Managing Your Social Media

We are becoming overloaded with a surfeit of social media sites and tools. We can either break under the load of options or we can find ways to cope, to manage our social media.

Bryan Person came all the way from Boston (6 hour drive) to talk to Podcasters Across Borders about how he manages these tools – and we’re glad he did.

Bryan Person-1 First, you have to make hard decisions. Make choices among the essential tools.

Develop a routine to allow you to cover things quickly. For example: Email; Twitter; Facebook; Calendar; Blog Reader. Then you’re good to go.

Using Tagging to save items associated with terms that are meaningful to you.

Prune your feedreader subscriptions. In fact, think of deleting all of them. You’ll quickly re-subscribe to those feeds that really matter to you.

Trust your network for recommendations. You don’t need to subscribe to or read everything. If one of your friends spot something that he or she thinks is important, they’ll pass it along to you.

Finally, be prepared to step away. Turn your computer off. Enjoy life. Then you can come back to the computer refreshed.

Getting your podcast seen as well as heard

To find information, most people search for a term on Google, Yahoo or MSN. And these Search engines don’t really care about sound. They care about text.

So, how do you, as a podcaster get Google to notice you?

Julien Smith-1 That’s the question that Julien Smith provided a practical, straightforward answer to this question in his presentation at Podcasters Across Borders.

First, podcasters need to become more than just a podcaster. You need to be Web producers. That means communicating through a blog, communicating through Twitter, through forums, through a variety of channels and media.

Second, you must pay attention to the keywords that people are using to find you. Subscribe to sites like SEOBook and SearchEngineLand to learn basic Search Engine Optimization techniques.

Don’t forget to post show notes for all of your podcasts. Use key words that describe your content.

Julien has many more tips. But, he only had 30 minutes for his presentation. So, if you get a chance to attend a session with Julien, grab it. You’ll learn a lot.

Creative Commons Licensing in Canada

Andy Kaplan-Myrth and Kathi Simmons from the University of Ottawa’s Law and Technology Program spoke at Podcasters Across Borders about the legal regime that podcasters and bloggers in Canada must observe.

Kaplan-Myrth outlined the fundamentals of Creative Commons licensing in Canada.

Traditional copyright seeks to reserve all rights to the author other than those that she specifically surrenders.

Creative commons has been developed to encourage sharing of information. It has several different licences that allow sharing based on a selection of different elements:

  • Attribution: Content may be used and redistributed, but the original creator must be given credit for it.
  • NonCommercial: The content may be used and redistributed only for noncommercial purposes.
  • NoDerivatives: People can use and redistribute, but not modify the work.
  • ShareAlike: Users can use, redistribute and modify your work. But if you do modify it, any work that you produce based on these changes must have the same ShareAlike condition.

In Canada, there are over 300,000 works licensed under the Canadian Creative Commons. This Canadian licences have been customized to reflect Canadian laws, so Canadian bloggers and podcasters who use a non-Canadian CC licence should switch to a Canadian licence.

Kathi Simmons unveiled the Canadian Podcasting Legal Guide. It has been prepared by the Law and Technology group at UOttawa to provide Canadians with the basic information they need to understand the law that applies to authoring and using content for social media in Canada. 

Hard copies of the guide were distributed to PAB attendees.

The Canadian Podcasting Legal Guide will be available for download form the Canadian Creative Commons site.

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Podcasters Across Borders

Podcasters Across Borders brought together about 125 podcasting enthusiasts for two days to talk about everything podcasting.

Some fresh voices that I’m not used to hearing at the standard conferences I attend.

Ted Riecken delved into podcasting as a community.

Communities exist as an expression of shared interests, similar backgrounds, shared needs. Podcasting exists as a liberatory space – a place where many people on the periphery can share in the common wealth of knowledge. As a communication medium, it serves as a gathering place.

Podcasting provides a means for people to tell genuine stories to a community with common interests in a largely unregulated environment.

Podcasting has many of the characteristics of a frontier culture. It is transitory, emergent and constantly evolving. Like a frontier economy, there are still limited and alternative forms of commerce. The discussion of “how do I monetize my podcast?’ does not yet have a universally accepted answer.

The podcast culture places an emphasis on freedom, opportunity and growth. Much of the content originates on the edge and reflects niche interests.

Podcasters place an emphasis on freedom of speech, thought and expression. They prize real people telling authentic stories about lived experience.

The echo chamber effect presents a challenge to the evolution of the podcasting culture. To overcome this, it is important to emphasize diversity, critical inquiry and thought, to offset the positive feedback loops.

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Making Audio Stories that Don't Suck

Tod Maffin entertained and educated the Podcasters Across Borders attendees with his From Idea to Air presentation.

Tod Maffin From Idea to AirIf you haven’t seen Tod give one of his keynotes or workshops, you absolutely have to. The best presenter bar none.

I’m not going to be able to do justice to Tod’s full presentation. He’s much better than I make him sound. And sound is the operative word. Tod doesn’t just offer sage advice in an entertaining way. He peppers his presentation with sound clips that make the points he wants to convey.

So, how do you tell great stories?
Off the top. If you want to tell good audio stories, don’t be predictable. Don’t follow a formula. Don’t be boring.

Start with an idea. And remember, that YOU are the content. Look around you for story ideas. Ask family. Ask friends. Never throw away clips. The bloopers and off-story clips may let you approach the story from a different, more playful angle.

Revisit old stories. Epilogues to past stories can be poignant and compelling.

Look for inspiration in wallpaper – the stuff all around us. The commonplace. Those things that are part of our routine and that we take for granted. Like ordering a cup of coffee leads to a story on oversized servings. Why the close buttons on elevators never work.

Use comparisons to create images in your listener’s mind. Like …a 20 oz. drink? You can buy 20 oz. baseball bats.

Take your recorder everywhere. You never know when you will encounter a great opportunity to capture a story as it occurs. And things captured as they occur have an emotion and an unpolihsed genuineness.

Don’t overedit. Sometimes the raw tape – with the pauses, the sighs, the silence – can be much more arresting than any edit or voiceover.

You can structure you story around several different devices.

The universal truth: It throws something into relief that strikes a chord with us and causes us to nod unconsciously. You can lead into this with the phrase, “There’s something about…” This sets up the listener to listen for something more profound.

The anecdote and reflection: This is the basic essence of storytelling. Bringing meaning to what you’ve just heard. Tell a little of the story. Reflect. Tell a bit more. Reflect. Dip in and out of the story. The audeince will follow throughout.

Bob Goyetche, Mark Blevis & Mitch Joel listen to TodSixty second scenes: Actively listening requires the brain to compose images. Allow time for this to happen. Provide audible “audio on-reamps” – music, an audio effect or even silence – to signal to the listener that they should be ready for a change of scene.

Emotional charges: Modulate the emotions through the story. Unrelenting seriousness is unlikely to sustain an audience’s attention in the way that a story that alternates poignancy with a lighter mood to bring balance.

Scoring: Use music. But don’t use music to comment on the story. It can be hackneyed (Pink Floyd’s Money in a story about the rich). Or it can actually pull the listener out of the images they have created in their mind.

There are three critical values for a compelling character.

  1. Your protagonist must be on a proactive quest toward a goal (love, redemption, money)
  2. Something is preventing him or her from achieving that goal (“force of antagonism”)
  3. The protagonist is risking something to achieve the goal. Risk is the secret sauce in making people care about a character.

Tod Maffin speaks at PABThe quest should have not be linear. There should be progress followed by setbacks followed by progress. Drama and comedy rest in the “Gap” between what a character expects to achieve and what they actually achieve. This gap provides reason for the protagonist to attempt a different approach to achieve their objective. And at each turn, the risk increases.

If life would go back to normal if the character failed to achieve her objective, then the story is not worth telling. It fails the risk test.

Tod presented much more on how to do this. But I’m not going to cover that here. You simply have to see Tod live to get the rest. And trust me. It’s the best presentation of this material you’ll ever see.

Podcasting Basics

Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche kicked off Podcasters Across Borders with a podcasting basics session. I’m a beginner podcaster and the guys provided me with an overview of what I need to get started.

Bob GoyetcheBasic equipment

The MXL 990 microphone is a good starter mic. Cost: About $150.

Add a pop screen to suppress the popping of your ‘P’s. Cost: $25 to $50.

Add a mixer will enable you to tailor your sound. Tod Maffin uses a Behrenger Eurorack 1002. Cost: $150.

You can mix either directly into your PC or into a recorder. The Samson Zoom H4 portable recorder is a good choice. Cost: About $400.

If you record directly into a computer, Apples come with GarageBand built in. PC users can download the FREE open source Audacity audio editor and recorder. Cost: Free

Cleaning the sound

SoundSoap 2 will help to filter extraneous noise. Cost: $130

Content

That’s up to me. Yikes!

Smart posts by smart people about Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0

The final day of Enterprise 2.0 was a bit of a bust for me. I just didn’t connect with the speakers in two of the three panels I attended. And the scheduled speaker for the third session was a no-show!

But the good news is that the conference was heavily blogged and many of the other posters found a good deal of value in the sessions they attended. So, for my final post about the Enterprise 2.0 conference, here are some posts that I think are worth reading:

And for something extra, read these posts:

  • Jeffrey Walker reports on one of those dinner discussions that make attending an event really worthwhile, this one on the ROI of Enterprise 2.0.
  • Alec Saunders offers reflects on what’s really going on with Enterprise 2.0. And he thinks it’s something big.

So, that’s it for me here in Boston. Air Canada’s calling my flight and I’m heading home to Ottawa.

Ross Mayfield and Kim Polese push Enterprise 2.0

Don Tapscott’s presentation at Enterprise 2.0 was followed by rapid fire presentations by Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource along with Joe Schueller, Innovation Manager of Procter & Gamble Global Business Services.

Ross Mayfield:

Complexity is in th social network. Vendors tried to put it in the software. Social Software keeps complexity in the social network, where it belongs, by only encoding simple rules.

Mayfield sees a power law of participation applied to social software: all people may engage in the basic tasks of reading, favoriting, tagging and commenting, but very few will climb the curve of participation to write, refactor, collaborate, moderate or lead.

By opening our systems to participation, people will find their appropriate level of participation.

So, what to Wiki? First, effective collaboration requires a goal.

Apply it to small group communication. Create a living Intranet. See what happens when people have access to the edit button.

A good place to start might be the creation of a global glossary, FAQs, How-tos to capture the language, practices and wisdom of the people who “do” within your organization.

Apply the Wiki approach to Processes. Think about a help desk. Their task is exception handling. A Wiki is a great means to capture both the experience and the wisdom in identifying and handling these exceptions. If the entire company contributes answers, the full expertise of the company will generate solutions.

Kim Polese

Gartner suggests that collaboration technologies will be widely adopted within five years.

Enterprises do not want point solutions. They want integrated or Suite solutions.SpikeSource has developed a product called SuiteTwo, which integrates a stack of social software into one Enterprise 2.0 solution.

Don Tapscott talks about Wikinomics & Enterprise 2.0

Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics, delivered the afternoon keynote at Enterprise 2.0.

Don TapscottThe idea that there is a New Enterprise has been around for a while. It is based on the notion of an open networked enterprise, not a closed hierarchy. Tapscott wrote about this in his 1992 book, Paradigm Shift. “Nothing like and idea whose time has come.”

Tapscott see four drivers of change:

Web 2.0

The new Web is based on XML, a standard not for presentation, but for computation. The Web is becoming a giant computer and it’s enriched for services.

The Net Generation

Our children are the first generation to grow up digital. They have no fear of technology because to them technology is like the air. It’s all around and it’s just there.

This is the first time in history that children are an authority on something important. And this has led to a situation in which we don’t have a generation gap, but instead have a generation “lap.” And the kids are lapping their parents.

The Social Revolution

This flows from the interaction of Web 2.0 and the Net Generation.

MySpace has eclipsed Mtv. Craig’s List has eclipsed Monster.com. Flickr overwhelmed Webshots.

They are all tapping into people’s instinct to self-organize.

The Economic Revolution

The dot com bubble is being followed by a period in which the real value, the workable solutions and the viable companies are driving an economic revolution. Consider the digital conglomerates: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, amazon.com, ebay… These are a new species of business.

What’s happening? Wikinomics

Collaboration is beginning to change the architecture of the organization.

We have progressed from the industrial age corporation and practices of Ford and Taylor through the Extended Enterprise of the multinationals through the Business Webs of the 90s to Mass Collaboration.

Today people cannot only socially gather, they can socially produce. Peers outside the boundaries of corporations or corporations acting as peers or peers within the boundaries of a hierarchy can collaborate across boundaries.

This yields the four principles of Wikinomics:

  • Peering
  • Being Open
  • Sharing
  • Acting Globally

Consider a company that won by embracing these principles – GoldCorp: A 50 year old mining company peers, opens, shares its proprietary data and acts globally in a bid to transform itself and explore the extent of a rich new find.

New models
Peer Pioneers: Think about Linux. If you can create an operating system through open source, what else can you create in this way?

Ideagoras: Open markets for uniquely qualified minds. Think of P&G, which has opened its problems to solutions from people outside of its corporate walls. Half of P&G’s innovations will come from outside of the company by the end of this year.

Prosumers:  Turn your customers into producers. Consider music mashups and remixes. Look at writing the final chapter of Wikinomics through a Wiki.

The New Alexandrians: The sharing of science. Consider the release of the human genome results.

Open Platforms: Consider the Amazon platform. It has over 200,000 delivers attempting to create value on this platform.

The Global Plant Floor: Consider Boeing’s revolutionary approach to create the 787 in partnership with suppliers who shared risk, benefits and development of this revolutionary plane.

The Wiki Workplace: Developing value in the workplace through the application of Wikis and Wiki principals. Consider Geeksquad labelled products at BestBuy.

Crisis of Leadership

This is a paradigm shift. New paradigms are met with coolness and even hostility. Those with vested interests fight the change. And this challenges our leaders to leave that with which they are comfortable.

The time has come for a new Web and a new generation for whom this is their birthright and a new model of how companies and organizations deal with the world.

Enterprise 2.0 Day One Roundup

One problem with a great multi-track conference is that you have to choose between sessions being held at the same time. I attended some great sessions today.

But, as I look at the coverage on other posts tonight, I realize that there were other first rate discussions going on in the adjoining rooms.

Here are some of the better posts:

John Eckman covers a panel with Greg Reinacker, Ross Mayfield, Chris Alden and David Cassidy talking about user adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Michael Sampson offer his notes on the Instant Messaging 2.0 session.

And, just for balance, a contrarian view from Jevon MacDonald of Canada (yep, Canadians get a free pass to think independently.)

🙂