Social media, A/K/A Web 2.0, seems to be all the rage this year. IIABNY has a group on LinkedIn. InsuranceCampus.org, a social networking site, has a group focused on social media. Insurance people (such as yours truly) are popping up on Twitter like dandelions. And, as you can see, they'll let just about anyone have a blog these days.
So, social media is a good thing, right? Well, yes, provided the person or organization uses it properly. If you're among the uninitiated (and that is probably a group of several million,) how do you know what to avoid? That's where Tee Morris comes in. Tee is the co-author of Podcasting For Dummies, Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies, and author of the forthcoming All a Twitter. He is a speaker and trainer on social media topics who has presented at the Library of Congress, Book Expo America, the Washington DC Tech Expo, and later this year he will speak at events in New Zealand. In his spare time, he's an accomplished novelist with four titles in print. In 2005, he became the first person to release a previously published novel as a free serialized podcast, presenting his book Morevi: The Chronicles of Rafe and Askana. The podcast of his second novel, Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword, won the 2008 Parsec Award for Best Audio Drama (Long Form.) He released a re-mastered version of Morevi in 2007-08, and he hosts several other podcasts.
Tee recently gave a presentation in Washington titled ANTI-Social Media: What Not to Do in Web 2.0, and he posted video on his Web site in three parts. I'm linking to part one, When Does a Blog Go Bad? today. I'll post links to the other two parts over the next couple of days. As we all dig a little bit deeper into this unfamiliar world of social media and try to figure out the best way to use it in our businesses, I think we have a lot to learn from people like Tee. Watch, listen and learn.