Back safely from Computex. Even though this was my tenth trip, this one will stand out for a long time for the high spirit of adventure it produced as a result of implementing many social media tools at once.
We picked a place thirteen time zones away to dive into the deep end of the social media pool. Metaphorically speaking, it felt like being in a tin can going to the moon. We were implementing lots of new capabilities at the same time that ultimately required lots of troubleshooting on the fly. It produced some early headaches and challenges but it turned out to be memorable, spirited, and a lot of fun.
Here’s the rundown on the experience, or should I say experiment, of all these activities.
First, the Nokia N95 phone, in my opinion, was a bust using it the way we wanted to use it. We wanted to be able to automatically capture, upload, and broadcast video with minimal delay. Amazing functionality, for sure, and I’m sure we’ll continue to use it in North America, but couldn’t get it to behave with the 3G networks in Taiwan. This made us dependent on unreliable Wi-Fi signals from the show floor and even back at our hotels. We resorted to using my Flip video camera, uploading that content into our YouTube account vis-à-vis the old reliable PC and using the help of the Flixwagon folks to back load the new content into our Flixwagon account. Two of our videos are still stuck in Flixwagon and won’t load into YouTube! (Check out “Pat Chats with Theo” & “Gigabyte’s Spider”).
We had to implement the same kind of workarounds with the Flickr account using the Nokia N95 phone as well. Frankly, the early troubles with the video impacted the attention we gave to Flickr, which deserved more. But we Flickred, it works, and we’ll do it better next time.
The live Mogulus broadcast of our press event also had mixed results. We implemented an up-rezzing transcoding engine on the live feed from a company called Kulabyte – a very promising technology. Feedback from the audience was mixed – I am told many were amazed by the high quality video streaming through their computers from half a world away. Some experienced a jittery picture. Clearly looks dependent on the capabilities of the end user PC, their network, their WAN, and we will continue to work with these companies to provide a reliable solution for our audience. You can check it out for yourself as the recording on-demand feature is available now. It looks great.
Twitter is still kind of an enigma to me, but it I think it has its place, and I am intrigued. It was kind of a like cross-breed between a mass phone text, a mass IM, and the Truman Show. Like many first-time cross-breedings, it was ugly at times. The Twitter network was down a lot, users were habitually complaining, and there is even a Twitter blog on the issues and reasons for the outages. Even with all the issues, we are starting to build a following. Translating that capability into an on-going business practice will take time and more experimentation.
Next, I didn’t need to spend much time following our Facebook page because it already integrates content from YouTube, FlickR, and Twitter. It is growing by itself and we’re hearing from many long time AMD fans from around the world expressing their feelings about why they like us…..and what they think we need to fix.
Finally, none of this “rise of the machines” stuff above worked without awesome “humans” ;> . I particularly want to thank Scott Carroll, our social media manager and Matt Davis, our PR manager for making everything work when the tech didn’t.
Here are quick & easy summary links to much of this content:
• YouTube AMD@Computex 2008
• FlickR AMD@Computex 2008
• Flixwagon AMD@Computex 2008
• AMD Unprocessed Facebook Page
• Follow AMD on Twitter
• AMD on Mogulus
Community-inspired innovation is awesome. I’m looking forward to continuing the use and implementation of these tools but doing so while playing for the home team in the states for a while… at least a few weeks
This is AMD@Computex 2008, signing off!
https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.