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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You know what the most amazing moment of PodCamp Philly 3 was?

At the opening, I asked the crowd – 200+ folks – how many people had never been to a PodCamp before.

About 80% of the room raised their hands.

That’s huge. That’s amazing. I have to give huge props to the Philly organizing team for continuing to attract new members to our community. When Chris Brogan and I started PodCamp in 2006, we never imagined that years later, events in cities all over the world would continue to attract lots and lots of new people.

Another interesting curiosity from the weekend – the podcasting sessions were stuffed to the gills, standing room only for many of them. If you’ve read Seth Godin’s The Dip, I think podcasting is on the other side of its dip now. It came out strong in 2004 and 2005, was the shiny darling of the new media world, and then more or less went through massive growing pains. Based on the number of folks I talked to over the weekend, podcasting isn’t the sexy new thing any more – and that’s incredibly good news for people interested in learning about podcasting. The snake oil salesmen have moved on (they’re now selling Twitter expert guides) and the space has technologically matured.

Clay Shirky said best at TED @ State that something like podcasting becomes socially interesting after it becomes technologically uninteresting. The shiny has worn off and now people from all businesses and all areas of focus are looking at podcasting for what it truly is: a delivery mechanism for content that can, if used properly and selectively, give people the information they want in the method best suited to their needs.

Hats off again to the PodCamp Philly team for a great event and for continuing to show that podcasting, far from being dead, is only now starting its march out of the dip and into mainstream usages of all kinds.

Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio

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One of the most interesting conversations at PodCamp Boston 4 was on the lawn, a discussion about race, gender, and social media. Lots of different viewpoints, from a belief in a glass ceiling in social media to an equally strong belief in the democratization of media and the power of us all to break out and succeed.

If you’ve known me for a while, you know squarely where I stand. I’m nearly antisocial on the entire topic of self-imposed limitations.

“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” – Richard Bach

If you believe there’s a glass ceiling, there is.

If you believe that life is unfair and that you’ll never succeed, you won’t. I guarantee it, because whatever success you have you’ll subconsciously sabotage anyway.

I fundamentally believe in two tenets: first, you are statistically more likely to succeed if you’re awesome, and second, if you’re not swimming the blue ocean, you’re dead meat. Let’s tackle these in reverse.

Blue ocean strategy is a popular marketing concept that’s so obvious, it’s amazing someone had to write a book about it. Red oceans – oceans filled with blood and sharks – are where idiots try to do business. They see a crowded space and try to jump in the crowd, yell louder, cut prices lower, claim unfair competition, and generally get eaten by the bigger sharks. Red ocean strategy is opening a fourth pizza shop in a strip mall. The only ones who win in red ocean strategy are the biggest, baddest sharks.

Blue ocean strategy says swim where the oceans are clear, blue, and non-competitive. There are niches for everything, and a decent number of them are profitable. This is where you do business, because it’s much easier being profitable when you have no competition.

The insurance against competition is the second part – being awesome. When I say that what matters isn’t between your legs but between your ears, I’m not being snarky. If you have awesome on your side, race, gender, religion – none of it matters. People want awesome. People want to buy from awesome, and will pay a price premium for awesome.

The real problem, the problem we’re too often too polite to say, is that most of the time, we’re not awesome. Most of the time, what we have to sell or offer actually sucks. Believe me, I sell student loans. I know what it’s like to market a product that completely sucks. Thus, we have to gussy up our total suckage in the trappings of awesome in the hopes of fooling the less clever. “Ooh, this doorknob doesn’t actually work but it has a Facebook fan page!”

If you believe your race, gender, or other defining demographic factor is a limitation in your efforts, then that means one of two things: you’re either swimming in bloody red ocean, in which case you’re an idiot (regardless of gender, race, etc.) for not moving to clear waters, or the product, service, or idea you have sucks. Sorry. There’s no neat and kind way to say that.

Barack Obama didn’t become President of the United States by whining that the white man was holding him down. He made his own game, leveraged all the technology like no one else ever had before, and swam the blue ocean to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Chel Wolverton didn’t become lead organizer of the first and oldest PodCamp by demanding a chance because she’s got a vagina. She got there because she’s got a brain, got there by being awesome, by always delivering, by always getting done whatever needed to get done, and when the time came for Chris Brogan and I to turn over the reins, her record – irrespective of gender – spoke for itself.

Look carefully at all of the tools of social media. Has Twitter ever said, sorry, you’re black, you can’t have more than 1,000 followers because only white people should have lots of followers? Has Facebook ever said, sorry, you can’t create a fan page because you’re a woman and women shouldn’t have fans? When you download MySQL, PHP, or jQuery, do any of the tools say, sorry, you’re Muslim and MySQL only works for God-fearing Christians?

No.

All of the tools and technology are available to everyone. You have complete and total equality in terms of tools and raw opportunity to make your own game. How you use those tools, what results you create are only limited by your talents and your self imposed limitations.

You are more than your limitations. You are much better than you think, but you have to awaken that inside you. If you get out of your own way and shatter your limiting beliefs, you’ve won half the battle.

I’ll finish with this thought, a lyric from Jewel:

No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from.

Every moment, every ounce of energy you spend on your limitations is time and energy you don’t have to spend being awesome, swimming your way through the blue ocean to success.

I wish you limitless quantities of awesome and blue waters, no matter what gender, race, or religion you are.

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If there was one overarching theme in the entire weekend of PodCamp Boston 4 that kept occurring over and over again for me, it was the theme of shackled potential being freed. Everyone I met was incredible, wonderful, kind, and seeking answers to burning questions, which pleased me to no end. Even the veterans, the old timers, had a wonderful fire in them burning for more than what they’d been getting from online and offline channels.

What really struck me, though, was this idea of shackled potential being freed. From the lawn discussion under a beautiful sky to deep conversations on the beach (yes, PodCamp Boston 4 had a BEACH, so there!), to sessions and discussions about technology, marketing, and achievement, everyone brought with them limitations. Things they believed they could not do, things that seemed out of reach for them, things that were impossible – so many of the conversations revolved around this theme.

What was more interesting to watch, what was in many cases truly inspiring, was seeing how other members of the community stepped up to help out, whether it was lending advice about optimizing a web site, connecting new friends together, trying difficult or uncomfortable new things – many, many people stepped up to help, and more still took that giant step outside their comfort zone.

I hope that for many of those folks, PodCamp Boston 4 was the crucible, the anvil on which they made a first crack in the self-imposed shackles on their potential. Everyone that I spoke with personally, everyone who had a story to share, has incredible, unbelievable potential to achieve, to be what they’ve set their hearts on. For a few folks, it may be coming to peace with parts of themselves, while for others it may be material success or social good. No matter what, know that breaking those limitations is possible and the rewards for doing so will defy what you can imagine.

I want to highlight one story that I think is a good example of potential broken free of its chains, about PodCamp Boston 4′s lead organizer this year. Two years and change ago, I met Chel Wolverton virtually at Matthew Ebel’s concerts in Second Life. When I met her, that was about all we had in common. She was working a dead end job (phone service for an online florist) living in a dead end neighborhood, going nowhere fast from minimum wage job to minimum wage job. Chel knew that there was more possible out there somewhere, but was fairly certain it wasn’t for people like her.

Through a fairly short apprenticeship and an incredible amount of courage in the face of the unknown, she made leap upon leap, first moving out of her situation, finding her way north (eventually to Boston), working insanely hard doing virtual assistant and admin work to pay the bills as she developed ever increasing skills in the online world. She helped to pioneer the first (that we know of) completely virtual fan-bootlegged music album that paid revenues to the artist (Matthew Ebel’s Virtual Hot Wings), used leverage and knowledge to take on more complex projects for people who originally started looking for someone to manage their calendar, and eventually became a seasoned, knowledgeable virtual project manager. (not to mention competent SEO professional and WordPress deployment specialist)

Then we threw her under the bus, so to speak, except that the bus was made entirely of a metal called chaos, weighed a gigaton, and bore the license plate PodCamp Boston 4, by making her lead organizer. What nearly 400 people experienced on August 8-9 of this year is the result of Chel continually refusing to limit herself to what her doubts and fears want her to be. Nearly 400 people had a phenomenal, educational time at PodCamp Boston 4, and hopefully took a first big swing at their own chains of doubt and fear.

It’s my sincere hope that you take away something similar from PodCamp. Folks at the closing heard about how PodCamp got started, about how Chris Brogan and I basically winged it with our first team 4 PodCamps ago, refusing to accept the limitation that new media conferences could only be thrown by professionals. I say this to encourage you to look at what you believe your limits are and take another swing at them on the anvil. I say this so that when I see you again in a year for the next PodCamp Boston that you are soaring higher than ever, your chains of doubt left far behind.

May you achieve your potential.

May you awaken your superhero.

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No surprise, I’m going to PodCamp Boston 4. How could I not?

I’ll be leading three discussions at PodCamp Boston 4, and I encourage you to drop in and say hi.

1. What’s now for what’s next?

What are the things we should be doing now to prepare for what’s next?

2. Marketing Makeover

Let’s get a few people to bravely volunteer their marketing programs and web sites, and we’ll all critique – constructively – together, from SEO to social media to old school. Think of it like Extreme Makeover, only about your marketing and no comments about your physical fitness or hair style.

3. Marketing Over Coffee Live

Marketing Over Coffee, the marketing podcast I do with John Wall, will be doing another live session this year, with special guests Chris Brogan and CC Chapman. Casual, fun, and actionable are the themes we’re going for. Come participate!

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I’m very excited to see how fast PodCamp Boston 4 is growing, particularly under new leadership as Michelle Wolverton takes PodCamp Boston in new directions this year as lead organizer. One of the most interesting aspects of PCB4 is the refocus on shared community knowledge through Questions.

How many times have you been to a conference and seen the same session descriptions over and over again, fully laden with jargon and as generic as toothpaste? “Industry leading best practices session given by noted thought leader…” Will the session even be what you want it to be about? You don’t know, and you roll the dice and hope the session isn’t going to bore you to tears or be one long product pitch.

PodCamp Questions are a different take on the conference. We all have piles of video of top speakers doing their talking head thing. You can, as Mitch Joel pointed out, attend the best conference in the world from your desk. Why would you spend the time and money to travel across town, across country, across the world to have the same experience, or even a lesser experience, since TED Talks are probably the best video sessions available to you?

You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.

What you would do, what I would do as an explorer, as a person on a mission to get my questions answered, is trek all over the place to get real answers to my questions.

That’s why PodCamp Boston 4 is asking people to sign up not as speakers, not as presenters, but as Questioners to lead a Question discussion. What burning question do you have about new media, podcasting, blogging, social media, etc. that you just don’t have the answer to?

Think about that for a second. The “speaker” doesn’t know the answers to their “session”? Yes. That’s the whole point. It’s reversing the speaker/audience model completely, because for every person with the courage to ask a question, there are a dozen people with the exact same question that aren’t as eager to give voice to it and another dozen who never thought to ask the question but deeply want to hear the answer now that they’ve heard the question. Instead, you’ll ask the question and be in a room with dozens of like minded people, putting together the answer you could never get from a talking head speech. Chris Brogan started this at PodCamp Toronto 2007, leading a session called, “Somebody Teach Me Final Cut Pro”.

Think about how much easier it will be to decide where you want to spend your time at PodCamp Boston 4. Rather than wade through senseless, jargon laden session descriptions, you’ll just take a look at the questions and decide which ones you want the answers to as well.

- What’s next in social media?
- How do I get more viewers for my podcast?
- What’s the ROI of Facebook?
- How do I write an application against Twitter’s Social Graph API?

If you’re not registered for PodCamp Boston 4, you’re going to miss out on some great questions and answers – including yours.

Register today to attend PodCamp Boston 4, then sign up to ask a question and lead a discussion to the answers you want.

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As we wrap up 2008 and the interesting year that it was, I wanted to throw out some ideas there for PodCamp organizers for 2009.

1. Use the tools! 2008 showed rapid growth in every social network of note, and as organizers, the more you can help people meet and greet prior to the event, the better. Set up Twitter accounts for your event, groups on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many others, use search and readers and RSS to keep tabs on word of mouth. There’s no shortage of opportunities to help your participants connect in advance. At MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer, every speaker’s Twitter handle was bundled on a handout – no reason that every participant at a PodCamp who’s active in social media can’t make a directory listing in the event’s wiki.

2. Separate lecture from conversation. Mitch Joel pointed this out in his Pixelated conference series, where he and others gathered together the talking head portions of major conferences. Figure out what makes your local PodCamp special and what’s just talking head stuff, and provide talking head stuff well in advance so that participants can maximize their time together. Grab videos of folks like Mitch, CC Chapman, Chris Brogan, and many other PodCamp favorites far ahead of the event and share them so that when participants arrive, they’re ready to collaborate and share, rather than passively listen.

3. Go paid. The economy has made life tough for the end user and consumer, but even tougher for the marketing budget. Plan your PodCamp to run 100% participant-paid at the door. If you get sponsors, great, but don’t bet the farm on them, and don’t financially extend your PodCamp beyond what money you already have in the bank. Continue to publish your ledgers publicly so participants can see how every dollar is allocated, but strongly consider going paid and having the event be wholly “sponsored” by the participants.

4. Support your local community. Pick a local charity and find a way to divert time, energy, or resources to it so that your community is a little better off for having a PodCamp.

5. Stay lightweight. Keep expenses to a minimum. We’re all adults for the most part who can locate the nearest Starbucks, Dunkin, or McDonald’s. The magic of PodCamp isn’t in refreshments or epic sponsored parties, but in bringing together people to learn, share, and grow their skills. Some facilities will allow you to unbundle catering from facility rental, which can keep costs way down, as food & drink are typically the most expensive part of any conference.

6. Add pieces along the way. Start with barebones expectations for attendees. As funding becomes available, you can add amenities later. Set expectations low, and you’ll never disappoint.

What things have you learned from PodCamps and other conferences in 2008 that you would pass on to PodCamp organizers for 2009? Leave your comments below!

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In the new media space, we use a lot of terms fairly confusingly:

Old media
Broadcast media
Mainstream media
New media
Social media
Personal media
Citizen journalism
Citizen media

Here’s a summary of how I think some of this stuff breaks down. Not authoritative by any means, just a perspective that helps me classify what is what in my own head.

Old media is stuff that’s been around for a while. It’s traditional media, like books, TV, radio, newspapers, etc. Note that this isn’t specific to brands or organization sizes – the New York Times is old media, but so is the Boston University Daily Free Press or the Wasilla Frontiersman.

New media is stuff that’s new, in a technological sense. It’s audio, video, and text publication methods and tools that were previously inaccessible for publication purposes to the average person in the past. Sure, you could run your own newspaper, and many did, but you never had a shot at the same level of reach that a blog or podcast today can have.

Social media is interactive media, and it’s a subset of new media, since the tools that enable social media didn’t exist before, and therefore are a subset of new media. Social media is by definition interactive. You can blog, podcast, crank out videos on YouTube, host Blog Talk Radio shows, etc. all by yourself and no one else has to be involved for you to be creating useful media. For example, Seth Godin’s blog is new media, but not social – comments are turned off. Is it still useful? Absolutely. Is it new media? Yes. Is it social? No way.

Social media is the opposite – it’s media that REQUIRES the participation of others. Twitter, for example, would never have existed without other users in the network. PodCamp as a conference would never have existed if it was only one person who showed up. Take any of the social networks, remove the people, and you have something not useful at all.

That’s why new media and social media are NOT interchangeable terms, and why I refer to PodCamp as a new media conference and not a social media conference. Yes, you can absolutely learn about social media at PodCamp, but you can also learn about the greater view of new media, too, and even, true to its namesake, podcasting.

What are your thoughts? Are social media and new media the same thing to you? Are they different? How do you view the landscape and make sense of it?

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Imagine for a moment that your industry, that your specialty, is a single post, a single beam. It represents your vertical, everything you’re good at, and also everything that’s wrong with your industry’s growth. It’s fishbowl. It’s vertical. It’s a silo, an echo chamber in which no new ideas flow in or out.

You keep struggling to find new ideas, new innovations. Event conferences in your industry are the same old, same old, with vendors marketing the same solutions to yesterday’s problems.

Now imagine you found a way to tie together your vertical with others.

Imagine you found a way to bridge the gap between your vertical, your silo, your fishbowl, and not just with one other silo, but with a ton of silos. Imagine a series of fishbowls connected, so many that you effectively have an ocean to swim in. Imagine you found the commonalities among verticals that were strengths, and that working with others in completely unrelated fields helped mitigate your individual weaknesses.

This is the mission of PodCamp. Bring together everyone from different worlds who wants to learn, share, and grow your new media skills. Bridge the gap between pools of ideas so that the best ideas are accessible to everyone, and the power of friends working together can overcome the obstacles that by yourself stood in your way.

Bring together the verticals and see what you can achieve.

See you at PodCamp.

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Why pro conferences are different than PodCamps and why neither is better

Some interesting discussion this morning on the differences between PodCamps and pro conferences like the Affiliate Summit, which I’m speaking at on a panel on Tuesday, August 12. A difference to highlight, from the registration page of the Affiliate Summit:

PHOTOGRAPHY, RECORDING & VIDEO TAPING: Sessions may be photographed, recorded and/or video taped by Affiliate Summit. By your attendance, you give Affiliate Summit permission to be photographed, recorded or videotaped and agree to the public display and/or sale of the photographs, recordings and/or videotapes. Personal recording or videotaping of any kind during the event is prohibited.

This is part of what separates PodCamp from pro conferences (that and the price tag, PodCamp Boston 3 was $50, $99 at the door, the Affiliate Summit is $949 for early bird, $1,949 at the door). That said, there are several very good reasons for pro conferences to prohibit recording, considerations that went into PodCamp and were ultimately rejected.

1. Protection of speaker intellectual property. This is a big deal. PodCamp has been absolutely blessed by speakers like David Meerman Scott, Mitch Joel, David Maister, and many others, who normally charge tens of thousands of dollars to speak at a conference. The presence of any kind of recording online causes them real economic harm – it literally costs them money, since it makes them a less valuable speaker. Why? Exclusivity counts for a lot. Imagine being a conference planner and trying to advertise that your pro conference has information that’s exclusively available at your conference… and then finding out that your keynote speaker can be found on Blip.tv or mDialog for free. You’re less likely to book that speaker as opposed to someone who’s always behind a paywall.

2. Protection of conference revenue. One of the biggest sellers at a conference? The conference DVD, often for up to 2/3 of the price of the conference. If you pay $1,949 for the conference and the DVD is available for $695 or you can see it on YouTube for free, which will you choose? More important, if recordings are freely available online, why would you go to the conference in the first place?

3. Protection of conference attendees. As we said at PodCamp Boston, the conference is the hallway. At top-tier pro conferences, there are a lot of folks floating around who, quite frankly, don’t want to be recorded for any reason unless they’re compensated to be, and that’s fair. That’s their choice. Some of these folks have exceptionally valuable information that isn’t intended for the world to consume, and the premium they charge for that information is their prerogative.

All of these considerations are valid, and make good sense for a professional conference model. That’s an important distinction, because a lot of folks in social media believe PodCamps, BarCamps, etc. are the evolution of the conference, and that the models which power PodCamps, BarCamps, and unconferences are the right way to go for professional conferences.

They are not.

Professional conferences and unconferences are two completely different animals, two completely different models. Professional conferences work on a revenue model that emphasizes profitability. Speakers get paid and share proprietary information, attendees pay and derive value from sessions (not to mention craploads of handouts, printouts, etc.) and access to VIPs, vendors and sponsors pay and get lead generation lists and access to top level corporate folks. Everything works.

Unconferences emphasize a revenue model of meeting costs. Attendees occasionally pay, sponsors pay for exposure, speakers don’t get paid, but the net effect is that everyone pays much less than a pro conference. An “expo floor” booth at an unconference will probably run a company $1,000 or less. An expo floor booth at a pro conference will cost at least $10,000, if not more. Because no one’s making money beyond meeting costs, expectations are lower and people are more free. Again, everything works.

Which model is right? Both are right for their roles, and both are supremely wrong out of context. A professional conference that let recordings be free would do itself significant economic harm. A PodCamp that sold its registration list for $25/head would be demonized by its community. It’s inappropriate for members of either style of conference to criticize the other for not being more like them, since each plays a vitally important role in the events ecosystem, and each attracts the crowd that wants to be there.

There’s room enough for everyone, pro conferences and unconferences alike.

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