October 18th 2006
Hey welcome back everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray number 16.
Hey you might be a new listener. I realized I have been talking about Managing the Gray to a lot of new people. So if this is your first time listening to Managing the Gray, welcome aboard. Sorry it has been a little while since the last episode. I have been a bit busy, a bit crazy and just kind of in the middle of a million different things but I was excited to get another Managing the Gray out.
This is going to be kind of a catch up episode, catching up on everything that is going on in my world, kind of what is going on in the blogosphere, podoshpere, what is just going on the world. I actually got a comment that drills home to that.
I just got back from the Portable Media Expo out in Ontario, California. There were some people there, some fellow capowers, some other pit listeners of the show and some people who I did not even know who listen to the show.
One of the magical moments of this is, if you do podcasting, if you do anything in social media a lot of times you are just creating content and creating pieces of yourself that you just give out and they just go out on the web and you are not quite sure who they touch or who they affect. You start hearing from the regular suspects you know, but then there are these people who you never expect that you are affecting, and I had one of those moments happen. I am standing at the Portable Media Expo and this individual, nice shaved head, very cool slick British accent comes up and introduces himself as Jason from, the podcast is called Abuddistpodcast.com.
I wish I had recorded it because it was so touching, he basically told me, he said “Keep doing what you are doing with Managing the Gray, the honesty, the openness and the ideas are really stimulating and I thank you for doing it.” He thanked me for doing what I am doing here and that really touched me. Jason and I, I think we have already created a massive friendship because he is picking out hotels for me when I am going to London and whatnot.
It was just one of those magical moments where you, if you create content of any sort, I am kind of getting away from the fact of podcasting, content is if you take a photo, you write a short story, you write a blogpost even, you record a podcast, you record a song, you put it out there, you are affecting people and touching people even though you might not ever realize you are doing it. It is a pretty powerful message and one that I am not going to take for granted ever again. That one little conversation in the hallway of the Marroit outside the bar is going to affect a lot more things in my life and I thanked him for that comment too. Now I have got this audio comment, let me play it, came in I think it really hits home.
Tack Anderson : Hey C.C., this is Tack Anderson, I just wanted to leave a quick comment. I have been rolling over this concept in my head for a long time and you kind of hit on it as well, with your quotes from Eric Rice, you know where it says “Social networks do not care about technology.” I think I agree, I think that is a great quote.
One of the shifts that I think that is happening in society, actually I am under the assumption that it has already happened and people are just now starting to catch on, as if there is no difference anymore between online and offline. In the marketing world, online marketing versus offline marketing, online conversations versus offline conversations, seriously, what is the difference anymore? I do not think it matters, I think that in the mind of the consumer, it definitely does not matter.
As you guys have pointed out several times with the Kapow network and on all of your podcasts is that the relationships that you build online are just as real, just as solid as the ones you build offline. Those conversations, they are just as real. I do not think there is anymore online or offline, I think there is just life. It is just the way we live nowadays. Generation Y and generation @, I think is what they are calling the young ones as they continue to grow up as digitally made. They sure as hell do not see a difference between online and offline. They live on their phones, they live on their computers, it is just life. Anyway, great show and we will talk to you later. Bye!
C.C. Chapman: Thanks Tack! Oh, he is hanging up. I agree completely. We take for granted, my generation and older, we grew up where we remember what the Internet was when it first started out, we remember our world without the Internet, we remember dialing in to check your email. Now wherever I am in the world, I can get my e-mail, it comes through my Blackberry or I can go to pretty much any computer in the world and I can get it, I forget about it. My wife just got a new celphone the other day, and she is a technophob compared to me and she was asking for a password for something because she was subscribing to my podcast via her celphone and that is cool. Everything is going to just blur and you are not going to ever talk about, “Yeah I had to go online and download something…” No, you will just go, “Oh yeah, I went and got it and I listened to it.” You are not going to specify whether it was a podcast, you are going to say, “I watched, Oh man, did you hear about this event that happened?” You are not going to specify whether you watched it on television, your computer, your handheld, maybe you watched it on a video podcast, on your iPod on your way to the gym. You are not going to specify, you are going to forget about that, it is going to become transparent.
Everything we do, it is just content, that is all it is. It is content, you are engaging with it and the medium kind of gets forgotten about. I cannot wait for podcasting to get to that point where you have to specify that you heard about something on a podcast. What does it matter if you heard it on the radio or NPR or if you have read it on a newspaper? What does it really matter? The fact is you have got the content, it touched you in some way or you got a reaction out of you in some way and that you remembered it. That is the core thing. Yeah I am kind of going off on it.
It is funny speaking of NPR yesterday, yesterday I spoke at the New England, I want to get this right, the New England New Media Association. They had this symposium called “Reaching Key Audiences”.
What it was, it is this is the association of all the major newspapers, oh I should not say major, it is all the newspapers in New England. It was great to meet people from little publications in Portsmith, New Hampshire all the way up to The Christian Science Monitor and The Boston Globe. I spent a lot of time talking with Rob and at WBUR who is a local NPR affiliate. Doing some old stuff, talking about what they were doing. We did great conversations about the fact, how things are changing and how the whole world around us. I went in there kind of worried because they said, they wanted me to give a really baseline introduction to social media.
I was told that these men and women are not going to be that in tune with what was going on in the social media sphere. That is one of the reasons why I started Managing the Gray. Managing the Gray is all about, sometimes you are going to get stuff here that is very simple and that you are going listen to and be going , “Yeah, no kidding.” But that is one of the reasons I am doing this podcast, it is for the people who are not at that place, people who listen to us and go, “Huh?! I never thought about that!”
That is what Managing the Gray is about, it is trying to boil down all the simple things that will give you the power to talk about these things. Things to go to your boss and pitch an idea like, let us go into Second Life, let us do a viral marketing campaign, take these episodes, play them for your bosses or your superiors or whoever you are trying to and say, “Listen here! This is what I am trying to talk about.” So that there is another voice out there helping you get to where you want to go.
You know what, I wrote down the five things I told them because they wanted a really simple introduction. So my presentation I called “Five steps to Social Media success” and I figured, why not put them out here? If you were at that conference yesterday and we have met, great to meet you, I know there were some very cool sessions, some very high, high energy in the crowd which was excellent to see. I really went in not expecting that energetic of a crowd and I was very happy to see that you all were excited about it. So my five steps for a newspaper for social media success, yeah this is going to sound simple but that where I wanted to go with.
Number one, set up a blog. Get a blog set up. I told them, I said focus on one writer or one area. If you just do a million of them, it is not going to be successful. Be very narrow at first, you can always expand very, very quickly.
Then engage the conversation. Turn on those comments, react to the comments, be honest, be forthright, be reactive to them, do not ignore them, that will get the conversation going.
Number three, embrace tagging. I had to explain the concept of tagging, what it is, but they are very powerful media when you figure it out. A perfect example, I was talking to somebody, there is a Nantucket paper online and they have any photos tagged with Nantucket to show up on the front page, and they pull from Flickr as well, anything tagged Nantucket they pull up to the front page. Some people would be freaked out, “Oh, what if there are nudity pictures? Or what if there where…” Yeah there could be. What happened was, this past weekend the paper did not have anybody to send out to the Blue Angels show that happened there, and you know what? They have Blue Angels photos on the front page of this paper, why? Because they are pulling in photos from Flickr tagged as Nantucket and a lot of people posted stuff. Think about that, you can let other people create content for you.
Number four, launch a podcast. I got very strict on what a podcast is, what it is not, how to do it right, some people who are doing it right, some people who are doing it wrong. Hopefully they will start doing that.
Number five, expand your community. I was stressing to get out there to social media sites, go to places like MySpace and Gather and in other places, and just get out there. Also I talked about getting involved in your community, if you are going to start doing blogging and podcasting, start listening to and reading blogs and podcasts and engaging those people who are talk about you. I had to give a quick overview of Technorati, they were not sure what Technorati was. So just trying to tell people, get out there in Technorati, check on yourself, see who is talking about you and when you see somebody talking about you or your publication, go react on their site appropriately, it will start a conversation going.
Then, of course because I cannot ever just stick to what I say when I say five steps, number six is keep on trying. I express to them, do not be afraid to fail. The cost of entry to doing pretty much any of these technologies is extremely low. The most expensive thing you are going to spend is your time. I just said “Try it out! If it does not work, move on to the next thing.” I also told them, “Do not be afraid to succeed.” That yes it could blow up, yes it could get very popular, yes it could be a resource strain on you, but you know what? You are succeeding, you will find it, you will make it work. Of course there is number seven, call me with any questions.
So as always, just email me at managingthegray@gmail.com, or cc.chapman@gmail.com, I would be more than happy to discuss anything that I have talked about on any show with all of you and it was great to meet you yesterday.
Now one thing I learned yesterday that I really want to give props for is I met the CEO from Gather. If you are not familiar with Gather, Gather.com, I am not sure if it is the official tagline but it could be “MySpace for adults.” Their target demographic is definitely older than the MySpace crowd. A lot of the same type of content, building communities, it is very different. I actually just set up, because it is something that I want to try, Managingthegray.gather.com. There is nothing there yet, so if you go join up we will figure out what it is, we will build it together, build this little community.
What was interesting is, I talked about Starbucks recently doing a podcast that I thought was a missed opportunity. I was not impressed with what they did with the podcast. It sounded good, it was interesting but I was not impressed with it and I thought it could have been better. I actually got an email from the Vice President of Marketing of Starbucks or the person, I forgot her official title, but she was in charge of this campaign and I wrote her back about it and stuff and hopefully we are going to keep the conversation going but yesterday I learned of something Starbucks is doing that I do think they are doing right.
If you go to Starbucks.gather.com, they have set up a Gather site, all around this guy Mitch Albom, I hope I am saying his name right. He wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, he has a new book coming out and the only place you can get to him to talk is either at one of his book signings, which he is doing at Starbucks or on the Gather page. He is coming out, he is answering questions, people are submitting questions or submitting feedback and he is reacting to it and there is this little community being built. It is all branded Starbucks, there is links out to Starbucks website and there is a link to the author and where you buy the book and everything.
This, I think, is a great thing and I think we are going to see more companies do it. It is a great trial and it is great for Gather, let us face it, it is going to give them a ton more exposure, than what they had over and they have grown. I did not realize they were Boston based I had no idea, until I met the CEO and he was like “Yeah we are downtown,” so we are going to have to grab lunch one of these days because I wanted to talk to him about how we can leverage Gather. I guess I did not appreciate Gather for what it was until I checked it out yesterday. See? Yes, I still learn everyday that there is something new that I need to play with and it was interesting to check this out. So kudos to Starbucks for doing that. See, I give kudos and I speak the truth here. If I like it, I say so, if I do not like it I say so too.
Some other house cleaning tips, while we are going here. Some people have swung by Secondlifeoffice.com lately and noticed that I am moving stuff out of the house. I actually had someone go, “I was going to have a meeting here.” which I have told you guys, you can always do. They say, “Where is the video screen?” and I have taken the video screen down and moved it to the new office. Yes, even in virtual space you have to move, it is a lot easier though because there are no boxes. Secondlifeoffice.com is moving, it is going to move very, very soon. The URL is still the same, the nice thing is I can point behind the scene that is why I set it up. It will point to a new place which will be coming very, very soon and that ties in, kind on to the next part where I have been getting a lot of questions about the new job.
Where am I working? What am I doing? CC why are you so busy? Where is Managing the Gray? I can officially tell you. I am not going to tell you where I work, sorry. I can officially tell you that it will be coming out very, very soon. The information will start coming, you will start hearing stuff about the company, I promise. You will be hearing about it. Everyone keeps asking me, “Where are you going to talk about it first CC?” The first place I am going to talk about is here on Managing the Gray. So if you want to find out just stay listening, I will be here very, very soon, I promise, promise, promise.
One more thing before I go. I had a conversation a couple of episodes ago on album art and I said I did not think that it was important. I am completely changing my opinion, 100% changing my opinion on album art. Why? Because iTunes 7 came out.
The new version of iTunes broke a lot of things but it also fixed some things, too. One of the neat things that they have now is that if you are using the US version of iTunes, go look at your music library, up in the right hand corner, up by the x, there is three little buttons that you can push. One of those is to browse by album art and what it does is it actually brings up, it looks like, Frontrow is the software on Macintoshs’ where you can look through all your media, it looks like that where it actually brings up the album art. You actually flip through album art like almost like your flipping through a cd case except it is left to right instead of back to front. If you do not have an album art it is a big question mark.
So having album art now is critical, I changed everything I ever said. Do I think it is critical to, I do not think it was critical for the reasons we were originally talking about but I do think it is absolutely critical because yes, iTunes is not the only thing out there. I agree with that fully and I think people they realize that. But it is a major player and let us face it, if it works for iTunes you are going to see other players start doing the same thing. You are going to see desktop applications do the same thing. So thus, album art is very, very important.
If you are not sure how to put album art on your podcast or any audio content you do, the easiest way to tell people, even if you do not use it for anything else, iTunes will do it for you. Just open up the file on iTunes, right click on it and say get info and there is an artwork tab, you browse to a .jpeg, there you got album art. That is all there is to it, it is really not anymore complicated than that but I wanted to say that my opinion has changed because this release changes everything, I think. We are going to see things, like they said, I think we are going to have other things creep up on us.
So I guess we are going to wrap up Managing the Gray here. This is number 16, I am CC Chapman. As always, 206-309-4729 if you want to leave a comment, ask a question, I love playing a comments on the show and I love playing questions or if you have a reaction to something I post about. If you are not reading Managingthegray.com, if you like the podcast, I am blogging a lot over at Managingthegray.com. So there is a lot of extra content there that you are not seeing on the show so you may want to check it out.
I have also added delicious things now so anytime I see anything during the day that I think is of interest, I tag it. And at the end of the day, I figured out what time it is, I think it is like eight o’clock every night Eastern Standard Time, it publishes out the links to my site so you can see what I am digging that day. You never know what it is going to be because I surf a lot of different sites.
I hope to see you really, really soon to everybody that I met at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, hey how’s it going?! Hopefully there are some new listeners here. To everybody that I met at the New England New Media Association, I hope there are new listeners from there, as well. We are going to have a lot of fun. We are going to do a lot of new stuff. There are some very cool announcements coming up and I cannot wait for them to come out because I am very excited about them. If you thought I was a passionate guy now wait until later because it is going to get even crazier.
So thank you for listening, I hope that you… tell a friend, get them subscribed, you can subscribe through any podcast engine you imagine, they are all out there and I will talk to you really soon. Take care guys! See you!
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