No surprise, I’m going to PodCamp Boston 4. How could I not?
I’ll be leading three discussions at PodCamp Boston 4, and I encourage you to drop in and say hi.
1. What’s now for what’s next?
What are the things we should be doing now to prepare for what’s next?
2. Marketing Makeover
Let’s get a few people to bravely volunteer their marketing programs and web sites, and we’ll all critique – constructively – together, from SEO to social media to old school. Think of it like Extreme Makeover, only about your marketing and no comments about your physical fitness or hair style.
3. Marketing Over Coffee Live
Marketing Over Coffee, the marketing podcast I do with John Wall, will be doing another live session this year, with special guests Chris Brogan and CC Chapman. Casual, fun, and actionable are the themes we’re going for. Come participate!
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Every conference these days has a hashtag and attendees are (unless explicitly prohibited) tweeting, live-blogging, streaming audio and video. If you wanted to, from your desk, you could attend nearly every conference in the world, and for free as opposed to paying 50-5000 to attend. In terms of content, you’d probably get anywhere from 80% – 99% of the content presented.
If you can attend 95% of the conference virtually and not pay, or attend 100% of the conference in person and pay, which will most people rationally choose? Which would you choose?
Right now, social media, for all its glamour and buzz, is still a relatively small space compared to the world of business as a whole. As it grows, how long will it be before conference organizers have to clamp down on usage to avoid completely devaluing their conferences?
Will social media, in other words, burn conferences to the ground? Yes – and it should.
My answer as co-founder of PodCamp and co-organizer of PodCamp Boston 4 is one we’ve been researching and looking at for years. Whether live or recorded, the talking head portion of the conference is something that is part of the old conference model.
While I love speaking publicly, I also recognize that it’s not terribly valuable in and of itself. I could convey the exact same information with a video camera and a YouTube account, and in fact I’ve done this to a degree. 60+ people saw my PAB 2009 presentation live. Over 300 have seen it virtually. Did the attendees of PAB 2009 get more out of the public speaking experience than the people at their desks? No, not really.
What we’ve been exploring with PodCamp year after year is how to take the other parts of conferences and amplify them, the parts you cannot get out of a talking head presentation. Side conversations in hallways. One to one interactions. Spontaneous group discussions. These are all things that you can’t bottle, and honestly, you can’t tweet, stream, or liveblog either. There’s simply no way for you, as a new media journalist, to be at 300 mini-sessions, or 3,000 micro-presentations, and if the conversations are valuable, you’ll be too busy participating to be archiving and broadcasting – and that’s as it should be.
What I think the conference model will evolve to, and where PodCamp is leading along with the other *Camp events, is the truly interactive community brainshare. Would I pay $500 to see Seth Godin speak? Sure. Would I pay more to sit down over beer with Seth and a few other folks at a roundtable and have him look at my marketing campaign, maybe sketch out some ideas on a napkin? Heck yeah. Multiply that times many tables over many hours and I’d walk away with a literal goldmine of useful information that’s tailored to me and my business. That’s what we want to bring more of to PodCamp – fewer talking heads and more sharing brainspaces.
When you walk away from a PodCamp, I don’t want you to say “that was a great conference!”. I want you to say, “I met and learned from some awesome people at PodCamp!” because in the end, your community is your strength. The conference is just a convenient place for the community to meet.
What do you think the future of conferences will be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
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Last night I had the opportunity to attend Radian6’s Rockstars of Social CRM. Interesting event. The panel discussion was mostly on interaction with customers, but all of the side conversations throughout the night made it absolutely epic. Some highlights:
Talking with Olivier Blanchard about the ultimate evolution of social media and speculating what true mastery of communications looks like.
Geeking out with Dan York over yet even more new stuff about Google Wave, including rich media in Waves and Wavelets. Incredible. Stay tuned as he’ll have a video we recorded about what Wave will make possible that’s beyond our ability to grasp yet.
Talking with Chris Newton about some of the new back-end features of Radian6’s integration with Salesforce. Honestly, I’m not sure they even fully get what they’ve created, but if they’re both lucky and good, they’re going to manufacture a bucket of money. We’ll see if the idea discussed over dinner can turn them from a million dollar category business to a billion dollar category business. Let’s hope they do.
Hanging out with the Boston social media crowd.
The true power of events like this isn’t even in the entertainment or the presentation, but in putting lots of very smart people in one room and letting the chips fall where they may. Last night, as long as folks were paying attention and studying carefully what was being demo’ed, everyone was dealt a flush hand. If you were there, I hope you took advantage of the amazing conversations and know what the future looks like for the next 12-18 months in social media.
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Podcasters Across Borders 2009 has wrapped up and the team of Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche threw yet another impressive event. This year’s PAB theme was ostensibly bringing outside knowledge into the podcasting world, but the general subject of many of the presentations was on story more than anything – ways to more effectively communicate your story from Six String Nation to a Hollywood career. There were some spectacular new tools and techniques debuted which I look forward to integrating into my shows, the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, ideas that I think will, if they work well, bring things up a notch. Also picked up some great new photography techniques I’ll be trying out soon.
Along the way, I presented an 18 minute talk on monetization and why it’s vital to new media. Longtime readers of this blog will find many of the themes to be as familiar as old friends.
I also did my usual Sunday morning semi-improv presentation, My Top 20 Social Media Tools. Unlike the other presentation, I’m not publishing this presentation in any context, and here’s why: you had to be there and ready.
The Sunday morning presentation is always a tough one for people to make. It’s at 8 AM, which, after a night of partying, only the hardcore attendees can usually make. Delivering a super-tight, all-meat presentation that many have expressed a desire to see is my way of thanking them for making that extra effort to show up.
It’s also part of a martial arts lesson my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, is constantly reinforcing with us. Very often in the black belt class, he’ll show a technique only once as a way of helping us train our minds to capture and catch as much information as possible, to be vigilant about paying attention.
Social media in some ways makes us reliant on the crowd, reliant on the tools, reliant on waiting for someone to retweet or blog or podcast an important event. That laziness – and it is mental laziness – softens our ability to capture vitally important things that happen which may never happen again. Think about your own life. Have you ever had the experience of missing a child’s first important event, missing a news story break on the street right in front of you, missing a key piece of information at a conference? I know I’ve missed information, especially in the dojo, because of a lack of focus. I know I’ve missed some terrific photos due to inattentiveness.
Thus, that presentation will never happen again, at least not like that. The slides won’t be posted, the video won’t be uploaded, the information never shown again. If you were there – fully and wholly there, meaning you were paying attention and not twittering, blogging, chatting, etc. – then you got some information I hope you find useful. If you weren’t there, then please make the effort to actually show up at events like Podcasters Across Borders or PodCamp rather than hoping someone will live stream/live tweet/live be there for you. You’ll find that there are many more gems from the weekend which will probably not be published from other presenters and attendees as well.
Also, big shout outs to all of the longtime friends and fabulous conversations from the weekend, from Marko Kulik’s photo advice to intense debates about the future of media with Whitney Hoffman, Tod Maffin, and Julien Smith, to the many other great conversations over the weekend.
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I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking on the Robust Online Content panel with Dr. Matthew Grant, Phil Juliano from Novell, Valeria Maltoni from Sungard, and Mike O’Toole from PJA on Monday at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. One of my personal themes (that I didn’t articulate in the panel) for the conference has been souvenirs from conferences.
My friend Chris Brogan has an interesting quote – when times are good, people love strategy. When times are bad, people want tactics. I’ll take this a step further for conferences: people want something to take home. In this economy, people want a souvenir that they can take away that’s immediately usable, something that, when they sit down at their desk the day they get back, they can plug in and turn on right away and start making a difference, as well as show off to the folks who didn’t go.
Tony Robbins calls this sort of thing profound knowledge – information that once you have, changes everything. You can’t ever go back to the way you used to do things unless you try really hard. A good example of profound knowledge is the rule of thirds in photography. Put a tic tac toe grid mentally over your viewfinder in your camera. Put subjects at the intersections of horizontal and vertical lines, and instantly your photos are likely to become better. Now that you know that, you can’t ever go back to NOT knowing how to apply that rule.
I brought two souvenirs with me to give away at MarketingProfs, one of which I discussed in the panel, and one of which I discussed in the Twitter Therapy sessions. Whether or not you were at the conference (and you really should have been), you can have the souvenirs, too.
1. Customer service isn’t a burden. Customer service is a gold mine. If you’ve ever wanted for content to blog about, to podcast about, to share, to act on, you will never find a better source than the customers you already have and the problems they desperately want you to solve. I’ve recorded 900+ episodes of the Financial Aid Podcast and the customers of the Student Loan Network are my constant inspiration. I don’t need millions of dollars of research. I don’t need millions of dollars in marketing budgets. My customers tell me exactly what their problems are. Your customers are doing the same. The catch? You have to want to listen to them. Far too many people in executive suites are content to glance at their marketing dashboards and that’s as close to the customer as they’re willing to get. You have to be willing to dig – as you would in any gold mine – to get to the real treasure.
2. Try the 8 foot test. This is an easy test to do. Load up your web site on your computer. Maximize your browser. From 8 feet away, is there an immediate and obvious call to action that gets your visitors to do what you want them to do? Here’s an example I use in my demo – go to StaffordLoan.com and do the same. If you can’t tell what we want you to do (apply for a Stafford loan), then you need to see an eye doctor. If you don’t have a room big enough to walk 8 feet away, then load the sites up on your mobile device and hold it at arm’s length for a similar effect.
Hopefully, these two souvenirs are worth enough that they alone made it worth it for you to come to MarketingProfs. Hopefully, every other speaker and presenter gifted you with a souvenir or two as well, so that you went home with an armload full of stuff that will immediately make your business better.
My thanks as well to Ann Handley and the MarketingProfs team for putting on another great event and assembling a terrific panel.
I’ll be at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum today, speaking on a panel about creating compelling content with Matthew Grant, Mike O’Toole, Phil Juliano, and Valeria Maltoni. If you’re at the B2B Forum, say hi. If you have no idea what I look like, the photo at the top of the post should help a little, as it’s fairly accurate and very, very recent.
The Conference FAQ
So what do you do?
I’m the CMO of Edvisors, Inc., a college student marketing company based just south of Boston. We operate Edvisors, the Student Loan Network, and a few dozen sites, and offer federal student loans, private student loans, online degrees, and student credit cards to the higher education audience. We’re always looking to work with new partners, and our 1.5MM+ audience is a great audience to share your stuff with. Grab me at the Forum if you’d like to talk more, or shoot me an email.
You’re looking at it right now. If you’d like to contact me, there’s a handy form on this site. You can also email my GMail address, cspenn at gmail. I don’t carry a pile of paper cards because [a] they’re environmentally bad and [b] information changes so frequently, it’s easier just to give you my personal web site URL, www.ChristopherSPenn.com
A while back, Mitch Joel posted his Pixelated conference series, a collection of seminars and sessions from conferences that contain the “best of the best” for any set of topics. I’ve been so busy doing stuff that I never got around to putting mine together until now. This version of Pixelated is focused on Business Marketing – ideas from sales, marketing, branding, and new media that should help any business do things a little better.
If this were a conference, a real life conference, I have no doubt that attending it would cost you thousands of dollars, at least for the first sessions. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of conferences and events who post their sessions, you can enjoy some of the best content on earth without leaving your chair.
Treat this as an actual conference. Take a day or half a day to watch the videos and give them your undivided attention. Have a bottle of water, a notepad, and an open mind as you watch the sessions, as if you were actually there.
Rather than just a pile of videos, I’ve also added brief annotations about why I think each session is important.
Updated: refreshed for July 2010, with some new sessions from TED and other shows.
Pixelated Business Marketing starts… now.
Seth Godin @ TED: This is Seth’s newest set of perspectives, based on his book Tribes. The evolution of marketing from mass media to hero culture of sorts.
Rory Sutherland @ TED: An amazingly funny and insightful talk about the creation of non-tangible value.
Malcolm Gladwell @ TED: This session ranks super high on my list because Malcolm gets you to think outside the box. What product or service do your customers deeply want but don’t know it?
Joseph Pine @ TED: If nothing else, this talk should make you think about what experiences are and how to give them to customers, rather than products or services.
Dan Ariely @ TED: Dan’s book, Predictably Irrational, is the basis for this talk about how our decision processes are flawed, including why consumers buy things they really shouldn’t.
Garr Reynolds at Google Talks: Garr is the author of Presentation Zen, a phenomenal book that asks you to look at how you present information and how you can make your presentations better, more impactful, and less boring.
Avinash Kaushik at Google Talks: Avinash is pretty much THE bottom line when it comes to web analytics. In this talk he goes over a good chunk of his book and also talks about data-drive corporate culture and its importance.
David Meerman Scott from Inbound Marketing Summit: David’s book, the New Rules of Marketing and PR, power part of this talk as he goes over how the ground is changing underneath traditional business outreach.
NEDMA: I talk about email marketing and social media integration.
Optimization Summit: I talk about the best practices of email marketing.
As we wrap up 2008 and the interesting year that it was, I wanted to throw out some ideas there for PodCamp organizers for 2009.
1. Use the tools! 2008 showed rapid growth in every social network of note, and as organizers, the more you can help people meet and greet prior to the event, the better. Set up Twitter accounts for your event, groups on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many others, use search and readers and RSS to keep tabs on word of mouth. There’s no shortage of opportunities to help your participants connect in advance. At MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer, every speaker’s Twitter handle was bundled on a handout – no reason that every participant at a PodCamp who’s active in social media can’t make a directory listing in the event’s wiki.
2. Separate lecture from conversation. Mitch Joel pointed this out in his Pixelated conference series, where he and others gathered together the talking head portions of major conferences. Figure out what makes your local PodCamp special and what’s just talking head stuff, and provide talking head stuff well in advance so that participants can maximize their time together. Grab videos of folks like Mitch, CC Chapman, Chris Brogan, and many other PodCamp favorites far ahead of the event and share them so that when participants arrive, they’re ready to collaborate and share, rather than passively listen.
3. Go paid. The economy has made life tough for the end user and consumer, but even tougher for the marketing budget. Plan your PodCamp to run 100% participant-paid at the door. If you get sponsors, great, but don’t bet the farm on them, and don’t financially extend your PodCamp beyond what money you already have in the bank. Continue to publish your ledgers publicly so participants can see how every dollar is allocated, but strongly consider going paid and having the event be wholly “sponsored” by the participants.
4. Support your local community. Pick a local charity and find a way to divert time, energy, or resources to it so that your community is a little better off for having a PodCamp.
5. Stay lightweight. Keep expenses to a minimum. We’re all adults for the most part who can locate the nearest Starbucks, Dunkin, or McDonald’s. The magic of PodCamp isn’t in refreshments or epic sponsored parties, but in bringing together people to learn, share, and grow their skills. Some facilities will allow you to unbundle catering from facility rental, which can keep costs way down, as food & drink are typically the most expensive part of any conference.
6. Add pieces along the way. Start with barebones expectations for attendees. As funding becomes available, you can add amenities later. Set expectations low, and you’ll never disappoint.
What things have you learned from PodCamps and other conferences in 2008 that you would pass on to PodCamp organizers for 2009? Leave your comments below!
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I had a blast at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer, held in Fountain Hills, Arizona. 300 of marketing’s most dedicated people flew, drove, and walked out to the middle of the desert to talk shop on social media, email, and search marketing, and my hat’s off to MarketingProfs for throwing yet another successful event. Some highlights:
– Speaking to an overflowing room about the prerequisites of social media. I got a real kick out of seeing so many people so eager and energized to learn more about social media and how to get started. Conversely, whenever the conference organizers have to make an announcement that extra chairs are being brought in and it’s STILL standing room only after more seating is installed, I know as a speaker I have to bring my A game up to an A+, to live up to the trust and energy that the crowd brings.
– Speaking on a panel with Gary Vaynerchuk and Greg Cangialosi. Great fun, some powerful takeaways from Gary (including stuff I’ll be trying with the Financial Aid Podcast), and intense energy. If you don’t watch Wine Library TV and read Gary’s blog, you’re missing out, even if you don’t care a whit about wine. Gary’s that passionate and engaging about a subject he loves and deeply cares about. Fun trivia fact that Greg Cangialosi pointed out at the beginning – Gary and I attended the same high school, 1 year apart.
– The HubSpot booth. The folks over at HubSpot, in case you don’t know, have a great little tool called WebsiteGrader.com, which does some very basic SEO assessments of any web site. What made their booth fun was them letting spectators stand around and chat with other participants about their sites. At the conference, there was a representative from a prison management software firm, a virtual mortuary firm, an executive dating firm, and many others, all of whom I wouldn’t have learned about if I hadn’t just hung around and chatted. Really interesting to see how people perceived the relevance of Internet marketing to their industries (so many people say, “But my industry is different because…”) and then watch their eyes light up when you show them how to Google prospective customers and partners.
– Late night discussions with Julien Smith. If you don’t know or follow Julien, you should. He and Chris Brogan are writing their first book, Trust Agents, slated to come out in mid-2009. We chatted on everything from trust to marketing to conspiracy theories.
– Sunrise over the Arizona desert. There’s nothing quite like watching the sun peek out over the horizon, illuminating the landscape. The Arizona desert is beautiful, if hostile.
– Being on vacation. I actually booked the MarketingProfs event as vacation time away from the Student Loan Network. It helps me to separate out the vitally important work at SLN from time when I allow myself to just sit back and enjoy an experience. Ironically, I’ve got more potential business partners and business from vacation than I’ve gotten from some financial aid events, and I hope to be able to bring those opportunities to Financial Aid Podcast listeners and readers in the near future.
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No surprise, I’m going to PodCamp Boston 4. How could I not?
