Archive for September, 2007
Slicing Time in a Face to Face Environment
The Podcasting and New Media Expo was this past weekend in Ontario, California. I’m a fan of the Bourquin brothers’ work overall, and found the event to be well-run from the perspective of someone who throws events for a living. I didn’t connect very well with the content in the speaking sessions this year (and that’s just my personal experience), but I think that some folks got some great information from it all. I saw C.C. Chapman and others doing a fascinating talk about virtual worlds that I wished I’d seen in full, but it’s hard to keep everything together and on track for my own personal schedule at events.
That’s actually what I want to talk about. I have to ask you for your help. I need your advice and some potential ways to manage things. Let me explain my dilemma.
The Overwhelming Effects of Social Networking
I’m fortunate to say that my efforts with Twitter and Facebook and my blog and other media have done exactly what I’ve set out to do: establish a long-distance personal connection with people I see only rarely. I feel that the way people treat me at events like the PMNE conference is directly related to how people perceive my personality and demeanor from afar. They take me to be kind, interested, and approachable.
These things are all true.
The only problem is: it’s hard to scale. I’m one human being. The one-to-many communication platform of Twitter and Facebook and a blog means that I am touching lots of people with the same message. It means you can all touch my message, feel my intentions, and have an experience with them.
In person, it’s a little harder. There’s only one me and there are hundreds of really great people seeking to have a one on one conversation. I’m grateful for this, and I wouldn’t want friends to feel that they couldn’t approach me and talk for a few minutes.
At the PMNE, I met a bunch of people after my speech at the Podcast Academy. They were all wonderful and interesting, and had lots of response to my presentation. It’s exactly what I would hope and made me feel appreciative.
Only, some of the conversations were much too long for me to manage.
Finite Time
First, some distinctions. My real good FRIENDS should feel that they can talk to me whenever they need me. Second, if I’ve met and spoken with you at other events, chances are I’d love to say hi to you at this one, too.
The majority of new people I meet are wonderful and great and amazing. I *love* meeting interesting new people who have some great projects on the go, and who are interested in talking about their passions. I love talking with new people about passionate things.
Sometimes, however, someone will speak to me and try hard to hold my undivided attention for 20 or more minutes at a time, rambling without much substance and not really getting to a point of conversation as much as they’ve decided to share a biography with me.
NOTE: If you’ve just recently met me, chances are I really enjoyed talking with you. This post addresses about 4 people total that I met at this event.
For those types of new people that I’m meeting and talking with about things, I wish there were a way to say, “You’re really interesting and I am grateful you want to talk with me. I only have a limited amount of time to meet and speak with everyone. Could I ask to you follow up with your larger questions via email?”
But I don’t know how.
My Biggest Fears
- I don’t want people to think I’m a snob.
- I don’t want someone thinking that I think they’re “unworthy.”
- I am afraid I’ll miss something truly wonderful, just because someone’s social skills aren’t all that.
So, what do I do? I need to better manage my time, because I’m learning that the people suffering the most from my inability to manage time are my friends, and the people who have something important and legitimate to share with me.
I need advice and strategies. What do you think?
Presentation Secrets for Social Communicators
Speaking and presenting is something I’m passionate about. Why? Because it’s another way to start conversations and build relationships. Or, it can be, if you think about how you present. Here are some recommendations on ways to turn your bullhorn into a party hat in the presentation world.
First, Defuse the Bomb
You have less than two minutes to set up your relationship with the audience. Your audience needs to LOVE you. They have to want you to succeed. And as part of this, they want you to succeed, because they’re hoping to learn something about themselves from you.
Let me highlight that so you take it home with you: People want to learn about THEMSELVES through what you talk about in your presentations.
SUPER SECRET TIP: Tell a funny story. Not a joke. A story. Tell it EARLY. Be as FUNNY as you can muster. Self-depricating humor helps, if you’re any good at that. Be the authority, but be human.
Sneak In With Questions
You need to sneak into your audience’s hearts and minds. I love asking questions, but not so much the hand-raiser types. Sure, I do that schtick. But if I’m trying to get you engaged early, I want to ask you questions that get you rummaging through your own internal autobiography? Why? Because I want you to be connected and engaged to what I’m saying. If I’m getting you to stir up internal memories, I’ve snuck in.
Think Television, Then Break It
We are a world of TV viewers. We are used to screens. Think HARD about this when planning your presentation. First, think about slides. Slides are PART of your TV screen. Know who the other part is? YOU. Now, if you and your slides are the presentation, which is more interesting? A big glowing screen? Or you hiding behind the podium.
Use Your Body
Learn how to move. First, don’t fidget. Second, step away from the podium (unless it’s a HUGE room and the mic is glued to the podium). Get around and move. Get CLOSER to your audience. BLEND for a moment with them. You’ve been to rock concerts. Crowds go CRAZY for contact with the star. And, uh, you’re the star, bub!
A Word About Slides
Never ever EVER use pre-built slide formats. Just don’t. Know why? Because they all look THE SAME. Don’t make my eyes bleed. Don’t make me sleep. Next point: bullets are for guns. Be creative. Think about it this way: if this were a TV commercial, would YOU watch? Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is basically a slide show with Al talking and some dramatic music. Think that way and work backwards.
In format, don’t do title, agenda, name, payload, contact me. Know why? Because EVERYONE does that. Try mixing it up. Just a little. Think TV and all the various formats.
SUPER SECRET TIP: Find lots of great photos on Flickr (use advanced search to select Creative Commons photos, and add a slide near the end of your slideshow giving people attribution for their work).
Your Voice is Important
If you speak in a monotone voice with no stops and go on and on and use ums to cover the spaces where you don’t know what you’re going to say next, people will fall asleep almost immediately, and then the best you can hope is that they dream that you did a good job.
WAKE people UP! Be loud. Be soft. Use your voice with as much energy as a radio announcer or your favorite entertainment personality. Think on this. Practice it. Use shorter sentences. (Notice I do this when I blog?) And try hard to mix up HOW you’re talking about things. Ask questions. Make statements. Pause for breath. Kill “ums.”
Finish With Idea Handles
ALWAYS end a presentation with things people can run off and do. Verbs. Give people ways they can take your ideas, and use them. Giving ideas handles means letting people pick up your idea, take it home with them, and incorporate it into what they’re doing and thinking. It makes the whole time you’ve taken from everyone worth it.
And make sure folks know how to reach you, okay?
Does this work for you? Do you want more ideas like this?
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Photo credit framesmedia/dan
Confidence Matters More Than Anything
I had an interesting plane ride over from Boston to Ontario, California. JetBlue has television sets on the backs of every seat, so I get the chance to catch up on all these shows I never see because I don’t have TV in my house, and my viewing habits are crazy. I watch stuff that is pure garbage, mostly because I find it fascinating that this is somehow on TV capturing the mindshare of humanity.
Take VH1’s The Pickup Artist. It’s a show where a couple of really cool guys teach a bunch of nerds how to pick up girls. This show is endlessly fascinating and here’s why: it’s teaching you (YOU, if you’re watching) about confidence. The actual mechanics of how to pick up a girl are kind of a sham, or rather, they’re just a skillset to get you closer to feeling confident. But ultimately, he’s teaching about confidence. If you watch the show with that lens on, it REALLY proves to be interesting.
At the same time, I was reading Jeffrey Gitomer’s book about persuasion. It’s the green one if you know Gitomer’s other works. Persuasion is ultimately heavily related to confidence as well. The more you can build on your confidence, the more likely you are to be persuasive, and/or make your point known.
Are YOU confident? What are you tactics for feeling more confident? If you’re not very confident, how has that affected your days?
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Make Your Own Advisory Board
Yesterday, I dropped an email to six friends asking for their advice on something I’m working on. I set out what I intended to do, my plans behind it, and my hopes rolling forward. They were wonderfully informative, challenging, and useful to what I needed. The value of a personal advisory board is more than I can express. You probably do this without thinking, but if you haven’t had the idea before, here’s what I do.
It Helps to Have Smart Friends
I’m lucky to have lots of friends with diverse jobs and experiences. I know legal experts, church pastors, software developers, entrepreneurs, artists, small business experts, musicians, actors, people from several countries, and certainly from all kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, the more successful your friends are, the better advice they can give you, so having some true winners in your circle is useful. (But then again, don’t discount people who fail successfully, as Becky McCray might tell you.)
Ask Clear Questions
I try hard to do all the legwork of my questions. I start with where I am with things, what my hope is, and what I know already. That way, I can get some of the legwork out of the way so that my friends can advise me understanding my mindset around what I’m asking. The better the questions, the better the help you receive back.
Be Available for Them
Don’t forget that it’s a two-way street. Make sure you’re available to give your friends advice when they ask. Give some kind of value back to the equation. And make sure they know that they matter to you even when you’re not asking them for advice.
Be Sparing
Don’t lean on your friends all the time. It goes from them feeling helpful to them feeling burdened. It’s up to you to understand how often is too often, but you’ll figure it out. The more sparse the response to your questions, the more likely you’re not really in a healthy balance.
Use the Advice
In my example from yesterday, I went against the naming advice I was given, but only because everyone’s great ideas gave me a better sense of why I picked what I picked. But the OTHER advice, I took it all and will run with it. It strengthened me. I have some GREAT friends for knocking my head into the right place.
Do You Do This?
Do you already do this? Is this the way you move through life? Have you read about other people using their own advisory boards? Maybe they use other terms, but I’m curious how this exists out in the wild. (Wild=”everywhere outside my head.”) Share your thoughts.
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Photo credit, Jon Swanson
Scoble Effect Better Than Digg
The other day, Digg and del.icio.us lit up my post about 100 blog topics. I subsequently blogged that it didn’t do much for the site’s traffic and stickiness overall. YESTERDAY, Robert Scoble linked to my bit about Facebook not letting me see my friends, and I got much more relevant comments, people that seemed to fit the demographic of what I write about, and who probably will stick around a lot longer. I think the Scoble Effect is better than the Digg effect, even if the traffic surge is lighter.
How It Works
Scoble uses Google Reader and shares items in a link blog. That link blog is in LOTS of people’s RSS reading every day (including mine). That’s one way.
Second, INSIDE FACEBOOK Scoble’s link blog gets noticed and picked up. In fact, Steve Rubel said he hadn’t noticed and started reading my blog until he saw it in Facebook. So that’s something to consider.
Third, I think Robert also uses Blog Friends, another Facebook app. If so, people surfing his profile might have yet another chance to see my post.
So Overall
My post traveled further, in more relevant circles, because of the Scoblevirus, than it did in Digg and del.icio.us. Not that I’m not happy with the other traffic, but I think the amount of people sticking around is fewer than what I’ll get from Robert.
Hmm. Are there other people with the same effect in place as Robert? What do you think?
Photo credit, Scripting News
Facebook-Let Me See My Friends
According to an article about Mark Zuckerberg in the current issue of Wired Magazine, one of the goals of Facebook is to organize one’s real life friends online, mapping what he’s called the “social graph.” I was thinking about this, and I have to say: Facebook does a HORRIBLE job of mapping this out for ME.
I Can’t See
If I click my “Friends” tab in Facebook, I see an alphabetical list. There are a few other ways to organize this list, but in none of the cases does this map to my real universe. I can’t, for instance, group Jim Long and Jonny Goldstein together, even though I know they both are in the DC area, are both media makers, and are both people I’d want to think about in similar ways. I just can’t see people in this fashion. My own friends are shuffled into a deck in an order I have no power over. (Yes, I’ve heard of “Top Friends.” I use it. Not enough.)
And I want tags to sort in other ways, like “Twitter friends” and “People to call when I’m sad” and “People who might help my business goals.” What do you think, Robert or Jeff? With thousands of friends, don’t you wish the organization would be just a little more David Weinberger for you?
What I Want
I want to slice and dice this data any way I choose. I want tagging. I want visual shuffling, the same way I do with business cards. Know how I organize my business cards? By event. If I met you at TechCrunch40, your card is right there beside other people I met there.
I want ways to message people or notify people geographically. “Chris Brogan is in San Francisco with a few hours to kill.” Sure, you see that status message on your news feed, but if you’re like me, and have more than a few hundred friends, these needles get lost in haystacks.
If YOU Won’t Slice It, Let Me
Is there an app I could write to do this? (By “I” and “write,” I mean someone smart who writes apps, and I would, say, either pay them or encourage them a lot). What’s up with this? Could we break open the “friend” prison, and let me see my friends my way?
Visual Data
And now for something completely different. I want my damned data my way all the time. I want that Microsoft Surfaces interface. I know. Sacrilege. A Mac guy just said he wanted a Microsoft product. But I do. I want to stack my info my way. I want to see things in a way that makes sense to my needs. For instance, I want Gmail notifier to do it my way. I want my files to slide around in piles. I want searches to be heat maps and graphical and more than just text.
Not in Facebook. Everywhere. But hey, if the new rumbling in town - Facebook is Google - is to be taken forward, then I want some better control and visualization. Have you ever thought about just how much we use our qwerty keyboards to do just that? To type words? Why aren’t we coming up with new ways to move things around, and see things not just as lists of text (Look at GMAIL and Google Reader), but perhaps as overlaying data structures? Where is that?
Okay, Zuckerberg. Give me back my friends, and you! Write some apps or something. Okay?
What do you think? Am I alone on this one?
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The Effects Of Digg on My Blog
The other day, I was fortunate enough to make the front page of Digg.com. I also made the top of del.icio.us. Somewhere in my mind, I had the vision that this would dramatically change my website. I figured I’d get some awareness, and that this would really build on the community of amazing people who’ve been with me over this last year. I’ve never wanted bodies for bodies’ sake. I’ve wanted more sharp minds for all of us to engage here. I think we’ve seen a few, and I’ve met some new names on the site, but here’s the truth of the numbers:
From before the big day to after, the net effect? Nothing. Neither on my web page directly or subscribers to RSS. Nothing.
Why This Matters, or Doesn’t
My experience tells me this about me and my content: you’re already here. I’m gaining 50-100 new friends a week. And that’s just plenty fine. It means we get to know about each other in a more organic way. And it also tells me that “fake” fast growth doesn’t do much to change my core community.
I feel good about this. It means that tricks don’t matter. Good content matters.
Rising Tide
We are at the heart of a social media and social networking revolution. And this might not be a money revolution, but it is most certainly a communications revolution. We’re now able to reach out to people, communicate in a rich fashion, and build stronger relationships using these tools. As such, I’ve found that my conversations here, with you, are pertinent to the revolution. We’re all figuring this out together, right?
So, to Digg’s front page, and any new folks who’ve stuck around, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. And to you who’ve been here for a little while, I’m glad you’re still here and still participating.
And for folks who haven’t said a word on this blog yet? Drop a comment. Peep. Say hi. : )
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Photo credit, SarahCartwright
Brand Stories
Brands aren’t about the words and images a company gives us as ways of understanding their product and its values. That’s just what people WISH brands were about. What brands “really” mean are the stories we attach to them. And that’s what I was thinking about today. I was thinking about my brand, and I was wondering what people thought about me. Am I considered reliable? Am I considered innovative? What’s the word or words that sum me up if you were telling a story about brand to someone else?
From here, I thought about brands and MY stories about them. Here are some samples:
- L.L. Bean- Best return policy ever. Killer service.
- Apple - Clean design. Easy to use.
- Saturn- No-nonsense. No haggle pricing. Reliable.
- Old Navy- I call them “Garanimals” for adults.
- Robert Scoble- A trusted voice in the Valley.
- Eric Rice - Always 3 steps ahead and challenging me.
- Bre Pettis- Does scary new things and shares how at the same time.
- PodCamp- Brings social media people together with low attitude drag.
- YOU - Show me what else I don’t know.
Your Brand Story
If you were to tell me YOUR brand story, what someone said about you when you’re not around, what do you think it would be? Be kind to yourself, and positive. Think not of what you HOPE they’d say, but what they’d likely say. If you’re willing, share it in the comments section. It won’t seem like bragging, and it will be something we can talk from.
Now, step 2 of the thought: what do you WISH people would say about your brand? Is there a way to bridge what you imagine they do say to what you wish they would say?
I’ll share mine too, after a few of you comment.
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Photo credit, chaelion
Measuring Social Media Efforts
For any of us interested in making social media and social networks a viable part of an organization’s communications and engagement strategy, the question of measurement comes up quickly. It makes sense. In an empirical world, where we want to know about Return on Investment, it’s important to know how spending money on a podcast or paying someone to maintain a Facebook group is actually worth anything to a company. Even as organizations become aware that they “should” take advantage of social media, the question that rushes in behind that awareness is, “How will I know anything is happening?”
There are some really interesting articles and posts coming out about this. For example, paying attention to Jeremiah Owyang on any given day will find you some data on measuring a social media campaign. There’s also the Association for Downloadable Media to consider, as they’re seeking ways to make this all mean more for us. Plenty of people are coming up with their take on how to provide useful measurements on the effects of social media for an organization. My question: are we measuring, or are we mapping?
Measuring vs. Mapping
First off, yes, I recognize that mapping is very empirical in nature, and that geolocative data is a wealth of measurements. But I also know that long before cartography became a far more instrumented science, maps could also mean simply a drawing of the rough way to get from here to there. So, in my explanation, I’m saying that measuring is far more detailed, and that mapping is a little more holistic. Go with me on this, will you?
How Many Whats Equals a Wow?
If I got you 300,000 listeners to your audio podcast, would that be a wow? It would be a wow to most podcasters. But what if you are L.L. Bean? Is that a lot of listeners? And even if it is, so what? What does 300K listeners do to change a metric at the company?
The best example of picking the right measure continues to be Christopher S. Penn and his Financial Aid Podcast. Chris loves every listener he gets, but he MEASURES how many completed loan applications his show drives. Why? Because he works for The Student Loan Network. He’s paid to make his show drive applications and granted loans. If I sent another 300,000 listeners to him, Chris would probably say, “so what?” until he saw how that changed his specific metric of interest.
If you’re working with an organization on a social media strategy, consider what metric might be truly useful. Is awareness enough? Is completed downloads the right measure of awareness? What does a blog do to drive that number? There are tons of ways to consider this. A partial list:
- Actions taken (like Penn’s loan apps completed).
- Links to posts from other blogs.
- Products sold.
- Satisfaction Index raised.
- Customer Service calls lowered (what if you produced screencasts or YouTube videos? to lower this?)
- Mainstream media coverage (conversions from social media to larger media outlets).
- Subscribers / users increased.
Mapping the Territory
I still feel a map is very important. What would the map show? It would show all the various aspects of your social media efforts, your strategy, and it would give the organization you’re working with the larger picture understanding of all the various components of your efforts and how your efforts would reach some desired goals.
Said a different way, it’s great to measure results like mentioned above, but it might also be useful to discuss the larger map of what could/should be accomplished by a social media strategy. For a map, I might create something like this:
- List of the most likely places a human will encounter the media I produce.
- Methods for listening to conversations off-blog and outside my media.
- Touchpoints along the value chain and how my media reaches each one.
- Path back to a central data capture for reporting and strategy monitoring.
- Pinpoints to corrective measures taken from initial strategy path to current efforts.
The more I consider what I’ve written, the more I can see the value in offering both the measurements and the map. The map might not be enough to convince an organization of the value of your efforts, and yet, the measurements won’t truly be valuable without the map of your larger intentions and the strategy you’ve considered.
What’s Your Take?
How have you worked with your clients? Are you a media maker? How do you use your media? To what effect? Is there a value in better understanding the different touchpoints of your strategy, and/or in understanding which numbers matter in what way for your efforts?
Even if you make media strictly for yourself, how does the above change how you look at your efforts?
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Photo credits young einstein and libby
It Takes a Village
Two posts today, one by Steven Hodson and his Chris Messina-ness that got me thinking about two specific aspects of social media that I think bear pulling out of the conversation and highlighting: “social” means something different, and “it takes a village.”
Social Features
A lot of time, when we’re talking about “social” media and “social” networks, we really mean the software features and workflows that enable social interaction. Steven Hodson mentioned that the word is being co-opted from the original meaning, which deals more with the organization and behavior of humans in groups. This isn’t bad, to make the distinction.
Think about BEFORE social features. I remember the first time my local computer bulletin board system went from being a 1:1 connection between me and a server, to that day when a chat room opened up with people all over the world. It was a rudimentary version of Internet Relay Chat. Beyond that, and before that, using the Internet was a very 1:1 experience. Sure, there were emails, and after a while, we had the AOL chat room thing.
But it all felt very linear. Everything was 1 then 2 then 3. And for whatever reason, it was exhilarating, this new stuff, but it still felt a little disconnected.
Look at now. Look at the difference between using iPhoto and Flickr. Think about how different Twitter has made your web working time different, even in a world where instant messaging exists.
So, in the case of social media and social networks, the word “social” talks more about the features that enable interactions than about the nature of engaging in real world societal experiences. And yet, the way *I* have experienced the web, it feels very social in the traditional sense to me.
It Takes a Village
I am frequently asked by people how I can manage to interact with an online community of 1400 people on Twitter and another (different, mostly) 1200 or so on Facebook. One easy answer is that not everyone comments or talks at the same time. For instance, on a blog where about 1200 people stop by on a given day, I get around 20 comments on a good post, and 3 or 4 on a less-engaging post. That’s easy to manage, right?
Some folks ask why I should want over 1000 contacts on ANY of my networks. The answer is that it takes a village. What I mean is this: if you are my friend, and you need to reach someone else who knows something about database administration, I know someone who does this. I might not know them well. I might not remember their kids’ names. But I know them enough to pass you, my friend, on to this connection of mine, such that you both get what you need.
And so it goes. There are always situations where I can reach out and ask someone in my social networks for help, either for myself or more often, for others. It’s this reason that lets me say yes to every request. It’s this reason that lets me feel comfortable sharing myself with people I don’t especially know very well.
My True Friends
I have three categories of friends:
1.) Friends from the old days that I don’t see very much.
2.) Online-mostly friends that I might have met in person, or might have not.
3.) Real, deep friends, who I can call when I’m happiest or sad, and who I can count on when I need them.
Category one doesn’t do much for me, but I still like them. Category two is the majority, and I spend a lot of time and energy with them. Category three is smaller than I wish, but makes sense for a guy who does social media and social networking for a big part of his life.
All of these types are people I’m happy to know, and for different reasons at different times. Sometimes, my “real” friends get frustrated, because I don’t see every Twitter they send, or don’t respond to their “Super Poke” request. But they know I’m there via email or phone. I publish all the ways you can reach me. Everyone else seems okay reaching me on whatever network they find.
But do you see why the village becomes important, even if I’m mostly interacting with a smaller subset?
What do you think?
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Photo credit, Julien Harneis
