DevCamp Explores the Social Web on May 10
My friend, Joel Mark Witt, is part of a band of merry folk working on an interesting spin on a BarCamp called DevCamp, with a focus on social software applications. It’s coming up this weekend, so if you’re in the Baltimore area, check it out:
Join Us To Explore The Future Of The Social Web At DevCamp East 2008
When: May 10 - All Day
Where: University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland
SocialDevCamp East is the Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web
Where is the social web going? It’s going mobile, to geocentric services, and to open platforms. Join a community of like minded developers, social media gurus and thought leaders for an unconference to discuss the future of the social web.
We’re looking for thought leaders from DC to Boston to meet, forge relationships, and envision the future.
SocialDevCamp East is convenient to the entire east coast corridor via Amtrak. Just travel to Baltimore’s Penn Station — University of Baltimore is two blocks south.
NOTE: Please sign up here and on the official BarCamp Wiki.
http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialDevCampEast
The password is ‘c4mp’. Thanks!
You can follow us on Twitter, also:
http://twitter.com/socialdevcamp
Please also BLOG this event. You can link to either the PBwiki page or to the Facebook page. We need to spread the word!
We are also accepting sponsors; the recommended sponsorship level is $250. Please contact us.
We’re planning an afterparty at Brewer’s Art, a short walk down the street. The party will begin at 4:30 and last til whenever. If you are interested in being an afterparty sponsor please let us know!
Aramark Strike in Houston
Outside our ITEC Houston event, representatives from the SEIU service union are protesting for worker’s rights. I spoke with a few of them, and what might have been their PR representative. They want better wages, health care, and to protest other concerns they have with their work conditions.
Meanwhile, I’m inside at the CrossTech Partners booth with an ear infection, deaf in that ear, and thinking about what else needs doing.
Wishing you well.
Business To Business Forum 2008
Marketing Profs is throwing a
Business to Business Forum event on June 9th-10th in Boston, focusing on Driving Sales: What’s New and What Works. I’m one of the speakers, as are some of my friends:
Tons more folks are also speaking that I’ve yet to meet.
It’s not free, but it’s reasonable for a two day event with lots of sales and marketing leadership information.
If you’re interested, check out the event page for more information.
Still Here
Some of you sent mail asking whether I was going to stop blogging. Short answer: no. I could just as much stop blogging as I could stop breathing. For over ten years (a decade!), I have been writing my thoughts and ideas down onto the Internet for people to take away, change, challenge, and adapt. Not because I just want to give ideas away, but because you enrich me with your thoughts and points of view, and because I love seeing where you go with the things I put out for consideration.
Some of you asked me what book it was that I read on the plane that helped me gain my most recent perspective. The book is called CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life, by Dr Edward Hallowell (who happens to be from Massachusetts, btw). It appeals to people who want to better understand how modern living (especially all of us online) can give us true ADD-like symptoms (Attention Deficit Disorder is a medical condition, but Dr. Hallowell says we can develop symptoms that are pretty darned close to the real thing).
So, if the book seems like something you want to check out, here’s an Amazon link (or use your local library).
But I’m still here. A more thoughtful post about social media and the like comes later.
Saying No
Doing anything well requires the ability to keep your plates clean and ready to accept a helping of what comes next, but by saying yes to every little thing that comes along, one will be less likely to be ready to handle the things that come up. ( David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, handled this topic well in his book, Ready for Anything). In looking over all that I have on my plate, I realize that I have to go back and say no to a few things, in order to be fair to my more pressing obligations.
I should state clearly that part of this stems from my eagerness to please, and my own weakness and aversion around saying no firmly.
It’s not easy to back out of things. The feeling of guilt for not completing a project is high. The sense that you’re letting someone down is a heavy lump in your belly. And yet, once one realizes that one isn’t going to be able to maintain the current pace, and that maybe one has bitten off too much, there’s really no other path (unless pure destruction is a path).
This morning, I sent notes to several people I respect and admire telling them that I had to back out of a commitment. I know that they will be disappointed. And yet, I think they’d hate it more if I put them in a rough spot closer to their deadline.
How to Assess Your Priorities
It should seem easy to know what’s important. Your family is important. Your job is important. But once you get beyond those two, how do you assess what you do for passion, for community, and for self-fulfillment? That’s where the confusion gets strongest. In my case, I did the following:
- Made a conscious commitment to the work I’m doing for salary.
- Made a conscious commitment to find more family time.
- Made a conscious commitment to the book I’m writing with Julien Smith.
- Made a conscious commitment to the community I started with Christopher S. Penn.
- Re-assessed which projects I was doing for business development.
- Re-assessed which projects I was doing for larger community.
- Re-assessed all the “can you just take a look at this?” projects I have in queue.
What I’ve decided in my assessment was this:
- My relationship with my company is going well and I want to try some more things with them. We’re working on new projects that I find challenging and interesting (which is what motivates me).
- PodCamp still has lots of evolution left in it, and I like working with Christopher S. Penn and Whitney Hoffman.
- Julien and I worked on the book while in Chicago, and now we’re REALLY excited about what we have.
- I will still evaluate speaking and private education opportunities for companies, but will have to better assess how that impacts my travel schedule and my family commitments.
- Where I’m stuck in the weeds is with all the “can you take a look at this” types of opportunities.
What Comes Next
It’s not like I’m closing shop or not interested in hearing from you. It’s not like I want to go into a cave and just work on my job, my book, and my family. But I will be a lot more clever in how I respond to the opportunities that come across my path. That’s where I should make a clear assessment and then move on with that decision in mind.
I’m still going to attend several events over the coming year. I’ll still be active in the social media scene. I’m still working on delivering quality information based on learning, execution, and extrapolation. I’m just going to work harder on being more fair to the primary commitments in my life.
Thank You
I’m forever grateful for the support of the community at large, and for all the wonderful people who like me enough to share with me their projects and passionate work. Don’t go away. Stick around, and see who else speaks passionately on this site and on the Rockstars page. We’re moving towards a community of shared excellence, and I will do something in the coming months to facilitate that even further for people with professional interests in this space. (Stay tuned).
For now, thank you, and I wish you well on your projects.
Photo credit, Afroswede
NTEN Rocks
The NTEN community reached out to have me as part of their “Ask the Expert” sessions. I told them I’d give them some blogging and social media resources. So, here you are, guys.
Social Media and Social Network Starter Points
Social Media Starter Moves for Business
Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning
Seven Blog Improvements You Can Make Today
Measuring Social Media Efforts
Oh, and I’m doing a newsletter too, if that’s useful.
How Does Your Blog Relate to Your Business
I’m working on something, but don’t have time. Job stuff to do, and heading off to Houston to work on ITEC Houston, which will be fun, too. Anyhow, I have a question:
How does your blog relate to your business? Does it? What does your blog do for you?
Let’s get a discussion going, and I’ll share more of what I’m thinking on this later (or tomorrow).
What’s your take? Take over my blog for me today, okay?
SOBCon08 was Great
Flying back from SOBCon08 in Chicago. It was a great experience, and I’m grateful to Liz Strauss and team for putting it on. I’ll have more to say soon. I’m working on my business right now, and trying to get things done, and kind of overloaded. I’ll put up something meaningful for Monday, but I wanted you to know that SOBCon was a good time, loaded with great people, and is worth your radar for 2009.
What Were Your First Steps
Let’s do a post inside the comments post today. I’ll ask some questions, and then let’s talk about it in the comments. Fair?
What were your first steps into social media?
Who were your early people you admired and followed?
How did you get started?
If you were going to give advice to someone starting out, what would you tell them?
What will you do in the next few months with social media?
(Let’s see where this goes).
Some Differences Between Pitching Mainstream Press and Bloggers
Meet the next generation of people who put stories out on the web. I say “next,” but blogging has been around for years and years. Some of us are making decent money at it, hiring and employing staffs, etc. Those types seem like mainstream press. But they’re not. One difference? We blog based on what drives our passion, plus in the case of some folks, what drives revenue.
Blogs have reach. Blogs don’t have as many barriers to cross before you reach the decision maker. Blogs don’t (always) require a PR agency to help you get access. Blogs always need good content, right? So it seems like a natural thing to just lob stories at a blogger, because more often than not, they’re going to be receptive, will run the bit if it fits their readership (viewership), and everyone wins, right?
Some differences.
Bloggers Often Write From Passion
Lots of us can’t NOT blog. We love what we do. We’re obsessed with getting information out into the world. Desperate to be useful. I’d say that we’re like news junkies, only we’re really interested in how we can contribute to making the news.
Bloggers Have a Bit More Ego Feeding Required
Try to disagree with me on that one, but when I just start rattling bloggers’ names down quickly, I can tell you that there are things you’ll want to do to reach out, and one is to know what makes a certain blogger tick. Want to get into TechCrunch or Mashable? Be sure you’re giving one the exclusive, and pick wisely. Want to get covered by Engadget? Don’t give it to Gizmodo on the same day. Go a few tiers down in blogs and what we want is to know that you know who we are, and what we cover. A pitch about something in my general area isn’t the same as noticing the kinds of things I write about and giving me something that fits.
Bloggers Like Free Prize Inside Experiences
If you want us to write about your software app or your new gizmo, give a few away. Nokia, Nikon, Flip, GM (Saturn), Garmin, and tons of other companies have given out gear on loaner programs (sometimes handled well, and other times handled a bit weirdly). And if it’s not something directly tangible, it’s something like getting invited to a pre-screening of a movie, or to a closed beta of an application, or something else that makes one feel exclusive. Still an ego play, and yet, very effective because once we play with your toys, we’ll be inclined to write about them.
Will we be fair and give opinions on the competitors like an official review site? Not always. Depends who it is, whether that’s part of their bailiwick, and whether they even know how to approach such a thing. I sure don’t. If I’m given something free to mess around with, I disclose it when talking about it, but then, my site isn’t a journalistic effort to review things fairly.
Bloggers Don’t Have To Be Polite
Though I prefer politeness, and try to be polite often (Sorry, Tom), it’s not required. And we don’t always do what you’d wish. It’s a little uncertain sometimes what you’ll get when you send a request to us. Wish it weren’t true, and I would prefer that we be polite more often, but we don’t have to be.
What Twitter Had to Say When I Asked My Friends
(That’s a hint, too. We’re far more networked. We talk to each other. We talk about YOU.)
Pitching ME
First, I have to say that I’m not usually on the lookout for a news story. If you read back through my posts, a great many of them deal with strategy and tactics that people can employ. I read about 1000 news items a day, plus I have a day job that isn’t professional blogging. So, I don’t always need news.
And yet.
If you’ve got something interesting about a new tool, a new way that someone’s using social media to build business or organizational relationships, a sense of what’s interesting to me and want to feed me something, here’s what you might do:
- Be my Twitter friend.
- Have read my last ten blog posts to have a sense of my flavor.
- Give me links, pointers, possibly screenshots, and follow up in about 9 days when I still haven’t managed to get your story out.
- Kindly understand if the story doesn’t fit what I cover (often).
- Realize that I can’t always check out your website.
- Understand that a “social network for ____” (dogs, lawyers, imaginary friends, ex-cons) isn’t really new unless they’re doing something REALLY new.
- Write the first paragraph of your email as if you really did only send it to me (I get it, but pretend, okay?)
While We’re At It
Here’s what I *am* really interested in writing more about, and where you can help me, if you’ve got an interesting story:
- Social media and network use inside the enterprise. (Spoke at Thomson/Reuters and IBM recently and was really impressed in both cases with what they’re already doing).
- Specialized social network applications - things that make a network more valuable, vs just profiles, blogs, pictures, and friends.
- Books about social media, social networks, next-generation PR/marketing, business, etc.
- Business models that aren’t advertising-centric. (For instance, Sermo has a neat model. So does Gimp.TV).
- Mainstream people coming into social media in a realistic and meaningful way.
- Nonprofit and organizational experiences with social media that have made an impact.
- Location-based tools and networking (for instance, I’m digging Yahoo’s Fire Eagle stuff)
- Technology that improves business, that improves personal interfacing with the Internet.
I’m probably forgetting a few of my favorites in there, but let’s start there. If you’re pitching something like THAT, drop me a line. My contact info is in the sidebar. I’m easy to find.
Further Reading
Social media expert, Jason Falls covered an advertising professional’s view on this recently, and that’s worth checking out, too.
Edelman’s superstar, Leah Jones showed us how to talk to bloggers.
Your Thoughts?
Lots of people who come here are PR or marketing professionals, journalists, and the like. What do you think about what I’ve said so far? What are your tales of success with bloggers, or your tales of woe? Bloggers, am I wrong in my starting concepts about what might feel different about bloggers vs mainstream press? I’m eager for your take.
Screen caps made with Skitch
