David Spark is a new media producer and consultant whose output includes Spark Minute, and he blogs at SparkMinute.com.

[The photo at left was taken at LeWeb in Paris, 2009, by Rodrigo Sepúlveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

You can check David’s Cool and Not-so-Cool post, but in the video, to save time, I edited to focus on the cool!

The post Backstage Pass- David Spark appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Ewan blogs at EwanSpence.com. He’s a blogger, author and writer based in Edinborough, Scotland.

[The photo at left was taken at LeWeb in Paris, 2009, by Rodrigo Sepúlveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

The post Backstage Pass- Ewan Spence appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Eliane is cofounder of Ubergizmo. She was a co-organizer of the Traveling Geeks tour to Paris and LeWeb, 2009.

[The photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepúlveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

The post Backstage Pass- Eliane Fiolet appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Beth comes from the application-development world, founded TechMamas.com and tweets as @techmama.

[The photo at left is by Olivier Ezratty.]

The post Backstage Pass- Beth Blecherman appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Robin writes at TechCrunch and is the managing editor of virtualization.com. He lives in Brussels.

[The photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

The post Backstage Pass- Robin Wauters appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Olivier blogs at Opinions Libres. His photos appear in the Flickr group for the Traveling Geeks. He along with Eliane Fiolet (who was a co-organizer of the Paris trip) was one of our local navigators).

[The photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa, one of the Traveling Geeks Paris geeks. Yes, that’s the lens on Olivier’s camera.]

The post Backstage Pass- Olivier Ezratty appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Matthew writes at MatthewBuckland.com. His favorite color is red.

[The photo at left was provided by Matt Buckland.]

The post Backstage Pass- Matthew Buckland appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Renee writes at DownTheAvenue.

[Photo at left is by Beth Blecherman.]

The post Backstage Pass- Renee Blodgett appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Amanda writes at TechZulu and is happy to strike up a yoga pose almost anywhere (not in this video, but in the Traveling Geeks Flickr photos).

[Photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa, one of the geeks on the Paris trip.]

The post Backstage Pass- Amanda Coolong appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The post Backstage Pass- Sky interviews the geeks appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Howard suggests the critical skills are: attention; participation; collaboration; network-savvy and critical consumption (what Howard often calls crap detection).

JD Lasica interviewed Howard in Cambridge [see JD’s blog post] when we were on Traveling Geeks.

The post Howard Rheingold- 21st Century Literacies appeared first on Sky's Blog.

You can download and use Google Latitude in the US, but you can’t download Google Latitude in the UK because it is “voluntarily” blocked by BT for privacy reasons (it discloses your location to others).

I just can’t say enough about how much use I get out of the little Flip MinoHD and UltraHD video cameras. I use them for all of my interviews now, and for shooting “trailers” to serve as proposals for projects.

My favorite part of the interview is when I wax poetic about the fact that the technology actually worked while we were on the road. I was really expecting much of it to fail. We really have a wired and wireless world today!

The post Tech recap from Traveling Geeks appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

The post Reaching Advocates and Influencers appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Earlier, in London, some of us had similar conversations with companies who are implementing social media strategies to be in closer touch with their customers. One of the companies I spoke with, in a conversation held under Chatham House Rule (meaning “not for attribution” or “off the record” in US press terminology), the head of customer support told me he had opened a Twitter account, reviews around 500 tweets a day, and helps between 10 and 50 dissatisfied customers resolve problems they’d been having with his company. This apparently takes him only a small amount of time (an hour or two, from what he said) and generates a huge amount of goodwill at very low cost, for his company.

I’ve been advising my clients for at least the past year to not worry about “attracting eyeballs to their web site” but instead to focus on making there presence felt “wherever the customer lives online.” In the case of my customers this means setting up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, and then using those to engage in genuine conversations with customers – not one-way marketing-speak.

Oops, almost forgot – listen to what Susan has to say about all of this!

She calls it Social Influence Marketing and it has three core components: 1) Social Listening; 2) Participation; 3) “Appvertising” (Give-to-get).

The post Companies must go where their customers are appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The post Social Media forces immediacy of customer support appeared first on Sky's Blog.