VisibleGains B2B Video Roundtable

Ames Pond Cisco office, Tewksbury, MA

I spent some time this week at our Tewksbury, MA office  meeting our mobile networking team, headed up by Ash Dahod, recently profiled in the Boston Globe. What a fun group.  I filmed an into for a video travel blog we’ll be producing when one of my colleagues Angela Singhal-Whiteford treks to Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai and Delhi to visit with customers.

David Meerman Scott invited me to speak Friday afternoon at the VisibleGains B2B video roundtable, along with Steve Garfield and others.   I shared a funny video and talked about some of the interesting things we’re doing with video, including the upcoming Doobie Brothers Cisco TelePresence event.

Update:  Here’s a comprehensive review of the Doobie Brothers concert from Howard Lichtman.

SXSW panel: Late Night Comedy meets Corporate Video

sxswi

Our proposed panel has made it through the first round of the SXSW Interactive selections, and now we need your vote to make it to the show.  Scott Teems, SXSW Film Festival winning director for THAT EVENING SUN and I (contributor to SNL, Letterman, Conan, The Onion) will discuss a few of our corporate YouTube video hits that earned recognition from The New York Times and Comedy Central, as well as lessons learned from near “fireable offenses.”   Bestselling author David Meerman Scott (New Rules of Marketing & PR, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead) will join us.

We’d appreciate your vote for our panel (voting ends 11:59 CDT Friday, August 27.) It takes a minute to register for an account, then click here [note: the panelpicker page doesn't allow for listing of all panelists, hence the above post]

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7744

The Business Case for Nonsense

I went to Harvard Business School.

But it was only for one evening.  Last Thursday, I was invited to present a case study on using comedy in corporate YouTube videos, and shared “Mainframe: The Art of the Sale.”  This video series we published in August 2006 continues to be discussed, simply because it’s funny.  It’s listed as a case study in the second edition of bestseller  The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, published this month.  (Congrats, David!)

Comedy done well has the power to cut through clutter and to influence, and that’s helped me get an honorable mention on Click-Z’s Social Media All-Stars list.  My thanks to Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics.

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Here’s my presentation:The Business Case for Nonsense: IBM Social Media

View more presentations from Tim Washer.