BWE 09: Video Buffet

While I managed to upload a few videos at Blogworld this past weekend, most of what I recorded came home on my Flip. I’ve already dropped posts about much of what’s below, but take a look for some of the highlights. Just a note, the panel videos are abridged.

The New Celebrity: Moderator Brian Solis, actor Anthony Edwards, choreographer/producer Robin Antin, musical artist Matt Goss and producer Jermaine Dupri. [Link to Original Post]

Shoes4Africa.org: Actor Anthony Edwards is working to help build the first pediatric teaching hospital in Africa. What are you doing?

The Death and Rebirth of Journalism: Moderator Brian Solis, Current TV COO Joanna Drake Earl, CNN anchor Don Lemon, NYU faculty member and blogger Jay Rosen, and radio host Hugh Hewitt. [Link to Original Post]

Thinking Visually: David Armano explains that you don’t have to be a designer to create great visual concepts. [Link to Original Post]

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You Need Geek Cred to Advocate Social Media

Explaining social media to people who don’t necessarily “get it” is becoming more commonplace in working at an agency, so it was timely that Greg Verdino would be giving a presentation on turning skeptics into advocates. Greg is the chief strategy officer at Crayon, a strategic consultancy that offers donuts and pony rides – not really – strategic insights to brands like Coca-Cola, Facebook, Audi and Panasonic.

Greg is all social-ed up with a few different blogs, and profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous, but he’s quick to point out that it’s a function of what I (and others) like to call “geek cred”; you can’t advocate for social media unless you’re doing it. [Great point - I have a couple blogs and the requisite Twitter handle and Facebook accounts, but I wonder how many agency folks sell this stuff without know what it takes to blog or the like.]

His preso is embedded below, so just a couple of quick points I’ll share. Greg said that in many cases, clients will be resistant to getting involved with social media because of one of four things:

• Ignorance. This is not to say they’re unintelligent, but rather they just don’t have any foundation of experience on which to understand social media.
• Fear. They’ve never done it, they don’t know how they’ll be judged and they’re afraid of making the wrong decision.
• Laziness. They prefer to continue doing it the way they’ve done it, because that’s what has worked (or has been perceived as working) for many years.
• Stuck. They don’t know how to get started, so they become paralyzed.

The key point I thought was so spot-on was that, whatever the cause, this response of hesitation is not new. It was the same way advertisers responded when cable television came to be, and certainly again with the advent of the Internet. The slideshow below has more discussion on the solutions, but Greg’s key points for turning a skeptic to an advocate are that you need to: keep it simple, be clear, be hands-on, and come armed with tangible benefits.

From Skeptic To Advocate

View more documents from Greg Verdino.

GregVerdino.com // Crayonville.com // @GregVerdino

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BWE 09 Celeb Talk – Twitpics, Causes and the Global View

Moderator Brian Solis, Anthony Edwards, Robin Antin, Matt Goss and Jermaine Dupri

[VIDEO COMING LATER.] I’ll admit, I was thoroughly interested to hear Jermaine Dupri and Anthony Edwards talk about social media and how that affects their roles as celebrities – and not surprisingly because they’re famous. What I didn’t expect to hear was that social media makes them a little less famous, and a little less like celebrities. By participating, it desaturates the mystique.

In leading the conversation, moderator Brian Solis talked about a report he helped develop that showed celebrity conversations are tracking between 80-90 percent positive. At the same time, fans are expecting some reciprocity where they’re talking directly to a celebrity and want to hear feedback; they don’t want to be a fan anymore, they want to be a peer.

Edwards made a good analogy of social media as a meal with different courses, so if a celebrity wants to share every minor detail, it’s like “frosting” – fans eat too much and they get sick. But if a celebrity gets it, and they understand it’s about sharing their passion and their causes – “the meat and potatoes” – then they’re respecting the medium.

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Armano: Good Design Helps Us Learn Faster

[VIDEO COMING LATER]. Realizing that David Armano speaks often about good elements of design, I’m not sure I have a benchmark of what is new versus what may be familiar to his followers. I need to think about this stuff before I create a more thoughtful, inspired post on what it means to me, but in the meantime, here’s the great topline ideas I took down from his talk.

David sums up the creation of good design by the four Ms:

• Metaphor. Envisioning a concept as a relevant symbol. (Ex. Web 2.0 is a subway map)
• Model. A complex idea that can be broken down and digested quickly. (Ex. Think a hub and spokes to show you and your relationship to others.
• Mindmapping. A free-form way to capture ideas by drawing circles and connecting lines between like ideas. Kind of like building a network of connected thought bubbles.
• Manifest. Develop the visual that shows how the concept is crystalized. Think Venn diagram – variable A and variable B overlap with you in the middle.

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So you’re blogging – Are you cashing in?

Having been a blogger at Pounded Thumb for a couple years and here on WordPress since….okay, Wednesday, I don’t think much about monetization. But as panel moderator Dave Taylor pointed out, it’s worth considering that your blog is a business. [He has too, it's how he pays his mortgage.]

Now maybe I won’t quit my day job any time soon, but I’m intrigued to learn how my sites may generate revenue – more the mechanics than the cash in hand. So it was during this session that I realized, if you want advertising – whether that’s Google AdSense or affiliate links – you  have to consider which advertisers are going to want space on your site. If you’re sharing funny pictures of cats, it might be pet food manufacturers. But if you write about “things that suck,” missives on things that bug you, you may have your work cut out for you in trying to attract advertisers.

Some popular ad services used by the panel: Kontera, Google AdSense, BlogAds, but there was caution – specifically from Chris Pirillo - about using text link ads.

Other recommendations from Chris [while not the only speaker, he seemed to boil down thoughts succinctly]:

• Be a content DJ. Take what content you already have and re-mix it to create new content, which can generate revenue. It adds up.
• It’s important to have your fingers in all pies. Your blog is the discovery forum for things you want to talk about, but it’s outside channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which are going to drive the lying share of interest that comes to your site.
• Link your content to your content. Related articles are an easy way to generate more read-through with your existing traffic, and in turn, page views and potentially revenue.
• Think about how you participate. If you’re looking to have more people comment/vote/like your site, ask yourself where you’re participating. Your actions can help spark others to act.

What are your tips for monetizing?

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BWE 09: The Rebirth of Journalism

Panel on re-birth of journalism. (Check out @DonLemonCNN, tweeting on his iPhone)

The future of journalism is such a critical discussion as social media explodes and traditional news organizations continue to erode. During a keynote panel this morning with some big names in traditional and newer media, moderator @BrianSolis mentioned that nearly 400 million tweets are recorded each month, while nearly 14,000 newsroom jobs were cut during this year. Wow.

The overall message, which @briansolis shared and each of the panelists reinforced, was that regardless of whether is social media or traditional media, earning relevance should be our goal. Another starting point he mentioned, was that social media was able to fill some key gaps in mainstream media; both when news is breaking and when it’s being reported.

Don Lemon, CNN reporter and tweeter @DonLemonCNN, argued that social media does a good job of keeping mainstream media in check, but reminded the audience that fact checking still needs to happen when news leads come in on Twitter.

Jay Rosen, NYU faculty member and PressThink blogger, countered by saying that it’s not only mainstream media that is picking up the need to fact check things. Everyone who is reporting news should have the ability to ask themselves, “is what I’m about to report true, do i know it’s true?” Bloggers can do this, incidental journalists can do this, it’s not just up to the mainstream media.

Solis later asked whether the short-form “statusphere” (any place people update a status) was the key to saving mainstream journalists. Lemon agreed it’s forced him to up his game, to “bring it.” At times, he’s been called on things in the statusphere, and the CNN staff has helped him determine if the news lead could be verified. In some cases, this has enhanced the news he was reporting.

Radio talk show host and author Hugh Hewitt pointed out that “talk radio is the original form of social media.” He added that Twitter, like talk radio, allows more lines to come into the studio; over time you learn who to trust. What struck me (tsauce) was how Hewitt described that as social media people elevate themselves in the world of mainstream media, they become the “sources” who eventually inform mainstream news. “If I don’t pay attention to them, I’ll get beat on every story like a drum.”

Once again, great panel – as a former beat reporter, I love the way this is playing out. Video later today – Joanna Drake Earl, COO of Current TV also participated in this panel and I’ll be included some thoughts from her in the video. Another great panelist.

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BWE 09: You Can Haz Awesome!

Super-great presentation by Ben Huh, the CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger, FailBlog, There I Fixed It! and so many other great, funny sites. This former journalist turned start-up guy now leads one of the largest humor networks in the world, with 23 different sites and roughly 12 million visitors each month.

Ben shared great ideas [scroll down] around winning, but in a super-cheap way. He also spent exactly 25 seconds sharing why failure is so important to making sure the best ideas rise to the top.

Other great thoughts from Ben:

• Undistract your company. Most companies don’t grow because they’re not tightly focused; they lack a clear vision.
• You are the obstacle to scalable growth. Find a way to take your ego, pride, assumptions and sacred cows out of the picture, and you succeed.
• Drive your business from the roots. Allow users to dictate who you are. You will take lumps, but you’ll get thick skin, and eventually you’ll grow.
• Go after the audience leaving digital fingerprints. The highly active site visitors won’t help you grow your audience. It’s not the comments, but the traffic patterns, the ratings they leave, and the quiet things that show your biggest opportunity to grow.
• Keep your lazy attitude as a state of mind. It’s the same way that users are lazy because they have a million better things to do than visit your site. Ask yourself what’s the least you must do to make the most money or generate the most traffic.
• Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity. Scaling is possible when your business is simple. So if you make it complex, you hinder your ability to grow things.
• Plug in and plug out –  better, cheaper and faster. The key is to outsource the things that aren’t important to you so they can be handled by the organizations that do care. Give up your landline and try Skype. Unplug from Exchange and move things over to Gmail. WordPress instead of anything else.

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