On July 22, 2011, I was honored to deliver the keynote address at HighEdWeb Arkansas to an audience of approximately 100 higher ed web professionals from the region. The title of my talk was “Once Upon a Semester: Storytelling as a Framework for Higher Ed Web Marketing.” You can watch a capture of the audio and slides from the talk here (or view the slide deck via SlideShare).
My talk revolved around four core elements that shape storytelling as a framework for higher ed web marketing:
Empathy - Emotions drive effective storytelling. Can you evoke an emotion that is appropriate to the context, or drives action?
Holistic approach – Think about the story arc of our web content and web user experiences. Does it carry the user to a resolution?
User as Hero – At a university, our users are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We need to help them be awesome. We are Excalibur to their King Arthur, Sam to their Frodo.
Purpose - Stories should support the brand by contextualizing our efforts to advance it. We also have to account for the brand storytelling role of our audiences — as “fan-fiction” authors of our brand, are they adhering to canon? Is this canon something people are aware of?
Thanks to the folks at HighEdWeb Arkansas for giving me the opportunity to keynote the conference. For just a day and a half, it was an extraordinary experience packed with useful knowledge, smart people and Southern hospitality. Hope to see y’all next year!
On May 16, I made a mad dash from Medford to East Cambridge in order to make it on time for Genevieve Bell’s lecture at the IBM Center for Social Software. I go to a lot of events, and while I always strive to be on time, I have to admit that the fire pushing me eastward was a bit hotter than usual.
You see, a few weeks back, Bell — an anthropologist at Intel — delivered a Where 2.0 talk entitled “Context is Everything” that left me slackjawed with awe and inspiration.
Her innovative ideas and the engaging manner in which she conveys them made her Cambridge appearance a can’t-miss for me. Thanks so much to the Somerville cabbie who turned off the meter and accepted my $15 as sufficient fare.
As Bell puts it, her charge at Intel is to “reinvent the way we all experience computing” — no bigs, right? In her presentation, “An Archeology of the Present: Cars, Mobile Tech and Messiness,” Bell showcased her brand of anthropology in looking at cars as an analog for mobile technology. This ties into the goal of better understanding the relationship between people and technology. Why cars? Because while there are nearly a billion cars worldwide, the interpretation of a vehicle is a very local thing.
Cars, in fact, are a type of mobile technology, Bell explained. They are “deeply cultural objects” that play different roles in people’s lives. Bell has spent the past six months traveling around the world — from Portland to Penang, San Francisco to Singapore — unpacking people’s cars, photographing the contents and talking to the owners about it all. Bell and her team reached out to a broad demographic, spanning urban and rural locales, asking people how they use their cars and what they carry in them (and why).
Everything in the car, Bell found, had a story and an explanation. Chainsaw and axe? Volunteer firefighter. And since he’s also a pub owner, he has stuff relating to that role in his car as well. People keep multiple forms of their lives in their car, Bell observed. (Polyvalence was the word she used, much to my delight.)
These are the “themes, thread and implications” Bell drew from her research:
- Being prepared for everything (and nothing) – the great example of this was the man who kept a lawn bowling set given to him by his ex-wife in his beat-up car. Why? She gave them to him so he would stop calling her from the side of the road when his car inevitably broke down.
- Getting to where you are going – Any variety of GPS or GPS-enabled device, in addition to good ol’ paper maps.
- Marking your territory – There are innumerable ways people make cars distinctly theirs
- Staging areas - People often call cars “the mobile office” or “the mobile living room.” This is inaccurate, said Bell. “People use cars to stage other parts of their lives.” The car is a transitional site.
- Extended storage – Contents in the car, with the exception of recently purchased groceries, rarely make it back into the house.
- Keeping you socially safe – In many of the Asian locations visited by Bell and her team, everyone kept red envelopes — traditional given at births, weddings, Chinese New Year and oter special occasions — in their car. When asked, they said it was “in case of emergencies.” Not surprise weddings, as Bell soon surmised, but rather social emergencies, since showing up without a red envelope would be severely embarrassing. A Volvo owned by a man in Singapore even came with Volvo-branded red envelopes in a special section of the car.
- Other people’s stuff ends up there
- Secret stashes and guilty pleasures – One woman had a collection of popsicle sticks from ice cream bars she consumed in secret, and only in the car.
- Broken, old and eclipsed technology – Lots and lots of old phones, chargers, you name it.
(Noteworthy? After Bell and her team removed every last item from these cars, laid them out on a beige cloth and photographed them, nearly every single item — trash and all — made it back into the car.)
All of this, Bell said, was to see if cars can function as a proxy for other mobile technologies, and they do. Just look at the list above. You can plug in any mobile function or digital article contained within a mobile device into each of those categories — passwords, calendar reminders, photographs, files, text messages, you name it. They all fit the bill.
Takeaways
There were a few particularly interesting insights I gleaned from Bell’s talk. As she said, this research is incomplete and ongoing (Brazil, Italy and Israel are still on the list to visit and unpack), but she sees a value in sharing speculative work publicly. I am glad she did, as it has given me many threads to consider, all of which are just as speculative as Bell’s work at this point.
I thought the explanation of cars as staging areas was fascinating. We are often fixated on everything having a role in and of itself, on looking at places as destinations, and the value of transitional states is often over looked. The car is just a liminal state on four wheels, really.
I like the idea of unpacking cars in order to use cars as an analog for mobile technology, since it’s impossible to completely unpack the contents of, say, an iPhone. We could probably stand to do more unpacking, turn more things inside out in order to better understand them.
Bell noted that most of the people she spoke with said driving is rarely about getting from point A to B — meaning, the car is not often valued for its pragmatic purpose. It’s a place to sing bad pop songs, or to quench the thirst for speed. The transportation role is often negligible. It’s about the other activities the car enables, the other roles it serves, the lives it helps to stage. How much is a phone about making a call, or even checking email nowadays? It’s about setting us up for what’s next, whether it’s dinner or a client meeting.
It’s all about how we perceive and use things, not necessarily what they were designed for. We will choose the role that something fills in our lives.
Everything has a story behind it, and those stories are clues to how we work as humans.
Thanks, Genevieve Bell, for getting my brain a-speculatin’ on a Monday afternoon. What do you guys take away from the points listed above?
On March 24, I had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Spatial. My presentation — “Experience is the New Place: The Next Evolution of Check-Ins” — was more or less a roundup of the ideas I began exploring in my “Checking In” blog series.
The event was great. GIS is outside my expertise and comfort level, so it was pretty fascinating to hear a majority of presentations that delved into the more technical aspects of space and place.
I learned about an awesome 3-D mapping initiative for Washington D.C. (and the hazards of driving around the nation’s capital in a vehicle with a camera mounted to the roof), how a citizen armed with data and the internet can affect civic change amidst the snowiest winter in recent memory, how members of the GIS field are using social media to learn and connect with colleagues, what some of my colleagues at Tufts are doing to create an Open GIS portal and how citizens can become urban mechanics and gain a sense of ownership of their neighborhoo with the help of an app called SeeClickFix.
Kudos to Guido Stein for organizing yet another awesome Ignite event. We were joking that his next event needs to be an Ignite Ignite, where we’ll all give five minute, 20-slide talks about delivering Ignite talks! You never know, it could happen…
The panel was moderated by Michael Morisy of Muckrock.com.
The event began with the panel discussing what CMSes do well. Gardner-Smith said that while they do what they were intended to do well, they need to catch up to the sourcing and distribution methodologies driven by social media. Systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla do a better job of managing content flow, distributing content and integrating social features, but they could do more.
Gaffin said that CMSes excel at templated content but are not good at ad hoc content creation, or pulling together disparate content types (e.g. photos, graphics, text) into a package.
Phelps pointed to a more fundamental problem — the lack of available resources to develop a CMS to meet an organization’s needs. WBUR, he said, has hacked its installations of WordPress to death, but many web publishers lack those technical skills or resources and end up using a product that they can manage but is unsatisfactory to their needs. Later, Gaffin made the point that reporters can’t be expected to learn PHP; they don’t want to know how to make something bold, they just want to make it bold.
Buytaert lauded open source CMSes (and in turn, the open source communities) and their commitment to keeping up with an “exploding” web. He pointed, however, to the need to get better at the mobile experience, since so much online traffic is moving there.
Next, the panel explored how much the expectations of the real-time web have pushed the ways they produce content. Phelps, who offered many insightful comments over the course of the evening, noted that the standard blog post format just doesn’t cut it anymore, since they aren’t able to pull together multiple sources of information (e.g. Phelps’ Twitter feed with the content from the blog he runs, Hubbub). WBUR plans to launch a “mini-post” format that essentially weaves in Twitter-style updates with more longform blog posts, allowing for more frequent updates with a significant labor uptick. “It’s all coming together,” he said.
Gaffin hailed the instant nature of Twitter (see @universalhub), but observed how it is bad at a conversation of more than two people. He pulled up an example from yesterday morning of heavy commentary around MBTA bag searches. Gardner-Smith, whose Pinyadda curation service is employed on BostInnovation, echoed Gaffin’s sentiments and talked about the “value-added curation” on BostInnovation (example) and bringing the community into the content experience.
Morisy asked about the need to control the medium, which I thought was an odd question, but Phelps replied thoughtfully. For years, he said, the medium was the message, but on the web, content can appear anywhere. So he tries to create content that can thrive anywhere, which means sharing blog posts with minimal markup that may not translate where in other feeds or formats, taking SEO into consideration when writing and crafting easily excerptable copy, keeping in mind that bloggers may comment on his content. These may be seen as dirty tricks by some, Phelps acknowledged, but nowadays, content is consumed the way the user wants to consume it, so we might as well make our content as compatible as possible with a wide range of uses.
The conversation then turned to mobile. Gardner-Smith cited the quick jump BostInnovation has seen to nearly 13% of its visitors accessing the website from a mobile device. Our consumption of information is broken down into short bursts — on the bus, at the breakfast table — that helps drive mobile. Buytaert echoed how mobile would be a “very big shift” for CMSes, and Drupal was working hard to do it right.
Transitioning to the appification of news, Phelps derided the iPad-centric publication The Daily, saying it was “ridiculous” to tailor content to one device. “No one group is more or less entitled to good information,” he said. Gaffin noted how to web is already routing around The Daily, with Tumblr blogs sharing the publications headline (and showing that it is not that great). What happens to the well-funded newsroom of The Daily if the app flops, speculated Phelps?
Gardner-Smith is also anti-appification, saying that while apps are beautiful, he is pro-web standards and the open web. The economics of the app store, he said, will fall flat against a generation of users who have grown up with a free content ecosystem and will not pay for a native app that offers content they can get elsewhere for free. The content economy, he said, is a link economy, which cannot be replicated with a native app. Buytaert, while he cited his desire for a “beautiful” news experience, echoed the point that he gets his news from multiple sources, which are difficult to combine into an app.
Moving on to the idea of the walled garden vs. link economy, Gardner-Smith predicted a move to a “branded content ecosystem,” since publishers will need to find money somehow. Phelps brought up WBUR’s tried and true model of asking users for money and “amazingly, it continues to work.” Services like Spot.us and Flattr came up as models for community-funded reporting.
Morisy then turned the topic to the recent Gawker redesign and asked panelists for their take on it. While Phelps did not hide his distaste for it (he called Gawker “dark artists”), he said there were many lessons to be learned from it, including the new emphasis on Facebook throughout the Gawker sites. At WBUR, Facebook competes with Google for top referred. “Friends don’t let friends read bad content,” he said. Gardner-Smith echoed this, noting how the new design highlights visual content and a good user experience. On the new Gawker sites, he said, every side door looks like the front door, an acknowledgment that visitors come from all directions.
The panel closed by touching on content distribution through social networks. While Facebook makes sense for Phelps and Gardner-Smith, Gaffin focuses on Twitter because of his emphasis on more breaking and less feature-y news. Phelps explained how WBUR hacked their story pages a bit so they would look better when shared on Facebook. Why is this important? Because stories linger longer on Facebook, hanging around in people’s news feeds. He echoed the earlier point of how it is difficult to aggregate conversation on Twitter, but Facebook makes it easy. In addition, Facebook places a high value on engagement (particularly likes and comments). WBUR will often tack on a question to a story post on Facebook to kick off that engagement — or even click the first “like” themselves, acknowledging that people are more likely to participate if others are participating.
All in all, it was a great panel, though I was surprised at the omission of topics like gamification, location and curation — particular the lack of mention of Storify, which seems to address the Twitter conversation aggregation problem most of the panelists decried. Hmm, I think we need a follow-up.
On Feb. 9, I attended the first public demonstration of Google’s Ngram viewer, hosted at Google’s Cambridge offices by Hacks/Hackers Boston and delivered by Google Books engineering manager Jon Orwant.
The Ngram viewer taps the Google Books database of approximately 15 million digitized books to graph the occurrence of certain phrases in literature over time. This can yield a rough data visualization of cultural trends as expressed via word choice in literature. Results can be broken out across 11 language corpora and any range of years.
Google is making this data available — whether its to researchers in the digital humanities or yokels like myself — in the hopes of extracting insights from the accumulated corpora. When you break down a work of literature into what Orwant described as its semantic data stack (I’m veering into an alluring yet unfamiliar library science world here!), you have pages, text/pictures and characters at the bottom. As you ascend, you can begin to discern structure, parts of speech, facts and — ultimately — ideas. Google’s goal is to be able to intuit ideas from the amassed data from these books — but they’re not there quite yet.
It’s a fascinating tool (there’s even a Tumblr where you can post your own interesting Ngrams). You can compare similar words or competing phrases. Sample Ngram searches included phrenology vs. neurology, middle west vs. midwest, nursery school vs. child care vs. kindergarten. You can also track to evolution of a term like “hospice” over time, or compare appearances of the terms freedom, security and liberty across American history.
What Ngrams demonstrate is the legacy left by language. Our language is an expression of our history, and by atomizing literature into data, Google hopes to empower an unprecedented quantitative cultural analysis, pulling out compelling trends and patterns and validating hypotheses. As any number-crunching reporter will tell you, data tells stories.
The challenge, though, as Orwant would be the first to admit, is context. A word only means so much on its own as a data point, and words may have multiple meanings that can best be sorted out via context. The lack of context also opens the possibility of gaming the data to spit out desired results. It’s easy to compare two words that will result in an interesting looking graph, but what does it really mean? Some of the Harvard researchers involved in the project (a study they have dubbed “culturomics”) have created a user’s guide to evaluating Ngram data, which is helpful, but the onus is still on the user to practice safe data interpretation.
Lessons from language
To web marketers, some of the tenets of Ngram may sound familiar. After all, don’t we use the Google keyword tool and webmaster tools to optimize copy for SEO, making our content more findable and relevant to the ways our users seek information? Of course, SEO isn’t about conveying a message or idea; it’s about getting a message or idea found.
There is more to consider. In her recap of the event, Katie Cohen notes that the Ngram viewer has value as a data-driven editorial tool that can inform our word choice and steer us away from antiquated verbiage. But she also raises the good point that as a barometer of the evolution of language, Ngram may provide an incomplete picture:
I wondered whether published works really captured the zeitgeist, especially in an era where so much is communicated off the printed page, via blogs, tweets, even video.
I can’t help but think about Mike Teavee from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” who wanted to be the first person transmitted by Wonkavision. Sure enough, he was transmitted in a million little pieces and came out on the other end — in one piece, but much, much smaller.
What do we lose in the transmission from ideas to data and (as Google hopes) back to ideas? Can a computer, even one like Watson, ever be intelligent enough to interpret data contextually and draw meaningful conclusions?
Words alone can tell stories, but when we can appreciate the words in their full context, that story becomes richer and more accurate. Ngrams from books across centuries can point to a trend or pattern, but if we were able to extract Ngrams from news articles and tweets and YouTube videos, think how much more robust and validated that pattern becomes.
What the Ngram viewer demonstrates is the significant role of language as a cultural watermark, and how breaking a whole down into its components can yield entirely new understandings. But above all else, to me, it is a critical reminder of the value of context in making true sense of the world.
On Feb. 7, I attended Ignite Boston 8 at the Microsoft NERD, part of Global Ignite Week. As usual, it was a stellar affair, with incredible speakers and a delightful audience. Here’s a wrap-up of the sessions:
Jacob Buckley-Fortin – Conception, Pregnancy, Labor, Delivery, and Infants (for Geeks): Jake let us know that due dates don’t matter and water breaking is a myth. He assured us that Boston is the best place to be born and showed off some of the awesome gear, apps and books to help you along the way. (Good: Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy and Harvey Karp. Bad: What to Expect When You’re Expecting)
Bobbie Carlton – How Freestrapping Is Killing Our Start-Ups: For entrepreneurs, freestrapping is like bootstrapping, except no one gets paid and nothing gets invested in the business — think leeching wifi or holding meetings via Skype. The problem with running a business with the freestrapping model is that “waiting to get bought” is not a viable business model. Is there too much of an expectation of “free” for entrepreneurs? Is the plethora of free tools available to freestrappers a bubble waiting to burst? Carlton, who sees lots of entrepreneurs as organizer of Mass Innovation Nights, warns that freestrapping does not create wealth, and it is important for entrepreneurs to know what they’re doing.
Max Ogden – Code for America: Education and Technology in Boston: Ogden talked about Code For America, an initiative that “enlists the brightest minds of the web industry into public service to use their skills to solve core problems facing our communities.” He talked about Paul Otlet, the forgotten father of information science, who may have pioneered the idea of the “like” button and the concept of recommendation systems. He talked in the context of libraries – imagine Netflix for public libraries, or an anthropomorphized library pushing book recommendations to you based on geolocation. How can we capitalize on the curiosity gap and encourage kids to seek information and collaborate? The spirit of open government is not about accessibility to data, but rather collaboration, and that is the engine behind Code for America.
Joe Flaherty – The Real “MobileMe” How Smartphones Are Enabling a World of “Augmented Humanity”: Joe, an app developer for a medical devices company, talked about how apps and gear that can help us better monitor our health. Why is this important? We’re getting sicker, with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other preventable ailments becoming more widespread. This creates a drag on the economy in order to care for sick people who did not have to be sick. In this case, says Flaherty, information is a more powerful disease treatment than pharmaceuticals (look at how Dr. John Snow halted an 1854 London cholera outbreak by simply mapping outbreaks), but there are requirements. You have to make it simple to collect data and use the app or device. You have to capitalize on social pressure.You have to make it visually appealing.
Katie Gradowski, Parts and Crafts - How to Start a Summer Camp: Parts and Crafts strives to create a kids’ hackerspace, taking kids’ ideas seriously and turning them into real things. Kids are taught to use tools, and the tools empower the ideas, thus empowering the kids.
Dan Zarrella – Social Media Science – Zarrella, who works at HubSpot, shared some great data about optimal content sharing times, whether or not “Please RT” works or not, whether or not social proof is infallible, how reading grade level affects content shareability, and much more. I’m excited to see him speak for more than 5 minutes at the Bridging the Gap conference next week at Suffolk.
Mark Watkins – The Future of Search Is Context: An empty Google search box, says Watkins, is like a restaurant without a menu. Search engines help us make sense of information, but they should be smarter, says Watkins, and they could be smarter by taking advantage of context — time, task, identity, location, etc. The future of search is to focus on concepts, not words, even doing things without us having to ask for it to happen.
Courtney Stanton – Trolling for Data: Imagine a troll came up to you, gnawed on you for a week and called you horrible names. What would you do? Stanton would give an Ignite talk, apparently, examining a downright nasty situation and pulling valuable data about “the differences between regular online discussion and trolling comments” out of it. She has posted her slides, with annotation, on her blog. You can read back in her blog for the context of exactly what precipitated the extensive trolling. It’s not pretty or for the faint of heart.
TC Cheever - Pure Imagination: How Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Is Really An Anti-Drug Parable: This was a hilarious breakdown of one of my favorite movies, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” and how it is through and through an anti-drug parable. By Cheever’s rationale, it makes total sense! You can read his essay outlining this theory.
Heather Gilmore – Compost Your Dishes: Better than Washing: Gilmore talked about how plates made from wheat stalks could help us never have to do dishes again. Woohoo!
Meaghan Cassidy – Social Enterprise: What Works, What Doesn’t, Why It Matters, and Why You Should Hate Oprah: Social enterprise solutions should be sustainable and efficient. Oprah is neither. She kind of sucks.
Sarah Hastings - 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Beer: 1) There may be fish guts in your beer. 2) ALL lagers are cold-brewed 3) Light lagers are not made with barley or hops 4) Beer is good for you! It has vitamin B, antioxidants and amino acids 5) The U.S. is at the forefront of the craft beer movement, and Boston is one of the best beer towns in the country.
So when Guido announced Ignite Craft, I saw not only an opportunity to reprise my amazing Ignite experience from last year, but to revisit the crafting community.
EDIT: Video from my talk is now available!
Here are just the slides from my talk (appended with some captions for the benefit of Slideshare).
The speaker lineup was awesome, and I learned a lot about a range of topics from bookbinding to letterpress to lockpicking to quilting and craft beer. One of the main points of my presentation was that creativity and craft flourish when you bring together people and the things they love, and this event was proof of that.
Here are some of the highlights from the evening which I thought might be of interest to a broader audience:
Guido Stein compared his journey into crafting to World of WarCraft. Working with others, he has gained experience and created communities (guilds).
SchneiderMike talked about craft beers, noting that the most awesome beers are typically the most scarce but it’s worth the time to find and try them. The appreciation of craft beer takes persistence and patience, as well as an affinity for details — color, scent, texture, temperature and flavor, to name a few.
Ann Weaver talked about how she self-published her book of knitwear designs, finding inspiration from Dutch Olympians, Johnny Rotten, Steve McQueen and more. To market the book, she hit the road, talking up her book at every trunk show or craft store she encountered.
Sarah Kuhn of UMass Lowell impressed me with her thoughts on hands-on learning. Standard classrooms, she said, are like sensory deprivation chambers that destroy the ability to think. How? Science shows that we think with our hands — the bulk of our cortex is centered on our hands — so optimally, we should learn through objects, with design as inquiry.
Will McFarlane of Parts and Crafts talked about his awesome organization — awesome not just because of what they do, but because of the $1,000 grant they received from the Awesome Foundation. McFarlane explained the idea of community-supported education and empowering kids by teaching them to use tools to create things.
Schuyler Towne gave a fun and enthusiastic introduction to lockpicking, an activity in which he is a professional competitor. Yes. It’s called locksport. That’s pretty awesome.
Gale Zucker previewed her forthcoming book on craft activism, which can assume many forms from yarnbombing to political statements knitted into sweaters to anti-consumerist totes made out of plastic shopping bags.
Christina Inge talked about the idea of being “multicraftual,” letting one craft inform another to give deeper meaning to your work. It’s all about being inspired by learning and looking past the medium. I was particularly impressed by her description of quilter Susan Shie, who quite literally weaves stories into her creations.
Stacie Dolin, a bookbinder, showed off what happened when you make papercuts of useful tools combined with ’80s song lyrics. The result? Hilarity.
Lis Pardi assured everyone that we can be good at everything as long as we are convinced we can do it but willing to admit we know nothing. Information, she emphasized, is the key to making things happen. The motto of the evening? “You can do it, you will do it, and it will turn out OK-ish”
Katie Helke talked about Knit for Boston, a nonprofit she founded to take advantage knitters’ busy hands to help give comfort and warmth to those who need it.
Alanna Nelson, a quilter, talked about how she challenged herself to carpe diem. In her quilts, she draws inspiration from everything around her, making the most of her surroundings no matter where her travels landed her.
My friend Seanna also wrote a really great recap with her thoughts and notes from the evening.
Thanks, Guido, for organizing an awesome event, and thanks to all the speakers and attendees for making it so much fun! I’m not sure if I’ll be speaking at the next Ignite Craft, but you bet I’ll be in attendance.
In recent months, I’ve had the pleasure of attending several events in the local series called Rock Shop. Organized by music promoter Steve Theo of Pirate! and hosted at The Middle East, Rock Shop aims to inform aspiring bands about various aspects of the music business, whether it’s getting accepted to play at a music festival or how to get booked on a club bill. I’ve written up recaps of several of the marketing-oriented Rock Shop events on my other blog, Safe Digression, for my weekly Take Five music column, but I thought it would be relevant to share them here as well.
For the most part, my life as a music fan and my life as a communications professional are separate, but Rock Shop has provided a great opportunity to bring them together. It has also been heartening to hear the DJs, writers and musicians who have spoken at Rock Shop echo many of the same principles and recommendations I have gleaned from colleagues and bloggers in my field.
Tim Kelly, WMBR, Hidden Capital; Dave Duncan, WFNX, Boston Accents; Anngelle Wood, WZLX, Boston Emissions; Carmelita, WAAF, Bay State Rock; Mark Hamilton, formerly of WZBC and WBCN and host of past iterations of New England Product and Boston Emissions, now in LA; Angie C, a ten-year veteran of WFNX, now in LA
Main takeaways: Make sure you are submitting a high quality product accompanied by all the info the DJ needs, and make it easy for DJs to find out additional information. Work hard and that commitment will be recognized and acknowledged.
Main takeaways: Mobilize your fans into ambassadors. Publish content that is meaningful. The scene thrives on collaboration, not competition. Find a way to balance the creative and the business sides of your enterprise.
Main takeaways: Do it right the first time, which means doing your homework in order to best work with a designer. Manage time and resources as efficiently as possible. Understand that your band is a brand and you need to treat it as such.
Less Talk, More Rock
In addition to the Rock Shops, here are some other music-oriented events I have covered for Take Five that explore innovations in communication.
As Troiano put it, the old tactic was to cram your view down the customer’s throat with self-serving copy. The new tactic, content marketing, focuses on delivering web content with intrinsic value. It hits the sweet spot of both what customers want and what serves the brand’s interests. Why is this effective? One, because people have become better able to filter unwanted noise. Two, people are becoming savvier at finding the information the way.
What is Branded Content?
As O’Brien put it, while in the past we strived to create a slick, finished package, the challenge now is to offer something incomplete that invites the audience to continue the dialogue. Our responsibility is to start the story and enable the connection with the customer. This participatory experience is becoming a default expectation for the digital natives we market to. In describing the web show “Chronicles of EMS,” which covers the evolving field of paramedicine, she spoke of a program designed by and for paramedics to elevate the profession and create community. Sponsored by a defibrillator manufacturer, the product is embedded in the field with the paramedics featured on the show.
Oliver says that the relevance of the content generated at Converse is driven by their audience’s passions. Converse doesn’t want to talk about itself; they want to know what their customers are doing in their shoes. One of those passions is music — historically, the Ramones, Kurt Cobain and James Dean have all shown off various flavors of Converse. Converse’s Rubber Tracks initiative allows bands to record music in a state-of-the-art Brooklyn studio and keep their recordings in exchange for Converse sharing the content created during the recording process. Converse supports the initiative by creating how-to videos for musicians and engineers. Oliver described it as “putting our money where our mouth is.”
Drinkwater echoed the audience-centric perspective, lending ut a more data-driven approach that Yahoo! has the ability to execute by mining search and click behavior. He shared the example of the branded web show The Thread in its women-centric Shine channel, focusing on celebrity fashion. This joint initiative with Proctor and Gamble adheres to three main pillars: 1) is the content compelling/engaging? 2) can the product integration be done tastefully? 3) discoverability. The Yahoo! editorial team doesn’t fall into the advertorial trap by posting content that doesn’t pass the “smell test” of what women want to consume organically on the web. The effectiveness of the venture is measured, with Nielsen tracking in-store product sales. According to Drinkwater, Comscore ranks Yahoo as having nine of the top 10 branded content programs on the web. The key, says Drinkwater, is commitment – these efforts take time.
Troiano talked about his firm’s work with Notch, a session ale (high flavor, low alcohol) looking to gain traction in the craft beer community. On NotchSession.com the makers of Notch aim to build rapport among craft beer drinkers and provide “information with objective value” about craft beer, session ale and other related topics. All of their social media efforts drive back to NotchSession.com. On Twitter, they follow targeted bars in a target market (in this case, Boston) as well as the people who patronize those bars. They set up a listening station to pay attention to commentary about session ale and craft beer, and comments left on those blogs have become a major inbound marketing vehicle for them.
Challenges for Content Marketing
Troiano mentioned how it can be a challenge to recruit content contributors from within the organization. It is important, he said, to share the strategic context of this work, so people see its value. Bring the content creators around the table from the beginning. Curation is also a valuable complement to creation, by getting people to react to select third-party content with their own context. In his projects, Troiano institutes content checkpoints at 30, 60 and 90 days, providing opportunities for high-ranking people in the company to weigh in on the value of the content work and help breed an internal culture of others wanting to contribute.
O’Brien seconded this, noting that sometimes, you have to play to the egos a little bit. Sometimes, she added, the problem is beyond simply finding contributors — it’s getting any buy-in at all. Content marketing is still new and tough to understand for some fields, including health care, which has the added complexity of regulatory challenges to contend with.
Budget can also be a factor, but as Oliver detailed, you can get high-yield content with a low budget, while adhering to the principle of creating content that is a draw over advertising that is a push. This video of the hot band Phantogram shows these ideas in action:
Troiano added that budget is not just a question of money — it’s also time, and an organization needs to culturally get what content marketing is about in order to allocate the necessary time to any content marketing initiatives.
The Future of Content Marketing
Drinkwater says there is an increased interest in content marketing (including a push toward microcontent), and thus an increased push to find newer and cheaper earned distribution channels. Relatedly, the barriers for content production have fallen significantly. A challenge he faces is giving his branded content more legs outside of Yahoo!
Oliver foresees that brand-sanctioned, crowdsourced content — through services such as Poptent – could gain in popularity, challenging the brand-agency model with a more community-driven approach.
O’Brien said that as brands grow more comfortable with losing control, they will more readily embrace user-generated content.
Troiano summed it up well, noting that in time, content marketing will become the core of marketing, and less of a side-project. This is because a human approach to business is becoming more and more vital.
“If you’ve ever tried to say something interesting at a party,” said Troiano, “you understand the essence of content marketing.”
Back in May, I signaled that I was looking to get more experience with public speaking and presenting. My first such experience at Ignite Boston 7 back in March was exhilarating and terrifying — like skydiving, really. And once I had a taste of the rush, I wanted more. I declared 2010 “The Year of Speaking Publicly.”
While things are relatively quiet, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on these whirlwind past few months.
Why is this important to me?
I think some people would be surprised to learn that I am shy, especially given how often I volunteer myself for public displays of varying types (like, uh, karaoke). Blame my Leonine tendencies. But for me, public speaking is very different.
When I do goofy things in public, my aim is just entertainment — both for myself and those around me. There is not a lot riding on it. But when I am presenting, people are relying on me to be valuable. In some cases, they’ve paid good money to sit there and listen to me, so I take that responsibility seriously. I can’t regurgitate crap. I have to be insightful and engaging. I have to be ready for questions. If I have weak links in my content, they will surely be exposed. And, dear God, what about the backchannel?? It’s a lot to worry about.
So, in pursuing public speaking opportunities, I want to share my knowledge and add value to my professional community, but I also see it as a personal challenge to feel confident that I have something to contribute and am worthy of that responsibility.
How did I prepare?
Solid preparation can defend against the pitfalls listed above. For my HighEdWeb/Stamats presentation, I spent hours doing research, poring over my sources, outlining, organizing, writing and making sure I knew what the hell I was talking about. For me, the real litmus test was the person who came up to me five minutes before I was scheduled to start and asked me to explain what I would be talking about, so she could decide which session to attend. It’s essentially the elevator speech for your presentation. If you can explain it well and succinctly, and you see the spark of comprehension and even of interest in her eyes, that’s a nice shot of confidence right there. And I think I passed that test.
The next step is the visual presentation. This is sort of a second step of the synthesis, as you try to translate what you’ve outlined and learned into a balanced aural and visual experience. I quickly learned how challenging this is — heck, I don’t think I’d ever created slide deck before this year. It’s challenging to learn how to use the visual space to complement and enhance what you are saying without distracting the audience, but I also think it’s a lot of fun. Because of my personality, my presentations were definitely speckled with humor and pop culture references, whether it was my “Spaceballs” shoutout at #140conf or the LOLCats and Legos I dropped into my content curation presentation. Some people play it straight, some people go for the personal approach, and I can’t help but fall into the latter category. Whichever route you take, you have to make sure that the whole package is clear and effective. (Presentation Zen provides some helpful guidance to that end, and I’ve also come across some great tips on designing effective presentations by Design Shack, 10,000 Words, Social Brite and Dan Schawbel.)
The thing I probably didn’t do enough of was demo the presentation for other people. Aside from one trusted friend, no one saw this thing before I took it on the road. I think this is because I was scared of being told it was crap. I did, however, do lots of solo runthroughs, to make sure I knew my talking points back and forth (though I did create a little crib sheet for the points at the heart of my talk). In the future, I’d like to get more human feedback before the real deal.
How did I feel?
I still remember how I felt before my 5-minute Ignite talk — more or less like I was going to throw up, possibly approaching the threshold of a mild panic attack. In the hours leading up to my 10-minute #140conf talk, which came toward the end of a full day of such talks, I fretted about the value of my talk, took a stab at memorizing it on the fly so I could be as cool as some of the speakers who roamed around the stage unbound by slides or prepared text (a plan I soon abandoned), but I did not feel ill or panicky. By the time I gave my second 45-minute presentation on content curation, I was nervous, sure, but not consumed. (Though giving the same presentation two weeks in a row was unexpectedly rough, if only because I felt like I had already gotten the presentation out of me the week before ) The all-consuming fear of speaking publicly receded each time I did it, survived and received positive feedback.
Sometimes, though, you need to tap your support network. The best advice I got came the night before my talk at HighEdWeb, as I confessed my nervousness to a couple of fellow conference attendees watching the Phillies game in the hotel bar. One of them reminded me that I was selected to present at this conference for a very good reason, so I should trust in the smart folks who made that decision. The second was that, when it comes to the topic I am presenting on, I am the expert in the room and people are there because they want to learn from me. Those two insights, while seemingly obvious, were extremely comforting to hear.
Is this real life?
I remember attending HighEdWeb back in 2006 and 2008 and marveling at the speakers. It seemed like such an unattainable goal and an incredible privilege to present at a national conference — on any topic. But what I’ve learned over the years is that good content always wins out in the end. If you have a good idea and valuable information to share, you’re halfway there.
The thing I didn’t realize before is that there are tons of ways to jump into public speaking and presenting. Whether it’s an Ignite event, a Podcamp/Barcamp/Wordcamp event, even a monthly meeting of a local organization (they often look for speakers), the opportunities are out there. Heck, how about your own workplace? Or, failing all else, try recording short videos on YouTube — you can’t see your audience, but at least you’ll get to look your webcam straight in the, er, lens and practice speaking directly and clearly.
But much like listening on Twitter before jumping in to engage, I found it very helpful to simply begin paying closer attention to presentations I was already attending. TEDxBoston in July was extremely valuable, not only for the content of the talks, but for the opportunity to learn from how the speakers delivered them. Whose slides worked, and whose didn’t? What made a talk compelling, and what made it fall flat? (Conveniently, lots of TED Talks are available online if there are no events nearby.)
Who can help me?
Here are some great posts that I have found helpful in thinking about public speaking more effectively and regularly:
More, I hope! The experiences of the past year have certainly lit a fire, and I am already building up a list of presentation ideas and possible outlets for them. But while this is exciting and fun and everything, I am not forgetting the most important question to ask: is this valuable? Not for me, but for the audience. If the answer is no, then I move on. But if the answer is yes… just hand me the clicker.
Cars, in fact, are a type of mobile technology, Bell explained. They are “deeply cultural objects” that play different roles in people’s lives. Bell has spent the past six months traveling around the world — from Portland to Penang, San Francisco to Singapore — unpacking people’s cars, photographing the contents and talking to the owners about it all. Bell and her team reached out to a broad demographic, spanning urban and rural locales, asking people how they use their cars and what they carry in them (and why).
In recent months, I’ve had the pleasure of attending several events in the local series called 
) The all-consuming fear of speaking publicly receded each time I did it, survived and received positive feedback.
