Will social media burn conferences to the ground?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 2, 2009 in Conferences, New media | 213 comments

Every conference these days has a hashtag and attendees are (unless explicitly prohibited) tweeting, live-blogging, streaming audio and video. If you wanted to, from your desk, you could attend nearly every conference in the world, and for free as opposed to paying $50-$5000 to attend. In terms of content, you’d probably get anywhere from 80% – 99% of the content presented.

If you can attend 95% of the conference virtually and not pay, or attend 100% of the conference in person and pay, which will most people rationally choose? Which would you choose?

Right now, social media, for all its glamour and buzz, is still a relatively small space compared to the world of business as a whole. As it grows, how long will it be before conference organizers have to clamp down on usage to avoid completely devaluing their conferences?

Will social media, in other words, burn conferences to the ground? Yes – and it should.

My answer as co-founder of PodCamp and co-organizer of PodCamp Boston 4 is one we’ve been researching and looking at for years. Whether live or recorded, the talking head portion of the conference is something that is part of the old conference model.

While I love speaking publicly, I also recognize that it’s not terribly valuable in and of itself. I could convey the exact same information with a video camera and a YouTube account, and in fact I’ve done this to a degree. 60+ people saw my PAB 2009 presentation live. Over 300 have seen it virtually. Did the attendees of PAB 2009 get more out of the public speaking experience than the people at their desks? No, not really.

What we’ve been exploring with PodCamp year after year is how to take the other parts of conferences and amplify them, the parts you cannot get out of a talking head presentation. Side conversations in hallways. One to one interactions. Spontaneous group discussions. These are all things that you can’t bottle, and honestly, you can’t tweet, stream, or liveblog either. There’s simply no way for you, as a new media journalist, to be at 300 mini-sessions, or 3,000 micro-presentations, and if the conversations are valuable, you’ll be too busy participating to be archiving and broadcasting – and that’s as it should be.

What I think the conference model will evolve to, and where PodCamp is leading along with the other *Camp events, is the truly interactive community brainshare. Would I pay $500 to see Seth Godin speak? Sure. Would I pay more to sit down over beer with Seth and a few other folks at a roundtable and have him look at my marketing campaign, maybe sketch out some ideas on a napkin? Heck yeah. Multiply that times many tables over many hours and I’d walk away with a literal goldmine of useful information that’s tailored to me and my business. That’s what we want to bring more of to PodCamp – fewer talking heads and more sharing brainspaces.

When you walk away from a PodCamp, I don’t want you to say “that was a great conference!”. I want you to say, “I met and learned from some awesome people at PodCamp!” because in the end, your community is your strength. The conference is just a convenient place for the community to meet.

What do you think the future of conferences will be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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A Week With A View

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 29, 2009 in New media, Photography, Social networks | 0 comments

A Week With A View

There’s an impressive amount of photography on Flickr. There are some amazing photos on there from amateur and professional photographers. Here’s a blogging exercise I’d like you to try this coming week. Find a beautiful photo licensed for Creative Commons use, a moving photo, a stunning, stirring photo each day this week. Tag it #wwav – Week With A View – and post it on your blog with a short description of why the photo is beautiful, then share the heck out of it so that we can all see some of the best, most beautiful photography available online.

General Guidelines & Suggestions

• Yes, absolutely they can be your own photos as long as they’re Creative Commons licensed.
• Post a photo a day from June 29, 2009 – July 4, 2009.
• Link and give full credit to the photographer!
• Ideally, they should be Creative Commons commercially licensed so that you can post them on a corporate blog, too.
• Search for keywords of things that YOU personally find beautiful. Everyone always seems to search for sunsets. What do YOU like?
• TAG YOUR BLOG POSTS! TAG YOUR TWEETS! The whole point is to see what OTHER people find beautiful.

Here’s a set of screenshots from Flickr’s Advanced Search.

Ready? Show the world.

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Time is not money

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 21, 2009 in Economy, Money, New media | 10 comments

There’s a popular expression, a cliche, that says time is money. However, time isn’t money. Why?

There is no such way to intermediate time. There is no coinage for time, no way to purchase time back that you have spent. If time were actually money, you could buy back that missed softball game or child’s first play. You can’t.

In fact, when you think about it, time isn’t money, but money is time. Money represents a store of value in classical economics terms, and value is time and energy spent on something.

Look at all of the things that function as money or precursors of money. The Pequot tribe had a certain kind of seashell called wampum. Multiple civilizations used gold and other metals as coinage. Why? Because these items were rare. Finding them, prospecting them, and refining them took time and effort.

Consider money as a store of time and energy, then. How long does it take for you to mine up a nugget of gold? Let’s say as a skilled miner that takes you two hours. How long does it take to harvest an ear of corn? For a skilled farmer, probably a few minutes at most. Thus, that nugget of gold is a time equivalent of two hours for a skilled tradesman. If you can harvest 80 ears of corn in two hours as a skilled farmer, then your corn is worth two hours of your efforts – or a nugget of gold, or whatever other store of value you choose. More important, as trades specialized over millennia of human history, it would take far longer for the miner to skill up his corn harvesting than it would for him to simply pay for the corn itself.

Time + energy + skill = value.

This is the basis of money, the raw foundation of money. Money stores value, and value is time, energy, and skill combined.

Consider what this means for social media and new media.

What things are you investing your time in, building skill, so that you’re creating value?

When someone starts to talk about monetization, exactly what value are they placing on your time, effort, and skill? More important, what value do you place on yourself?

This, by the way, is why so many folks in social media object to monetization – not because money is bad, but because any new field inevitably has two extremes: those folks willing to value themselves for a pittance (thus devaluing everyone else) or those folks who pimp and sell at obscenely high prices far above the value they create, thus undermining the entire community’s reputation and devaluing everyone else. After a field matures and the low bidders & snake oil salesmen are washed out, a balanced perspective on value is usually achieved.

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Social media success and the idea of sensei

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 19, 2009 in New media, Ninjutsu, On ko chi shin | 0 comments

Sensei is an interesting term in Japanese culture and the martial arts. Traditionally, most people translate it as “teacher”, and the term is applied as an honorific to doctors, lawyers, teachers, and others of high esteem. If you dissect its meaning and characters, it literally translates as “before born” in the sense of someone having gone before you, blazing the trail ahead. A sensei is someone who has gone before you and has experienced all of the things that you as a student are running into now.

For example, in a particular martial arts kata (routine or exercise) I remember stumbling over one movement time and again, and my teacher helped me to get past that because he’d made those exact mistakes when he went through the exercise. Now, as an apprentice instructor at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I see my juniors going through that exercise… and making those same mistakes, which I then help them to get past, relying on my teacher’s advice to me.

What does any of this have to do with social media? Here’s what: unlike martial arts, where you have to rely on slightly fuzzy (or very fuzzy, depending on how many times you’ve been hit in the head) memories of what someone has gone through, in social media you have a gigantic written record in our blog histories. Justin Levy made this point at SMJ Boston, and it can’t be underscored enough.

Want to know how folks like Chris Brogan or CC Chapman got to where they are today? Want to achieve things similar to what they’ve done? Look back in their blog histories. Look what they did to get things rolling – like Chris Brogan’s Grasshopper New Media (does anyone remember that?) or CC’s Random Foo productions. Look back at the original PodCamp from 3 years ago (seems longer than that, doesn’t it?) and see how that got started.

(Food for thought: if you live on Twitter, this historical record is much, much harder to come by. Keep your blog alive too.)

The end goal of a sensei in the martial arts is for a student to surpass their teacher so that they can explore, learn, and grow together as colleagues rather than in a rigid hierarchy of student and teacher forever. Once you get to a certain level of expertise, each begins to learn new insights and share them with the other so that both can flourish. Each has something to teach the other and to learn from the other.

As you develop your social media skills, as you look back at the written record of where we’ve all been and where things are going, remember to catalog your own insights so that when your juniors are coming up through the social media ranks, you can share with them all you’ve learned as well.

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Bring the player, not the class

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 5, 2009 in New media | 4 comments

There’s a peculiar expression that accompanies World of Warcraft that needs to make its way into social media, and quickly:

Bring the player, not the class.

In Warcraft, there are different classes of players – mages, paladins, shamans, etc. Each of the classes has different traits suited to different kinds of players and playing styles. One of the most common sources of arguments, debate, and complaints is X class is better than Y class, to no one’s surprise.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, has said that it designs the game to be as balanced as possible, so that no one class is better or worse. The expression they use is bring the player, not the class, especially with regard to difficult challenges in the game.

Their belief is that a skilled player will make the most of the classes that suit their personal style of play best, and that a class in the hands of one player may be outstanding, while a different class may be a disaster. I know from personal experience that playing a frost mage suits my temperament and style best, and being a Death Knight tank, not so much.

Bring the player, not the class is the advice Blizzard gives to its guilds and groups in the game – find the best players you can, and class will sort itself out. Bring the best players you can, and you’ll defeat the enemies you’re to face.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Bring the producer, not the medium.

Which is better, Twitter or Friendfeed? Which is better, video or audio, blogging or podcasting, YouTube or Qik…

You get where I’m going. Your content will dictate which forms of social media you participate in (some content is better in one format than another), but what will govern your success is YOU, the producer. How skilled you are and what you’re most comfortable with will do more to contribute to your success than any given platform by itself.

Just as a Warcraft player’s spec (Blood vs. Unholy vs. Frost vs….) doesn’t make that player any better or worse, neither should your choice of medium make you any better or worse a media producer. Find the forms of media that best suit your style, content, and what you want to communicate. Try as many as you practically can to see what’s available, but recognize that some will feel better to you. Do those. Even if they’re currently unfashionable (podcasting was so 2005? Tell that to the listeners of the Financial Aid Podcast or Marketing Over Coffee) if they fit you best, you’ll create and produce media best in them.

More important, invest time in making yourself a better producer! Forget about being a social media expert. They’re a dime a dozen, if that (hey, it’s the Great Recession, everything’s on sale). Be an expert in a subject or field and use the best form of media available to communicate it, old or new, social or broadcast.

One of the best pieces of advice ever given to me was from my Edvisors CEO, Joe Cronin, who years ago said, don’t be a podcasting expert, be a financial aid expert who has a podcast. In terms of doing the most good and helping the most people, that advice has paid off handsomely. I know plenty of social media experts, gurus, wizards, whatever, and none of them have helped a family put their kid through college.

Bring the player, not the class is sage advice to guilds and raids in World of Warcraft.

Bring the producer, not the medium is the pathway to long-term success in media, social or otherwise.

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