December 13th 2007
Transcript for Managing the Gray #46
Facebook and the Passion of Listeners
Originally Posted on November 30, 2007
C.C. Chapman: Well, good morning everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #46. How’s it going? I am C.C. Chapman, partner of The Advance Guard, new media guy, just all around passionate individual about this space that we’re playing in. New media playground is an awful cool place. We get new tools, new toys every single day it seems like. We haven’t any really big new ones in a while. We got some new ones coming out now, which is exciting. Today, we’re going to be talking about lots of different things. We’ve got Facebook, Seesmic, lots of different things.
Lots of reactions to the last show. I usually don’t play a ton and ton of listener comments. I’m very selective about them and not selective in the sense of what you’ve got to say, just I don’t have enough time to play them all because I try to keep the show short, but the last show when I reacted to my buddy Scott Monty’s audio comment talking about stats and all this — I didn’t lose it. I’m passionate about that. I just kind said it how it is and you guys reacted, you guys really reacted. I got some comments I want play from people reacting to that. If you didn’t hear the last podcast, what I was talking about was how to me as an individual, stats don’t matter to me that much. I barely ever check them. I check them every so often once in a great while just to make sure if things are working, that people are downloading, there are no problems, but I don’t pay attention to them. I honestly don’t know how many listeners I have at the moment for Managing the Gray. I don’t know. I could check. Go to FeedBurner or something, but every stat is different. I just kind of said for businesses, knowing these types of things is important, but for an individual, I don’t see it as being as important, my blog being the perfect example where cc-chapman.com has always been more of a personal journal than anything else. So, you’ll hear me just posting stuff to update for my family to read more than anybody else and if I let people read it, that’s great, that’s cool for me. You guys reacted. Man, phone line. By the way, if you ever have a comment, 206-309-GRAY. That’s 206-309-4729. I always love hearing from people.
You know what? I’m just going to kick in here. There’s a block of comments. I just want to just bam! Right? There are tons of them from lots of different people, some from different sides of the fence, which I think is great. That’s why the conversation should work. They shouldn’t be all back padding and, you know, “yeah, yeah, yeah.” It should be honest, constructive, good conversations. It’s what drives the world. It makes it a fun place. So, I’m just going to turn it over to the listeners. You guys rock for a second. How long is this? CastBlaster is telling me this is 8 minutes and 45 seconds of listener call-ins in case you need to fast forward. I hope you don’t because there are some good voice and good opinions, all men I just thought of. We don’t have women callers. There’s got to be women listening to Managing the Gray. I know there is. I can hear Heidi Miller and Donna Papacosta going, “Hey, what about us?” I know you’re out there. I just realized that all the comments on today’s show are guys. Something’s up. Anyways. I forget who is up first. I put them all together. I think it’s Tim Coyne.
Tim Coyne: Hey, C.C. It’s Tim Coyne calling from Hollywood. You know what? I’m halfway through your most recent Managing the Gray and I don’t want to pile on the guy who just called, but right now you’re in the middle of just kind of talking about how the reasons why you do Managing the Gray is how you do any of your personal type of blogging or podcasting and I just felt compelled to call in because, God, it just speaks to me. All right, a quick anecdote. Living out here, I’ve been doing The Hollywood Podcast for a couple years and it’s all about what I find interesting. It’s literally my creative outlet. Whatever I want to put out there, I put out there. Whoever responds, responds, and that’s it. You were talking about how comments kind of feed you and I feel similar in that way. I recently had a guy came out here for business in LA, listened to my show and he called me and we went and had lunch. His name is Scott. To me, that is just sort of personally mind blowing and it’s just, I don’t know, anyway. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m just saying I’m with you and, yeah, that’s it. That’s it, man. Hope you’re doing great. Love the show. I’ll be here, man. I’m going to keep on doing this, putting out my stuff and whoever responds, responds. That’s the way it goes. All right, later. Bye.
David: Hey, C.C. This is David from Britney Mason’s Popcast. I just got down listening to Managing the Gray, November 15th episode, “Risk and Success,” and you went on about stats don’t matter to you and stats aren’t important. You do it for yourself and I hear that and that is definitely the noble road. You mentioned the fact that you didn’t have sponsors. It would be sad, you’d miss the money, but you do it for yourself. It was a reality bitch slap. I’m going to take the opposite of you because you and I have talked about stats in the past and you know I’m obsessed with statistics. Some of us who are in need don’t have the luxury that you do that have listeners that call in or email. We have no other way to gauge whether or not people are listening to the show or is anybody out there? Who are we talking to? We can’t all be just noble and nice because you are one of the nicest guys I know. You just got me fired up about that a little bit and that’s my 2 cents. It’s a way for some of us to gauge listeners and, yeah, I might become compulsive about it and obsessive about it, but at least I know there is somebody out there downloading the show. That’s it. I will talk to you later. Bye.
Sebastian: Hey, C.C. It’s Sebastian. I just want to leave a comment regarding your comments about your own stats and I got to say if you really [unintelligible] I think I might appreciate your work even more. Sure, you want to attract everything you do for the clients, but I mean for being so not interested in your stats, you have to be really comfortable with your work and really excited. You show this excitement every other week and I think [unintelligible] really profits from that. Then you got also the reason why your nook on Facebook [unintelligible], but maybe that has other reasons too. So, thanks again for sharing and thanks again for being so generous with your thoughts. Take care. Bye.
Dave Jacobs: Hey, C.C., Dave Jacobs, the Rock and Roll Jew Show, The Connected World Show, and davidajacobs.com. It’s a driveway moment, just after work and listening to Managing the Gray and just had to jump on the phone line even if I’m unpacking my bags. Great, great show the last time. I agree with you on stats. I used to check them habitually. I almost never check them now. I don’t really think it’s about how many people are listening, it’s who is listening. It goes back to an old saying our friend David Fleischer used to say and I totally believe that. It’s really not about the raw numbers; it’s about the kind of influence that you’re having over the whole social media space. That’s way more powerful than the kind of numbers that you have. You can have 50,000 listeners, but another guy can have 1000 and have massive influence because of who those 1000 people are. That guy is a lot more powerful than the 50,000 guy.
Also, on careers in new media, I wanted to pimp a new project that I have going. I think I sent you an email on this a while ago, but I have it going now. It’s going as a Ning group and it’s called New Media Professional at www.newmediaprofessional.com, an idea I had where people like myself and you who are trying to break into new media or who are just starting their careers in new media, we need to come together, form a community, help each other out, support each other, give each other advice, but I formed this social network group to do just that, all kinds of advice and forum topics that I put up, everything from marketing to sales, the legal tax advice, everything you need to know to get your new business going or to get a job as a new media professional in an interesting business however you are approaching it. It doesn’t always mean that you have to quit your day job and go on your own. There are new media jobs being created every day I believe in the traditional space and some of us are probably going to go that direction. So, I encourage everyone to come to newmediaprofessional.com and join in the conversation and let’s help each other out as we go on this journey together. Some of us have more experience than others and together we can push everyone together. So, that’s it. Have a good day. I’m going in to start mine right now and I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
Gary Alexander: Hi, C.C. This is Gary Alexander from The Ultimate Podcast. I want to say that I just listened to Managing the Gray “Risk and Success” and I want to tell you how much I enjoyed that podcast. It was very, very honest and very straightforward and to me, it was one of the most enjoyable episodes that I have on my iPod from Managing the Gray. I think that you came across as a very heartfelt, very sincere, and, you know, just off-the-cuff almost, like you were really speaking from, you know, C.C. Chapman versus — and I’m not, you know, trying to dog out any of the other episodes, but this one just really hit me a little harder than the others. I don’t agree with you with stats. I’m one of those guys that, you know, figuring out stats is very important to me because I am in this for myself, that’s the reason why I started this, but also I do realize that this is a business that I can make some money off of and I look at it like that and I do know that numbers are extremely important. I do consider myself successful already, but would really like to grow those numbers, which is why I listened to your show trying to learn more about ways to grow my audience, ways to just learning more about social media and how that may affect my show and my possible future career, as you say, in new media, maybe that’s the word. I don’t know if there’s a word for what I want to be when I grow up. Irregardless, I started my show as a UFC McMartial Arts type of news and interview program and through that I am now the commentator and ring announcer for a new promotion that’s coming up the XFA, that’s xfalive.com, and I got that gig strictly through podcasting. So, I am really excited and appreciate the effort and input you put into Managing the Gray. Thanks a lot. I will keep listening and of course telling everybody that I can. Thanks bro. Bye.
C.C. Chapman: Congrats! You’re a ring announcer and you got that through podcasting? I purposely saved that one to the end because I was like, “Wow.” See? That’s what people need to realize is that new media as cool and slick and fun and everything it is, part of that breaking the echo chamber is the fact that there’s all these other worlds out there. Don’t forget the rest of the world. Don’t get stuck inside the fish bowl that is new media. Break out. Look at that, through podcasting, he’s a ring announcer. Would you have made that connection an hour ago? I wouldn’t have, but that’s the thing is the fact that people are connecting in weird ways that we haven’t even thought of yet. People haven’t even begun.
I was reading Dave Winer wrote a great blog post yesterday talking about how we haven’t even begun to crack the surface of what podcasting can be for a delivery mechanism. Don’t forget podcasting is really the delivery mechanism, the synching up and subscribing, that’s the podcasting. Why aren’t we doing more with it? He had some great ideas. Check it out at scripting.com. Dave has his days where he pisses people off, but he’s always pushing the needle a little bit further. He’s one of those guys. I got one more comment to play on this. It’s from the guy who started it all. It’s all Scott Monty’s fault. You know how Scott is. No, Scott is a friend, all right? We worked together at Crayon. Before we just kind of go on, I got to play Scott, right? I mean he called in too.
Scott Monty: C.C., my man. Hey, thanks for playing my comment on your show. It’s clear that you’re pretty passionate about it. That’s one of the things we’re talking about. I didn’t expect to inspire such an early morning rant, but at any rate I’m glad I got your blood running. Just to clarify one thing, I’m totally with you on the whole separation of personal and business. I think absolutely, as I said, it’s essential for business to have some kind of measurement in place, some kind of set of goals against which to measure your success.
On the personal side, I don’t think that’s essential. I use it myself and like I said, I’m probably a stats freak, but I don’t think it’s essential for everybody to be measuring how many visitors they have. To me, one of the best measures of engagement if I’m just writing whatever I want is the comments I get back from people and how people basically respond to what I say, how I have conversations and, as you say, yeah, you write your blog for yourself, but at some point it’s nice to just hear from other people and know that you’re not just writing into a black hole. Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to monitor how many people are coming to your site, not at all, but again it’s the passion that drives it whether you’re passionate about a business topic, passionate about a hobby, passionate about music, art, science, whatever. That’s what drives good content and in the end that’s what we’re talking about is delivering good content whether you’re delivering it for yourself, whether you’re delivering it for the one or two or 10,000 people that come to your site. It doesn’t matter. As long as you’re doing good stuff that you feel good about, that’s what’s going to keep driving it forward. All right, man, thanks for letting me go on about this and for entertaining the debate. Again, we’ll see you locally.
C.C. Chapman: Yeah, Scott. It’s all good. It is all about passion and that is true about anything you do. It is about passion. It is about creating compelling content. It is about putting that before all the tools and the gadgets and everything. So, thank you guys for that debate. I appreciate it. It was good to open conversation. I hope it’s gotten you thinking about it. If you’re out there and you’re listening, you’re going, “How do I feel about this?” Just figure out what works for you. It’s exactly what I always tell people when they have kids. I say go read every book and then figure out which pieces of it work for you. No one book has all the answers. No one podcast, no one individual, none of us have all the answers. We all have our opinions, our thoughts and we’re figuring it out and we throw them out there. Take what sticks and run with it, you know? That’s where the magic is. That’s where the magic is for this.
One of the things I want to talk about too is Facebook. Facebook has been a really crazy thing the past couple of weeks and one of the things I haven’t done lately is talk about tools and giving you kind of news of what’s going on. Facebook this past week had a really interesting couple of weeks. Beacon happened, which for those of you who don’t know what happened, I’m going to generalize this. Go listen to like For Immediate Release or, God, what’s the other one. I’ll come up with it. They talked about Beacon in much, much more detail.
So, basically, what happened is all these marketing retail sites on the web use cookies. Everybody use cookies on the web. It’s okay, but what they were doing was there’s this network beacon. All these bigger retailers were using this cookie and then it was tied into Facebook so that all of a sudden — you know how your news feed happens in Facebook? It says “Hey, C.C. friended” so and so or “C.C. joined the group” blah, blah, blah. Well, what happened was with this beacon thing, all of a sudden you’d see “C.C. bought a leather sofa from Overstock.com” and it will put in my feed. Now, the problem here is people didn’t realize this was happening. Where was this crossover? In the past, everything you did in Facebook was shared, but all of a sudden here you had this crossover where people who were doing stuff outside of Facebook, all of a sudden that data was being shared with Facebook and that pissed a lot of people off. Now, what all companies seemed to realize is the fact that — in today’s world, the web, there are two critical things. There’s your reputation, which is it’s everything, it’s everything you do and it’s also your data. Now, we give up lots of data to things. I mean my Gmail account is on a server somewhere and Google serves me up ads based on what I’m writing about. That freaks some people out. It doesn’t freak me out personally. I have given up on that.
Facebook, I share a lot of things, but when all of a sudden things start crossing over and the user doesn’t know about it, that is when you’re going to run into trouble. They should have made a big honking banner, big full screen thing when you first log in and say, “Hey, FYI, this is going on.” People wouldn’t have reacted as badly. Communicate, communicate, communicate. One of the things I always do is it’s not even playing devil’s advocate, it’s how are the users going to react? This goes for anything you are going to do on the web at all, not even on the web. You’re going to be holding a concert. Try to think of what is the worst possible reaction you could get. Not so much what could go wrong because you hope for the best and you play in for the worst, of course. That’s rule one, but what is the worst reaction that could happen and how could that spiral? We always talk about that. Every project we do. Who could get a thorn up their butt and start screaming about this? You need to think about those things because in today’s world, that will spread like wildfire. You saw every blog, every Twitter, everything was talking about Beacon and flipping out. I mean Facebook blew it on this. They completely blew it. They’re fixing it now, but they blew it. The best blog post, Chris Abraham had a post how Facebook ruined Christmas. I mean think about it. You put in the most simplest thing… I mean Laura now is on Facebook. She sees my Facebook. If I have bought her something on one of these sites that uses beacon, it would have said, “C.C. bought a gigantic penguin,” which Laura loves penguins or something like that. That’s a simple thing, but maybe you shopped at a site that used a beacon and you didn’t know about it because of course you’re not going to know. Maybe it was risqué, maybe it was appropriate for Facebook, maybe it’s something you don’t want to share. What if it had been a health store?
Start thinking about these things. It’s not fun when your data is getting shared without your knowledge. One of the things I highly suggest you do if you use Facebook because I hadn’t thought about it until I saw someone twittering about stuff I was doing on Facebook, groups I was joining. It also happened when I left a group just because there was nothing going on. I was cleaning out my groups. I didn’t know what this group was and I got an email from someone saying, “Hey, why did you leave my group?” I’m like, “How the hell they know I did that?” You go into Facebook and on the upper right hand corner, there’s a privacy thing. Go in there and look at the things you can do. You can actually say what you don’t want to share on your news feed. I knew it was there. I just never actually dug through it. They have a lot of privacy options. I suggest you go on any site that you’re doing work, think about the privacy options. Just go check them out, really dig into it. Just look. It took me a little while and I said, “You know what? I really don’t want to share that.” I just don’t, little certain things. So, I highly suggest you do that. That’s what happened on Facebook this week if you weren’t aware of that.
In Facebook, another thing they did was they opened up pages in ads so now you can actually create almost like Google ads. You can create ads on target individuals. Now, what’s gotten people a little freaked out and marketers of course, you went, “Ooh.” I mean even I did. I went, “That’s kind of cool.” You can go into this and say, “I want to create an ad.” Now, even if you don’t want to create that, what you can do is you can get really quick research on Facebook demographics because as you start putting your criteria whether you do it by buzz words, you put in there “blogging” or “knitting,” you can put in words and what it’s going to do is it’s going to search things that people put in their Interests and whatnot in their profile. As you type in those words and it finds it in its database, you’ll see the numbers so like it starts off with 8 million users or how many users and then it starts getting smaller. It tells you how many users that ad is going to target based on that. As you filter, it’s kind of neat.
So, you can literally say, “Show me only women.” I forget if it’s just age now, but I think it does, “Women, 20 to 30, who are into swimming,” and it will slowly tell me how many there is. It’s a great way to quickly get demographics. Now, that kind of freaks some people out because like, “Wait a minute. Should you be sharing that data?” That, I’m okay with honestly because it’s not saying “and here are those 5000 users.” If it took it to that step that would be bad, but that would be stupid on their part. I’m okay with them saying “there’s this many users who do that” because I think that’s great. It kind of goes, “Oh, cool. There is a community here.” I think it’s a great way to target. The ads are kind of annoying, but I’m also already blanking them out unless it’s something really compelling.
The other day, I saw a face, I knew him, “Hey, I know him!” and I clicked on his ad just to see where it took me, but the Pages feature is also something neat. For those of you who haven’t figured out what’s going on with Facebook Pages, what it is, is it’s just like any other account in Facebook. The difference is they finally have allowed businesses to do this. I’ve had people in the past say, “Hey, C.C. What do you think about…?” I know somebody set up a newspaper account in Facebook and it got bounced because that’s against their Terms of Service. Terms of Services says a person and account, real person, but now businesses can create what are called Pages. They have pretty much all the features, but they are okay for businesses to set up. I think there are some nice categories, some local stuff which I love. I haven’t seen much happened with it yet, musicians, all this stuff, and you set up a Facebook account. Big deal, right? There’s a huge difference. There’s one huge thing that people seem to forget. These Pages are public if you make them so and what I mean by that is you can go to this page without being logged into Facebook. It doesn’t show you all the data, but it shows you the majority of it.
Yesterday, I was playing around so I made one for Now is Now, a band. I know Mitch. I have permission from him to do stuff like this, so I made a page and what’s neat is you can actually go to it and never have been in Facebook before. It looks like Facebook, it acts like Facebook, but you don’t have to log in. If you log in, you can become a fan and you can do things like that. The key part is the fact that your profile is outside of the walled garden of Facebook [unintelligible] and I’m seeing people create them for podcasts and I’m seeing them creating for other things. I’m still not sure. I don’t know if I need that. It’s one of those things I’m trying to figure. I mean I’ve got the Hey Home Fries group, which is working for me. If you are on Facebook, go to heyhomefries.com. It will redirect you into a Facebook group, which is kind of my landing ground for everything I’m doing and you become a member. I [unintelligible] once in a while over there. The Pages thing is neat because it’s another step forward and I’m interested to see where it’s going. Searching for them is kind of, not broken, but it’s weird. Facebook’s search algorithm kind of messes up sometimes like I saw yesterday Matthew Ebel had created a page and I went searching for it and I couldn’t find it, but I knew it was there. So, I don’t know how long it takes to re-index and all those things. Maybe it’s not broken, maybe it was a timing issue. I just wanted to give a kind of quick update to people on what’s going on, on Facebook because a lot has been happening there and I know you guys, a lot of you are trying to figure it out. You’re playing with it, you’re investigating it, and I just wanted you to have that update.
I got one more comment that called in because this one’s cool. I love when people call in and are excited and I’ve incited somebody to go. So, here we go.
Paul Lyzun: Hi, C.C. This is Paul Lyzun of the Video StudentGuy Show. We met briefly at PodCamp Boston and I’m looking forward to seeing you again and talking in person at the next New England Podcaster Meetup. Since PodCamp, I’ve made it a point of listening to a wider range of podcasts. I’ve got a long day of commute between Connecticut and Boston, so I can get through two or three each trip. I just finished episode #40 and I was so jazzed by your comments that I had to push this out to you. Listening to podcast on a commute is great. There is so much good, uplifting information out there. It’s just that I don’t have a chance to respond when the idea is afresh because I’m sitting behind the wheel. So, tonight on the way home with about 10 more minutes to drive, I decided once the show is over I’d run silent, think about what you were saying. I love your audience contributions, by the way. It really adds color to the show. PodCamp Boston was a great event for me. I didn’t make as many personal connections as I would have liked, but I came home with a lot of ideas. I didn’t get in on the Circle Conversation, but thankfully Chris [unintelligible] of the conversation at the end of the day on Sunday.
The thing I like about your show is the enthusiasm you have. It’s infectious. Right now I’m considering adding another show, a video cast, and the comments in show #40 on podcasters selling themselves short and ways to bring in money was very encouraging. Of course, it’s not going to be easy to get sponsors and advertisers. When you approach those goals, you’re talking about being a business. It’s serious work, but getting money for what you enjoy doing is certainly worth the effort and the way you, Mitch, Chris Penn, and others talk about it, it sounds completely doable. I’m busy like everyone else. I already got a podcast and I’m in school with a day job and a family, but after your show I feel like I have to absolutely must create a new podcast so I can swim deeper in the waters of new media. I know this is pretty longwinded. Use what you want and lose the rest. I just want to say thanks. I’ll talk to you later.
C.C. Chapman: Don’t lose it. I’m not going to lose anything. Thank you for calling in or sending an MP3 file. That was awesome. One thing, I just want to clarify this. You talked about having to swim deeper in the water. Don’t think you have to do that. Sometimes I’ve watched people, I’ve done this myself, you disperse out and do too many things and then you don’t just dilute yourself, but you also hurt yourself because you’re so stressed about “I got to do this, this, this.” Sometimes it’s just better to just focus in one direction, pinpoint, tip of the spear, figure out what you want to do and then when you get that rolling, then branch out. Don’t think you have to consume everything at once. Just be careful. I just want to advice you on that. If you’re listening and you like my passion, trust me, that comes at a price. I don’t sleep. I love sleeping, but I don’t sleep very often. Just take your time, get your feet wet, enjoy. Dip it in the deep end of the pool, but don’t think you have to dive in, all right? What is up with the water? It’s not even raining. I shouldn’t even be thinking about water. I love the fact that in your comment you said you like when other voices are in the podcast. Well, then you’re going to love today because there are all sorts of voices today and I am excited and I want your voice. You can email me at managingthegray@gmail.com or call the comment line. It’s just like voice mail. You just call up and say, “Yo, what’s up?” It’s 206-309-4729. I would love to have you on the show. This show just go on longer than usual and I’m okay with that. Things are going really good. I’m very excited.
Oh, I’ve got Seesmic invites that I have to give out. Okay, so Seesmic, what Seesmic is. Seesmic is a new upcoming video platform. Well, it’s just not a YouTube, but it’s different. There’s something different about it. It’s all Flash-based, which has some people liking it and some people not liking it. The FedEx guys are driving up. I’ve got Seesmic invites. You got to seesmic.com, check it out, you can watch videos. What’s cool about it is it ties into Twitter, it ties into YouTube, so when you submit a video, it ties into your webcam. I can record a video, hit Publish, it goes up in Twitter, people see it, they can reply, they can connect. They tie together. The community angles are coming. It’s in pre-alpha. Everybody wants the invites. I’ve got five to give away and I don’t know how to do it.
Part of me said I was going to ask you guys to do Managing the Gray reviews on iTunes, but I was like, “I wouldn’t want my listeners just to do that anyways.” I was going to maybe call in for them. I don’t know what I was going to do. So, let me make this really easy, no contest or whatever. The first five people who would leave a comment on this podcast on managingthegray.com get the Seesmic invites. Leave something besides “Hey, I want them.” React to the show, that way I know you listened. Don’t worry about putting your email on the comment because I’ll see it behind closed doors when you comment. The email is there and I’ll get in touch with you with the Seesmic invite. I guess that’s the easiest way to do it. I can’t think of anything fun to do, something goofball, take a picture of yourself listening to Managing the Gray and post it on Flickr. I was going to do something silly. I just want to give them out to people. I have five of them, so just go to managingthegray.com, leave a comment, and you get a Seesmic invite and we’ll go from there. I’m on there. I’m randomfoo because they didn’t allow underscores, I was pissed, or dashes in the name so I went with randomfoo. So, if you look me up, I do random videos there. They’re fun, they’re stupid, they’re brain dump, extremely conscious.
We’re going to wrap up because I know Roxie is going to bark at the FedEx guy. I don’t know what the FedEx guy is bringing me. I wasn’t expecting anything today. I’ll talk to you guys soon. Have a great time and listen, enjoy new media, just enjoy it. Have fun. Do what you want with it. Get people excited about it. We will all get there together. We’re all figuring it out. I’ll talk to you really soon. Take care.
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