I put together a brief guide to PodCamp DC based on my experiences in the Capitol City as a tourist (and getting lost frequently on the Metro) as well as sessions and other information for PodCamp DC. Enjoy!
Download the PodCamp DC PDF, 1.2 MB.
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As a followup to my previous Snapple Antioxidant Water post, Deana over at Snapple sent me a sample pack of Snapple at the behest of Chris Abraham, who I presume is marketing Snapple to bloggers. I got a 4 pack.
Thoughts:
Is it good? I suppose if you’re a Powerade/Gatorade drinker, you’ll probably like some of the flavors. Personally, I’m more of a Red Bull/Rock Star fan than Gatorade for sugary drinks, on the premise that if I’m going to suffer the consequences of extra empty calories, I’d better get damn jittery from it, too. If Snapple made a “Closest Legal Alternative to Meth in Fruity Flavors” I’d give that a try, if for no other reason than the product name alone.
As for the antioxidant water? I’m going to stick to regular water now.
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What I’ll Be Sharing at PodCamp DC
A few people have wondered what I’ll be sharing at PodCamp DC. I’ve got two sessions blocked out, plus possibly a panel – we’ll see about the last part.
Session 1:
New Media Marketing: How New Media Powers Business. 10 AM Saturday. I’ve been working on refining this ever-evolving presentation which now includes aspects of sales, internet marketing, search engine optimization, and just about everything else, all linked to a framework that you can take home and apply to any product, service, or organization.
If you’re thinking about using blogging, podcasting, social networks, or other new media tools to promote the ideas you care about, this session is for you.
Session 2:
Power Your Personal Network with LinkedIn. 3 PM Saturday. I’ll be co-presenting with Dan Williams, another LinkedIn Power User, on how to use LinkedIn to power your networking skills. This is a session by request from a few participants who’d asked early if there was going to be something about LinkedIn. I’ll be sharing a few of my tips about using the service, what it’s good for, and how to help you build your personal brand with it, including simple but effective techniques you can start using immediately for better results.
Dan’s got even more juice to add to the discussion as the person on LinkedIn ranked #1 in the country for recommendations. He’ll talk about his LinkedIn stories and power tips as well.
Session 3:
Speed Mentoring: Promoting Your Political Ideas in Social Media. 4 PM Saturday. This is an idea based on Dan Patterson‘s PodCamp NYC panel about how social media is changing the political landscape. In this session, I’d love to put a bunch of us together and workshop either a candidate or cause’s social media efforts, showing where social media can optimize a campaign’s efforts to share and spread ideas.
It seemed funny to have a political discussion panel at PodCamp NYC and not have one in the heart of politics itself, Washington, DC.
This is not a discussion on politics itself – this is a collaboration, a brainstorming session, to help those individuals working at organizations with causes to power up their efforts. The ideas and techniques we discuss should apply equally to all parties, beliefs, and campaigns.
If you plan on attending any of the sessions at PodCamp DC that I’ll be participating in, please feel free to ask questions in advance of the event itself – just leave comments here!
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Preparing for PodCamp DC with the Jeff Pulver Method
Jeff Pulver writes a great recurring blog post about how to prepare for an upcoming conference. His method of making a conference a productive experience for you is one that is infinitely valuable, and I highly recommend adopting the framework for your own conference experiences, whether at one of Jeff’s highly recommended VON conferences or unconferences like PodCamps.
Here’s my action plan for PodCamp DC, based on Jeff’s method.
Join the community. Taken care of.
Set your goals. My goals for PodCamp DC are twofold – to share as much as I can of the stuff I’ve been working on with all of the folks in new media who want to hear about it, and to learn from folks doing important work about what they’re doing and how I and my network can help. Social media has given me a rare opportunity to be a part of a community of millions, with thousands just a click away on networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
I especially would like to meet folks who are interested in taking their existing communities in the political and government relations realms into the new media realm. There are a lot of people in new media who can be especially helpful to your work, and I’d love to be able to connect the two worlds together a little.
Say hello. Here I am. There are a lot of ways to get in touch with me. A few include:
My friend Chris Brogan recommends posting a recent photo of yourself before each conference so people know what you look like. To be honest, I haven’t really changed all that much in a decade or so, so this photo is perfectly up to date.
Change my email habits. I’ll definitely be checking email less frequently, probably in the early mornings and evenings. As much as I can, I’ll try to stay in touch.
Study the map of the conference. In this case, Google Maps is the main game, as I’m staying in one spot, helping with the UnKeynote in another spot, and presenting in a third sport. Here’s my public PodCamp DC map.
Be aware of the event schedule, and be in control of your own schedule. Both will be tough, but I think there will be plenty of time for, as Jeff calls it, serendipity.
Originally, PodCamp DC was scheduled for two days, but logistics and other considerations demanded a full one day instead. As a result, I’ll have a little extra time on Sunday if folks want to get together to chat, do some informal stuff, maybe grab a cup of coffee or lunch before I fly back to Boston. If you’d like to schedule a meeting on Sunday, please hit up one of the contact links above, and I’ll do my best.
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Andrew Baron Selling Twitter Account, Database For Sale?
Chris Brogan raised the question people should be asking about Andrew Baron’s eBay sale of his Twitter account.
What are you buying? What’s the value?
Laura Fitton said on Twitter: “you can’t sell relationships.” You can’t. But you sure as heck can sell data.
In the case of Twitter, you can’t export meaningful amounts of data from Twitter followers from Twitter directly.
If Baron put up his Facebook account, that’d be a different story, because I can extract real data from it – names, email addresses, other contact information. At that point, it’s a database, and we buy & sell databases all the time.
What would I pay for that? The going rate is about 1.50 per valid identity on the commercial markets – you can buy header files from credit bureaus with roughly the same data for about1.50 a head if you’re buying in bulk. Experian, Transunion, Equifax – all of them are selling YOU already, at a cost far below what your personal worth is.
Companies are buying and selling your data all the time. I can’t give specifics, but of the companies I’ve worked for in the last decade, most of them bought customer lists at one point or another, and the sad reality is that your personal identity, information, and privacy are dirt cheap.
You are for sale.
A piece of Andrew Baron is for sale, as is his followers on Twitter.
He’s just being transparent about it.
Incidentally, if I were a current or future Rocketboom advertiser, I’d buy this account in a heartbeat and run some analytics on it. Who DMs or @s Andrew the most, about what topics, and are those people running media channels of their own that I should advertise on?
Also, you can’t export data from Twitter. But you can cross-reference data pools you already have with Twitter. A social graph of Twitter cross-referenced with your house list and other social networks will tell you quickly who participates in that account’s first level relationships. THAT has value to someone who wants to market to Andrew or his connections.
Combine that with other data pools, and Twitter is giving me something truly usable, something that might be worth paying for.
With the right tools, if I started with a million address email list bought on the cheap from a broker, I could use social networks – especially high profile ones like Andrew’s – to cleanse my list and determine if the addresses were of value. Remember, you can’t pull any data from private or protected profiles publicly – but if you bought a high profile account, you’d gain access to those individuals who established relationships privately but are still hidden publicly. Value.
Oh yeah, and if you see a LinkedIn profile for sale, be afraid. There’s lots of usable data in there.
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Marketing Sucks
Marketing sucks. That’s the perception that many, many consumers have about marketing, for good or ill. Here’s an example of what I mean. Richard Mondello, a high school senior in Dover Plains, New York, recently wrote on his blog:
In my opinion, marketers will always be marketers. It’s their job to manipulate you into purchasing their product or service, and this isn’t arguable.
This is depressing, mostly because Richard’s right. Decades of bad behavior, bad marketing, bad advertising, and general shortsightedness on the part of corporate marketing departments have blackened the profession’s name to the very people we want to reach.
At every opportunity for new means of communicating, bad actors work as fast as possible to piss in the pool in the hopes that they’ll be able to scrape up a few meager commissions or sales before being consigned to the bin of perpetual ignorage by consumers in that channel.
Don’t believe me? Here’s one of my favorite examples – Twitter is 18 months old and has tons of clueless marketers trying to garner attention every hour of every day. Not a single day goes by when I don’t get a follower notification from some asshat marketer whose Twitterstream is only pimpage.
How did it all go wrong? Short term thinking, short term vision. When companies, organizations, or individuals focus only on the short term, whether it’s quarterly results on the Street or whether you can get some action at the single’s bar tonight, the same desperation is created by short term thinking. That combined with a profit above all else mentality has turned marketing into the corporate equivalent of that guy in the bar who smells of equal parts aggression, fear, and desperation – and the target audience stays far, far away.
Marketing can be more than this. Marketing can be more than desperate selling or attention whoring. Marketing can be, at its ideal, the sharing of ideas, the promotion of ideas. One of my favorite quotes from Seth Godin is that marketing can kill people. Bad marketing has basically been responsible for things like genocide in Darfur or the war in Iraq because the ideas that would have led to the most favorable outcome were not marketed as well as the ideas that have led to current outcomes.
So how do we get from desperate, lonely attention whoring (buy my product! digg my article! watch my video! pay attention to me!) to the ideal McMarketing outcome – billions and billions of lives saved? It really comes down to a change in our perception of what marketing is. Look at what the American Marketing Association says marketing is:
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.
Quick, close your eyes and try to remember that. I’d say marketing has a branding issue, wouldn’t you?
Try this:
Marketing is the sharing of ideas.
The idea that college is affordable with the right solutions.
The idea that a conference can be more than wooden panels and hotel food.
The idea that a marketing podcast can inform and entertain.
The idea that you can change your life for the better in an instant.
We need to change our own belief system about marketing from corporate pimpage to the sharing of ideas, of knowledge, of insight. If you have a product or service that is unremarkable, that is not worth sharing, either change your product or create something on top of the product that is worth sharing. That’s been the basic idea behind the Financial Aid Podcast. Student loans – especially federal student loans – are commodity products. They’re fundamentally more or less the exact same thing, give or take a few minor details. So how do you make a commodity interesting? I couldn’t.
But what I could do was create something else that was interesting – an internet radio show and new media initiative that changed how I thought about financial aid, and in turn helped others to change their ideas about financial aid. Instead of being a boring, obscure process that happened behind closed doors and in back room deals at conferences and golf courses, the Financial Aid Podcast has helped to bring at least part of the financial aid process out into the open, into the digital dialogue. It’s about sharing the ideas I’ve learned in financial aid with everyone and anyone who wants to listen and have a conversation about financial aid.
Are my ideas any good? That’s for the audience to judge, but based on the results so far – thousands of listeners, thousands of friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks, coverage in US News & World Report, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WCVB Boston 5 – I’d say that they’re at least worth talking about to some degree.
If you’re a marketer, the very best thing you can do is to start figuring out what ideas you have that are worth sharing. Not products, not services, not pimpage, but actual ideas. If you work at a company that, frankly, has no ideas worth sharing, you either have to create them, or work for a different company.
What are your ideas worth sharing?
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A few folks have been talking about how following works for them on Twitter – do you follow back everyone who follows you (minus the spambots)? Do you selectively follow some people? How and why?
Here’s my rationale. As I said in a recent post, Twitter is my AP Newswire. As such, I look to Twitter to learn first and foremost – I watch Twitter and see not who’s interesting or attractive or fun or whatever. I look to see who has the information I need most in their Twitterstream and follow.
My day job at the Student Loan Network requires me to stay on top of current events, to keep an eye on markets, to have discussions with the smartest people I can on a regular basis to keep myself sharp. I look to Twitter for folks who work on the inside of firms like Merrill Lynch (ticker: MER), Citigroup (ticker: C), JP Morgan (ticker: JPM), and many others. I look to Twitter for folks as avid about economics and finance as I am. Twitter is my Bloomberg terminal.
My hobby job as PodCamp Co-Founder along with Chris Brogan requires me to stay on top of trends in new media, social media, marketing, PR, and much more. Twitter is the conference that never ends.
My focus on Twitter changes, too. Lately it’s been focused on macroeconomics, politics, marketing, and PR, but back in February it was heavily focused for a couple of weeks on object oriented classes in PHP, and I followed/unfollowed a lot of people when my focus changed.
Just as I have a choice between CNBC and Bloomberg on TV or the Boston Globe and BostonNOW, I have choices about who I follow on Twitter, based on what I need Twitter to teach me. If I don’t follow you, it’s not because I don’t like you or because you’re irrelevant. It’s that what you’re doing right now isn’t necessarily in my field of focus – but may be in the future.
I try to keep the number of people I follow between 300 and 400 – any more than that, and Twitter becomes unusable because I lose more information than I gather.
To keep balanced and make sure I don’t miss anything, I check my Replies tab religiously.
That, in a nutshell, is my follow policy. What’s yours?
Quoting Gillian Tett of the Financial Times:
In recent years, the concept of a “Goldilocks” economy has permeated the policymaking world. For after decades of painful economic booms and busts, politicians and central bankers have become wedded to the idea of chasing a growth rate that is neither “too hot, nor too cold, but just right” – as Goldilocks famously said, in reference to her porridge.
I’ll take a moment to make another fairy tale reference. Depending on the storyteller and the story source, there are three bears in the Goldilocks story…
… and in some of those stories, when the bears awaken, they kill her.
Not a good omen for our economy.
China’s power today is driven by economics first and foremost. Want to lead the charge, make a difference, influence their human rights policy? Forget the Olympics, forget Olympic Torch protests. The Olympics are symbolic, and while as a Buddhist, I certainly acknowledge and applaud any attention given to the plight of Tibet, protests will accomplish very little in the long run.
Want to really make a change?
Every time you go to the store, check to see where a product is made. If you have a choice between goods made in China and any other nation (and you may not), buy the product made somewhere else as often as you can.
Commit today to buy 25% fewer goods made in China, and 25% more goods made in the USA or other countries that support the human rights initiatives you value.
Economic power made the giant, and economic power can change its course on human rights – but only if you have the will as a consumer to vote with your wallet, no matter how great the sale is.
I’m loading up my iPod before heading back to Boston, and it occurred to me this simple thing:
With as much content as we have available to us – TED Talks, Google Talks, Google Employee Discussions, NY 2012, PodCamps, etc. – if you own the gear and don’t arrive at your destination smarter than you left, you’re not taking advantage of the technology.
If you have an iPod capable of video (and yes, I recognize many don’t, but for those who do…) load up your personal graduate school of life and arrive smarter.
