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Reporters' Roundtable: How to (really) use social media in your business

On this episode of the Roundtable, we're talking about how to really use social media in your business. We're not going to say you should hire a bunch of "consultants" to tell you that Twitter will rocket you to success. Instead, we'll explore how to carefully, deliberately use your brand and your personality online to make your loyal customers more loyal and to spread the word to potential new customers.

And yes, the most recent and possibly most successful social campaign ever is the Old Spice program, which we will be talking about. Also, today: What Apple could have done in the social space to mitigate some of the brand damage caused by the problems with the iPhone 4's antenna design.

Our guests:

Brian Solis, founder of the branding and marketing firm FutureWorks. Now, there are hundreds of marketing and PR people in tech, and it's fair to say that most of them have at one point or another pitched me. Including Brian. But behind Brian's PR chops is a person who does more than pitch. Brian is one of the few branding and marketing people I've met in this business who backs up his approach with both a sensitive social radar as well as a real head for research and numbers. His books, Putting the Public back in Public Relations, and Engage, are thoughtful works on how to use social media.

And joining us from the real world (not tech): Rick Bakas, director of branding and social media for St. Supery winery. Rick is also author of the book, 75 Savory Tips for Social Media Success. Rick's real-world cred includes the fact that he's a Certified Sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He's also an old-school branding expert.

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Show notes and talking points… Read more

Summer = beer + robot that delivers beer

When it's too hot to even get off your ass and stick your head in the freezer, who ya gonna call?

PR2, that's who.

Engineers at Menlo Park, Calif., robot start-up Willow Garage have hacked their PR2 humanoid platform to make it deliver fridge-fresh, cool beer straight to their desks. The droid even wields a bottle opener for easy access.

PR2 can fold towels like nobody's business. While 11 PR2s are being loaned to universities around the world as part of an open-source research project, beer-fetching chops will doubtless make them more popular.

We've seen some … Read more

The 404 610: Where it won't work if you hold it wrong (podcast)

The show title for today's episode of CNET's The 404 Podcast actually refers to two stories in the rundown. The first, of course, refers to the masses of complaints from early Apple iPhone 4 adopters. As if yesterday's heatstroke line nightmares weren't bad enough, some owners are experiencing disappearing signals when the steel bands antennas are covered by gripping the phone in use.

Ironically, the external antenna band was supposed to increase reception bars, but many feel jilted that Apple and Steve Jobs failed to mention the glaring design error during the keynote earlier this month. … Read more

Willow Garage gets robots into researchers' hands

MENLO PARK, California--If you've never seen 11 all-purpose robots doing a choreographed flag-waving dance--and really, who has?--Willow Garage was the place to be Wednesday night.

That's because Willow Garage, a developer of robotics hardware and software, threw a party to celebrate the "graduation" of 11 teams (see video below) from around the world, each of which has won the right to take possession for two years of one of Willow Garage's PR2 open-source robots and work on a series of innovative and unique research projects.

The idea is that each team, using the PR2 … Read more

The BP Twitter parody that remains unplugged

Perhaps you are one of the more than 45,000 people currently following a Twitter page called Twitter.com/BPGlobalPR. This, for those who are wading, rather than sailing, through the week, is not an officially sanctioned site.

You see, it been created by those who believe that BP is a company polluted by venal perpetrators of environmental disaster.

Hark at its first tweet, which was offered on May 19: "We regretfully admit that something has happened off of the Gulf Coast. More to come." Soon, this Twitter page, purporting to represent the folks who are "Beyond … Read more

Getting robots to do the laundry and the dishes

For years, one of the dreams of robot enthusiasts and researchers has been a single robot capable of performing a wide variety of tasks. But while single-purpose robots are everywhere, the general-purpose vision has remained pretty much a fantasy.

Now, however, groups of roboticists at 11 institutions around the world will get a chance to take part in a beta project (see video below) that could change that dynamic forever. On Tuesday, Willow Garage, a Menlo Park, Calif., robotics firm, said that in June it will offer each of the 11 teams a two-year loan of a Personal Robot 2 (PR2), a sophisticated machine that is fully programmable and that has two arms, a "rich sensor suite," a mobile base, and 16 CPU cores. Also included is the free, open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) framework that controls the PR2 and that comes with software libraries for perception, navigation, and manipulation.… Read more

Towel-folding robot won't do the dishes

If you hate folding laundry, you might like what you see in a recent video from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. They programmed a robot to fold towels.

The researchers used Willow Garage's PR2, a general-purpose humanoid robot with two seven-axis arms and a wheeled base. In an ICRA 2010 paper, they present a cloth-grasping algorithm for getting the robot to pick up and fold towels it hadn't previously analyzed.

Fitted with four stereo cameras, PR2 was able to successfully figure out, grasp, and fold 50 single towels, as well as a pile of five … Read more

Adobe preannounces Creative Suite 5

I have to admit--I'm in complete awe at the capability of Adobe's PR machine to instigate and maintain a steady buzz about a product months before it's even official without ever having to lie, pretend to leak, or have a well-known evangelist equipped with a reality distortion field. For a product like Adobe's Creative Suite, home to popular applications like Photoshop and Flash, there's never a doubt that a new version will arrive,  and it's on a pretty regular timetable of every 18 to 24 months. That means Adobe can't rely on … Read more

Crave giveaway of the day: Insignia NS-DPF8PR digital picture frame

For our final 2009 Crave giveaway, we've got the Insignia NS-DPF8PR digital picture frame. It's an 8-inch LCD digital frame with 800x600 resolution, 1GB of internal memory, and USB and flash memory inputs. You can find more information about it on Best Buy's Web site--and we thank Best Buy for providing the prize.

We'd also like to give a shout out to Shopper.com for helping set up this Crave giveaway. Shopper.com powers CNET's price-comparison engine, and it's a great site for finding the best prices on products. (See all of Shopper'… Read more