“Tweet seats” are just the start. I’m pretty sure we’re going to see a lot more integration of social media with real life, and I hope to do a lot more blogging about that in 2012.

Image via Flickr/Piero...

For decades, technology has helped us feed that curiosity and desire to be in touch with our surroundings. Radio reporting from war correspondents was groundbreaking in its day. Then TV came along with its incredible ability to transmit moving images of things happening halfway around the world.

Online tools now personalize and decentralize experiences even more. Perhaps most importantly, they facilitate meaningful interaction and connection as life happens. There’s something extremely powerful about that.

And like I said earlier, I think this is just the start.

Last week, I spoke to Tom Murphy who is a powerful force in the international development / humanitarian aid social media space. I’ve also spoken with social entrepreneur Saul Garlick, China/Chile/California whiz extraordinaire Leslie Forman and Sherry Petersik, half of the rockstar blogging team at Young House Love.

I was one of those people who thought Oprah pretty much had the coolest job in the world. So having my own little platform is kind of the biggest treat ever — especially because of the cool people I get to interview.

The sound quality of the interviews has been sort of erratic, and I still have a ton to learn on that front. But I have picked up several tips from the Podcast Answer Man website. Cliff really knows his stuff and has an infectious passion for podcasting.

When it comes to the content, I draw inspiration from a lot of sources (aside from Oprah!). Mixergy, The Rise to the Top, Copyblogger’s podcast and On the Media are on my can’t-miss list. I can’t really begin to tell you how many things I have learned from listening to these shows. It’s an essential part of my week. I download them onto my iPod and listen whenever I am on the move — on the metro, running errands or at the gym (except for when I’m on the treadmill, then I just need some good beats).

It’s early days for the Brazen Life podcast, but my goal is to create a show so valuable that listeners feel like they want to make time for it each week.

So feel free to listen to some of my shows linked above and let me know what you think! Did I miss a critical question? Would it help to have some intro music? I’d also love to learn about your podcast listening habits. What makes you tune in and what shows do you love?

If you’re familiar with my Twitter feed, you know it’s rare that I tweet about stuff like this, but I couldn’t hold back my enthusiasm:

And then… silence.

My tweet went unanswered. Not a huge deal (clearly I’m still super impressed with their concept and happy to tell you about it here), but it is a missed opportunity.

Every brand should have a plan for fans or evangelists — regardless of the size of their online network. When someone mentions you online, acknowledge it. But even more importantly, find a way to keep engaging them appropriately.

For example, when Argo Tea does open its first store in my area, they should tell me. My tweet makes it clear that I’ll be excited to hear this news, and I’ll probably tell my friends, which means instant buzz for them.

It sounds simple enough, but a lot of businesses and nonprofits just don’t follow that principle when creating tweets, Facebook status updates etc. Their updates often focus on why the content matters to the business. Our CEO was quoted! Our general manager’s dog is pictured! You know what I mean. This is a good approach if you want your own employees to (maybe) read your stuff, but it’s not so effective if your goal is to position yourself as a valuable source of information for your followers.

The focus should be on the thing that makes you think, oh that’s interesting! Or focus on identifying the most repeatable piece of information from the item you want to share.

Here’s an example. The charity Global Impact got some nice attention in The Washington Post. Great fodder for a tweet! Here is what they wrote:

This isn’t bad. But it could be better (Global Impact, hope you’ll forgive me for picking on you, but we’re all here to learn, right?). The problem with this tweet is unless you know Scott Jackson personally or are already predisposed to care what he thinks, there’s not a whole lot motivating you to click.

Instead pull a nugget from the piece and focus just on that (if people read it they will see that it’s an interview with Scott Jackson). Here is what I tweeted:

By shifting the focus a little, I grab the attention of anyone who wants to be a global health leader or thinks of himself or herself as a leader in that industry. It also makes you want to click to get more context.

So focus on the substance. If you can find some in this post, I hope you’ll use that as a basis for sharing

Perhaps part of the reason I found this article so fascinating is because of my recent, serious interest in outsourcing (how do people do it, how can I make it work for me sort of thing). Also, looking for a new job always struck me as the sort of thing that has to be DIY. But so does managing email and lots of people outsource that!

So reading about the companies in the article and their successes and snafus was definitely an eye opener, and I wanted to learn more. I mean if you were actually going to outsource your job search, how would you do it? And what could you learn from others who have done it.

So I looked around to see what I could find and wrote about in my first piece for Stepcase Lifehack. Hope you’ll check it out…

I was glad to connect with journalist Vickie Elmer and provide my perspective for the piece. There’s a lot of media coverage of the apparent freelance revolution. But as an active participant in the “Gig Economy,” I am consistently disappointed with the “woe is me” tone in a lot of the writing about freelancers and solopreneurs. The focus is often on the negatives: long and irregular hours, finding business consistently etc. Perhaps we’re getting an imbalance of this view because these days, a lot of people didn’t choose self-employment. They became freelancers by accident because of the economy.

But for those of us who were deliberate about this, it can be frustrating to be placed in the same category as the freelancers who are just trying to make a go of it until they find a suitable full-time job. I respect the accidental freelancers and their ability to improvise. It’s just that the narrative doesn’t resonate with all of us who spent time working toward the switch to self-employment.

My solution? I don’t identify myself as a freelancer. I generally introduce myself as a journalist/media consultant or online communications consultant. So I was really happy to get the final word in Vickie’s Washington Post article and (hopefully) avoid the “woe is me” freelancer tone. Here’s the end of the piece:

Schiff made the switch gradually, taking side jobs and clients for at least two years as she worked full-time at the Kaiser Family Foundation. She often had two to four clients to juggle, so when she switched to full-time contractor “in some ways it was kind of a relief. I just had more control over my schedule” after she left this spring, she said. Usually she creates the schedule and deadlines for many of her projects, except perhaps for her work as managing editor of a blog for Brazen Careerist, a site aimed at 20-somethings building their work lives.

She and Loyer agree freelancing requires self-discipline. “You have to adhere to self-imposed limits,” Schiff said. “No one else is going to be looking out for your time.”

She still has plenty of friends in the worlds of government, media and nonprofits. “I don’t know anyone who gets paid overtime. Now I get paid for the time I put in,” she said, since most clients pay her by the hour. That is a distinct advantage: “I’m still putting my heart and soul into it. I’m just getting paid.”

In the post, I reference Morton’s brilliant social media stunt. Now no one explains the value of what Morton’s did better than Gary Vaynerchuk. Trust me, here! Watch this video clip of Gary describing it and why it matters. He’s so on the money.

There are some surprises (that was the point of the post, after all) like the business magazine Fast Company. But I’ve pointed out instances when it had good global health content, often coming at it from the social entrepreneurship angle.

But what do you do if you want to make sure you see all the global health news (or other niche topic) from Fast Company (or another large publication) without having to sift through their feed or newsletter content to find the stuff you’re actually interested in?

One way to get around this is to set up a customized Google alert. Using Fast Company as an example, follow these steps:

1) Go to the Google News page to test your search

2) Specify that you want to search for news only on Fast Company, by typing this in the search bar: [ site:fastcompany.com]

3) Add search terms before “site:fastcompany.com,” to see what type of result you get and to tailor your search. For example, I used “health”

4) When you’ve found the term or terms you want to get alerts for, add it as an email alert or subscribe to the customized RSS feed at the bottom. See here:

Hope this helps! If you have any other tips for following niche news from a major site, please add your tip in the comments.

But neither WNYC nor the Gates Foundation has acknowledged that the show has actually received a grant.

Several recent episodes of On the Media credit the Gates Foundation, among other groups, with supporting the show. You can hear the message on the July 22 show at around 11 minutes. “Support for On the Media also comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live healthy productive lives,” the announcer states.

When I first heard the sponsorship message a few weeks ago, I searched On the Media’s website to learn more about the Gates Foundation funding. But I didn’t find information or acknowledgement of it anywhere. The show does not appear to put all its sponsorship information on the website. Apart from a sentence in the footer, I could not find mentions of other sponsors mentioned in the same podcast, such as Reputation.com and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

I put a question out on Twitter about the nature of the Gates Foundation’s support for the show. John Keefe, WNYC’s news director, responded almost immediately. He didn’t know the answer, but he referred me to WNYC’s press relations staff who have not gotten back to me yet (question was posed about two weeks ago).

After coming up empty on the Gates Foundation’s website, I reached out to their press people. In an email response  to my inquiry, a member of their media team wrote, “We do not have a grant to ‘On the Media’ or WNYC, but we have long supported NPR generally.” The media team rep. suggested I might have heard the general underwriting credit.

Hmm.

Recently, I was looking into a story about new global health developments in the Houston area (it didn’t quite pan out and I ended up doing an editorialized blog post on it for UN Dispatch). I did some Googling and found contact information for a guy who used to blog about global health in Houston. I emailed him and appreciated that he was “chatty” in our correspondence.

But when I asked him followup questions in one email, I was quite taken aback with his defensive responses and incorrect assumptions. Here is part of his email:

You mentioned something about global health, which is a jargon term that does not mean the same as international health. And your confusing of the two terms is the sort of sloppy thinking that makes life difficult for those of us interested in addressing the social conditions that determine most of a person’s health potential (a cornerstone of global health efforts). Notably health care delivery and technology (foci of international health) play only a very small part in this.

There’s a fine commentary in Lancet from a couple years back called something like “What is global health” that I encourage you to read.

So to me your questions seem off point.

For the record, I have read the Lancet piece he mentioned (it was great and thought-provoking!). But that’s beside the point. It’s nice that this guy has the luxury of staying cloistered in academia where he can nitpick what we call things. But that attitude doesn’t really bode well for communicating with journalists or any non-expert audiences.

I guess this guy just wasn’t interested in taking his message beyond our email exchange, and that’s fine. That’s not everyone’s goal. But for expert sources who do want to use media to reach larger audiences, there’s a lesson here: don’t let your expertise prevent you from being accessible.

And being a little nice can’t hurt either.