A while back Shel Israel wrote a post which touched upon the impact of the “cult of generosity” on marketing.
Today, Tara Hunt has a great post about the real meaning of the spirit of generosity and the gift economy. This is a must-read post for anyone who really wants to understand what motivates many of the social media thought leaders.
Thank you Tara for reminding us about what this should all be about.
The hyperkinetic, ultra-connected Sean Moffitt is looking for bloggers who would like to enter their blogs into a “tournament” of Canadian bloggers.
If you write a blog that deals with digital, tech, online, media, social media, PR, marketing, communications, design, or research, you can enter your blog in the Facebook group that Sean has set up or via the Contact Us link on Buzz Canuck.
Blogs will be matched in pairs for each round, with only the winner of each pair advancing to the next round. The judges will judge two posts submitted by each blogger on five criteria: “overall impact (20%), clarity of thought (20%), did it make me want to think/act differently (20%), did it want me to comment/participate (20%) and originality (20%).”
Sean is aiming for a starting field of 128 blogs. Already, he is half way to that goal. The initial list of entrants reads like a Who’s Who of the Canadian social media scene, including Kate Trgovac, Doug Walker, Bill Sweetman, David Crow, Michelle Sullivan, Marc Snyder, Michel Leblanc, Mitch Joel, David Peralty, Ed Lee, Colin McKay, Collin Douma, Jonathan Dunn, Brendan Hodgson, Leesa Barnes, Dino Demopoulos, Michael Seaton and Eden Spodek.
Sound like a good way to get your blogging juices flowing? For sure.
So, hop over to Buzz Canuck and tell Sean that you want to be entered into Canada’s 1% Army tournament.
Yes. This space has been very quiet for the past two weeks.
It’s vacation time. And that means a break from blogging too.
I’ll be back soon.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
Tod Maffin entertained and educated the Podcasters Across Borders attendees with his From Idea to Air presentation.
If 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.
Sixty 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.
The 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.
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.
Basic 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!
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:
So, that’s it for me here in Boston. Air Canada’s calling my flight and I’m heading home to Ottawa.