On the Eve of Podcamp – Podcast Transcript
Transcript for Managing the Gray #57
On the Eve of Podcamp
Originally Posted on July 18, 2008
CC: Hey everybody. Do you even remember who I am? This is C.C. Chapman, host of Managing the Gray, co-founder and partner of The Advance Guard and all around just web freak.
It’s really exciting. It’s an exciting time for me right now because in a couple of hours, Steve Coulson, my business partner, will be here in town. It’s going to be the first time he’s been to the house, first time he’s met the family. I’m just kind of excited about it. It’s one of those things that’s been on my mind a lot lately and if you read my blog over at cc-chapman.com or on managingthegray.com, you’ll know I’ve been thinking a lot more about the face to face, the social, the interactions. I’ve been thinking a lot about the marketplace, both work and play now these days and just thinking about how it’s changing, it’s evolving. I mean it’s different and there things that people seem to forget and that I don’t want to forget.
One of those is the personal connection. I mean here I am, I’ve been working with Steve for a long time now even before The Advance Guard, I talk about him every day, I work with him and my family haven’t met him yet and that feels very strange. I’ve hung out with his family. I know his kids very, I know his wife very well and it’s not to have the favor returned, not favor, but, you know, have it flipped. The kids are really excited to see him. It’s that whole personal connection.
Working virtually, it’s difficult. It’s not a walk in the park and anybody who tells you it is, is full of crap because it requires a different type of person, a different type of connection because you’re not having this face to face connection. It’s different. It’s very, very different and that’s something that people need to think more about in this social media space. If you can’t tell today, this is one of those stream of consciousness. I’ve got a blank Moleskine in front of me where I was going to make notes. I just really wanted to do a show. I miss talking to you guys, so just stream of consciousness you guys seem to like. I got one comment to play.
People need to realize that you’ve got to still connect with people. You’ve got to still meet them face to face, shake their hand, have a drink, sit down and have a conversation, a real conversation. What we have online is conversation, but it’s not the same as talking, seeing facial expressions, just hanging out. I had dinner this week with a great group of individuals, most of whom I didn’t know and it was great to talk about all kinds of weird, I mean creative storytelling through game play and photographic representation of poetry, topics I would never ever talk about and I’d probably never go seek out online.
I saw Chris Penn talking about this the other day. He talks about it quite a bit actually. One of the things with social media and the web in general is you get to choose what you see. If you sit down and you watch the nightly news, pick any of the networks because each network is different, but if you watch the network, you consume what they give you. They choose what to show you in that half-hour of news. You don’t have a choice, but online when you open up your RSS Reader, whatever one it is, you’re choosing what you’re reading there. It’s not like something generic and magical is going to pop up randomly and be in your face. You’re going to pick what you want to read and that sort of isolates you.
One of the things this week I’m trying to experiment is I’m trying Google Reader. It’s weird. I use Google for everything except for the Reader. I’m a lifelong Bloglines guy for some reason and I really like it, but one of the features I’ve already fallen in love with, with the Google Reader is the Friends Shared Items. Now, whenever I’m reading something in Google Reader, if I just want to share it, I just click Share. All that means is if somebody has decided to look, they can at any point go, “Oh, what is CC sharing?” and look, so every morning whenever I go in, it shows me on my Friends what they’re sharing and I click and read and I’m getting exposed to things that I would not usually read. Some of it is the same old stuff, but some of it is stuff that — I read something last night, it was some fish or something, it was weird. This is what I mean is it’s starting to broaden my horizons and we all got to think about that a little bit more, that we are isolated.
You hang out on Twitter, you’re talking to the same people everybody. You hang out on Facebook, it’s the same people. There’s nothing wrong with those people. What I’m just saying is remember there’s a whole world out there of people that you’re not interacting with, the stories you’re not hearing. There is cool programs, cool happenings that you’re not aware of.
Music, I found this new band I got introduced to, Girls, Guns and Glory, thank you Sooz. I hadn’t heard them before. Why? Because they’re on the radio and I don’t listen to the radio that often and they’re not on podcast either. So, they’re in this weird world where I don’t usually get exposed to, but over dinner, talking about new bands we like, they came up. I went and checked them out and I dig them. See? It’s really, really simple. Let me play a comment. I got this comment and it’s funny because, you know, I was talking about the whole social media expert and the expert thing and how I don’t like to call myself an expert and Shel Holtz, a good friend and a great guy, chimed in and said, “Well, CC, no.” So, let me play his comment.
Shel: Hey, CC. This is Shel Holtz from For Immediate Release at www.forimmediaterelease.biz. That’s my podcast. I co-host with Neville Hobson and I blog at A Shel of My Former Self at blog.holtz.com. I’ve been catching up on podcast including Managing the Gray. I had a couple of really long flights getting back to the west coast from Montreal earlier this week. I should have said beautiful Montreal, shouldn’t I?
In any case, I heard the episode where you proclaimed that you’re not a social media expert and while I sympathize with what probably led you to say that, which is humility, I would argue that you are in fact a social media expert. An expert isn’t necessarily somebody who knows everything. In fact, even in professions that have been around for decades or even hundreds of years, the best experts are constantly learning. I understand that social media is new and evolving and nobody knows everything, but what distinguishes you and a lot of the other folks that we know in this space is that you concentrate on it. You focus on it to the exclusion of other possible things that you could do to generate and income and as a result you developed expertise. Note expertise and expert derived from the same root.
Over at Princeton on WordNet, they define an expert as a person with special knowledge or ability who performs skillfully and I don’t think you would argue that that absolutely defines you. So, I think you need to fly your expert flags very proudly. I don’t think that there is anything arrogant about calling yourself an expert. When you get right down to it, why would anybody hire you if you weren’t an expert? Why not just go to somebody who has a blog if we’re all still learning and we’re all at the same level, all in the same boat? You’re most definitely an expert and you work hard to develop that expertise. I think you should be proud of it and I think you should proclaim it. My two cents and of course thanks for everything that you continue to do and I’ll keep listening.
CC: Man, you know, there are certain people in this world that when you get a compliment from, at least I do, I get very humble. I don’t blush, but you know. Shel Holtz is one of those guys. I’ll never forget Shel actually called me a mentch one time and that really hit home and meant a lot coming from him. He’s a great guy and thank you, Shel.
Yeah, it’s funny. There was a blog post this week talking about the whole expert term. It’s a weird term because some people take it wrong and some people take it right. Yeah, I know a lot of stuff in this space, I do. I admit it I do. I have worked hard to understand this stuff. I continually work hard. The expert term is always something that just doesn’t work for me. I don’t know what it is. I just like to think of it, you know, one of the things I was seeing the other day on this blog post I read was talking about the fact that I think the best people in any area are always in a role of advisor and student, always. You’re always learning. You can always teach and the best always are teaching. I understand the term about those who can’t do, teach, but at the same time I mean I think those who do, do it make the best teachers. I love teaching people.
I’m really looking forward to PodCamp Boston this weekend. I had a presentation set to go talking about building your brand with passion and I’m going to kind of change it completely. I had the slides and I went, “You know what? No. I want to get back to the roots. I want to teach. I want to work with people.” It will be interesting. I’m hoping people come to the session.
It should be interesting time. I know one of the things I was really excited about directly involved with that too is I asked Chris Penn this year, right at the beginning I said, “I want to give my usual sponsorship that I give to PodCamp Boston — this year instead of doing, you know, I don’t need a table, I don’t need any of that stuff. Can I just give the money, but do it as scholarships, whereas, there was this, you know, it cost to get in.” He’s like, “Yeah.” So, it was really cool and what was interesting is the scholarships I gave, I know a couple of them were to Emerson students. I got an email from a professor saying, “Hey, I listen to your show. I would love to give these out to my students.” I said to him, “Well, ask your students if they’re interested and have them contact me.” They proactively did.
I gave one to a girl in New York. I cannot wait to meet her. I don’t know and that’s what I am excited about because I am empowering them to get into something where they may not have, but I hope they get something out of it and I’m going to try to follow up with them, especially the Boston too, I’d love to follow up and get them on Managing the Gray maybe and just talk about what they got out of it and get an honest opinion from complete newbies, what they thought about it. I think it could be really intriguing.
Speaking of PodCamp Boston, it’s funny. I’ve taken a kind of a break from speaking. I got kind or burnt out this spring. We were doing a lot of speaking and travel with launching the company, I said, “You know what? I’m going to take the summer off from speaking.” So, this is the first time I’m going to be speaking in months and I cannot wait for it. I’m very, very excited about it. I’m energized about it. I get a kick out of public speaking. I enjoy speaking to a crowd, especially in an environment where people are excited to be there. They want to learn, they want to find out more. I can’t wait. People have been approaching me about speaking this fall and I’ve been talking to them. Yeah, I would love to get back into speaking just because I’ve missed it even just a couple of months away. Mentally, it was the right thing to do.
Some people have been asking how The Advance Guard is going. The Advance Guard is going really good. I don’t ever want this podcast to turn into a pimping exercise, but business is good. Steve and I are pushing forward, doing the right things. It’s one of those interesting things where, you know, here we are several months into the company and you start thinking about, okay, so where do we want to go in the next 12 months and what clients do we want to work with, what clients don’t we want to work with, what do we want to be when we grow up.
It’s one of those things where we had kind of a broad — we had a very broad definition of what our company was when we started it because it was one of those things we weren’t planning on starting. This is advice. I hope this helps somebody. We kind of came in with a broad scope of, you know, we do this, but then as we started doing things and contracts started coming in and clients, we started narrowing our focus and not so much narrowing, but saying, “We don’t want to do these types of things. Here’s that broad bucket. Well, let’s take out these rocks that we don’t like. Get rid of them.” If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, why do it? Yeah, it’s the money. It’s one of those things, you know, early on you take the work you get and like, “We don’t like this type of work. Let’s kind of focus away from that. Let’s do this,” talking about what do we want to do. It’s been really, really exciting.
We just sent out a Facebook update the other day. If you’re on Facebook, search for The Advance Guard. We’re using that as kind of our newsletter now, it makes easier for people to opt in and out, and just talking about the things we’re doing, how we’re helping with the HBO True Blood campaign and the Verizon My Home 2.0 campaign. We just finished up a project for Coca-Cola and it’s just been a lot of fun and some things in the horizon. It’s a really exciting time, a challenging time. If anybody thinks that starting your own business is an easy thing, let me tell you, it ain’t. It’s a lot of fun. I’m having a blast. I’m learning a ton. I got a good business partner. It’s kind of interesting the fact that, you know, connected virtually, met virtually, and pretty much run our business virtually. We have a real office in New York now, but I don’t get there as often as I’d like, but it’s a cool thing.
I just want to kind of connect with everybody and let everybody know I’m still alive and kicking out here and doing pretty well. The comment line is always open and I’ve got a new one. It’s toll free in the US. It’s 1-866-384-4522 and you can call that with anything and I promise — I have a bunch of calls I got to go through. It’s just one of these things where I’ve just been so busy and taking the time to do a podcast has been difficult, but it’s something I need to do more because I miss you guys and I like to share my thoughts and brain dumping like this for 13 minutes and you let me do it.
So, if you’re coming to PodCamp Boston this weekend, I hope you swing by and say hello. I know Steven and I both will be there, so will Christina from The Advance Guard. We’ll be in and around. I’d be ashamed not to say swing by and say hi to mDialog, they’re our client as well. I’m really proud of this Unicef program we did, the What Would You Say to World Leaders? I’m really personally proud of it. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Check it out. I just like the message of — you know me. I’m a little touchy feely, I like doing those types of projects, it was a lot of fun, but mDialog will be at PodCamp Boston. I know they’re going to have a table. They’ll be around. You’ll see them. Come say hi and learn about what they’ve got going on.
Until next time, guys, I am CC Chapman. You know, you can find out more about me at cc-chapman.com or go to theadvanceguard.com. I promise that site’s coming, just we don’t need it at the moment. Anyways, until next time. If you got to call, 866-384-4522 or swing by managingthegray.com and leave a comment and I’ll talk to you very, very soon. Have a good one guys. Get out there. Be creative. Be smart. Have fun. It’s what it’s all about.
