Where are the advanced conferences?
One of the questions that crops up all the time in social media and new media events is, where are the advanced conferences? Where are the events tailored to the veteran practitioners, the folks who have been doing it forever and are already good at it, beyond the basics? The answer may surprise you: there aren’t any.
Why?
The answer comes back to teaching and learning, and how teaching evolves throughout your educational process. At the most basic levels of learning, a one-size-fits-all methodical approach works extremely well. Memorize this multiplication table. Learn the periodic table. Execute this set of procedures. Follow this recipe to make a cake. Move your hands like this and your feet like this.
After a certain point, however, you achieve proficiency in the basics. You know how to Tweet. You know how to post items on Facebook. You’ve sat through the same “How to build your brand” session at every conference. This is the point where most conferences stop, and understandably so. At this point in your education, you need to start experimenting.
Experimentation, testing, breaking things and seeing the results – this is the essence of more advanced education. There isn’t a single conference in the world that can give you this experience. You have to go out and do it. Test things, play around, vary stuff, until you find what works and what doesn’t work for you. The problem is, no one can teach you this in a conference session.
At this point, you need to be working with a mentor, a guide, someone who has gone before you and has made their own mistakes and learned from them. You might get a few ideas about new things to test or new tools to experiment with at a conference, but there is no substitution for the journeyman’s path at this point in your education. It’s up to your mentor to give you more advanced cases to learn the intricacies of your craft. For example, they might suggest building different kinds of Facebook pages to see which works better for you, a brand page or an organization page.
Once you’ve gained proficiency, once you’ve gained a certain degree of mastery, then conferences and events really become useless. At the most advanced levels, you and your teachers are simply explorers on the path together, sharing discoveries, learning and teaching each other. You’ve transcended the basics, transcended the need to have someone give you different scenarios to test, transcended the need for going to conferences entirely unless you’re there for the social aspect or to teach as a presenter.
Can you, as a veteran practitioner, still get value out of conferences? Absolutely, but it’s value you have to create for yourself. Here’s an unpleasant truth: most conference organizers in the social media space aren’t veteran practitioners of social media themselves, so they have no idea what would be of benefit to you. Find other veteran practitioners and go grab lunch or coffee while you trade ideas and your own research, so that you can get fellow explorers’ input on what you’re doing. Find the local coffee shop near the venue or the diner or other places where you can create meetings and brainstorming sessions for yourself.
If you’re a conference organizer, try to create as many open spaces as possible such as lounges and alcoves with open seating so that veterans can get together outside of sessions. One of my favorite facilities in this regard is the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, where we hold PodCamp Boston 6. There are tons of little alcoves that are wired up with displays and pervasive Wi-Fi, so veterans can gather in impromptu meetings to share and discuss, some of which are out of line of sight to ensure a little more privacy.
The bottom line is this: once you no longer need to sit in conference sessions about the basics, the rest of your journey is largely your responsibility. Find mentors, find fellow explorers, and see what you can create together, but understand that there is not and likely never will be a conference for you.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Social Media Job Search Webinar 10/26 8 PM ET
Please join me Wednesday, October 26, at 8 PM Eastern Time, for a 45 minute webinar on social media job search. This is a webinar based on my past experience as a hiring manager, technical recruiter, and in my marketing and sales work today. It’s an expanded version of some of the course material I teach for the University of San Francisco and is one of the most popular sessions I’ve ever created, and for good reason in this economy.
Caveat: this is not a session on how to find a social media job, but how to use social media to find a job.
In the session, I’ll be showing you:
- how to set up some of the necessary groundwork in your social media profiles
- how to package up your expertise
- how to prospect effectively using social media
- even a couple of interviewing tips
The webinar is free of financial cost to attend, but I will ask for your personal information and subscribe you to my newsletter.
To register, simply complete this form:
How to distill content curation for real impact
How do you cope with the flood of information that swamps your inbox, blog reader, and mobile device every day?
How do you find and isolate all the good stuff, separate the wheat from the chaff, and use the information you’re receiving to actually move the needle?
The same way that you get the good stuff out of crude oil, weak brews, and perfume herbs: distillation. If you slept through high school chemistry class (or were interested in an entirely different kind of chemistry, as many of my peers were), distillation is the process of heating a raw material to extract a chemical based on its boiling point, then condensing the distilled product separately. Cognac, for example, is distilled wine from high-quality ugni blanc grapes. It’s distilled twice in copper pots, then aged for two years before being sold for consumption.
The same process that works for cognac works for content curation. It’s not enough just to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and read a bunch of tweets, not if you want to take all of the information you receive daily and make it useful. Here’s the process I use on a daily and weekly basis; feel free to modify or adapt it for your own needs.
I start every day with my blog reader on the iPad. I’ve subscribed to about 2500 different blogs across a spectrum of topics, and each day I hit the main topic areas, such as economics, marketing, social media, development, etc. I skim through rapidly, looking for bits of information and data that catch my eye, read into articles that do, and then share them via Google Reader. I do this specifically on the iPad because it lets me focus better on just reading the news with no other distractions.
If that were all I did, I’d still be swamped with information, since I share 20-30 different articles a day, if not more. The first distillation pass is what I cull out for #the5 on Twitter every day. Of those 20-30 articles, which 5 of them are the most worth sharing? Some days, that’s easy. Some days, that’s a very tough call. But forcing myself to distill out only 5 different pieces of information makes me focus on the stuff that’s truly important to me, stuff that I’d want to really remember. One of my general rules of thumb for stuff in #the5 is that if I didn’t learn something, I don’t share it.
The second pass of distillation occurs weekly, as I prep each Tuesday night for a recording of Marketing Over Coffee. I actually subscribe to my own #the5 tweets as a separate RSS feed so that I can see just the most important articles of the week that I thought were good enough to share. I’ll star key items in that feed so that I have a very compact list of stuff that should be headline discussion topics and then bring those with me every Wednesday morning when John Wall and I record the show.
The final stage of distillation, the stage where I know something has got to be kept or else, is when I take distilled items out of this process and put them into reference tools like Evernote or Instapaper, ensuring that I have them on hand for when I need to reference them later.
This three-phase process wasn’t automatic or something immediately contrived. It just evolved that way as the amount of information thrown at me increased, and this was a handy way of filtering it down until only the gems were left. It’s probably not right for you and your information processing style, but I hope it gives you some ideas and inspires you to try multiple levels of content curation to distill out the things that you really need or want to remember and learn.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Informer vs. performer
Ever look on a conference session list and see a presenter listed whose talk you’ve seen before? I certainly have, and depending on who it is, I’ll either go for a “repeat” session or skip them and see someone else. What makes the difference? Whether the presenter is an informer or performer.
I’ve talked to some presenters who believe that constantly changing your presentations is bad, the sign of an inexperienced presenter. If the goal is performance in the sense of performance art, then they are absolutely right. The goal is for the show to be as smooth, as flawless as possible. These folks have their shows timed perfectly, and it’s an art to watch and enjoy. Tom Hopkins is a great example of the performer as speaker – he can recite his presentations literally word for word from his books, which is no small accomplishment since his books are hundreds of pages long. That said, if you as a member of the audience got the message the first time, chances are you don’t need to see the show again unless you enjoy it for the performance that it is. Every subsequent performance will be a literal re-run.
I’ve talked to some presenters who believe that every speaking opportunity should be unique, with content tailored to what the audience is there to learn. If the goal is education, teaching, and sharing of knowledge, then they are absolutely right. The goal is for the education to be as thorough and as current as possible. The informer’s presentations will be rough around the edges. There will be stumbles as the presenter sees data they just slotted in the night before from the latest research study, or odd pauses as ideas hit them literally right on stage. There’s less polish, but you can go see the teacher at every single conference they’re at and get new ideas, new information, new perspectives, and new stuff to test.
Which is better? It depends on what you value. I value learning first and foremost at conferences. I’ve been in some sessions in which the presenter was awful but the data was valuable, and I was there principally to learn, so I got what I came for. I’ve been in some sessions in which the presenter was marvelous and I was incredibly entertained. That said, I walked away with nothing new from the presenter, so I didn’t get what I came for. If you’re a conference organizer choosing a keynote speaker, you may well value the polished, perfectly timed, perfectly nuanced performer for your center stage spotlight because they’re a known quantity and a reliable performer.
Can you have the best of both worlds, a presenter who is both a performer and an informer? Yes, you can, but such teachers are rare masters, true experts who have incredible expertise in their areas such that new information and new ideas are seamlessly integrated into their decades of existing knowledge and ability. Go watch someone like Stephen K. Hayes teach martial arts and you’ll see decades of experience and new learning all at the same time. What’s truly incredible about teachers like this is that they can present in such a way that everyone, veterans and newbies, walks away having learned something.
I’d imagine at the end of the day, most speakers who want to be on stage for a living aspire to be both informer and performer, masters of knowledge and delivery equally. I know I certainly do, and in a few decades, I hope to be able to do both flawlessly.
What about you? Which do you value more? Which do you enjoy more? Does this reflect who you choose to see at conferences?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
The incredible danger of third-party payee systems
USA Today and Get Rich Slowly both featured an absolutely amazing statistic recently that blew me away:
The amount of student loan debt outstanding in the US now exceeds the amount of credit card debt outstanding.
Rattle that around in your brain. The legions of people buying crap they don’t need with money they don’t have are now second to kids accruing massive amounts of debt for an education of questionable value. College tuition has gone up to astonishing highs, in which students are graduating with a bachelor’s degree at price tags of a quarter million dollars.
How did this happen? Why did this happen? The answer lies in third-party payee systems. Here’s what that means. You generally don’t pay cash for college. You take out loans, you get scholarships, etc. Uncle Sam pitches in with loans, too. What happens then is that the price becomes decoupled from the people who pay it. Colleges effectively are getting their money from banks, not consumers, and banks in turn get their money from consumers. The problem with decoupling cost from buyers is that it changes how market forces work.
In a normal market, prices change demand. If you raise your price to be too high, people will stop buying your stuff. They’ll find cheaper alternatives or simply do without. As a result, you have a soft cap on how high your prices can rise before your business becomes unprofitable and you have to bring prices down, or competitors step in to take profits at slightly lower margins, forcing you to reduce prices.
In a third party market, if someone is paying the bills and passing the costs on, neither party has an incentive to control prices. Neither party benefits from regular market forces – in fact, quite the opposite. Both parties acting on behalf of the consumer have strong incentives to make things as expensive as possible as quickly as possible. A good example is real estate – if you had to pay cash for a house instead of borrowing, there’s a good chance that:
- many people wouldn’t own homes
- those who owned homes would have bought them for materials cost plus labor
Once you introduce a third party into the system that pays on behalf of the customer, prices and reality begin to dine at separate tables. It takes much, much longer for a price increase to change the consumer’s behavior when a third party is paying on behalf of the consumer, and as a result, prices rise at amazing rates.
The only way to get prices back down to earth on any third party system – healthcare, college, housing, etc. – is to remove the intermediate party and recouple prices back to the consumer. The consequences of doing so are drastic, possibly economy-breaking. Colleges would lose 80% of their students overnight until they adjusted pricing. Houses would sit empty for years, or possibly never be bought at all. Healthcare would be denied to everyone but the wealthiest at first. It’s this nuclear scenario that prevents us from making substantive changes that in the long term would benefit us, but in the short term would be incredibly painful.
There is one other option, one which holds more promise, and that’s revolution. Online marketing has made life very hard for direct mail marketers and other channels. Online forums have been the death knell for newspaper classifieds. Once the way of doing business is shattered by a completely new model, the old model becomes affordable as the market leaves for greener pastures or is rendered irrelevant. Education is headed this way rapidly: why pay $250,000 for information and skill you can acquire with Google, iTunes, and online learning? Eventually, colleges and education groups may realize their role isn’t the dispensing of knowledge, but the certification that you have it and can wield it. Certification comes at a much lower price tag than today’s current model.
What do you think? Is college worth it? What about home ownership or other third-party payee systems?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Pay your head first
Pay yourself first is an often repeated, seldom executed piece of financial advice, one that sounds good but most people fail to do. It’s quite simple: before you meet all of your other financial obligations, save some money for yourself so that you can build up emergency savings at first, then enough capital for investing after you’ve met your savings goals. Companies have made attempts at helping consumers pay themselves first from rounding programs (round up every purchase to the next dollar and deposit the difference in savings) to Safe Harbor 401(k) plans that automatically add money to a retirement plan. Yet it’s still not enough – more people than ever are without a secure financial future, even when times are good.
It should come as no surprise, then, to realize that investments in other areas of life are falling short as well. Fitness goals aren’t being met because of perceived time constraints. Long term projects at companies are ailing because 100% of your workforce’s capacity is putting out day to day operational fires.
Most of all, an enormous number of people are failing to pay themselves first in their heads. What do I mean? How much time do you allocate (because, as the goblins say, time is money!) towards investing in your own learning every day? How many books do you read a month? How thoroughly do you read the blogs of people you claim to adore and act on the information you glean?
Pay yourself first in knowledge. What one area of your chosen industry, practice, specialization, or expertise do you feel weakest in? When was the last time you paid yourself with an hour or two of dedicated research and learning in that area? Days? Weeks? Months? Never?
Try this for a week. Take one small aspect of your specialization. It can be building an audience on Twitter, tanking as a protection paladin, cooking without wheat, whatever. Take one small aspect and ask a very challenging question of yourself, then over the week, spend 30 minutes a day researching it. Set your alarm clock for exactly 30 minutes earlier just for a week and really dig into your question. See what answers you come up with. At the end of the week, see if your investment has paid off at all – are you any closer to the answer to your question? Are you more knowledgeable about your specialization even if you didn’t get a final answer?
Pay yourself first in knowledge as well as money, and you might be surprised at just how capable you can become, far above the skills you’ve developed just reacting to circumstances blindly. In the same way that paying yourself first in money can accumulate capital, paying yourself first in knowledge can make your life much easier or make you incredibly productive. The trick is that you have to do it!
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Book Me to Speak
Got an event coming up? Learn why you should book me to speak!
• Download my 2012 speaking kit
•Book me to speak now!
Get Marketing White Belt
Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, and get better at marketing right now!
Blog Delivery
Things I recommend:
I recommend:
for Wordpress themes like this one.
I recommend:
for Twitter audience building.