Quick'n'Dirty podcast's chaotic no. 16: pay phones, paper clips and oneforty

The sixteenth episode of the Quick’n'Dirty podcast was one of the most exciting ones that we had, thanks to a series of technology failures. Being the pros that we are, of course, Aaron Strout and I rolled with the punches (or, tech failures) and brought together a very fun show, if we do say so ourselves. That was, after I was able to get Aaron on the line with only a minute left to spare at the start of the show. I blamed the switchboard. Aaron mocked me. I still vote it was a tech error, not a user error, but on with the show.

Laura Fitton, founder of freshly launched oneforty, author of “Twitter For Dummies” and owner of Pistachio Consulting was scheduled to be our guest. We knew our time with Laura would be short as she was at LAX waiting for a flight to DFW, but we did not expect iPhone failure when her device decided that it no longer had a SIM card and wouldn’t let her call in.  A series of frantic email exchanges ensued as we went along with the show. She raced around the airport trying to find a pay phone. Did Laura make it on? I’m going to keep you in suspense as I highlight what we talked about:

• Social Network: We kicked it old school with Flickr, the photo upload and sharing site now owned by Yahoo. Aaron mostly took this one as I am not photo savvy and therefore don’t use the site as often, but I did acknowledge that Flickr is a site that has slowly evolved to be more social as it has aged. Some might not see Flickr as a social network, but with all of its sharing options, Facebook and FriendFeed integration, and multiple ways to talk to other users (or even do photo memes) it is definitely social.
• Featured Twitterer: I got to pick our featured user this week so I went with a fellow security twit — Tom Eston aka @agent0×0. Tom is an incredibly savvy hands-on security guy who I’ve known through the online security community for some time. He is a thought leader who had the foresight to launch Social Media Security, a site dedicated to exposing the insecurities of social media, and even launched an associated Twitter feed as @socialmediasec. If you want to stay aware of security issues impacting social media from a reliable, technical source, these are the feeds to follow.
• Point / Counterpoint: Aaron and I talked about a blog post that I wrote yesterday, which was a spin-off of a post Jeremiah Owyang wrote earlier in the week: “Does social media reward whining?” The post has more details, but essentially I talked about my dismay with companies having enabled consumers to whine and get their way, but more heavily my dismay at consumers who are trying to take advantage of the system. Aaron argued that there is an absolute appropriate time and place for complaining via Twitter or social media, and also shared a personal story of service he recently received and how he dealt with it. I could tell you more but you need to listen to hear the debate.

Last we saw our friend Laura she was racing around the airport trying to find a payphone, which she did. But did you know that pay phones now charge $13 for the first MINUTE. That’s highway robbery! We would never expect a guest to pay out the nose just to talk to us (though we really wanted to talk to her) so she kept on moving, going to plan B. Eventually she got the MacGyver bug and hunted down a paper clip so she could try and pull out the SIM card in her phone and reset it. In the meantime, our Twitter friend Wesley Faulkner of HP was kind enough to offer to come on and be our spontaneous guest, but I sadly had to cut off Aaron during the middle of his intro because Laura actually got her phone to work. Big thanks to Wesley for being there for us, though!

You really need to listen to appreciate the saga.

So, after ALL of that, what did we talk about ? The newly launched oneforty, of course. While we were on the line I recapped my experience with oneforty and my associated blog post and Aaron talked about Team Shuckri (you really need to listen). Laura talked about the launch tour that she is currently on but she made it clear that this is a “listening tour” versus a speaking tour, as she really wants to take in the community. She stressed that oneforty is about the Twitter community, so she recognizes the importance of listening to it.

Finally, we gave away a pass to Inbound Marketing Summit Boston to Beth Gwazdosky of Austin, who called in at just the right time. We’ll have more next week so be sure to listen live! If you can’t, remember you can always find our archived shows on the BlogTalkRadio site or subscribe on iTunes by searching for ‘QuicknDirty’. Cheers!