Real quick shameless self-plug:

There is a new weekly podcast entitled “Conversate” from Portage Digital Media (disclosure: I consult with them), which is essentially your opportunity to be a fly on the wall of the PDM office whilst a conversation takes place. Said conversation can (and usually does) go anywhere, and is chock full of intelligent discussion sprinkled with a healthy dosage of shenanigans for good measure.

This past Friday I was at the office and participated in the conversation, which evolved into a podcast-in-gestation when the “record” button was pushed. Our conversation included everything from authenticity in marketing, to what a seminar on social media won’t get you, to what makes good (and bad) business copywriting, to cats awesome enough to have Facebook pages.

I can only stand to listen to myself talk so much (believe it or not) but if you, for whatever reason, want to hear my recorded voice along with two handsome gentlemen, head on over to the PDM blog and take a listen. If you like what you hear, subscribe to the podcast, why don’tcha?

I probably won’t be a regular weekly voice on Conversate, as my schedule will be picking up in upcoming weeks, but I’ll definitely be back as an occasional contributor. Don’t let that stop you from subscribing, however — these guys are hilarious and definitely worth a listen.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over to PDM and take a listen — who knows? You might learn something! At the very worst, we’ll tickle your funny bone and make your neurons dance a little jig.

Recently on Facebook, I posted the story about how Michael Arrington over at TechCruch quit the iPhone. In a nutshell, Arrington loves Google Voice but doesn’t like having two numbers, which is understandable because changing your number is a pain when everybody already has one for you. Soon Google will be introducing number portability, meaning that you can keep your number and transfer it to Google Voice. Well, it turns out that Apple and AT&T are blocking the iPhone app that makes using your one Google Voice number much more seamless between the two.  Says Arrington:

Why? Because they absolutely don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing – moving their phone number to Google and using the carrier as a dumb pipe.

So I have to choose between the iPhone and Google Voice. It’s not an easy decision. Except, it sort of is. Google isn’t forcing the decision on me, Apple and AT&T are. So I choose to work with the company that isn’t forcing me to do things their way. And in this case, that’s Google.

I have Google Voice now and so far I like it, but I’ll admit that yes, having two numbers is inconvenient.  However, I do not have an iPhone, because my brand loyalty was with Verizon long before it was with Apple. When I posted the story on Facebook, I prefaced it with my own commentary, which was:

I won’t get an iPhone because I refuse to leave Verizon, and I knew that a LOT of iPhone users weren’t happy with AT&T, but whoah … had no idea people were all-out abandoning theirs. I have Google Voice, a different number than my usual one, and now I’m wondering how long it’ll be before I can just transfer my usual number to it.

I had no idea that that little post on Facebook would spark such a conversation among my friends. I know a lot of people who share the same I-love-Apple-but-I-love-Verizon-you-can’t-make-me-switch sentiment as me, but I wasn’t prepared for the comments of some of my friends. Here’s a sampling:

I know, my husband and I just recently had this conversation, and iPhone is cool but I know I cannot beat Verizon! They have proved over and over and over again that they take care of the customers, not to mention the service is great! - Leah McChesney

[My fiancé] & I both have Verizon (LGenV2′s) and we LOVE it. He’s been working in NYC for about 5 years & in that time, we had tried at least 3 different carriers. Verizon is the ONLY company that we didn’t get dropped calls with every five minutes (or less!) I’m sorry, but AT&T SUCKS. I have several friends with iPhones — our calls drop randomly — it’s always THEIR phones dropping the calls, not mine! Even out here in the Poconos, we have friends come to visit & the only company that has a signal consistently out here is Verizon. I’m with them for the long run … I have my iPod Touch … it’s the best of all worlds w/o the pain in the ass service you HAVE to take with the iPhone… – Marilyn

Will have to pry my Verizon service from my cold clammy hands. ATT is the worst. – Michael Spleet

Verizon, are you listening to all this? People love you. People are refusing to get the “Jesus Phone” because they don’t want to give up your service. What are you doing with your marketing to tout this?

I had to Google what Verizon was doing as far as social media. Whaddya know, they have a social media hub that links to their presences elsewhere. Except, I had no idea any of it existed, and I keep up on this kind of stuff. So I decided to take a look at what Verizon was doing on the social web.

The Good News

Verizon has an active community forum where staff and consumers help each other out and discuss things like FAQ, plans, devices, and other products and services. That’s great.

Also, Verizon is blogging. Every day on their PolicyBlog, and at their Verizon At Home blog. Entries look pretty interesting and helpful.

The Bad News

Most entries on the PolicyBlog have zero comments, and they were almost as sparse on the At Home blog. One entry I saw had 24 comments, but the next most popular one had 5, and it went downhill from there.

Nobody is reading them, because nobody knows about them. Here’s why:

Twitter

As of this writing, Verizon Newsroom has 693 followers on Twitter, FiOSFans have 118 followers (I didn’t know what FiOS was, I had to look that up. It’s only available in New York and New Jersey, apparently), VCast Music has 33 followers. Eric Rabe, the SVP of Verizon Communications – “internet, FiOS TV, all that” is on Twitter with 149 followers.

Facebook

The Verizon Facebook page has 160,000+ fans, but if you think about it, for the nation’s largest network, that’s pretty sad. Even sadder, the Verizon Newsroom Facebook page has 51 fans.

YouTube

There’s a YouTube channel with 10 videos, and it’s been a month since anybody signed in. There is some video on MediaSeed.tv that I stumbled upon accidentally, but if I didn’t know it was there, most people don’t either.

Come on, Verizon. You’re the nation’s largest network. You can do better than this. Here are a few suggestions, from me to you:

Ditch the “Verizon Newsroom”

When I found this a few minutes ago, I was expecting to see a social media newsroom about all things Verizon. [Note: I eventually did find the Verizon Newscenter, which isn't bad for a SMNR, but it wasn't where I expected to find it.]  Instead, I saw this page that looks like it’s trying to compete with Yahoo, MSN, and other portals. That’s not your game. You do cell phones and wireless service. Don’t try to compete where you can’t compete. Nobody is going to go to Verizon for news, they’re going to go to get a new phone or change their plan. If I want to change my wireless plan, I don’t go to the Huffington Post, do I?

Don’t call it “PolicyBlog”

That’s misleading and confusing. I was hard pressed to find anything about Verizon policies on the PolicyBlog at all. Call it something Verizon-relevant, but don’t call it something it’s not. Call it “Can you hear us now?” or something. There are 9 authors on that blog, together you can come up with something a little more accurate, I’m sure of it.

Don’t make us register to comment

As a general rule, if people have to take extra steps in order to comment on a blog, they won’t.  Oddly, though, the Verizon At Home blog requires registration and the PolicyBlog doesn’t, yet the At Home blog has more comments (though they’re both sparse). Just think of the interaction you’d get on the more popular blog if you didn’t make people jump through that extra hoop.

Please do something about your Twitter problem.

To be fair, Eric Rabe is doing pretty well interacting with people on Twitter. He pimps his blog quite a bit but overall he’s not doing bad. But he could do better if he were listening and responding to when “Verizon” is mentioned, and gain many more followers that way. I also suggest that somebody please do something about http://www.twitter.com/verizon. Is the brand jacked or does someone at Verizon actually have that handle and isn’t doing anything with it? Either way, it’s orphaned and it needs some love.

Integrate online and offline

OK maybe Verizon already does this, I don’t know because I don’t watch TV and I’m not very observant when I go to the Verizon store. But something just as simple as saying “Follow @EricRabe on Twitter” at the end of a commercial will call enough people to action to take notice of other Verizon online stuff. Integrating your marketing campaigns even further can have pretty awesome results.

Listen.

I save for last what you should be doing first. I already suggested the simple act of following a keyword on Twitter. Set up an RSS feed for it. That’s easy. But there are other ways to listen, ways as simple as setting up Google Alerts, blog searches, and stuff like SocialMention to monitor the social web. Since Verizon is ginormous and has the budget, I strongly suggest a professional social search like Radian6 because it’s better and more comprehensive. If you were doing these things, you’d be much more visible on the social web, more people would be commenting on your blogs (hell, more people would know about your blogs), you’d be responding to any concerns people may have with your products and services, and the great customer service I know you have would be bleeding over to your web presence.

If you really were listening, you’d know how awesome you are to people like me who sacrifice having the most kickass phone just because we don’t want to leave you, and you’d be using that to your advantage in your marketing efforts. And you’d be reading this blog post.

So, Verizon, can you hear me now?

Yesterday my pal Robin of InnerMedia Coaching & Consulting and I took a field trip to Ann Arbor for one of the LA2M Marketing Meetings, whose speaker that day just happened to be one of my favorite people in all of Metro Detroit, the lovely, smart, and talented Ms. Shauna Nicholson, marketing manager for Biznet Internet Solutions in Wixom. She was leading a discussion on viral marketing.

Though I did RSVP on LA2M’s Facebook event page, I forgot to actually tell Shauna I was going to be there, and forgot to check to see if there was an official hashtag for the event. (I hadn’t been to one of these events before so I wasn’t sure.)

Robin and I were sitting at the far end of the room from Shauna. It was pretty packed, and there was a big table full of people in between us. I didn’t really want to get up just to ask her that, so what did I do?

I sent her a text message from across the noisy room:

is there a hashtag for this? #la2m?

I saw that she was just putting away her iPhone so I nudged Robin and said, “Watch this. . .”

Shauna suddenly looked at her phone, looked up, looked all the way down the long table of people and gave me an affirming nod.

I turned to Robin and said, “See? This is yet another reason I love technology!”

January 18, 2009: Day 1 without my MacBook Pro.

Sent out tweet around 5:00 p.m.: “I haven’t tweeted all day. I’m OK, but feeling so empty and useless without my MacBook Pro. This is going to be a long week.”

Online activity sparse: Checked email, sent a couple DMs via Twitter. Read a couple blogs and commented. Couldn’t get into Facebook because it was down for maintenance or something.

People have been asking me what I’m doing this day or that day. Realized I can’t answer those questions because my schedule is in my iCal, in my laptop, which I cannot access. Yes, it does sync with my iPod, but I haven’t synced my iPod in a few days and have added appointments, etc. since then. Must do my best to remember everything. Think I’m going to follow Laurie’s lead and go back to using an actual planner that you write in. Have been thinking about it lately, the only hindrance being my god-awful handwriting that is illegible even to me.

Otherwise, have been mapping out in my head how much of my current projects I can do with this bare-bones PC and whatever tools/data I’ve got online. Think I should attempt to map these things down on paper now, trying my best to write legibly.

10:13 p.m. I’m sitting here, staring at this monitor, and I feel like I have a LOT to do … I just can’t remember what any of it was.  This is not good.

January 19, 2009: Day 2

Tweeted around 10:30 a.m.: I’m tweeting, I’m tweeting … how long is this going to last? I feel like less of a person without my MBP.

Last night I tossed around the idea of getting a new MacBook Pro. I definitely can’t afford one, but I’m in the process of officially starting my own business (attempting to, anyway), and thinking about including a new MBP in my startup costs if/when I apply for a loan. I can justify the need. Even if this had never happened, I needed to buy an external hard drive because my internal one only has about 15 GB left on it. My MBP is about 3 or 4 years old, it’s tired, and its programs/OS need upgrading. Hmm… may be wishful thinking, but I can dream, right?

There is a Tweetup tonight in Novi at B-Dubs. My presence is expected and I would like to go see everybody, but I’m also kind of in the dumps and should probably stay home and get as much work/research done as I can tonight. I don’t know.

January 20: Day 3

Went to the Tweetup in Novi last night. It was huge. Had a lot of fun (maybe too much?), met a lot of cool people, hung out with friends. Brain is kinda fuzzy today. Was going to go to Shauna’s & Kasey’s inauguration party tonight but fuzzy brain + not getting the stuff done I wanted to last night = no go.

Scott Monty & me at the Novi Tweetup.

It’s technically the third business day from when I ordered my keyboard, but it did not come. It was a good mail day, though: I received my $50 rebate card from Verizon, my $15 from the Nielson people for taking that looooooong online survey, and my coupon for a free Whopper I earned for “sacrificing” 10 Facebook friends … before Facebook sacrificed the app. (They were people I barely talked to/knew, anyway.)

I need to bury my face in some research now. Well, maybe I’ll eat first. Maybe a Whopper.

January 24: Day 4

I am so non-productive that I can’t even think of what it was I was supposed to do in the first place. My brain feels like Jell-O when I stare at my TweetDeck. Tried to accomplish what would be a relatively simple errand for anybody else but me, ended up visiting two VG’s & an out-of-order ATM with no dice. Found a dead bird in my yard, can’t wait to take care of that on garbage night.  Attempted to do a lot of research and read until I thought words were going to spill out my ears. I think my brain is broken. Nothing is going right for me today.

January 22: Day 5

Keyboard finally came. Woo-hoo! Spent an hour or so installing it and putting my computer back together. First thing I did when I turned it on was sync my iPod. And now, I am so tired of dealing with this whole issue that I’m grumpy and don’t even feel like being online. Hmph! Signing off.

January 22: Day 6

I realized that after all that, the left side of the keyboard isn’t secure and flat like it should be, and my caps lock doesn’t work. I’m going to have to take this thing apart all over again and try to adjust it. WILL THIS EVER END?!

(That was hard to type without caps lock, btw.)

Image 1 by makelessnoise, image 2 by Daniel Eizans, image 3 by hyperscholar.