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.

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2. Why pro conferences are different than PodCamps and why neither is better
3. Advanced Social Media Course is Live!

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:

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2. Sign up for the Facebook Analytics webinar
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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.

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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?

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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?

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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!

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Much has been said about personal branding, about establishing an unmistakeable identity in the online and offline worlds. Some judge it to be essential, while others call it the height of narcissism. That said, there’s an overwhelming tide racing to the shore now that only things like personal branding can endure: a tide of enforced mediocrity.

Take a read of this article about West Potomac High School all but removing failing grades as part of the educational process. By effectively removing the ability to fail, the school blurs the line between those students who are capable of doing good work in a timely fashion and those students who do mediocre work whenever they feel like it.

Here’s the problem: under this system, there’s no way to tell a B or C level student who works hard from a B or C level student who has no discipline. Changes such as this effectively make things like GPA (which were already fairly skewed and not terribly useful measures) and academic records useless measures of quality. As trends like this spread (and they invariably do), we remove more and more ways to judge a person’s capabilities.

Who would you rather hire? A hard worker or a lazy, undisciplined worker? Under models like West Potomac’s, you can’t tell the difference from academic track record. The diploma looks the same.

This is where personal branding comes in. This is where personal branding transcends being an exercise in self-congratulation and becomes a useful tool. As we continue to enforce mediocrity throughout our society in the name of self-esteem, those people who invest the time and effort to build credible personal brands will have the advantage when it comes to being hired, being promoted, and being valued. This is especially true for new college graduates, since they typically don’t have a track record of achievement and experience to point to, making one bachelor’s degree as good as the next.

So what should you do to build a personal brand? What should you advise your kids, your coworkers, your friends to do? Start obviously by stacking up achievements and doing great work. If you have no latitude to do interesting things in your current workplace, volunteer somewhere to put your talents to use in unconventional ways. Reinforce your great work by building out a strong content presence, blogging about what you’re doing, connecting and building a strong network as quickly as possible, and finding more opportunities to add to your track record of achievement.

Who would you rather hire? A B or C level student with a diploma and nothing else, or a B or C level student with a diploma, blog about your industry or vertical, well connected network, maybe even a magazine article or two, and a pile of LinkedIn recommendations praising them for their hard work as a volunteer? It’s a no-brainer if you’re looking to hire talented people.

No matter how much we neuter academic achievement or homogenize education for a consistently mediocre result, there is no way to disguise hard work, dedication, focus, and achievement in real world results. Your personal brand is your single best method for communicating that to the world, and as more and more signals of quality get diluted for the sake of poor achievers’ self-esteem, building a credible personal brand should become higher and higher priority for you.

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I was reading bedtime stories the other night and came across a gem by Richard Scarry in the 365 Bedtime Stories compendium, which I think is incredibly illustrative of the way we dealt with bullies in the past and the way we deal with them now.

In the short story The Rudiments, a boy is bullied in the schoolyard and goes home to his father. His father, knowing how the rules of the schoolyard go, teaches his son the rudiments of boxing. Later on, the bully returns to the boy and gets a bloodied nose for his efforts. They make up afterwards and become schoolyard friends.

How much our culture has changed in the 35 years since Scarry’s book was written. How little personal responsibility we are willing to take, and how little personal responsibility we encourage our children to take for their own safety, welfare, and confidence. I’m reminded of a quote from my teacher’s teacher, Stephen K. Hayes: it takes two to make a bully – the bully and a willing victim. Most bullies are folks who are not looking for a fair fight. They’re looking for someone to use. If it’s obvious you’re not going to roll over and give in, they’ll typically move on to someone easier, someone who is willing to play the role they want them to play.

When I look at the “epidemic” of schoolyard bullying, there is blame to be assigned, unquestionably. It’s not the school’s fault. It’s not the bullies’ fault. It’s not the child’s fault.

The blame squarely falls on the parents of the bullied child.

Now, just to be clear, the bully has as much responsibility for the act of bullying as the victim, but the reality of life is that there will always be bullies, jackasses, profoundly clueless and deeply irresponsible people, and just plain idiots. When they do something stupid, it has an impact, unquestionably, but you have little to no control over them. You have total control over yourself and how you choose to respond, and a bullied child has that same control and responsibility. That’s where parents are falling down hard now – they’re taking away (or never giving) their kids that power.

Every time you intercede on your child’s behalf or appeal to the school system, every time you negotiate for more impotent rules to attempt to govern the behavior of other people’s kids, every time you whisk your child away from an unpleasant situation without encouraging them to solve it for themselves, every time you give away your child’s power to stand up for themselves to a teacher, monitor, lawyer, principal, you make them that much weaker and more vulnerable to bullying, especially when they’re very young. It’s akin to blasting your immune system with antibiotics every time you get a runny nose. The immune system’s ability to fight back is never tested and strengthened, and when some serious illness comes along, your body completely caves in. The same exact principle is at work every time you swoop in to rescue your child.

Stop coddling your child and interceding on their behalf, and teach them how to fight back by whatever means are available. Enroll them in a martial arts class. Teach them how to network and be an incredible friend-maker so that other kids in the schoolyard will ally with your child, even if they’re physically not able to fight back. Teach them most of all how to stand up for themselves against all those who would do them harm, because if you don’t, they will be permanent victims for life.

When I was a kid, I got a healthy dose of bullying in the schoolyard, especially being small, short, and not especially athletic. Instead of just giving into it or crying to my parents about it, I took action, finding friends willing to help me stand up against it and finding my own, very unique ways to fight back against it. Later on, I got involved in the martial arts to strengthen my physical abilities to protect myself and the people I cared about, but most important, my parents (especially my dad) encouraged me to stand up for myself however I could from very early on, and true to form, the bullies went elsewhere, for easier opportunities.

Bullying changes as you get older, but it never stops. The physical acts of violence might diminish, perhaps, but there are just as many bullies in your cubicle farm now as there are on your playground of yesterday. The tormentor who made fun of you being tall, short, black, white, fat, thin, whatever back then is the one who gossips against you now, sending memos to undercut you, makes discriminatory comments behind your back, and is working to sabotage the people around him or her because they can.

If your child never learns how to stand up and punch someone in the face (literally or metaphorically) from very early on, then they will endure it for the rest of their lives, because bullies and asshats are a perpetual constant. Wouldn’t you rather give your child the confidence to escape or stop a bad situation when they’re very young, so that they learn it’s okay to stand up for themselves, that it’s not okay to be a victim, for the rest of their lives?

What if your child became so strong, so confident, so powerful in their own right with your guidance that they not only stood up for themselves, but stood up for others and were able to make their own schoolyard world a little brighter, more cheerful, more safe? Wouldn’t that be amazing? It all starts with your role as a parent to help build that strong personality, that strength of character and confidence, that iron will to act and not waver in the face of wrongness.

Incidentally, those are also the attributes of the people we call heroes.

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In old Japan, it was fairly common for a young person in the tradesman class to be apprenticed to a master. Whether it was blacksmithing, cooking, or any tradeskill, apprenticeship was just about the only way to get an education. What’s interesting about old Japanese apprenticeships was the duration and work asked of the apprentice. In many cases, an apprentice would spend many years doing very menial work, like sweeping the floor of the blacksmith shop.

There’s a reason for this: unlike today, in which we teach only parts of any given discipline, being told to sweep the floor of the shop for four years taught something incredibly valuable to an apprentice. The apprentice got to see the total view of being a blacksmithing master.

What do I mean?

Everything from how the master greeted customers, to his accounting system, to his marketing, to his trade was witnessed by the apprentice. Instead of being told to market and greet customers in a textbook (with no details on how), the apprentice got to see the master working firsthand. The apprentice, over a period of years, got to understand the seasonality of the business and the ebb and flow of customers. Given the tumultuous times that comprised so much of medieval Japan, the apprentice likely got a chance to see what business was like in times of peace and war, what items were bought and sold, and how the market changed.

The apprentice could, within the bounds of etiquette, also ask the master how he handled very different situations, very different customers, and learn firsthand all of the different aspects of being a master blacksmith.

Compare this to how we teach and learn today. So much of the little stuff gets lost when you distill down a trade into textbooks (or blog posts), and some of the things lost along the way might be vital but not captured. For example, a master blacksmith may start his day with a very set routine for opening his shop. How much of that routine isn’t essential to being a good blacksmith?

Here’s another example: for centuries, the formula for making Damascus steel was lost. Only through extensive research was the recipe ever recovered, and only recently. It turns out that a particular iron ore in the Damascus region was responsible, as it contained traces of vanadium, normally an impurity that you’d want to cull out in the steelmaking process. The knowledge that you should buy your ore from Assad on the eastern side of town was lost along the way and with it went Damascus steel, because textbooks say that vanadium is an impurity and not an essential ingredient, so no one ever thought to put it back in.

How does this apply to modern day marketing, sales, and social media? Take a look at your own trade. Take a look at the people who are really successful at it, and if they allow it or freely share it, do your best to try out their systems for a period of time. Not just a few days, either – try it out for a longer duration, the same way an apprentice would, so that you can see how a system works in the ebb and flow of your own career.

While there’s virtually no one offering any kind of formal apprenticeship in social media or marketing in the same style as old Japan, there are plenty of internships to be had. Ask, too. Ask folks you respect if they have internships available, because working as an intern might not pay well but someone might say, “Okay, intern, here’s my Twitter management system. I’m tired of doing this every day, so why don’t I show you and have you do it for a while…” and you’ll have the opportunity to see their system at work firsthand (and the results it generates).

If you’re a successful practitioner of marketing, sales, or social media, generating impressive results, what would you teach an apprentice? How would you document your day, week, and month so that someone could see all the little things you do? (do you make coffee first or is there something else you do to start the day before coffee?)

Most important, which of all those little things are responsible for your success?

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

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I’ll be doing a webinar on July 23 at 2 PM Eastern on 21st century email marketing, put on by my employer, Blue Sky Factory. In the webinar, I’ll be going over the 5 things every email marketer wants:

1. More audience
2. More delivery
3. More opens
4. More actions
5. More/better metrics

In terms of value, I’ll be covering a lot of new material, including what things you should be testing (we all talk about the importance of testing but no one ever helps you judge what should be tested in the first place), new ideas for content, and nearly instant ways to measure ROI.

I’ve given previous versions of this talk at marketing conferences that charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to attend. This webinar will be almost-free. There’s no out of pocket monetary cost, but in the spirit of full disclosure and setting expectations, you’ll get email and probably a phone call from a sales rep afterwards. The price of attendance is your attention, time, and a little bit of disk space for the email and voice mail message. If you think that’s a good value, then please feel free to sign up by clicking here.

Lame FTC disclosure: Blue Sky Factory is my employer and thus your attendance at this webinar provides direct financial benefit to me. If I don’t suck at what I do, it should provide indirect financial benefit to you, too via making you a better marketer.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

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