Podcast Transcript: Passions, Photography and Face to Face
Transcript for Managing the Gray #58
“Passions, Photography and Face to Face”
Originally posted on September 2, 2008
CC: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Managing the Gray. I am CC Chapman coming to you from a beautiful, beautiful Metro West Boston today.
It’s funny. On my mind today is passions, photography, getting out of your comfort zone, all those types of things. I realized it has been way too long since I did a Managing the Gray. Summer, you know, summer happens and if you’re a father or a mother or have kids, I guess you’d be one or the other, wouldn’t you, summer takes a lot of time and when you’re running your own business like I am here at The Advance Guard, summer is one of those times where things just get away from you and one of those things that happened was podcasting kind of took a backburner, not a priority or anything, just timing, just didn’t have a lot of time, but I want to make sure I got a Managing the Gray out because I know I have at least a few new listeners from a photography workshop I took this past weekend in Portland, Maine. What I wanted to focus on — it got me thinking.
So, what it is, is a good friend of mine, Chris, does a podcast called Tips from the Top Floor. If you’re into photography at all, even just point-and-shoot of your kids, Tips from the Top Floor is a great podcast. It covers all sorts of photography, all sorts of questions, answers, and Christ is just an all around great guy. He’s from Germany and he did these workshops. He did four of them last year and I couldn’t make any of them and this year I got to go to one in Portland, Maine, that focused on studio photography.
What was amazing is just sitting around with these different individuals from around the country because they came from all sorts of directions who were all there around a collective passion for photography. No one was a professional. Everybody had different jobs they did, everything from a truck driver to people who work for a large computer company to an Air Force, I forget his rank, but it was just interesting.
What hit me was it was one of those things where I was there for passion for photography. It’s nothing I ever want to make a living in doing. It might be fun, but it’s truly a passion of mine, something I enjoy doing, something I love doing. What was fun is sitting around with these people who I wouldn’t have met through the podcasting circles or through going at marketing seminars. I wouldn’t have crossed paths with these people and just sitting around and talking about life and then it was funny because things like podcasting did come up because most of the people there had listened to Chris’ podcast so they knew what a podcast was.
It was interesting hearing what other people listen to for podcast. None of them had heard of either of my podcast, which was cool so I got to talk about that. Most of them are listening to photography or tech podcasts or things that they were passionate about. It’s one of those things that you really need to step up away from your comfort zone every so often, just to be reminded that the stuff that we’re doing in new media and on the web, if you think about it, go look at your — pick a social network, Facebook, MySpace, pick either one of them then go to Twitter or go to LinkedIn and I bet you’re going to see that the same people are in those networks over and over again in your circles, in your friends or whatever you want to call them, your connections. It’s going to be the same people over and over again. One of those things is, you know, call it the fishbowl, call it the echo chamber, call it whatever you want, the problem is that you got to get away from those.
I’m not saying disown them. What I’m saying is you’ve got to spend time away from all the same people. This was the problem before social networks, your dear cliques in high school, your dear cliques in college, even cliques in society, it’s just the way it is, but I think more people if you break out of this and hang out with people that you normally wouldn’t cross paths with, it opens your eyes and remind you that there’s more out there than what you’re seeing in the daily basis, something you take for granted, twittering and talking to people and getting news split second to your Blackberry or your device of choice. It’s something that not everybody does.
Just go into the bus stop in the morning, which is a new thing for me by the way, taking the kids to the bus stop is something new and just talking to those people every morning and the things they are talking about, the other parents, are very different than things I would be talking about. Politics come up and life comes up and sports and who knows what and it really hit home that I think too many people have gotten comfort in this bubble that we’re playing in and just don’t get outside enough.
I know I’m not the only person who talks about this, but this just really hit home that I think more people need to get out. I wasn’t totally unplugged when I was in Maine, but I was up there for four days and I checked email at night and I was twittering once in a while. I wasn’t reading any twitters. I sent them out once in a while and it was just kind of nice to hang with these new people. Sunday before I left the class, I got down a little early and I stopped by the Portland Lobster Company to sit and watch my friend Mitch from Now is Now play a little bit and just kicked back and did nothing and people-watched. I didn’t even bring my camera which was funny. I’ve been shooting photos all weekend, but just sitting and watching people and interacting with new people, people need to try that whether it’s your business, whether it’s you online. Find new people. Interact with them. Unplug and interact with people. Talk face to face. Really, really, really get to know people. It’s funny because what this all ties back around is I got a listener comment that kind of talked about the same things and I really want to just stream of consciousness brain dump out to the Managing the Gray listeners today. Let’s get an audio comment here.
Ian: Good day, CC. My my name is Ian. How right you are. We mess around with all sorts of people on the Internet. We have all these social interactions with people, but do we actually know them very well? It’s interesting. I’ve met quite a few people on the social networks and I don’t think I actually really get to know a great deal about them until I meet them in the flesh, when you get to look in their eyes, when you get to ask them what their passions are and they stop to talk to you and their hands stop waving and their eyebrows go up and then you start to get that real connection.
That’s what I thought was fascinating about the points you were making. Yes, we do mess about on the inter-webs and talk to people, but it’s getting to know people in the flesh that we still do. I often refer to the [unintelligible] walking around the planes of Africa how it used to do all sorts of things in a very basic way and one of those things was to basically sit around the campfire or sit around, you know, eating and just all the nonverbal that were going on.
We forget that we do these things. We can put so much across in language whether it be written or spoken, but there are all these nonverbal that we use all the time. We all know this. When you’re with your partner and they do something, you pick up on all sorts of attitudes, don’t you? We often forget this and when I want to make a relationship richer that I’ve met somebody online, I always like to try and hook up with them. That’s why when I started my podcast last year, I made the conscious decision that I was not going to do Skype conversations with people.
I decided that everybody, it’s not an absolute because I might come across somebody that I’ve just got no other choice, but at this point in time I have not had to have a telephone or a Skype conversation to somebody from a podcast. That’s why when I went to Europe recently, I made a point of actually tracking people down and meeting them, sometimes just socially, sometimes to actually record a show with them and I was able to get I think a lot more out of them because I could get excited by what they were saying and I can draw out of them what they want to express a bit better. It was a more human conversation and those people who listen to my show have actually said that it feels like they’re sitting in on a conversation, which is exactly what I want. So, I absolutely agree with what you’re saying. Thanks for your show. If you want to check out what I’m doing, it’s over at yourstorypodcast.com. That’s what I’m up to. Thanks for your program. I love catching up whenever you put it out. It doesn’t matter if you don’t put it out for a few months. Just keep putting it out from time to time. I love it always. See you, bye.
CC: I agree fully. I hate doing Skype interviews. It’s why you don’t hear me do interviews very often because I much prefer to do them face to face, to sit down to talk. I love that and he’s totally right. It was funny because I had this in my head of stuff I wanted to talk about and then I heard that audio comment and I’m like that’s perfect to put in right there what I’m talking about, getting out and meeting people and talking to people and interacting and get out the bubble and all that. It’s really on my mind and I think people need to start thinking about it more and companies as well.
I had this conversation recently where if you think about it, if brand X, it doesn’t matter what brand it is or what they’re selling, they’re going to go out, they want to hit the blogging community, hit the inter-webs, they’re going to look at the same people day in and day out for the most part. Granted if you’re tech, you’re going to go one direction; if you’re music, you’re going to go another direction, but there’s definitely, as much as I hate the A-lister term, there are certainly A-listers, there are certainly a core group of people that you know if you can get them to write about your product or get attention for your service. It’s going to help, it’s not going to hurt, but at the same time I’m like look beyond them. Don’t always focus on the numbers. I’ve always been a big fan of it’s not always about the numbers. If you have 100 listeners who are highly interested, highly concentrated as opposed to 1000 who are kind of cashable, I’d rather have that 100 everyday.
Chris Marquardt and I from Tips from the Top Floor, we’re talking about this weekend and how vital it is for us as podcasters to have connections with our audience, how much of level of trust that is. We both have the same philosophy. You can’t break that. It’s a two-way street. If either one of us was to either pimp something or shill something and we didn’t really believe in it, our audience would see right through us and would leave us. It’s definitely a relationship and it was fun meeting these people this weekend who are in his community, who came because they listen to his podcast and they traveled across the country and paid a significant amount of money to attend a photography workshop. It was neat and it was really fun.
I got another listener comment I want to play. This is going back a little way to when I was talking about the cost of a social media expert.
Andrea: Hi, CC. This is Andrea Vascellari from Finland. I just finished to listen to one of the latest episodes of Managing the Gray and I was thinking about the comment that Shel Holtz from FIR left, talking about experts. The funny thing is that the blog post you mentioned after Shel’s comment is the post I wrote. The title of that blog post was Experts – Yes, No, Maybe.
I got the inspiration, you know, I thought to write that post after I read this tweet by Kathy Sierra in which she was asking how do we decide when someone is an expert or when should be taken seriously as an expert. Shel made a very good point in his comment and I think it assimilated to stop by and record my thoughts on this audio file. So, what I think is that they key isn’t points of view. So, one side, we have people, common people, and on the other side we have so-called experts. I mean people see you as an expert because of your expertise, because of your special knowledge and abilities, but on the other side when we look at those knowledge and skills, well, I guess we take a distance from calling ourselves experts because we know really well the space and we know how fast it can change and evolve and in a way how difficult it is to be always up to date and always one step ahead.
Like Chris said, like Chris Brogan wrote on his comment on that post I wrote, he says, “Experts in this space are tricky to quantify.” That’s why I think we prefer the role of advisors. On the other hand, I agree with Shel when he says, “Why would anybody hire us if we weren’t experts?” Here’s how I live my relationship with the term expert. I feel more like living like an advisor and then I let people tag me as an expert if they want. I don’t know if this is humility like what Shel said, but I don’t know.
I’ve noticed that when somebody starts to call you an expert, well, you know the power of word of mouth. So, I will attach to this audio comment also a link to that post I wrote, so if you fancy you can include it in the show notes and it will be interesting to hear also the thoughts of the other Managing the Gray listeners. You’ll find me on my website at andreavascellari.com. There, you have access to my blog and podcast. I will spell my surname, it’s V-A-S-C-E-L-L-A-R-I. So, again, CC, thank you very much. I love the show. Keep up the great work. Bye.
CC: I love that the two listener comments today have great accents. I love listening to people with accents whether it’s a different dialect from America or somewhere else in the world and it’s funny you mentioned Finland. I’m very disappointed I couldn’t go to — I got this unique opportunity from Nokia to go to Helsinki for a conference.
The problem is, honestly, I’ve been on the road so much and being a family guy I just don’t like traveling a whole lot. I really, really don’t. the excitement of going to a new town, the excitement of meeting new people, the exciting thing about taking photos in a new place is great, but I hate being away from my family. Plain and simple, I love spending time with my family. I thought about it long and hard. It was not easy to turn down a free trip to Helsinki where I wasn’t even going to have to speak. I was just going to participate, but thank you very much Nokia for the opportunity.
I hope I get another chance, but I am going to be traveling in a little bit and this is one of the reasons why I didn’t go to Helsinki was because the weekend after that, I’m headed to PodCamp Montreal. If you’re thinking about going, it’s the weekend of September 20th and 21st in Montreal, beautiful Montreal as my good friend Mitch Joel says. I’m really looking forward to it. What’s going to be interesting talking about breaking outside of your shell and going to a new area is this is going to be a bilingual PodCamp. There’s actually going to be sessions in French and sessions in English. Every post they do on the website is in French and English. It’s very interesting. I’m extremely curious how this is going to go.
As someone who only speaks English, once I get past “Bonjour! Je’Mapelle CC Chapman,” that’s about the extent of my French and some Canadian swear words that I learned on the Bob and AJ Show back in the day, but I’m extremely interested in this and extremely excited. If you’re going, Mitch Joel and I are doing a presentation together talking about passionate podcasting and why we both subscribe to the live podcasting methodology, if you can call it a methodology, the sit down, hit record, and when you’re done, you’re done. I’m really looking forward to it. I cannot wait.
Montreal is one of those cities I’ve been trying to get back to for so long and I haven’t been up there since podcasting began, which is scary, but there’s people up there that I love and respect and I’m really looking forward to PodCamp Montreal. So, if you’re thinking of going, please consider coming over, going up, whichever direction. I look to the speaker list, there are some really interesting speeches going on. It’s a different conversation than the standard ones, so I’m very much looking forward to that and I can’t wait.
Then in October, I’m actually headed out to the Marketing Profs Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. There goes the phone, talking about live podcasting. You got to love it, speaking of live podcasting. Hopefully, the answering machine won’t turn on and we’ll just ignore the phone, right? This is why podcasting is real. Yes, Scottsdale, Arizona, I’m going to be going out there for a conference speaking on video and branded entertainment. So, I’m looking forward to that as well. There are some other conferences mixed and match here and there. I have to do a blog post more for my sake than anything, but also to let people know where I’m headed.
So, that’s going to wrap up Managing the Gray for today. If you want to call in, the call-in line is always open. It’s toll free here in the States. It’s 1-866-384-4522. That’s 866-384-4522. We’d love to have you calling on the show. I know school is starting out for a lot of people. My kids started up last week. If your kids are starting school, I hope it’s a great year and I hope to hear from you really, really soon. You know where to find me on the inter-webs, managingthegray.com or drop me an email at cc.chapman@gmail.com. Until next time, I am CC Chapman. You guys, stay safe, have lots and lots of fun. I’ll talk to you soon.
