I’ve lived in the Charlottesville area for 20 years now.  During that entire 20 years, NBC29 has always been my go-to source for local news.  This is due in large part to the fact that NBC29 was the ONLY choice for local news until fairly recently.  With the addition of stations at the Newsplex, things changed.

I still watched NBC29, though.  Hey, habits are tough to break.  Especially those built over a decades.

The mere addition of three new stations wasn’t really enough to change the way I got my local television news.  On top of that, now that I have DishNetwork, I really don’t watch the local channels that much at all. Add to that the fact that network television is pretty much horrendous, with the exception of sports broadcasts, and you have the perfect recipe for me to completely ignore the local news outlets.

What has changed, however, is the way in which I get news and information, generally.  It’s not that I don’t want the local news and information, it’s just that I get all my news and information differently than I did five or even three years ago.  I don’t read a hard copy of any newspaper, but I read a heck of a lot of news through the various iPhone apps I have, or on the Internet when I am at the computer.  I use twitter a lot more to see what local folks are up to, and they tend to break a lot of stories for me.  I also follow a lot of local people of Facebook, and the same holds true there, too.

That is why when I discovered that CBS19 had a Facebook page, I was interested enough to become a fan.  Boy, am I glad that I did.  CBS19 does a wonderful job of posting not only the stories that they have during their broadcasts, but also additional information, polls, and more feature/behind the scenes type stuff that is interesting.

The best part about it is that I don’t have to be home at 6:00 and 11:00 to get the news, and I can find it while I am catching up with what my friends are doing on Facebook.  The fan page allows me to discover and connect with other people in the Charlottesville Area.  All of this means that the CBS19 Facebook page is not only convenient, easy to use, and informative, but it also helps me meet new people and expand my network.  Very cool.

If you want to become a fan of the CBS19 Facebook page, just go to http://facebook.com/Newsplex.  You can also find CBS19 on Twitter, and even on YouTube.

Kudos to CBS19 for being willing to take on the challenges that traditional media outlets face in this new media world.  I hope they continue.

And who knows, they may even get me to change the channel. . .

I’m a big New York Jets fan.

I’m not a crazy, irrational, talk-about-the-team-in-the-first-person, Jets fan, but I definitely a big fan.  Accordingly, one of the blogs that I like to frequent is TheJetsBlog.com.  It gives daily news and information about the Jets; which is cool, especially that I live in Virginia.

A recent post on the site discussed the NFL considering a policy on in-game tweeting by players and personnel.  The post generated numerous comments, including one by yours truly.  Apparently, I was the only one who supported allowing participants to tweet from the sidelines during games.

It seems that the most popular objection to allowing tweets from the sidelines was that players should be concentrating on the game, and not tweeting from a phone or computer.  Ok, I get that, I guess.  But the point I was making in my comment is just as applicable in a football game as it is in any other endeavor in life– players aren’t ALWAYS focused on the game.  For better or worse, this is the way it is.  I’ve played in many an athletic contest, and officiated even more of them.  If you think that every waking moment of the players is devoted to the game on the field, you’re kidding yourself.

I’m not sure why this comes a surprise to so many people.  I mean, how many people go to work everyday and concentrate on their job all day long?  No one.   Really, no one.  It’s just not possible.  In order for you to concentrate as hard as you need to on the most important aspects of a long task, you need to break for a little bit to regroup.  You can do any physical or mental task perpetually.  At some point, you gotta break to refuel.  Professional football players are no different.

I see no problem with allowing players to tweet during said breaks.  Rather than sitting on the bench daydreaming, why not allow them to give fans some insight into the game?

To me, the sport that does the absolute best job of filling down-time with valuable information and content for fans is NASCAR.  If you watch a NASCAR broadcast, every yellow flag is filled with interviews of crew-chiefs, listen-ins to team communication, and even in-car interviews with drivers.  NASCAR fans get more information about the sport during the contest than any other fans on the planet, and they love it; and the participants don’t complain about it, either.

So, I’m not really sure what the big deal is.  Let the teams decide.  If they want to stop their players from tweeting, fine.  If, however, there is a team that would like to test the waters and open up a bit more to the fans, why would the league want to stand in their way?

I read a lot.  I haven’t read a fiction book in a long time, but I still read a lot of non-fiction, especially business books.

Recently, I read Ignore Everybody, by well-known marketer/blogger Hugh MacLeod (you can order it here).  I first came across Hugh’s work when I first started blogging.  He has an awesome blog called Gapingvoid, where he muses about all kinds of things, and shares his “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards.”  I’ve never met Hugh in person, but he seems like a cool dude.

Ignore Everybody is Hugh’s first book.  It is, hands down, the best business book I’ve read in a LONG time, perhaps ever.  Granted, I call it a business book only loosely.  The real subject of the book is creativity and how to release and nurture it.

Hugh’s book inspired me.  It inspired me in a way that a book hasn’t inspired me in a long time.  So now, it’s time to turn that inspiration into motivation into ACTION.

That’s what I’m going to do right here at DanielRothamel.com, take some action.

What does this mean?

Honestly, I’m not totally sure, but that is the fun part.  I do know that this site is my house, my little corner of the universe where I can share my thoughts and feelings with others, in the hope that I can help them with something.  So, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.  I’ll still be blogging about real estate issues over on RealEstateZebra.com, but this site will be something different.

I’ll be posting more frequently, and I’ll be posting about the things that interest me.  I’ll try to address things as creatively as possible.  My goal is to use my little corner of the universe to inspire and help others reach their goals, be they personal, professional, or otherwise.  I guess that is the first component of my very own, as-yet undetermined evil plan.  :-)

It might be a bit frenetic from time to time, since I don’t really know exactly where I am going, but I can promise that it will never get dull.  I guess that is what it means to become a crazy, deranged fool.

Thanks, Hugh.  I owe you a beer, or something.

This past Sunday, I gave a presentation at the National Association of REALTORS Association Executive Institute.  The subject of my presentation was, you guessed it–  social media.

Association executives face challenges that just don’t exist for the individual who uses social media.  They have to consider the wants and needs of an entire group of individuals.  They have to consider who will manage the social media efforts, and include input from many people.  It can be tough, but it can be done successfully.

The one thing that I wanted to make clear during my presenation was a lesson that applies equally to associaitons and organizations as it does to individuals–  social media requires a plan in order for you to have success with it.  As I said in the presentation, social media is a tactic; it won’t work without a strategy.

If you are an individual who wants to use social media to connect with friends and family or grow a business, you need to have a plan for what social media tools you will use, and how you will use them.  The same goes for organizations and associations who are trying to incorporate social media into their member and public relations.  Having a plan and goals in place for how social media is to be used is the first step to having success.

Judging by the excellent questions I received from the audience, I think that my message came across loud and clear.  I hope that the association executives who heard my message will be able to put it into practice and reach not only the goals of their respective associations, but of their members as well.

If you want, you can take a look at the slide deck from my presentation.  I live-streamed the presentation, but neglected to record it (d’oh!):

Social media works in strange ways, even locally. Here’s a very recent example. . .

My wife, Kari and I, are both on Twitter (@STRduo and @RealEstateZebra). Yesterday, she came across a tweet from fellow Charlottesville area resident and blogger, Marijean Jaggers.  Kari sent me the link in the tweet, which took me to a post on Marijean’s blog, STLWorkingMom.  The post is about Marijean’s new feature series on the local television station, CBS-19.

Marijean is going to be on CBS-19 every Tuesday during the 6:30 newscast, where she will feature an area “Blog of the Week.”  How freakin’ cool is that?!  Local bloggers will be featured every week on TV!  The Charlottesville area has a very vibrant blogging community, and it is good to see it getting some recognition.

The first “Blog of the Week” is from right here in Fluvanna

The first installment of the “Blog of the Week” was yesterday.  For their first featured blogger, CBS-19 chose a Fluvanna County Resident, Dana Adams, and her blog– Frugal in Virginia.  You can read the CBS-19 story, or even watch the video.  Marijean did her own feature on Dana, as well.

Dana writes a very important blog, helping folks find deals on the things they buy every day here in the Charlottesville area.  CBS-19 and Marijean did a great job sharing and promoting her blog to the community.  I can’t tell you how excited I am to see folks like Marijean out there promoting great area bloggers like Dana.

There is more to come. . .

So, if you’d like to learn more about area bloggers, make sure you watch CBS-19 every Tuesday at 6:30, where you will find Marijean featuring another blog; and if you are looking to save some money (aren’t we all?), make sure you visit Frugal in Virginia.  You can even follow Dana on Twitter.

Congrats to Marijean and Dana, and I can’t wait for the next installment of “Blog of the Week.”

One of the folks who attened my social media presentation a few weeks ago was Lee Francis.  Lee is a writer for The Central Virginian.  He was there to not only learn, but to cover the event for the paper.  Well, a few days ago, I got to see the fruits of his labor when I read the article he wrote about the presentation.

The article is excellent (albeit, I have a bias).  The only thing about the online version of the article is that you don’t get to see the pictures.  I thought the pictures that accompanied the print version of the article were pretty cool.

Oh, I wanted to draw your attention to quote from the article, in particular.  Remember Barbara Gibbons, the member of the Fluvanna County School Board who started a twitter account?  Well, here she is in the article:

Barbara Gibbons, Rivanna District representative for the Fluvanna County School Board, agreed with Rothamel.
“I’m here because I don’t think we have great communication in our county and I’m always looking for ways to make sure that people get all the information that they want,” Gibbons said.

Barbara is definitely on her way to improving communication in our county (more on her in another post).

I’m glad that Barbara found the presentation valuable, and hope that others will find value in the coverage of it. Thanks to Lee and the Central Virginian for writing and publishing the article. You can follow The Central Virginian on Twitter, too.

My presentation last Wednesday went very well.  Better than I anticipated, in fact.  The audience was filled with about 20 local residents, and everyone was very interested in learning more about using social media.

I can’t say enough about how great everyone in the audience was during the presentations.  We had so many great questions, we actually stayed until 8:30 answering questions and showing folks different websites and applications.  I look forward to being able to do a lot more of this type of thing in the future.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, or for those of you who could, but just want to revisit some of the information, below is the video from the presentation.  The recording was made live, using Ustream.tv.  Enjoy!

Some people are probably wondering what I plan on talking about during my social media presentation next week. One of the things that I mentioned in my first post was how social media could be very beneficial to school officials, even right here in little ol’ Fluvanna. One of the examples I will talk about happened just a few weeks ago. . .

The Fluvanna County Schools power outage generates discussion

Back on January 22nd, Fluvanna County Schools had to close due to a power outage. Had this happened a few years ago, the local news outlets might have reported the story (news is notoriously slow around here), and then pretty much nothing would have happened. That is not, however, how things happened on January 22nd. . .

The same day that the schools closed, local news station NBC29 reported on the outage. The story they posted on their site is exactly 6 sentences long. That’s it. It was a 30-second story. But it didn’t end there. . .

You see, NBC29 has what has now become a very common feature on their website– the ability for readers to comment on the stories. If you notice, at the end of every NBC29 story is the ability to leave a comment. Well, that is exactly what people did when then read the Fluvanna power outage story. In fact, by Midnight on January 22nd, there were 78 comments on the story. 78! As I am writing this right now, there are 214 comments on the story.

Who says that folks in Fluvanna don’t use social media?

Conversation requires participation

The comments on the story came from parents, residents, even students. It is possible that some of them came from teachers, but since most people who commented were anonymous or used a pseudonym, it is tough to tell. Some of the comments were positive, some of them were negative, some of them were, honestly, pretty ignorant. That really doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that the Fluvanna County schools were talked about 78 times on January 22nd, and NOT ONE of those comments was left by anyone who identified themselves as officials of the school district (not that I could tell, anyway).

The school district missed out on a golden opportunity to be involved in a discussion about an even that was obviously important to residents as it was happening. That’s too bad, because it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’m not saying that the school district chose to ignore the story, or the comments. I doubt that any of the district officials were aware of the discussion. My point is that I was aware of the discussion, and I don’t even have children in the school district. I found out about the discussion because I track “Fluvanna” in my Google alerts. So, if I can find out about a discussion about the school district, then so can the school district; and if I can participate in the discussion, so can the school district.

What you can learn from this example

How and why the school district, residents, and any member of the community can participate in online conversations for their own benefit is exactly what I plan to talk about on the 25th. There are all kinds of discussions going on right now about the issues important to you (or even about you). It is important that you are listening and participating. Come see me on the 25th, and I’ll show you how you can do just that.

I’ve started sending out invites to folks for my seminar on social media for community organizations later this month.  Almost immediately, I received a response from someone who asked the question,

“Would you please define social media so that we’re on the same page?”

DUH!

I totally overlooked the fact that for many of the people I am trying to reach, this might be their first formal introduction to social media.  I should do something about that.

Rather than try and wax philosophic about social media, I thought that I would let social media do the work.  So, here are two wonderful examples of social media at work, defining social media:

First, you can read the Wikipedia definition of social media.  Wikipedia is an information resource where you can find information on just about any topic you can imagine.  All of the information found there as been submitted by users of Wikipedia.  Sure, there are a few folks who do some of the moderation, but anyone can share information and have it end up on a Wikipedia page.  This is vastly different from the old Encyclopedia Britannica that I remember from my grade school library.  That came out every year, and there was only a select group of editors and researchers who were allowed to contribute and decide what information was included, or not.

For another explanation of social media, check out the following video by the folks and CommonCraft entitled, “Social Media in Plain English.”

Aside from being incredibly insightful, the video is also social and interactive. Anyone can post this video on their site, anywhere. And if you clicked on the link above the video, you might have noticed that the CommonCraft website is in blog format, meaning that not only can people view and share their videos, but they can leave their own comments, as well.

So there you have it, two definitions of social media, from two sources that are, in fact, social media. How cool is that?

So, now that you have a better understanding of what social media is, you might like to learn a little bit more; and if you want to learn more about how social media can benefit you and your organization, don’t forget to check out my presentation later this month. It is sure to be informative, and a lot of fun.