This episode addressed a series of recent debates and discussions about whether blogging has been replaced with lifestreaming.

In this episode, Bill and Nathan talk about one of the most important things in social media: transparency. For all the talk and excitement over new tools and technology, one of the greatest changes brought about by social media is an expectation of transparency. Some companies that have really embraced this are DreamHost and Twitter. Other companies, like Apple, haven’t embraced transparency at all and have had a series of issues where this has hurt them like the recent admission of Steve Jobs’ health problems.

One of the biggest things to remember for implementing social media well is to adopt the right mindset. There is an old mindset and a new mindset. Choose the right one.

At the end of the episode, be sure to check out the information about FastPitch, an opportunity for people to pitch their business ideas and get those ideas funded. The FastPitch events will be held during February and March, 2009.

First off, please forgive the crappy quality of Bill’s microphone on this episode. We’re going to reconcile that before the next episode…meaning we’re going to take a sledgehammer to the current mic and buy a better one. Ok, on with the show:

We talked about social networking and how new media marketers can can use them and got into some debate about whether it’s better to jump into Facebook or use a service link Ning to create a close social network all to itself.

We weren’t in total agreement as to how social networking can be used for marketing but where we landed is that perhaps Facebook is better to acquire people in social networking but once a fanbase is developed, creating a focused group in Ning may be the way to go. At the very least, we don’t think you should discount the well known social networks altogether, but it takes intentional commitment on the part of the people setting up the group or network.

We would love to get your thoughts on this…and again…we apologize for some of the bad audio here. We’ll get it fixed. Promise.