Last Friday I had the pleasure of what is probably my first ‘real’ media experience. I’ve done newspapers and magazines before, of course, and I’ve certainly written plenty of opinion pieces for a great variety of fora (websites, magazines, newspapers, etc), but I’ve never done live radio or live TV before. I’ve still not done live TV, but I have now done live radio with ABC local radio through Richard Stubbs in Melbourne, Bronwen Wade in the Riverland (South Australia) on Monday, and Paula Tapiolas in Townsville on Tuesday.
It’s an interesting experience – particularly the Melbourne interview, which was on Friday and was the longest session I’ve had (although, the beauty of radio seems to be that you get the luxury of discussing the issue a bit at length – and you don’t have to shave if you’re on the phone). The Melbourne interview I did from what I do believe was called a Tardis – which is an airless dark box with a microphone and a headset at the Toowong studios here in Queensland.
As a parent and I joked this morning, luckily I wasn’t there to talk about claustrophobia…
Actually, though, I was there to discuss the business impact of social media marketing, which is a topic that’s dear to my heart, particularly since I am putting the finishing touches to the Online Social Networking Guide for CPA Australia (and I might get to do that the instant I stop doing radio interviews and marking assignments).
As you would expect, the questions of all the interviews were fairly basic to anyone who has any exposure to the online world – I did particularly like the Townsville interview, probably because no matter what I do I’m still a parochial Queenslander (and Townsville was the third interview in a row, so perhaps I now know what I want to talk about). The themes were around the risks to business, although I did try to bring in the benefits of online social networking as much as I could.
Certainly, if I have a mission in these interviews it is that I am trying to get businesses to set up Google alerts, be aware of what’s going on in the social networking space, and let their staff know what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to their business’s brand.
Anyway, anyone who wants to be scarred some more can listen to my interview with Richard Stubbs online here.
Ironically I haven’t heard from ABC 612 here in Brisbane, whose studios are all of three kilometres from my house and would be better for my consulting business than, say for instance, building my LinkedIn network in Melbourne :).