Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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Tennessee Never Cried – new Matthew Ebel video

I had the opportunity to film Matthew Ebel playing live at AS220 in Providence at NewBCamp this past Saturday. After some uphill learning curves, I got the hang of the tricks I needed in order to make this video, and here’s the final result.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1LqUUv2cC8[/youtube]

Enjoy it!

Please leave all comments on the video itself, and rate it – I’d love for more people to see Matthew at work.

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February 26, 2008
Reflections on NewBCamp 08

For those who didn’t head out to PodCamp Toronto this weekend, another UnConference launched in New England – NewBCamp. Very closely aligned in concept (though no connection) to PodCamp Pittsburgh‘s BootCamp PGH, NewBCamp was created by Sara Streeter, a student at Johnson & Wales University, to achieve the dual goals of introducing new people to the various technologies available and to energize the Providence area technology scene with the power of new media.

I went to NewBCamp to share a little and see someone else’s take on the UnConference idea, and I’m pleased to say that NewBCamp is very much the same energy, enthusiasm, and excitement that embodies the PodCamp series of events. I think the Providence area has got its own UnConference series, and it’ll be interesting to see if NewBCamp and BootCamp can work together, since they’re so closely aligned.

Even a veteran can learn lots of new stuff, and I’m certainly no exception. Sara’s session, Speed Mentoring, is an absolute gem of a session that I would love to incorporate into PodCamps. It’s like Speed Dating, but instead of relationships, a few people self-designate as mentors in specific topics, and then folks in the room can cluster towards topics that they’re interested in or that they need help in. Those small, focused discussions were revelatory in their own right, but I think the Speed Mentoring concept is a nice twist to conversation.

I had the opportunity to fine-tune and present a more story-like version of my New Media 101 session. Matthew Ebel was kind enough to stream it on uStream.tv, and recorded part of it here:

A full version with better audio will be produced and released soon.

The day concluded with a concert at AS220 in Providence with Matthew Ebel. Over 90 minutes, Matthew took us all on a fantastic musical tour of his work, including a new version of probably my all time favorite song of his, I Will Wait For You.

NewBCamp was a fantastic experience, and I hope to see it flourish and accomplish its twin missions of introducing new people to technology and bringing a boost to the Providence technology and new media sectors.

“The sun’s coming up in the morning, and I’ll be there…”

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February 24, 2008
Unsponsored Review: SuperDuper

I wanted to take a moment to very publicly thank the developers at Shirt Pocket for making SuperDuper, the backup software for the Mac.

A few weeks ago, my MacBook Pro started making noise. A LOT of noise. One of the fans broke and made my Mac sound like it was harvesting grain or sanding plywood. Needless to say, I was less than thrilled at the idea of repairs, and Apple confirmed what I’d not wanted to hear – 3 to 5 days of repair time to get the machine fixed.

At the Student Loan Network, we have extra machines in case things like this happen, but as anyone who’s ever gone through the process knows, sitting in on a hot spare means operating in an environment that isn’t yours. Shortcuts and aliases, preferences, it’s literally like trying to drive someone else’s car, wearing someone else’s clothes, living in someone else’s house. It’s never pleasant, though usually tolerable.

Enter SuperDuper. I originally chose to use it because it uses half the disk footprint of Apple’s Time Machine, and unlike most users, I actually do backup my data regularly. In the manual for SuperDuper, it says it’s possible to boot from its backups. Unfortunately, I found out that if you back up to an image on disk rather than a disk partition, it’s not bootable.

Except…

… If you boot from the Mac OS X install/repair CD and fire up Disk Utility, you can load the disk image of a SuperDuper backup, mount it, and use it to restore your hard drive.

So when the AppleCare box came for me to ship my ailing MacBook Pro to Apple, I did a final incremental backup, shut down, booted the spare MacBook we have in stock, did a restore, hit reboot, and hoped.

If I believed in an external deity, I would have yelled that my prayers were answered. Not only did the MacBook boot, but it loaded in my environment, with all my Quicksilver hot keys, iTunes, everything, exactly as I’d left it when I shut down the MacBook Pro. It was like my computer just decided to go on a hardware diet but otherwise was exactly the same, not a thing out of place.

Today, the MacBook Pro came back from Apple. I did the process in reverse – backed up the MacBook, Disk Utility, restore – and here I am, typing on my MacBook Pro, as if it had never left. Only now the fan is quiet.

SuperDuper not only saved my data, but it made a 3 day absence of my computer more than tolerable – it let me work uninterrupted, save for the hour to backup and the hour to restore. I can’t thank the folks at Shirt Pocket enough for making such a damn fine utility, and it has certainly paid for itself MANY times over in the past few days.

If you run Mac OS X, go buy SuperDuper and start backing up today.

Full disclosure: I paid money to Shirt Pocket, Inc., not the other way around.
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February 22, 2008
Don't be that guy… or gal… doing blogger outreach.

I got a promotional email from Big Machine Media today cc’ed to a list of 340 podcasters and bloggers, promoting their musicians.

Good try, gang.

Look, a lot has already been said about blogger outreach by better minds than mine.

Here’s where this campaign really fell flat.

First, please, please, please if you’re going to do outreach, at least BCC your list. I’d actually prefer that you “go pro” and use a mailing list service like Blue Sky Factory to manage your mailings, so that you have comprehensive blacklist and other filtering at your fingertips. On those occasions when I need to do outreach, I set up a segmentation that says, “Never, ever send this email to the same address twice”.

Second, put an obvious, functional opt-out in the email.

Third, if you’re going to pitch me, PITCH me. Show me why you deserve an ounce of my time or attention. The email I got had a relatively decent subject line, but a really poor payload. This company wants to promote their musicians to me. Fine and good, I love promoting musicians (like Rich Palmer, Matthew Ebel, Anji Bee, Rebecca Loebe, Black Lab, Natalie Gelman, Rayko KRB, and countless others) and I love hearing new, independent music, but the pitch in this message was about as exciting as getting my grocery bill via email, which is to say not at all. (perhaps you have exciting groceries? I do not)

What would make an effective pitch to me? Well, you could send me a link to an MP3 ( <= free MP3! ) so that I could hear what you have to offer – that’d be a start. Tell me WHY your musicians are so good, and whether or not musicians like to be compared to others, tell me at least who they kind of sound like – for example, Matthew Ebel sounds like the love child of Billy Joel and Ben Folds with a dash of William Shatner from time to time, and an ounce or two of John Mayer.

Marketing music is difficult under the best circumstances, and lord knows I’ve made more than my share of missteps. At least maybe this list of basics will help music marketers who WANT to do outreach be a little more effective.

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February 22, 2008
Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

If you want your favorite blogs to be ultraportable, check out Feedjournal. It makes an old-school newspaper out of your RSS feeds.

Here’s today’s Christopher Penn morning paper. (PDF, 292 kb)

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February 22, 2008
What metrics matter to podcasters?

A recent question sent into Marketing Over Coffee – what metrics matter for podcasters to measure their success, a la the ADM?

Ultimately, traffic metrics are only the top of the funnel – they’re the raw number of eyeballs in, and that in itself isn’t worth much except for general trends.

No matter what statistic you use – file downloads, Feedburner numbers, etc. the main value of basic traffic statistics is trend growth – does your show have more audience this month than last month? Does your show have more audience this year than last year, and what kind of growth are you looking at – 1%? 5%? 50%?

It’s more important to use a consistent growth metric than a standardized one – if you consistently measure on Feedburner numbers, then you have a baseline to measure growth. If you consistently use files downloaded with status code 200 from Apache, you can measure based on that.

Having two statistics – Feedburner + Apache – is good for ensuring that trends are consistent. If Apache completed downloads are radically different than Feedburner numbers, you need to investigate why. Is it a spambot scraping your content? Is it people listening straight off the web site without a download? If metrics matter, your chosen benchmarks should move in tandem – 10% growth in Apache is 10% growth in Feedburner.

I think it’s vitally important for podcasters to also chart out their funnels, even for shows with nothing to sell. For example, Marketing Over Coffee right now doesn’t have a revenue model per se, at least in the sense of a widget for sale. But we do have conversion metrics we want to examine – blog comments, subscribers to the feed, etc. and rolling forward, we’re almost certainly going to put out a newsletter. We may even be able to measure our success by speaking gigs, etc., but unless you’re living in a CPM advertising world, eyeballs and ears don’t count for much.

The Student Loan Network measures the Financial Aid Podcast by both growth of the house list and loan volume – two very clear, revenue-generating sales metrics. Those count for a lot more than eyeballs and ears.

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February 21, 2008
John Wall Nails Trade Shows

Want some of the best advice about being a trade show exhibitor? The Ronin Marketeer, John Wall, has it all for you.

For more of John, check out Marketing Over Coffee, too.

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February 21, 2008
Quick look: the Nokia n810

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about this little machine ever since Podshow’s sponsorship of it with a few prominent podcasters I listen to, like CC Chapman and Julien Smith. Yesterday I got to play with one of the boxes, courtesy of Peta Andersen, and I think one of these is in my future soon.

Why?

Take a look at this picture. What do you see?

That’s an n810, and it’s running terminal.

The n810 is a Linux box. Yes, it comes with all the shiny applets and stuff, but it also comes with a Linux distribution called Maemo. Maemo makes the n810 a big deal because it’s a variant of Debian Linux, and that means you get a command line.

Poking around a little more, that terminal is running bash, and apt-get is installed on there.

apt-get, if you’re unfamiliar with Debian Linux, is a package manager that lets you download and install packages from the command line. To install, say, wget, you’d type apt-get install wget when you’re online and the service would do the rest.

Why is this a big deal? Unlike my iPod Touch, which I still love, the n810 is a true portable computer. The existence of a bash shell and apt-get means that I can run most of my marketing software (a lot of the stuff I do is on the command line on my Mac, such as wget, perl, bash scripts, etc.) from a microcomputer in my pocket. That plus a large, tactile keyboard makes this little device a winner.

Now if only I could get a better price than $400…

If you’re a podcaster promoting your show’s coupon codes, you are welcome to post the codes in the comments.

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February 20, 2008
Sometimes, the responsible choice is walking away
I read with dismay this story on MSNBC about people breaking into their retirement funds to pay for housing and other debts they’ve accrued.

Now, understand that I work for a financial institution, a lending company. It is in my short term interest and financial welfare to recommend that people should always pay their debts, and for the most part, if you have the ability to repay, you should.

However, in cases like the story above, sometimes the responsible thing is to walk away.

Which is worse?
- Declare bankruptcy, default on your loans, and take a 7 year hit in which you pretty much are cut out of the lending world?
- Deplete your retirement, default on your loans anyway, and not only take a 7 year hit on credit, but also be wholly dependent on welfare and charity for the last 20 years of your life?
Which is worse?

The logical conclusion, the business conclusion, is to walk away from your debts. Don’t think that businesses don’t make that decision every day. Sallie Mae (ticker:SLM) lost a deal with JC Flowers – they walked away. There were consequences, but the consequences of walking away were weighed by JC Flowers and they decided that walking away made the most financial sense.

There’s a culture encouraged by financial institutions that there’s a moral penalty for walking away, and that moral pressure is one of the many forces used by companies to keep individuals in obligations, whether or not they have the ability to repay.

Here’s the problem with that. It’s short term thinking. For the citizens in the MSNBC story, it is in my long term interests as a taxpaying citizen of the United States for that borrower to walk away. Companies come and go, but that citizen, if he depletes his retirement, will be dependent on me and others for a subsistence lifestyle. Just as he’s trading his future for the present, so are financial institutions trading America’s future for the present if they continue to encourage debt holdings by consumers who simply cannot pay and will not be able to pay.

Conclusion: if you’re a financial institution with a consumer who cannot repay, that loan is going to decay sooner or later anyway. (unless it’s a student loan which can never be forgiven or written off by the consumer) Write it off now, preserve that citizen’s retirement and savings, and help them be able to buy your services later on down the road. Think long term, think big picture.
February 20, 2008
Why Keynote Speakers Violate PodCamp Rules
I’m pleased to see the ever continuing evolution of PodCamp as a community gathering. It’s amazing to see how people adapt PodCamp to fit what’s appropriate in their communities and local cultures, and I hope we continue to see new innovations. I wanted to clarify something that occurred to me on the drive into the office this morning:

Keynote speakers are a violation of the PodCamp rules.

Now, the most recent PodCamp to have keynote speakers was PodCamp Nashville, and I want to be perfectly clear this is not saying their event was bad or their organizers did something wrong – they did not, and from those who attended, it sounded like a great PodCamp. This is an opinion and a request going forward.

Here are the Six Rules of PodCamp:
1. All attendees must be treated equally. Everyone is a rockstar.
2. All content created must be released under a Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
3. All attendees must be allowed to participate. (subject to limitations of physical space, of course)
4. All sessions must obey the Law of 2 Feet – if you’re not getting what you want out of the session, you can and should walk out and do something else. It’s not like you have to get your money’s worth!
5. The event must be new-media focused – blogging, podcasting, video on the net.
6. The financials of a PodCamp must be fully disclosed in an open ledger, except for any donor/sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous.
The reason why Keynote speakers are a violation of the PodCamp rules relates to rules 1, 3, and 4.

Rule 1. Keynote speakers are by default not equal to other participants. They’re placed in a position of prominence above other participants.

Rule 3. Keynote speaker slots are likely not going to be put up for general availability. The whole reason to have a keynote speaker is to select someone special, so it’s unlikely that anyone can speak at the keynote.

Rule 4. Keynotes typically have nothing going on alongside of them, which means participants have no other content options, and therefore cannot exercise the Law of 2 Feet.

Of the three rules, #1 is the most important. PodCamp is built on the foundation that all participants are equal.

When Chris Brogan and I set out our own guidelines at the first PodCamp for the UnKeynote, we agreed:
- An introductory statement and welcome by organizers is more than appropriate
- Logistical issues should ALWAYS be presented – restrooms are here, organizers wear this color shirt or this badge so if you need help, grab them
- Thanks for coming to PodCamp
- A reminder that PodCamp is YOUR conference, not ours, and the experience you have is driven solely by participants, not organizers
Like I said at the beginning of this post, this is relatively uncharted territory, but important to address now. No one in the past did anything wrong, but I’d like this guideline to be in the minds of organizers from now on:

Keynote speakers are NOT okay at PodCamps.

What are your thoughts?
February 19, 2008

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