This week is Broadband World Forum in Paris, France, and one of my teammates from the show was good enough to send some pics from the booth. I've posted them on the Nortel Facebook page, which allows me to give that page a bit of a plug as well.
After creating it in March, the "official Nortel Facebook page" went through a bit of a lull. The original plan was to have the page populated via feeds from a few of the Nortel blogs (including Buzzboard) and the Nortel Twitter. Unfortunately, Facebook timed a redesign of their Facebook Pages for immediately after our launch, and the apps we used to create those feeds no longer worked. The result was a page that was pretty stagnant.
Busy as always, the Nortel web.alive team has create a new YouTube video trilogy. OK, that may be overselling it a bit...these vids aren't going to make you want to throw away your Star Wars platinum edition box set.
What you will get from these three new videos is a view to how easy they have made it for an average PC user to get up and running in a web.alive based virtual environment. All three vids are narrated by Chris Hardy, who's the web.alive marketing guy. The first video is what he calls the "boring one" because he walks you through the set-up process for the web.alive plug-in.
In my opinion, though, it's this first video that provides the most striking example of the work that has gone into improving the end user experience with web.alive.
I'm going a bit off this blog's normal path for this post...hey, it's a Friday afternoon. Earlier this week, Pizza Hut was the big news in the social media world when they announced that they were hiring a summer intern to Twitter for them.
Now I can't fault Pizza Hut for their marketing skill with this one. They somehow managed to turn a summer intern job posting into an article in the New York Times, coverage on CNN, and visibility all across the social media world. But the timing and details of this position make me think it could have a heavy dose of gimmick to it.
Who isn't Twittering now? Britney Spears does, as does Shaquille O'Neil. Even the President of the United States has a Twitter account (though he tweets much less now that he has won the election).
Now you can count the International Nortel Networks Users Association (INNUA) as on the Twitter bandwagon, too. First INNUA president Steve Ford started Twittering earlier this year. Now, INNUA's annual Global Connect event has a Twitter (though you have to ask for permission to follow them). INNUA will be using twitter before and during Global Connect 2009 to share thoughts, ideas, questions, and reminders with anyone who is attending the event.
In the category of "one small step at a time," we now have a blogroll on this Nortel Buzzboard news blog. Or would that be a blog roll? Either way, I know my blog role -- which is to do everything possible to make this blog better.
One of the things that has been missing from Buzzboard for a while has been a blogroll -- which would seem to be one of the more basic elements of any blog. Unfortunately, the new community platform that we implemented last December didn't have a standard blogroll feature that could be easily turned on.
Our IT guys, who played our their blog role perfectly, have found a blogroll workaround, and now everyone at Nortel with a blog role can add a blogroll to their blog.
Now your role as a blog reader is to peruse our new blogroll. Just scroll down a bit and look at the blogroll list on the left column.
Today I came across an interesting new video on YouTube that gives a visual walking tour of the Lenovo eLounge. The eLounge is, of course, built upon the Nortel web.alive platform.
And a shout out goes to Skribe Forti of Skribe Productions, who created this very well-produced video.
The first part of this last week I was in San Diego helping support our media activities at OFC/NFOEC. I took advantage of the show from a social media perspective as well through Twitter, posts on this blog, as well at taking a bunch of pictures.
I've posted all my pictures from the trip to the Nortel Facebook page. You can see the entire album here. By the way, if you haven't tried out the Nortel Facebook page yet, give it a look. The number of people following it has recently jumped up, so apparently we're doing something right.
How's that for a loaded question? Well if you're reading this blog, you are likely interested in Nortel, and interested in keeping up with the latest about Nortel.
Today Wilson Korol is the proud father of a new -- green -- baby blog. And I'm proud to announce that he has named it "greenroots." No word yet if it will be called "greenie" for short.
error.unauth.blog is the newest Nortel blog. As its name indicates, the focus will be "all things green." And Wilson Korol is just the person to lead the discussion. Aside from being a great guy, Wilson is Nortel's green expert. He has two masters degrees from Duke, one in a Public Policy and another in Environmental Management.
Tomorrow, March 6th, marks an unofficial milestone of sorts - the one year anniversary of Nortel's social media program launch. Why this date? It marks the day last year that All About Nortel blogger Mark Evans outed this Buzzboard blog, which was the first real external signal of our new social media efforts.
A heck of a lot has happened since then for both the social media program and Nortel overall. We've had both criticism and somepraise. We've had disappointments (losing John Roese's blog presence was a big setback) and a few surprising accomplishments (we fell into our YouTube success).
I hope everyone had a good holiday vacation. Among other things, I spent my time off buying a pull-behind RV, and am looking forward to a few family road trips (I bought used so no comments about me being loaded). I might even put the concept of Hyperconnectivity to good use and try posting from the road on my first trip.
Like many, I've started off my new year by making a list of New Year's resolutions. Some are new this year -- many are repeats from last year (and from the year before that).
If you're still working on your New Year's resolutions, and keeping up with Nortel news is important for you, then here are a couple of suggestions to add to your list.
You've likely noticed that Buzzboard has a bit of a new look. After an initial aborted attempt at moving over from WordPress to a new Jive Clearspace platform a few weeks ago, last night we made the move.
The goal isn't so much improving Buzzboard or our other Nortel blogs as much as it is integrating them with a broader "Community" area that has now been created on nortel.com. You can see the new community home page here, which now includes a whole host of new discussion forum pages.
I'll post more details about the broader community and forums in the new year. For now though, I need some honest feedback on this blog. I am under no illusions that this new platform is complete. It is in many ways a work in progress as we improve navigation, add functionality, etc. We also have some issues with our re-directs from old blog pages.
While most of the U.S. (including myself) has been taking some or all of this last week off for Thanksgiving vacation, my teammate Miranda MacDonald has been kind enough to keep this Buzzboard blog going.
But this coming week from December 1-4, several Nortel blogs will be on vacation too. Beginning this weekend, Nortel will be migrating several of our blogs over to a new blogging platform. Every post, every image, every comment - everything will be moved over.
This morning while reading through the press clippings for Nortel, I ran across a new story in the Globe & Mail where Simon Avery focuses on the departure of Nortel CTO John Roese.
I found two things particularly interesting in the article. In the absence of an interview, Simon instead turned to John's comments on his blog, and specifically from his final blog post at Nortel. Second, Simon included commentary and quotes from you, the blog readers and commenters, and highlighted the "mixed" reaction so far.
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