Finally tackled a home improvement project I’ve been thinking about a while. And now, a couple of days into using my new internet connected big-screen TV from the couch of my living room area – I can clearly see it’s a game changer for me and my work.

Pretty sure if your reading this your probably like me in increasingly living your life online. This isn’t a bad thing to me. I have fully embraced a huge range of online services that benefit my life – both personally and professionally. It’s really become more a question of creating the connectivity points to where I access these services.

Before installing an internet connected big screen, my three main touch-points for accessing my online life have been a home office desktop PC, a netbook, and my iPhone. When I’ve wanted to bring the net to my living room couch for myself or when entertaining with friends the biggest screen would usually turn out to be a friends MacBook.

So I had this idea about adding a new 40″ big screen TV to my living room area – and not for the “TV” – I have been without cable television for a year and certainly don’t miss it (or what I consider the overcharging of it.) Online streaming of tv shows and news content has more than satisfyed me when working – usually in my home office. The challenge to bring a new online window to my living room area was figuring out a way to clone my office monitor already running my home PC to a brand spanking new 40″ full HD (1920 x 1080 resolution) LCD TV.

Because I was adamant about not adding any more computer boxes – besides the TV, the only other device I wanted present in the living room was a DVD player (I was serious about NOT adding a bunch of new boxes and cables and all that mess.) In my perfect world, I needed my new living room big screen TV to output content from just TWO sources – standard DVD’s (which I have a wealth of) and my already connected home office computer desktop.

The first big questions on my quest were; What brand of TV? And should it be Plasma or LCD? Some quick online research quickly revealed best results when using a HDTV as a computer monitor would most likely come from LCD (mainly because of a burn-out issue Plasma sets can get from computer screens that remain static on screen for long periods of time.)

So I knew I was looking for a 40″ LCD – but which brand? what model? There are a wealth of big screen LCD screens on the market today, many made from brand name manufacturers you’ve probably heard of (Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba) and many coming from cheaper China made brands you probably hadn’t heard of. I wanted to stick with what is usually the better made brand names.

I quickly zeroed in on the Samsung line of hi-def LCD televisions. I have been using a 24″ Sumsung monitor in the office which has treated me well the last couple of years, but more importantly, their line of big screen TV’s always seemed to look pretty good to me in the stores.

I ended up getting real lucky and scooping up an open-box special on a 40″ Samsung SERIES 6 LCD for a little over $700. This proved a good decision – spending a little more and going with a Samsung Series 6 LCD over Series 5 (where you see a lot of the Series 5 on sale today.)

Every few years, almost all brand name television manufacturers are improving at making these big screens televisions look better (namely in the areas of improving contrast ratio and how fast-moving video content, like sports, render on these big screens.) There is a noticeable bump in quality that Samsung has managed in moving from Series 5 to 6 and many of these improvements directly tie into making these types of full HD LCD’s ideal choices to mimic computer monitors now.

So now I had the big screen in-house, it was time to secure the connection to get from home office computer onto the new living room LCD. A couple of months ago I boosted the RAM in my office desktop and while I had the attention of my friend who guides me through much of this hardware techy stuff (and in anticipation of this living room big screen idea which was gelling in the back of my head) I upgraded my computer video card to a dual display card. It’s this added second monitor port that now serves as the LCD display in the living room. The upgraded video card was just a little over $50 and it would be a DVI to HDMI cable that connects the big screen LCD to home office computer. But it should be noted; the new DVI output on the back of the computer only carries video to the living room big screen. I still needed to get the audio and ended up using my computers mini-jack speaker out to a mini-jack audio PC in (which the Samsung LCD’s beautifully have!) I managed to find from the good folks at Canada Computers on College st. a DVI to HDMI cable which has a mini-jack audio cable built into the casing. (I just found it challenging to find a long one, 20 feet or so.)

Once we had the video and audio cloned from the home office monitor to the new living room LCD big screen – the KEY question now becomes which keyboard / mouse? How to control the whole damn thing?

I wanted something slick and wireless to control the big screen from anywhere in the room. The boys at Canada Computers really helped with some good advice (namely, must go bluetooth over regular wireless technology) and the store on College st. did have a large, in-stock variety of cables which you always need a few of to get everything hooked up.

Ended up getting the Logitech cordless MediaBoard Pro ($70) with a cool built-in touchpad (the keyboard says its for a Playstation 3, but it can be used on a PC just the same.) One final step was just needing to add bluetooth connectivity to my PC and this Belkin mini bluetooth adapter for under $20 was great for this. (though, of anything in my little project, getting the bluetooth thing going proved most challenging and took a few hours of software tinkering. But when it got going, it worked great.)

One of the first places I went to get a sense of how streamed entertainment would look on my new living room big screen set-up was my netflix.ca account. About five minutes into watching a widescreen HD episode of Mad Men I knew I was seeing NOW the likely future of content delivery into most people’s homes.

Mad Men looked and streamed amazingly. The computer desktop, icons, and text are as sharp, clear, and readable as my office monitor (just much bigger!)

The BACK my new internet connected big screen. I wanted to ensure things were clean and simple. Didn’t want new boxes and cables everywhere. With just two simple cables (The AC power and HDMI computer cable) and with a TV stand I added wheels to – my new online TV floats into different positions in the living room area.

Because of my previous (and hopefully, future) work on the Cadillac TIFFinsider campaign, I took special interest in one particular session at the recent PodCamp Toronto 2010 social media conference – the talk by Christopher Barger – the Director of Social Media for General Motors U.S.A.

Mr. Barger came to Canada for a weekend to discuss how GM made extensive use of online social media in a presentation titled, “The Social Web – Crisis Response & Reputation Rejuvenation.”

Chris started his talk by stating he was given one small problem – and just one week to prepare a communications plan for it. Simply put, how to deal with the public fallout on what would be the biggest business crisis in North American history – The Chapter 11 filing and bankruptcy of General Motors.

If there ever was a massive public relations challenge – this was it.

Chris knew he wanted his response plan to heavily involve online social media. But he still had convincing to do with some in the executive ranks of GM. Some GM people wondered, in this period of bankruptcy and crisis, was this the right time to be “open and transparent” on social media?

So while there was talk about “going dark” – that is, shut down the GM blogs and facebook groups, and not engage in any new forms of networking (Twitter) – Chris Barger executed a social media plan that pretty much did the exact opposite.

Mr. Barger discussed at his Podcamp talk some key points he discovered and tried to infuse into his social media team. Almost any corporate social media campaign could benefit from a lot of the ideas Chris Barger of his GM communications team have put into play.

1. You can’t over-communicate in a crisis.
Before Chris had his social media team respond to reactions regarding the GM crisis. He Listened. And listened, and listened. A key point he stressed during his Podcamp talk. Before GM was going to respond and be open and transparent in what the company was going through – he first listened to find out what people where talking about and where their concerns lie.
And then General Motors started to become something it hadn’t been before with its corporate communications, “OPEN. OPEN. OPEN.” as Barger would call it.

Those first documents and legal filings on the Chapter 11 – Chris and his team broke up key points and tweeted them out – 140 characters at a time. The General Motors CEO sat-down and did multiple live online chats on twitter.

And GM’s Director of Social Media also made sure of one thing – that traditional media, television and newspapers were always made aware of the social media campaign at each step. GM wasn’t going to forget about the traditional media that has spent decades writing about the company in this new communications campaign.

2. Let others tell your story.
The GM social media plan ensured genuine reach out to online news sites and bloggers. And not just the well-known, influencer type with large audiences. If a blogger with a passion for cars and only maybe had an audience of just 200 people per month. Barger decided that was still somebody to reach out too and engage. That small blogger is still a person speaking to 200 people interested in automobiles and that’s a community GM wants to be involved in. So just like the traditional car journalists and big news sites – GM also started to invite the small blogger in for press events and hands-on driving tests.
Another huge benefit to all the conversations that GM was doing in social media – was that traditional, offline media was listening as well to what the company was doing. A lot of GM’s social media efforts were picked up for stories in traditional media sources. And a lot of the time, the tone of the story was this was a different GM – a General Motors that was engaged in new social technologies and listening to its customers and critics (for perhaps, the very first time.)

Some of the initial results of the online campaign included thousands of conversations across many social media platforms and millions of hits for a special website GM put up explaining the situation in better detail.
But with all the online efforts Christopher Barger’s team put in – he never forgot one golden rule – 90% of word-of-mouth advertising still occurs offline. The GM team never forget to keep offline media aware of their communication efforts and ensure dealer and retail touch points was engaged and also participating with the new media.

3. Follow-up and value the relationships you’ve built.
The GM Social Media team can look back to last year and have a good idea of the news sites, bloggers, tweeters, and more that contributed to the dialogue of incredible change that occurred with the company. And when it comes time for the communications team to reach out again for a “GM hands-on” campaign, you can be sure this engaged community that Barger’s team has carefully cultivated, will hear about any new plans – as well, get their invitations.

NOTE: I’ve adapted this post from what I originally wrote on HoundsTV.

I would love to say that getting blogged about on one of the world’s most popular celebrity blogs – PerezHilton.com – just happened and came as a nice surprise. It didn’t. It was actually the result of a carefully crafted plan my producing partner, John Bortolotti and I set in motion a long time ago. We certainly didn’t expect it would take so long. But when you finally reap some traffic rewards – it is worth it. I’ll let the press release explain the rest.

Celebrity gossiper Perez Hilton blogs about KayvonTV.com – pushes the online reality show to #1 most watched video and channel on YouTube Canada

It’s was PEREZ FEST all last week on www.KayvonTV.com – the online reality show featuring media provocateur Kayvon Zahedi. All episodes were themed around celebrity blogger extraordinaire Perez Hilton and feature video interviews with Kayvon and Girlicious, Spice Girls Mel C,and others.

The final episode featuring Kayvon interviewing Perez did not go unnoticed by the celebrity blogger. Perez Hilton, on his wildly successful blog, perezhilton.com posted a blog entry about the memorable meeting calling the video “funny and sweet.”

When Hilton’s blog post linked to KayvonTV’s official YouTube channel – the views exploded. KayvonTV was given the honour of being the #1 most watched video and channel on YouTube Canada for July 27th, 2008. More than 250,000 KayvonTV videos have been viewed during the last week alone.

Next up for KayvonTV are his Red Carpet video reports from the Toronto International Film Festival in September. But KayvonTV producer John Bortolotti cautions, “KayvonTV needs a sponsor. The budget for Kayvon’s chocolate Peps habit alone could very well sink the show.”

KayvonTV episodes can be seen on www.KayvonTV.com, Facebook, and YouTube (www.youtube.com/kayvontv)