I have recently signed on as the Senior Director of Social Media Strategy with M80, the Los Angeles based leading provider of social media marketing and digital publicity services to Fortune 500 brands.  That’s a mouthful, isn’t it?  Simply put, I work with some of the most amazing companies from around the globe, helping them to reach out, listen to and engage their current and future customers.

I’m humbled and excited to be in this role.  The staff of M80 consists of some of the brightest and most forward-thinking men and women that I have had the privilege to work with, and what we have been able to accomplish together in just the last few weeks in amazing to me.  Although I probably won’t get into granular detail with what we are doing (need to keep some of the wizard behind the curtain stuff behind the curtain still…) I will continue to write about how social media and technology impacts both brands and consumers.  I actually hope to be writing more now, as I’m spending so much time on airplanes.

Me and my Zune HD

I am working with some amazing global brands like Microsoft, LG, Dr Pepper, and Volkswagon.  All of our projects are incredibly interesting and exciting, and if you have been following me for some time you know that I am really passionate about one in particular: Zune.  In the interest of full disclosure, I do advise the truly delightful people at Zune, but my enthusiasm should come as no surprise to anybody that has been reading this blog for any amount of time.  I wrote my first Zune post in July 2006, and did the math about why Zune is superior in this June 2008 article (boy did I get blasted by the fanboys in the comments!) I’ll keep blogging, tweeting and Facebooking about them and our other clients, but now I can do it as a loyal consumer and an industry insider!

As usual, I will continue to use social media to make personal connections with people, both digitally and in the real world.  Twitter is my daily hotbed of activity, but I would also love to connect with you on LinkedIn and Facebook. If you want to subscribe to this blog, the feed is here.

I would love it if you would also start tracking M80 in the usual places like Twitter and our blog.  We’ll be striving to provide value to you, information that you can use (like this article) within your company or just for your own personal satisfaction.

Thank you so much for being a part of this community!

I got the Sony Ericsson HBH-IS800 package (in which Jed was kind enough to include a NA-friendly charger since he’s from across the pond) and was immediately impressed with the small size.  Jed didn’t tell me what he was sending, so I was quite happy to find two ear buds, no larger than what I normally use to listen to music, attached with only 1 cord.  Beautifully compact, these fit in my backpack or pocket quite nicely.

I first synced them with my Sony Ericsson Xperia X1i (also courtesy of Jed, thank you sir!) to check out the quality of sound on a phone call.  Again, I went into this very skeptical…I have tried dozens  of headsets, none could provide what I needed.  I made a call to a friend from home and asked him how I sounded.  He told me he didn’t realize I was even on a bluetooth.  Score 1 point for the SE headset.  My next test was to get in my car and drive down the dreaded 101 freeway at breakneck speeds so that there was plenty of road noise.  I called another friend, and although he could tell I was in the car, he said it was “surprisingly quite” on his end.  Score 1 more point for SE.  The greatest thing of all was that both of these people could hear me clearly! If you’ve heard me talk, you know this is a marvel indeed…my voice falls somewhere between James Earl Jones and Don LaFontaine.  Impressive, and yet another point for the HBH-IS800! Over the next week I made many calls in different circumstances, all with the same results: amazing reception (save the weak link that is my mobile carrier).

What about music? I synced them with my iPhone and played some music from iTunes.  The quality? Amazing! I read a couple of online reviews that said these can’t compete with corded ear buds, so apparently I’m not as discerning as I thought.  I listen to a lot of music and am used to pretty nice gear…and these sounded excellent.  I even streamed Pandora for a while, and the only lag in quality was from the streaming service itself (although still not bad).  Although the sound may not be quite as quality as my high-ended corded headphones, honestly it’s decent enough that I don’t care.

The Sony Ericsson HBH-IS800 Stereo Bluetooth Headset (next to a quarter for size comparison)

There is just one button on the headset, and I’m still not sure of everything it does.  Perhaps I’ll read the user manual one of these days, but I do know that when I push it once while connected to my iPhone it toggles between iTunes and Pandora…trippy.

Pros: very small, easy to transport.  Great phone call quality, the ear buds block out a lot of background noise that I would normally hear (they fit nicely in the ear) and the noise cancelling works great.  Very nice stereo sound for music.

Cons: very small, easy to lose.  I haven’t lost them yet, and I’m going to try to do my best not to because I think they are awesome, but one of its greatest assets (size) is also one of its greatest liabilities.  Also, at close to $200 these aren’t a casual purchase, but if you can afford them I think they are well worth it.

My bottom line opinion of the Sony Ericsson HBH-IS800? Perfect for somebody like me that is a heavy phone and music user and doesn’t want to carry around a lot of hardware.  The fact that it is bluetooth allows me a great amount of freedom, and I even made phone calls quite successfully while riding my bike…and I didn’t get tangled up in cords! As a bonus, if you have a super low voice, these work great and you’ll want to pick them up for sure. You can buy them online directly from Sony, and if you do let me know what you think of them!

Note: Even though a PR firm sent these to me free of charge, they didn’t tell me what to write.  I think they are amazing headphones, but if I thought they sucked I would tell you that also.  So now you know.