximizes the returns of even a small social media campaign through the gratuitous use of “Foo”.

Foo (foo) -verb

The amazing ability of human action in all of its forms to excite, engage, enrage, amuse, disgust, align and create a passionate response in others.

Foo is the action taken every day by our strategists to build viral blog articles, build and then engage fans, earn and then maintain community influence and finally to stand at the top of the highest mountain and announce brand dominance to the market.

If you are looking for Foo, you came to the right place.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is a philosophical riddle that questions the relevance of something that occurs in the absence of a listener.

Fallen tree

We are challenged with this riddle with staggering regularity in life. The traditional marketing theory has been if you could yell loud enough, in order for every man, woman and child to hear you; that you would them be able to ”sell” your wares to a percentage of those people. This is best demonstrated today with Super Bowl advertising, New York Times Square and other massively loud (and expensive) ad campaigns. We also see this in our Inbox when someone wants to wire us $1 million in cash if we only wire back $10,000 to them from our checking account. Those Nigerian marketers are not dumb at all. They are not targeting the 99% of the people that delete the obvious scam email; they are targeting the 1% of folks who actually think they will become rich if they follow those instructions. If the email is sent to 400,000 people, 4,000 people will respond x $10,000 or $4 million dollars profit to the Nigerian crime syndicate. 

Many Social Media specialists will tell you that it is not the number of fans/followers you have, it is your ability to share relevant information with them, providing them with a reason to follow.

But isn’t relevance a subjective thing for each one of us? For instance, if there is a twitter stream that only blasts-out discount coupon codes for Longaberger baskets, most folks without any affinity for baskets will not follow that twitter account. They will consider that channel as “spammy” and of no importance to them.

Now, if you DO happen to have an affinity to these particular baskets, it may be one of the most important and valuable twitter accounts you follow.

It is the challenge of the digital marketer to identify those that have an existing affinity for their product, and market to them. Additionally, there is opportunity to provide broad, direct marketing to a wide audience of followers who as of yet do not have such affinity.

So the next time you are in a forest and you hear a tree falling, ask yourself if you were actually paying attention to that tree, or did it only become relevant to you when you heard it crack above you head!

*This post was penned only after I pledged my undying gratitude and support to Mike Driehorst @mikedriehorst for providing the topic to me on a day where a socially relevant tree was not readily available. “Esse est percipi”

Thank you to the incredible folks at Coefficient for taping my session at PodCamp Ohio 2009.

Why does your digital marketing campaign suck? from Coefficient Media on Vimeo.