Kennedy-Spaien, Dot Com

It has been over a week since the end of PodCamp Boston 3, and I’ve had some time to collect my thoughts on the experience. Here they are in no particular order:

1. It is rewarding to run a 1-on-1 101 session for a newbie.
2. Creating content on the fly is exciting, even if somewhat daunting.
3. Use websitegrader.com
4. That rule of 2 feet? Use it. Ruthlessly.
5. Chris Penn is a font of amazing practical knowledge. (Seems I re-learn this at each PodCamp I attend!)
6. Spend time in the brainstorming area.
7. See a useful freebie? Pick up an extra and then give it away on day 2 to someone who missed seeing them.
8. If at all possible, attend any extra social events in the evenings.
9. Occasionally, the Fail Whale can be amusing!
10. I’m not the only human with social media overload issues.
11. Never, ever doubt the power of a focused and like-minded group of creative thinkers (to crash a Harvard University load balancing server).
12. If you have a question, keep asking around until you get an answer.
13. Don’t assume presenters are recording the sessions they lead. Bring a media device of your own.
14. Don’t concentrate on networking with just A-listers or just peers, bring everyone into your social network, Today’s newb will probably be tomorrow’s Rock Star/Ninja.
15. Don’t condescend. You’re not all that.
16. Don’t get involved with melodrama: you’re here to learn and share, not star in a soap opera.
17. Have a ready answer for the question: “What do you do? / what are you working on?”
18. Polish up that elevator pitch!
19. Not everyone with an elevator pitch knows what he/she is talking about!
20. Give and give freely - it comes back to you.
21. Link to stories on CNN.com. They link back.
22. In July Heat, get specific directions to meetup places before setting out on foot to find them.
23. Bring a camera, even if audio is your shtick.
24. Bring a lanyard with a badge-holder.
25. Stuff your business cards into that badge-holder for quick access.
26. Drop your card in the raffle bowls!
27. Understand that a lot of the sessions may focus on Industry. If you don’t like that, create breakout sessions on stuff like “Using Audacity” or “WordPress SEO 101″.
28. Yes, your XYZ business should have a social media presence to one degree or another.
29. Is your site’s Raison d’Etre hard to succinctly describe? Figure out a simple way to say it and put it on your front page.
30. Guido Stein is a mensch - Find him and befriend him!
31. Whitney Hoffman’s kids are fully capable of leading a 101 “What is a PodCast” session.
32. No matter how good the alternatives are, Twitter is too sticky to go away (any time soon). They could drop the whale on a bus full of children, then bake their parents into meat-pies and people will still use Twitter over anything else.
33. Chris Brogan is not only a competent rhythm guitarist, but is amazingly good at extemporizing on social media themes. Search for a recording of the “New Media VS. Old” breakout session he moderated on day one to see what I mean.
34. Use Ping.fm to help avoid social media overload.

I’m really pleased with the current batch of projects I’m working on, and thought you might be interested in some of these yourself.

First, as always, I’m neck-deep in producing The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show With Jimmy Moore. This has gained a lot of prestige in the last few years. The show airs on Mondays and Thursdays and is currently featuring interviews with various low-carb celebrities and physicians. [I also did the theme customization for this site.]

Also, I’m producing the Twin Peas Blog and Podcast for host Kelly Damron. Kelly shares knowledge and experience dealing with issues of infertility, premature birth and parenting twins. I’m very proud of this one- it has tons of original music (by me) and the overall effect is similar to “This American Life”. [Another customized theme, here.]

Recently I completed a blog setup for the amazing Phoenix Gilman, author of Diet Failure: The Naked Truth.

Hmm, a common theme - everyone I’ve worked with lately is a published author!

Anyway, please check these out and, as always, please consider giving the shows a review in the iTunes store!

Links:

Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show Site and iTunes
The Twin Peas Pod site and iTunes
Diet Failure: The Naked Truth Blog
My company, Disc of Light Media and Consulting

Whaddaya think of them apples? Let me know in the comment section below!

Filtering through new followers on Twitter often turns up some great websites and articles. Here’s a few I found today:

Noah Everett (creator of TwitPic.com) has a post at his FindMotive blog where he calls out EchoPic a company for their seriously obtuse registration page. Simplicity, people!

Chris Kieff at 1GoodReason.com has a great case study of how Esurance has dropped the ball by not extending their “Erin Esurance” ad campaign into the world of social media. Epic fail, Esurance.

Last, if not for being followed by MarketingProfs, I would not likely have found and subscribed to their newsletter. Check it out at MarketingProfs.com.

So thanks for all the Tweets, folks!

Not that anyone should care if I follow them on Twitter, but because people are adding me at an alarming rate since PodCamp Boston 2 (and I’m talking about strangers, not people I met and swapped cards with) I’m going to be frank. If I don’t add you back, there’s a reason and it isn’t because you are a horrible person (I actually do follow some horrible people - they can be funny!).

When I get a notice that someone is following me, the first thing I do is go and check their last page or two of tweets. If it is all about their kids, dating, what they ate with no content that is related to social media, new media, web 2.x or something at least tangentially related, I probably will not add you back, although I will check your blog or web site and may still add you if that knocks my socks off.

Now, please understand that I am spoiled. For a long time I followed only a handful of folks and an even smaller subset of those followed me. I was able to maintain a twitterstream with a ridiculously clean signal-to-noise ratio. As a necessary evil I accept that as I follow more people there will be an increase in tweets about sporting events and favorite foods, even the antics of pets!

Rest assured, I want to follow you. I’m sure that by virtue of your being interested in what I have to say, I’d be interested in your thoughts and perceptions. So help me want to follow you, by tweeting those thoughts and perspectives. You can still post about the Patriots or the Celtics, but try to have some meat in there, too!

This is a response to a great post by Nicholas Butler called A Social Network Startup Pack.

Nicholas presented on the Social Media Startup Kit at PodCamp Boston 2. I sadly did not attend this session, but read the above post, and the following occurred to me:

Here’s a hint. If you are just starting to get into Social Media, by all means add the folks recommended in Nicholas’ blog. But you may find that many don’t add you back.

If your web presence is new and you haven’t yet really wrapped your brain around this whole “Social Media Thing” there may not be much in your Twitterstream that is of interest just yet.

Now, Many of these fine folks WILL add just about anyone back, but understand that with 2000 followers, they may not have the bandwidth to read all the stuff addressed to them on Twitter.

Many have secret profiles for those whose words they value most.

But, fear not! After you have become more established and have a body of relevant Tweets and blog posts linked to your Twitter profile, you can drop people and then re-add them. This gives them a second bite at the cookie of recognizing you as the valuable community member you are.

Fantastic. Met up with Ellen Moschetto and Pistachio and many more. Attended 3 sessions so far: Viva La Vida freelance (www.freelanceliving.wordpress.com - join the fun!), The Bigger, Better Deal Of Podcasting with Chris Brogan and David Eckoff (touchy feely wellness and empowerment goodness) and The New Rules Of PR with David Meerman Scott, which was invaluable. Grab his free ebook at http://davidmeermanscott.com/.

I’ll edit later to add more links.

I will be at PodCamp Boston’s Kickoff party (Thanks to sponsor The Student Loan Network) at Tequila Moon in Kenmore Square this evening. Look me up, shake my hand and tell me your life story… I’m always looking for material!

I’ve dabbled in hosting forums before. I used to administer a forum on Apnea at my old apnea blog. It was a self-hosted phpbb affair and it was really rather dismal and best forgotten.

Forum administration is a lot of work, even without a ton of subscribers. With 2005 era phpbb and limited knowledge of tweaking code, managing comment spam was horrible!

So for a few months, it has been clear that HHX should consider adding a forum to help build a sense of community. Talking with people like Justin Kownacki about hosted options like Virb, Miggle, MyNow, Catastrospace, Ning, etc, I settled on FaceBook. Christopher Penn has a forum over there for the Financial Aid Podcast, so I figured why not give it a spin?

(Bonus points: how many social media sites from that paragraph actually exist?)

So, please check out the forum located at HHX: The Health Hacks Podcast Group.

That is all.

Michael Bailey of MobaSoft is a great guy. I first met him at PodCamp Boston where he was networking and promoting his service MobaTalk (formerly MyChingo).

MyChingo is a voice commenting system for blogs, kind of like a public VOIP answering machine for your site. The name came from CHAT+LINGO. As it turns out, that name is strikingly similar to something very naughty indeed in Spanish. To fix that, as of later this year (when video support is added) the new name will be MobaTalk.

In the world of blog comments, audio is a great feature. I have tried using a dedicated phone line on some of our GNMHealth shows and I have also used MyChingo. What I have discovered is that the audiences for our shows don’t like sending audio comments as much as we enjoy getting them. Or even at all. In ANY format.

I see a lot of the people in the New Media Twitter circles sporting the MyChingo player on their sites, all filled up with comments. So it seems that perhaps it is a matter of demographics. Assuming that is the case, this blog may be a good place to try it again, as the audience here is quite different from the show sites I run.

I’ll be putting it up within the next week, and once it is in place, I’ve put the MobaTalk player up in the sidebar, so please feel free to drop me a line! In the mean time:
A) Have you used the MyChingo commenting system? How has it worked for you?
B) If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a whirl and let me know what you think of it.