Hitting the road (again)
I’m preparing to head out on another tour, this time of just the United States & Canada. If you’re going to be at any of these shows, please feel free to say hello!
- Blog World East, New York City. May 24-25, 2011. I’ll be speaking about podcasting and Facebook Analytics.
- MARCOM, Ottawa, Canada, June 1-2, 2011. More on 21st century marketing methods with one of the premier marketing conferences in Canada.
- NCHELP, Austin, Texas, June 7-8. 2011. I’ll be talking about how higher education professionals can leverage social media.
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, June 13-14, 2011. I’ll be teaching the social email marketing session. If you’d like to attend, knock off $100 using discount code SPEAK100.
- #140Conf, New York City, June 15-16, 2011. I’ll be presenting the second iteration of Awaken Your Superhero at Jeff Pulver’s landmark real-time conference. Don’t miss this eye-opening talk!
- Blue Sky Factory Email Marketing Conference, Chicago, June 22, 2011. I’ll be leading off with my 21st Century Email Marketing talk.
- Wharton Web Conference, Philadelphia, July 13-15. I’ll be teaching social media as a part of your integrated marketing mix.
- WordCamp Boston, July 23-24, 2011. I’ll be talking about all the different ways I make WordPress work for me.
- PodCamp NH, Portsmouth, NH, August 2011.
- PodCamp Boston, Boston, MA, September 2011.
- Optimization Summit, Phoenix, Arizona, September 12-13, 2011. I’ll be talking email marketing in depth.
Do you know about a conference that isn’t on this list? Tell the organizers to bring me in to speak!
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Painless conference charity
While there are any number of excellent causes out there that need and demand attention, I want to draw yours towards something relatively painless: conference charity. As someone who has attended, planned, and created conferences of all stripes, from Podcamp to giant shows, I can say with great confidence that there’s always room around the edges.
Crates of shirts from Podcamp Boston 2
For example, as any conference planner will tell you, meals and food are squishy numbers at best. Even when the price tag of a show is in the thousands of dollars, there are still no-shows. There are still people who eat less than others. There are still people who don’t take the freebies even when they’re built into the price, from shirts to pens to foods of every kind.
At the end of a conference, we all shake hands, exchange business cards, and go our separate ways. What we don’t pay attention to is the army of venue staff cleaning things up, most of which goes straight to your nearest garbage dump. Go look at the trash bins after an event and you’ll find everything from untouched meals to piles of shirts to televisions (seriously, I saw this after a major electronics show – the vendors tossed their gear rather than pay to ship it back).
Obviously, all that stuff at the edges, the excess, can find new homes. After every Podcamp Boston, we call in the Pine Street Inn to take away leftover food, which is distributed to Boston’s homeless. After the Blue Sky Factory user conference in the fall of last year, the local Catholic Charities did the same with the leftover food in Baltimore. Back when Podcamps were printing t-shirts for every event, a good number of the leftovers (especially from Podcamp Boston 2) ended up going to several local homeless shelters, because the shirts were perfectly good. I get tons of trade show swag including more pens than I could possibly count, and most of those end up at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a local charity near my home. Larger stuff gets picked up for free from the Vietnam Veteran’s Association.
The point isn’t to say here’s stuff I do. The point is to say that you’ve got tons of stuff from conferences that deserves a better place than a trash can. If you’re a conference organizer or event planner, you have literal mountains of stuff that other people will value greatly, especially after your attendees have left. You need only one look at the grateful faces in the local soup kitchen when you walk in with a few crates of really good conference food to know that there is always a home for leftovers. You need only one look at the faces of the kids at a local program when you drop off a few boxes of promotional stuffed animals that no one took at your trade show booth to know that a tiny amount of effort and no money on your part can still make a big impact.
If you want to make a painless difference at upcoming events, ask whenever you register if the event organizers will be donating leftovers of any kind (food, clothing, etc.) to the needy once the event ends, whether it’s a local Podcamp or SxSW. If the event organizers say no, ask them if it’s okay if you coordinate it, then find the local charities that can use that event’s leftovers and arrange to have them swing by at the end of the day to pick it up. If you’re an event organizer, make sure you have charities at the ready to pick stuff up when the day is done. (as a bonus, you can take a tax deduction on anything you donate) If you see tremendous waste from an event, do what you can to salvage at least some of it – if you see a few boxes of shirts sitting next to a dumpster, call in the troops to come rescue them.
In these times, charity is needed more than ever. The good news is that you have it within your power to make a difference at conferences and events with just a phone call or two. You know what needs to be done now. Go and do likewise.
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Building community
I had the pleasure of presenting recently to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council about building strong, large online communities. The discussion ranged from World of Warcraft gaming sites to Marketing Over Coffee to many others, and we reviewed the methods and skills needed to build and grow a community. Instead of using slides, I chose to present off of a mind map. Perhaps one day services like Prezi will allow mind map imports. In the meantime, if you’d like to see the “presentation”, click on the map image below for a full-size version.
While the “slide” may not be 100% intuitive, there’s enough on there to see a framework for successful community building.
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PodCamp Boston 5: Prepared for the future
PodCamp Boston 5 has come and gone, celebrating 5 years of what started as a goofy little experiment and turned into a worldwide movement. Chris Brogan and I have you to thank for taking our idea and running with it, and we hope you continue to do so. I’ll let Chris expound on his takeaways from the event, but here are a few of mine and some thanks.
First, a gigantic thanks to this year’s organizing team: Doug Haslam, Ellen Rossano, Carissa O’Brien, Steve Sherlock, Chris Brogan, Chris Bowen, and especially to lead organizer Michelle Wolverton. These folks did an amazing job, and everything you saw and experienced this weekend happened principally because of them.
Great huge thanks are also owed in quantity to sponsors Microsoft R&D New England, my employer Blue Sky Factory, CC Chapman, Batchblue Software, and Boloco. These folks provided the hefty infrastructure that made PodCamp Boston 5 possible.
Finally, thanks are owed to everyone who learned, shared, and grew their new media skills.
The theme of this year’s PodCamp Boston was preparing for the future, and I think a good part of the content fit that theme very well. We all shared things from basic social CRM to mosaic branding, from blogging 101 to competitive intelligence practices. There wasn’t a lot of waxing rhapsodic about social media’s effervescent qualities or actionless dreaming about quitting your day job, but instead there were plenty of takeaways, even for PodCamp veterans like me. I’ve got a nice list of things I need to check out and learn more about, and to be perfectly honest, that hasn’t happened at a PodCamp or any conference in quite some time.
As I mentioned at the kickoff and during my podcasting session, it’s time for folks to re-look at podcasting. It was 5 years too early and most of the folks who burned out and left have missed the opportunity. The research done by firms like Edison Research point to huge potential in an audience that very few people are serving. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t the hype of the early days of podcasting. It’s still much harder work than nearly any form of new media except video production, it still requires a ton of commitment and passion, but the audience you have access to now, 5 years after PodCamp 1, is gargantuan compared to the audience we had back then.
Podcasting is an incredibly poor vehicle for the casual prospect, for the casual browsing sort. Tools and platforms like Twitter or quick hits on YouTube are much better suited for low-commitment, short attention span crowds. Podcasting is an ideal vehicle for the highly engaged, highly committed customer or prospect because these are the folks who will make room in their day, their workout routine, their commute for you because they love you and everything you produce. There will not be many of them compared to audiences like Twitter followers, but they will follow you to the ends of the earth as long as you continue to serve them well.
Finally, the preparation for the future is ongoing. Everyone who attended PodCamp got to expand their personal power and reach, expand their knowledge, expand their networks, and these are good, important first steps. Keep doing them, keep growing, but start to leverage that power. Start to use your awakened superhero powers to make something happen in the world. Take what you’ve learned and apply it. If you have no opportunity to do so at work, find a local charity and volunteer to start them down that road.
To everyone who has been a part of the PodCamp adventure since that fateful weekend at Bunker Hill Community College 5 years ago, thank you for being a part of the adventure, and thank you for continuing to make the world a better place in all you do. I hope that PodCamp continues to help you in your quest!
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Job search recommendation: Steve Sherlock
As I wrote on the Blue Sky Factory blog today, it’s Labor Day, a great opportunity to not only celebrate friends and family, but to also take a few minutes to help out someone you know who is looking for work. These days, with the unemployment rate knocking on the 10% door (and underemployment significantly higher), there are plenty of people who are exceptionally talented but can’t find a place to call home. It’s not the scrubs or the lazy that can’t find a job – it’s millions of people.
So to do my part, which is a bit more than 5 minutes, I want to take a few moments to tell you about someone I’ve had a chance to work with in a volunteer capacity for years upon years now, a guy most known for two things: his reliability and his hat.
Photo Credit: Whitney Hoffman
Enter Steve Sherlock, of Franklin, Massachusetts. Former director of project management for some of the largest corporations in New England (Fidelity and Unisys), he’s been a reliable face at PodCamp Boston nearly since its inception. While I never worked with Steve at Fidelity or Unisys, I’ve worked with him at nearly every xCamp in New England that he’s been a part of. If you’ve been to a PodCamp and seen this hat, you’ve seen Steve.
He’s a master of his trade, which unfortunately is supremely unsexy: making things happen, getting things done. While most volunteer events would be lucky to be able to find their own bottoms with two hands, a flashlight, and a team of five, it’s folks like Steve, coordinating organizer conference calls, transcribing meeting notes, coordinating teams of volunteers at events, and working in the trenches on game day that make things happen. And this is on a volunteer basis, with no pay, no compensation, no reward except to see an event you care about happen smoothly. Imagine what he’s capable of for things that actually matter, like your business.
Here’s the part where you come in.
I know Steve’s hitting all the channels – he’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, his own blog, etc. But in this economy, that’s not enough. I’d like your help in helping him find a Boston-area company that is desperately starving for good operations and project management on an ongoing basis, a company that currently lacks reliability internally and needs a rock to build on.
Help me connect Steve with that company in and around the Greater Boston area. If you’ve worked with Steve in the past (and many of you have), please forward his profile to the hiring managers you know. If you’re a hiring manager, take a careful read of his recommendations, because you’ll notice a consistent theme: not just smart, but rock-solid reliable, a rare trait these days.
Who will you help on Labor Day?
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Squeezing the webinar juice
Do you ever ask these questions?
- What should I blog about?
- What should I be doing in social media?
- If I wanted to write a book, what should I write it about?
- How do I become a better public speaker?
If the answer is yes, then your next step is a webinar on the topic of your choice. Why? Webinars are absolutely incredible, amazing content platforms. Let me walk you through the process of how to squeeze the juice out of your webinar strategy.
Does your content suck?
Before you consider hitting the public speaking stage, a webinar is the fastest and easiest way to judge whether you’ve got anything worth saying. It’s super-low risk to you as a speaker – you can focus on content and delivery. It’s super-low risk to your audience, especially if it’s free, because it means no travel and expenses and no time out of the office besides an hour behind a closed door or in a conference room.
Conducting a webinar will tell you very graphically whether you’ve got anything worth listening to. Create a hashtag in your Webinar and monitor which items get retweeted and make a note of those. Answer questions and use those questions to diagnose parts of the presentation where you are unclear or fuzzy.
Trading up
Once you’ve conducted a few webinars and polished your presentation to the point where it’s valuable, record and publish it. Now you’ve got video on demand on your web site. Use this demo as part of your speaking kit so that conference organizers (particularly for smaller events) can judge that at least the content you’ll be presenting is worth hearing.
Polishing some more
Get in front of an audience? Good job. Record yourself and your audience as you speak and watch the recording to see what points resonate with people’s non-verbal body language. Applause and questions are two verbal metrics to watch, but look for people leaning back, nodding off, leaning forward, shifting to the edge of their seats, and scribbling furiously on a notebook to see where the juice is in your presentation.
Oh, and the recording of you, if it’s any good, can be edited and parlayed into more speaking opportunities that you can then use to keep refining your content and monitoring for feedback.
Breaking out
Let’s say you’ve got 50 slides in your presentation. I guarantee that audiences never truly capture the depth of meaning behind any one of them because you’re flinging a massive amount of information at them in a very short time. You could probably expound on any one slide at considerable length, providing supplementary notes, commentary, and additional resources for people to look at…
… which makes a great blog post for your blog. Guess what? That’s 50 blog posts – 5 weeks of Monday-Friday posts that are content rich for your blog. Commentary from readers of your blog will help you learn more about each slide in your presentation, helping you to refine it some more and be a better presenter.
Publishing
It takes no great leap of imagination to say that your 50 slides, now fully expanded, commented, and annotated makes for… a great eBook! Ask great commenters on your blog posts if you can include their commentary in the eBook as well, and you’ve got yourself a stellar piece of work that’s ready to be published and distributed electronically… and if it gets hot, really hot, you might even get a jingle from a dead tree publisher asking to turn your eBook into a full-length paper one.
This of course creates the virtuous cycle where you, as a published author, can now take your presentation to more events, get more feedback, refine it more, and make followup blog posts, some of which may include ideas for your next webinar… and the cycle continues.
Side plug: I just published my 21st Century Email Marketing webinar and I’m psyched about how nice it looks in Adobe Captivate. If you’re in the mood to see (or re-see) this event, hosted by Blue Sky Factory email marketing (my employer), check it out here. As you can guess based on what’s written above, you know what’s happening next with this material!
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