For those interested, these are my slide decks from 4 of the 6 sessions I did at PodCamp NYC.
As per all things PodCamp, these are released under the Creative Commons 3.0 US by-nc-sa license.
A few people asked me why I presented so much at PodCamp NYC. Here’s the simplest reason: I get too comfortable. By that, I mean it’s not only human nature, but very much in my own nature to hang out with people I know and enjoy being with. At an event like PodCamp, that’s bad. Very, very bad, because it means I’m not taking the opportunity to meet new people. My way around this, my mindhack if you will, is to do lots of sessions on different things and see who shows up, then meet them. Based on the sheer volume of emails in my inbox waiting for replies, I think the strategy is working. Hello to all of my new acquaintances and friends!
Action is all that matters.
The podcasting world has been obsessing about metrics lately, and I thought I’d pitch my two cents in as a podcaster whose show makes a fair bit of coin in the world of student loans. Here’s the rub:
Action is all that matters.
Forget audience size. Forget CPM, PPC, Adsense, and all of the monetization strategies that are being bantered around, because unless you’re already a highly successful web entrepreneur with a large web-based audience, these strategies will largely waste your time.
Why? Most advertising models are based on mass media. They’re holdovers from the radio and televison broadcast days, when there was no clickstream, no digital tracking. You slapped up a billboard in Times Square or ran an ad in the Washington Post, and they told you how many people roughly might see it, and charge you a rate based on those numnbers.
Those numbers are largely unhelpful. Why? Because podcasting is a high engagement, narrow band communications mechanism. If you want mass media audience sizes, then go work for the mass media and use the existing, established tools that work in mass media systems. Podcasting is not mass media – it’s niche media.
Here’s a question: if you sell Gulfstream airplanes and you want to reach your goal of selling one every two years (which will feed a family of four and house them VERY nicely), how many audience members in your podcast do you need? The answer is: one that buys a plane from you every two years. If you have 100,000 listeners or viewers and none of them buy a plane, you effectively have no audience for monetization purposes. If you have 5 listeners and one buys a plane from you every six months, you have all the audience you’ll ever need and then some.
Action is all that matters.
I sell the services of the Student Loan Network. That means that my audience listeners need to get connected with our services. If I have 100 listeners and 99 are customers, my podcast is a success. If I have 1,000,000 listeners and none are customers, my podcast is a failure.
What if you don’t sell airplanes or loans? Find something that fits your audience well and pays decently, and if you can’t find anything, either start a podcast in one of the industries that pays well, or find a different model to pay the bills and put food on the table. At PodCamp NYC, I mentioned during the marketing session that you already have over 10,000 advertisers at your disposal through affiliate programs, or pay-per-action. Instead of trying to sell artificial sweetener on a technology show, sell technology on a technology. It will better suit the needs of your audience, and will likely put more food on your table.
Why don’t content producers like the affiliate program model? Simple – it pushes the responsibility for sales to the content producer. If your program sucks, but you’re getting paid on impressions (CPM), then you will still possibly earn a few bucks. However, if you work in the affiliate model, your audience will likely never buy a product from you and you won’t make any money at all. That’s why advertisers are willing to pay more for affiliate programs versus other forms of advertising – the risk has been offloaded to the content producer.
Make a podcast that rocks the house. Make a podcast that inspires your audience to become a real community, to lend you their trust and appreciation, and then judiciously connect your community to products and services that are a great fit, and you will make frighteningly good money.
Action is all that matters.
Chris Brogan started the meme, CC Chapman continued it, so here’s my contribution – how to find me at PodCamp NYC.
I’ll be arriving late Friday afternoon, probably an hour or two before the party at SLATE. I’ll be at the party at SLATE both nights, as well as supporting podsafe musicians with Natalie Gelman‘s concert at Stain Bar Friday night and Brother Love‘s CD Release Party Saturday night. Amidst all the activities, I’ll be doing some presentations, running around having fun, and trying to be helpful as best as I can for the largest PodCamp yet.
I will be sharing at these sessions:
I’ll also be at the Student Loan Network booth on the second floor mezzanine at these times:
Please stop on by to say hi and enjoy what we’ve got at the SLN booth. There will be the usual corporate stuff like business cards, but we’ll also have:
If you want to say hi, please do. I don’t bite. I’ll be wearing my PodCamp Boston organizer shirt, which is depicted here:
Finally, I want to give a huge shoutout to the organizers of PodCamp NYC. I’ve been following the evolution of this PodCamp since it was announced, and despite more than a few roadblocks (like venue change, etc.), the team of John C. Havens, Adam Broitman, Laura Allen, Eric Skiff, Jason Van Orden, Caroline Desrochers, and everyone who is pitching in to help have done a FANTASTIC job managing the chaos. The sheer number of people registering to attend despite it being a holiday weekend is a true testament to the power of this event and the work they’ve done in building the community’s trust in it to give up time for it.
Oh, and be sure to print out the UnOfficial Guide to PodCamp NYC. I checked with Kinko’s and they wanted to charge $6,428 for 300 copies, so that was a no go.
Chris Brogan and I extend to you an invitation to hang out in Stockholm, Sweden, June 12-13, 2007 for PodCamp Europe. Jeff Pulver‘s organization, VON, is donating an enormous big room (or two) and we’re going to fill it with fun stuff and people – including you, ideally.
As with all PodCamps, it’s free to attend (excepting PodCruise Miami, which is technically free to anyone on the boat, but you have to pay to get on the boat) and will provide a great community gathering place for podcasters, bloggers, and new media folks around Europe.
Warning in advance to participants: I apologize for being American, and therefore functionally unilingual, though I think I can ask about the restroom (washroom/privy/loo) in a couple of languages. As we roll with the process, those of you in the international community, please help Chris and I with our unintentional but highly probable cultural faux-pas, like formatting dates incorrectly and other stuff. We thank you in advance for your help.
Chris Brogan and I have been watching and participating in the dynamo that is PodCamp NYC, and he recently pondered how to keep a sense of community in a large crowd? On ko chi shin – let’s look outside conferences. Remember the Dunbar number? It’s a sociology theory that says the maximum group size of any given social network in which a person can maintain stable relationships – i.e. where everyone knows your name – is about 150. Once you get beyond that, things don’t work as well, according to sociologist Robin Dunbar.
Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.
What does this mean for PodCamp NYC? Dunbar’s theories tend to suggest that people will self-reorganize around 150 connections, either dropping some, reprioritizing, or in some cases, like in communes, simply splitting off to a new commune or colony.
This is what I believe will happen at PodCamp NYC, and in virtually every large UnConference. People will simply divide up into optimal group sizes for the application at hand – it may not be Dunbar’s number, which is more of a theoretical maximum limit. I believe that people will naturally self-group, and in those groups you’ll have lots of opportunities for conversation.
What DOES need to happen is to ensure that groups are as diverse as possible – no college student group over here, no Fortune 500 executive group over there. The individual sessions, I believe, will help with that, as there will be lots of interest from all the demographics in different topics. It’s up to session speakers and ambassadors to encourage as many connections as possible, and to keep mixing things up, so that groups, while they will form, will be an enjoyable experience for all.
Above all else, if everyone keeps in mind the central ideas of PodCamp – learn, share, grow, contribute – then everyone will walk away richer for the experience. Even though the audience size will in aggregate be large, I think keeping these tenets in mind will help encourage the grassroots experience.
See you at PodCamp.
A few people have asked me about how PodCamp got started, the history behind it, etc. so I thought I’d take some time to recollect my perspective of how this grand adventure got started.PodCamp more or less got started on a Yahoo Group called New England Podcasting (since moved to Google) on February 6, 2006, when a few of us were lamenting that all the big podcasting events seemed to be on the West Coast – Podcast and Portable Media Expo, Podcast Hotel in Seattle, Podcast Academy, and so forth. Initially, we’d talked about calling it the New England Podcasting Expo (I still own that domain name, amusingly), and the group as a whole had both eagerness and skepticism about creating such a large event. Some of the remarks were prescient and funny in retrospect.
I’d eagerly vote for a Northeast/New England Podcast expo of some kind. My initial feeling is that it should start relatively small – so as to not make us all instantly insane – and then grow it. Maybe the first one or two should be like a meetup on steroids; if they can be managed well, tightly, then you could conceivably have one every six months, or even one per quarter. Certainly trying to go for a Podcast/Portable Media Expo right out of the gate would be cumbersome, but theoretically possible. – me
The podfather of New England, C.C. Chapman, played devil’s advocate in the debate:
Ok one thing I’m not clear on is the “WHY” for this event. I’m with John that by calling it an Expo it makes it seem like something bigger. I like the idea of having a big get together. LOVE that idea, but I’m not sure the world needs another “expo” with Podcast Hotel this month, Podcast Academy happeningi n Boston in April, the PodcastPalooza thing in Texas in June and then the Podcast Expo in the fall in Cali. Oh and don’t forget PodcasterCon in January. Kind of crowded if you get what I mean. Do we expect people to come from outside of New England to this? Just sort of playing devil’s advocate for a minute.
Michael Johnson of the Indigenous People’s Music Podcast even volunteered a meeting room or two at Foxwoods. Steve Garfield ventured this comment about the logistics of setting up a conference:
you could organize it as an un-conference see this:
https://barcamp.org/
Steve, you’re always the visionary.
Ultimately, the time frame we’d set – a couple of months – didn’t seem feasible, so we shelved the idea for a while. Then in May, I went to BarCamp Boston and met up with Chris Brogan and Bryan Person. We ran around a lot, recording various sessions, and realized two things:
1. BarCamp was extremely technical.
2. The BarCamp unconference model where everyone just kind of does stuff was a really good one.
Snarkily, after BarCamp Boston, I made something of an offhand comment:
Well, we have standing offers from CC Chapman for Babson College and Michael Kickingbear for space at Foxwoods. We’re all Type A personalities with a billion things on our plates, which means we don’t have the time to put together a full-out, hardcore conference. So here’s a thought, an idea, something for everyone to debate,
encapsulated into one word.PodCamp.
Chris Brogan and I started talking an awful lot about a conference idea, and Chris dropped this on the group:
I mentioned a few weeks back about wanting to get together and do some technical howto exchanges with people, basically sharing out our skill sets with the mindset that someone knows something you don’t, and you know something they don’t. Tentatively, I’m thinking about a September gathering timeframe, and probably somewhere that’s train-accessible to Boston but still affordable (free) as a gathering spot. That’s all I want to share about that right now. Does that sound even vaguely interesting? If we get enough “yes” or “tell me more” type responses, I’ll put even more effort into making it really memorable (like flying a top-shelf podcaster or 2 in to visit with us all, etc).
Of course, we eviscerated Chris for implying that New England’s podcasters weren’t top-shelf, but once over that little bit of semantic, Bryan Person suggested:
I, for one, will not be attending the Expo and wouldn’t be opposed to a local hands-on session in September. Mrs. Person is pregnant and due the second week of October, so I need to be close to home. I throw this out: what about a PodCamp the Saturday after Labor Day, September 9? Just a thought.
And the official announcement from Chris Brogan:
The plan for the event is a 2 day UNconference, similar to BarCamp in format and style. We’re at the very early planning stages, and need lots of help from whoever can participate in some way. Remember, unconferences are built by the participants, for the participants, and are fueled by your participation as an attendee.
At this point, we need it all: venue, sponsors, helpers, podsafe bands
You can help by going to https://podcamp.pbwiki.com (real live URL forthcoming – thanks Chris Penn and Financial Aid Podcast), signing up, signing in, and thinking of ways we can get this all put together. The password is: nepod
This won’t be just another meet-up. The style and format of events like this is such that we can have gear show and tells, podcasting 101 talks, panels on how to work with bands on getting more podsafe music, and whatever else interests you. If you’re interested in podcasting at any level, there’s something that someone else will want to talk with you about.
Reading up about how BarCamp works is a good way to understand what we’re doing here.
At this point, it was mid-June, around June 20. The rocketship took off after this – the organizing team of Steve Garfield, Chris Brogan, Bryan Person, and me got off the ground. After about 6 weeks of search, we settled on historic Bunker Hill Community College with the help of Adam Weiss and the Boston Museum of Science.
PodCamp Boston arrived in the blink of an eye, literally. At one point during the setup process, we weren’t sure we’d have enough money to even have the event, and the next thing we knew, we were 33% over our needs. One week, we weren’t sure 100 people would come, and two weeks later, we had 400 people registered, of which about 300 attended.
Some quick looks back:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=729mmj0aaMg[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfN_7y9vvq0[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WAw4NLEZdQ[/youtube]
The funny thing was, the roller coaster didn’t stop at Boston. It kept rolling, kept picking up steam:
Podcamp Atlanta – March 16-18, 2007 at Emory University
Podcamp Toronto – February 24-25, 2007 @ Ryerson University
PodCamp Second Life – January 26-28, 2007 in Second Life
Podcamp Germany – January 12 – 14 in Berlin
PodCamp Copenhagen – December 10, 2006 in Copenhagen
PodCamp Kompresory – Dec. 11-12, 2006, Atlanta
PodCampWest – Nov. 18-19, 2006, San Francisco
PodCamp Pittsburgh – Nov. 10-12, 2006
PodCamp Boston – September 9-10, 2006. The first-ever PodCamp!
This weekend, April 7, is PodCamp NYC, in the heart of the city that never sleeps. We’ll have over 1,000 people registered to attend, over 60 presentations, and new opportunities to build and grow our community.
What a wild ride.
