The Twitter back channel ( #defragcon ) went nearly silent as a roomful of bright people struggled to keep up with a firehose of big ideas. Yeah, I'll be back. I mentioned earlier that I would again make the trip to Colorado for Defrag. While its schedule competed with other attractive events this year, Eric Norlin has assembled an outstanding event that attracts an exceptional community. MORE

Do you think this whole social TV, whether it’s American Idol or Super Bowl or what have you, this back channel, we’re watching it with one eye, we’re tweeting it with the other eye, is that ultimately a good thing? We used to sit around television sets with families, or farther back sit around the radio and watch the radio back in the ’40s and ’50s before there was television, and it was a shared experience. MORE

But any time there’s a new trend, tactic, or channel, this collaboration turns to competition. Open dialogue gives way to back-channel alliance building. Social Media has a claim because much of the content is created for social media channels. Rather than rushing to plant your flag in content marketing, invite others to participate. For more than 12 years now, I’ve worked at companies that have been committed to integrated marketing. MORE

Barbs on the "Back Channel" that don't help move the conversation along in a win-win for the audience and speaker is a clue that you want all the candy for yourself. Friday Fun is Diva Marketing's virtual happy hour from cosmos to Jack to lemonade. A waiting for the weekend 'playground' time to be sophisticated-silly. Or sometimes just plain silly. In the spirit of David Letterman's Top Ten. A zillion landing page blogs are pretending to be social media. MORE

The customer in the back of the line has a Klout score of 75, the customer in the middle of the line has a Klout score of 17. Where I think I took my blog post today, sort of over the line a little bit, was that I likened social profiling of basically hearkening back to Jeremiah’s post. I read a chapter and then put it down for a week, and then come back and read another chapter. MORE

Do you think this whole social TV, whether it’s American Idol or Super Bowl or what have you, this back channel, we’re watching it with one eye, we’re tweeting it with the other eye, is that ultimately a good thing? We used to sit around television sets with families, or farther back sit around the radio and watch the radio back in the ’40s and ’50s before there was television, and it was a shared experience. MORE

Now for the back story. First I want to quote a paragraph from the abstract of a 2011 paper by danah boyd , a renowned expert on teen culture and social media at Microsoft Research. The paper is titled, The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics. Here’s the quote: “Drama is a gendered process that perpetrates conventional gender norms. MORE

Back-channel emails are a wonderful thing. A couple of CEOs have pointed out how few of the vendors ever featured in Forrester's reports on social media analysis are still independent. So, in the spirit of the filmmaker who's not sure how to end a movie, let's roll the "where are they now?" The first report in the space was Peter Kim's Forrester Wave: Brand Monitoring (September 2006), which introduced us to seven companies: Biz360 Acquired by Attensity in 2010. MORE

Everything will be done in the open, encouraging participation, contribution, and truthfulness and discouraging passive-aggressive behavior, back channel discussions, and hidden agendas. I have begun advocating a shift in thinking about social media which considers it as one component of citizen/ public engagement From this perspective, social media is just one of the many different tools and channels where interaction can take place. So now back to my original statement. MORE

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To me, the people tweeting about a show are already watching the show , so the Twitter-fueled “back channel” surrounding the show may result in additional loyalty and/or visits to the show’s website/Facebook page/SnapChat account etc., In another bandwidth-deficient edition of The Baer Facts, I talk with Kyle Lacy of ExactTarget about new research from Nielsen that shows tweets causing actual increases in television ratings. Is Social TV Overrated? MORE

Conferences and Meetups Back in 2007, I followed the back-channel conversation at the NewComm Forum using Internet Relay Chat ( IRC ). Now, of course, the back channel is always Twitter, and it sometimes threatens to overwhelm the front channel (the person on stage). If you can keep from being completely distracted by it, the back channel is a great source of connections, discussion, and sharing that enhance the event experience. MORE

Twitter and other networks are an ideal back channel for people to communicate before, during and after a virtual event. As companies have pivoted from in-person events to virtual events in 2020, one of the most common questions I’m asked is how to drive social media engagement. MORE