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Transcript for Managing the Gray #60
“PodCamp Montreal Reflections”
Originally posted on September 23, 2008

C.C.: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Managing the Gray #60. It is a crisp, cool, beautiful morning here in Metro West Boston. I’m fresh back from PodCamp Montreal and I said, “You know what? I’ve got to do a Managing the Gray while the thoughts are fresh in my mind, the vibe is still there and before the workday really gets underway,” but does the workday ever really end nowadays?

Have you really thought about that? It’s always on society especially if you run your own company or if you work in something other than, I don’t know, I’m sure there are certain jobs where you shut off, but certain jobs, the ones I work with, the world I live in, it’s always on society. We talked a lot about that at PodCamp Montreal and what was going on and differences between the generations, the demographics, everything surfing the web, how they interact with things. I’ve had some amazing conversations.

If you go to podcampmontreal.org, you’re going to find that there’s tons of stuff out there. Go to Flickr, search for the tag for the weekend. If you’re into tagging, it’s pcmtl. So, if you search for that on Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, or whatever you want, it’s out there, lots of stuff.

I still have to write my wrap-up post, but I want to do a podcast first. Of course, one of the highlights for me was sitting down and presenting with my good friend, mentor, and all-around great guy Mitch Joel from Twist Image. What’s really neat is we did something about podcasting with no nets, just kind of the way we both record, fire up CastBlaster, hit go.

We kind of talked about how to make that possible if you want to do it. I’m not saying it’s the right or the wrong way to do podcasting, but just talking about the ways we prep to do it and how we can handle doing something like that and why we do it. We also recorded live. After we kind of did the overview and talking about things, we recorded Six Pixels of Separation for Mitch. Of course, we’ll link to it in the show notes so you can go over there and listen to it. It’s the entire audio, uncut.

Basically, we spoke for about 20 minutes talking about how we prep and things and then we actually recorded the podcast. What’s a lot of fun is it’s just right there. You hear the reaction, you hear the crowds. It’s just a little micro track that he loves. So, I will definitely link to that in the show notes, but if you’re listening now and you want to jump over there, it’s www.twistimage.com/blog. It’s probably a couple of days — well, it depends when you’re listening to this. He put it up on September 21st I believe, so if that helps you when you’re searching for it if you’re listening to this years down the road. Who knows? That’s what’s great about this audio we’re creating is that it goes out and lives forever, but it was a lot of fun. People seemed to be into the session, which was great.

So, what did I think about PodCamp Montreal? I thought it was very well organized. It flowed very nicely, the sessions. There was a variety of speakers. There was both French and English. The only bad part for me was the first session I went to was supposed to be in English. The way they had the little pocket schedules, which is a great idea, a pocket-sized one, if it was in English, if the description of the session was in English, the session was going to be English; if it was in French, French was the basic thing, but I went into this morning session I thought was going to be extremely well and people liked the session I guess, but it was all in French so I couldn’t understand.

Yes, I know the law of two feet, but I would have had to literally walk through the U stream to do it and I was just, “All right.” It was very taxing on the brain, but it sounded like people were into it and passionate about it, so that’s what matters the most and the presenter was certainly into it and I talked to him about it later, but it was a great, great PodCamp, lots of different people.

One of the interesting things, we were sitting there, some of us who had been to other PodCamps were observing and thinking how is this different and one of the noticeable differences and I don’t know why it was so noticeable, there was a large number of women there, a large number. I don’t know what the percentage was, but it almost felt like 50:50, if not more, and that’s not the norm for a PodCamp. It was enough of a difference that it was noticeable and it was refreshing and it was nice. It was just different. It was one of those weird little things that we notice.

The location was great. I don’t know how related location in Montreal. I thought it was fine, lots of little lunch places to go around it. There was a neat design school, so there were neat things to look at if you kind of walk around outside of just the classrooms, which was exciting.

I think it was the first times I actually saw Julien Smith speak, which was interesting. He gives an amazing presentation with Mario Bros. and Pacman talking about life is a game and trust agents. It was very, very well done and I know it was the first time he gave it. I’m looking forward to him actually fine-tuning it and making it richer. I think it’s going to be a very powerful keynote sometime. I think Julien giving a keynote to a big room of CMOs and CEOs is going to be a very exciting thing because they’re going to judge him the minute they see him and then he’s going to get on stage and he’s going to rock their brains out and I love that.

I also got to meet David Usher. David Usher and Mitch Joel gave a great presentation on the future of music. No, I didn’t see it, but I know it because the day before, we went out to lunch and I was there when they were brainstorming and going over it. I know it was going to be a great presentation. The reason I didn’t go to it was because I was meeting the famous Cat from the CatFish Show, an old friend that I had never met.

So, that’s what PodCamps are about for me. They’re about connecting with people. They’re about meeting people that you’ve only known online. It’s about establishing new connections. It’s about giving a hug to someone. That’s what any conference should be about. Yes, they’re about business development. Yes, they’re about getting your name, your brand out there. Yes, they’re about making business connections and personal kind of connections, but I prefer the personal connections first because the business connections come with those personal connections.

Something I said that seemed to be people resonated with, there was a panel on blogger outreach and PR companies and it was an interesting panel, but one of the things, I thought they were being a little, little preachy about things, about how always establish a relationship. Now, I am all for that. I am 100% for relationships, but I’m also a realist. I run a business.

We do blogger outreach a lot at The Advance Guard and we believe in doing it right, but the thing is, you can’t always have a relationship with someone that you want to outreach about a product. They may be the perfect person for it and you don’t know them. I said something. There was a girl who was asking questions. I talked to her after wards and I said, “Every relationship begins as a stranger,” and I mean that because yes, I would love to have personal relationships with blogger out there or podcast or influencer or individual that I want to talk to about a client, but the fact of the matter is you can’t. You can’t have it and you’re going to have varying degrees of relationships. You get one of those really close friends, you get one of those acquaintances, maybe someone you bump into at a conference, the fact of the matter is yes, establish those relationships, but they have to begin somewhere. Every friendship begins somewhere so just don’t be afraid to reach out and talk to people.

One of the other highlights of it is this company Akoha. Now, Akoha won TechCrunch50. No, they didn’t. Whoops. They didn’t win. They were AT. See? Early morning, no holds barred. “C.C. says…” No, Yammer actually won TechCrunch50, but Akoha was at TechCrunch50 and they presented and I’m very excited about it and I want to tell you about it and I’ve got a contest about it.

What Akoha is, is the very thing — you know Pokemon, Magic, all those playing deck cards you do stuff, well, it’s nothing like that except for the cards. It’s based around the concept of Play It Forward and I’m very, very excited about it.

If you don’t know, I’m a huge, huge fan of charities and volunteer work and giving back. I think you need to give back. Trust me, it’s the whole karma thing. It comes back to you. Some people would say, “Oh, that’s really sweet of you, C.C.,” but I just believe in it. I really, really, really do believe in it. It’s just the way I was brought up.

What Akoha is, it’s based on the whole concept of Pay It Forward. So, you get a deck of cards — you can hear them, I’m playing with them. They’re missions. Each card is a mission. Give somebody flowers. Thank somebody. Make somebody smile. Send drinks to a couple in love. Give someone a surprise gift. Give someone a book. My favorite one? Read a blog or feed a blogger. A wildcard. Give someone chocolate. Donate an hour of your time. Invite someone for drinks. Give a fluorescent light bulb. Invite somebody for coffee. These are mission cards. You can get them — they’re hard to get actually.

So, I take this “give somebody flowers” let’s imagine and say I was go to buy, or yesterday, let’s use real world example. Make somebody smile was one of my missions. So, I stopped by and had a coffee break with my wife Laura at work yesterday. I just finished a meeting. I was in the area so I stopped by. I knew she was only going to have 20 minutes, but I wanted to surprise her. So, I bought her coffee, actually she bought me coffee now that I think about it and I gave her the card. I said, “This is the thing I’ve been raving about,” and I gave her this thing that said make somebody smile.

Now, what happens is on akoha.com, I had that as a mission. When you get a deck of cards, you type in a number and it assigns all these missions to the cards for you, but in this case I gave her a card, right? So, she goes out to the website, she says, “Yes, I got this card from someone,” and types in this number because it’s a unique identified per card and it says, “This is the make somebody smile mission from C.C. Chapman,” because I’ve tagged it in the system as well. She puts it into the system now and now she is expected to pay it forward and give it to somebody else and that person will register it and this card will travel around the world hopefully and doing good. It just pays it forward.

Take it from a business side, you wonder, “Well, what’s the business model? What is it? Why are they doing this?” Well, I had the distinct pleasure of spending a lot of time talking with the Akoha team, I mean a lot of them, just Simon, Sean and Austin Hill. I had a great chat with Austin Hill. Me, Julien and him had a chat on the street corner. He was waiting for his girlfriend and we just started talking about things. They’ve got some amazing plans. I don’t know what is secret and what’s not, so I’m not going to talk about their future plans, but they’ve got it. They’ve it figured out and even if they didn’t, I still wouldn’t care. Even if this was some rich philanthropist who just wanted to make the world a better place and funded a startup like this, which isn’t how it was funded I don’t believe, I think it would be in a great story and I love it.

I’ve got five Akoha decks I’m going to give away. I want to do something a little different. These are getting spread all over the US. There’s a big concentration in Boston and starting to happen in San Francisco and of course Montreal where it started, but I want to get them out in the international waters. I want this to start spreading around the world. So, I what I want you to do is the first listener from five different countries who emails me at cc.chapman@gmail.com, I’m going to send you a deck of Akoha cards. I’m very, very excited to get these out in the stream, but I want to spread them out because what’s amazing is you start this, you give it to one person and then you give it to the next person and the next person, they’re going to spread all over the place. I want to get them out into different areas of the world so we can start spreading it.

So, just drop me an email and say, “Hey, C.C. I want an Akoha deck.” Give me your mailing address. Literally, just five different countries around the world and I hope they spread all over the world. I would love to give a deck into Africa and one into Asia and in Europe, just everywhere, Australia. I’m starting to name continents, but you know what I mean. I just wanted to get them out there and I’m very, very excited about Akoha. Again, check it out at akoha.com.

A web 2.0 company doing going, something that’s just all touchy-feely, it hits every spot that I love, well, not all of them, but you know what I mean. It’s a great thing. I’m very excited about it. Getting my hands on a deck was my goal at PodCamp and to actually get some extra ones because I asked. I said, “Hey, could I get some more?” I want to give these out to my podcast listeners. It’s something I really, really, really believe in. I should talk to Austin about doing their marketing because I’d love them to be a client, but, no, I just love them. I just think it’s such a neat idea. It’s funny because when you open the pack, you don’t know what you’re going to have for missions. There’s going to be new missions coming and people can create their own missions and localized missions. There’s so much going on. I think it’s just a very neat thing. Plus, it gets you out to do some good.

One other person I need to thank before I forget is Rob Cotter, as Mitch likes to say it, from Fixion Media. He put me up when I was in Montreal. He has a corporate apartment and he let me stay there and I really want to thank him and his girlfriend for all their hospitality because they went above and beyond what they needed to do and I really, really appreciate that. I will link to him in the show notes so you can check it out.

If you’re ever going to do advertising to reach the heavy metal and the rock and roll vertical, he’s the guy to contact. He’s the guy where you should buy your media buy through. He’s also just an all-around great guy. He’s a long-time Home Fry listener of Accident Hash and we’d never actually met. That’s what I’m talking about. You never know something.

Speaking of something, side note here that I’m very, very excited about and yes, this is a for a client. It’s not for a client the reason I’m talking about it. If you get the new issue of Rolling Stone, page 30, there’s a full page ad for American Eagle and the contest they’re running right now for a Rolling Stone live concert. The photo on that page that takes up the entire page is my photo. I took that photo. I’m very, very excited. It’s of the band The Black Fortys who won their college — as someone who’s getting into photography and someone who’s just getting I think just starting to get my feet wet in photography, it’s pretty cool to say I have a photo in Rolling Stone. I had to share that. I hadn’t talked about it on Accident Hash, yet, but I’m very, very excited that I have a photo.

It’s a very good time. It was very neat to me. I also met Marko from Photography.ca at PodCamp Montreal and it was a lot of fun.

In the back of my head, I keep wondering. It feels like the first time at the beginning of the show, I said PodCamp Boston. I don’t know if I did, but every time I say PodCamp Montreal, it’s the back of my head going, “You idiot. You said it wrong at the beginning.” I’m not sure if I did or not. So, if you’re laughing at me or maybe I’m just making no sense, I don’t know, but that’s the way we roll around here.

Oh, the comment line, because I always forget to give you the comment line. It’s 1-866-384-4522. Again, 866-384-4522. It’s toll-free in the States. You can call up and leave a question or comment, whatever you want. For those people in the US who are complaining about I didn’t give Akoha cards because I can already tell because I’m giving them out to international listeners this time, I might have something for you very soon. We’ll see what happens.

So, I think we’re going to wrap it up today. If you have a second, swing by iTunes. Leave a review of Managing the Gray there. It never hurts to get a review. Of course, go to www.managingthegray.com and leave comments because I love to hear from all your listeners. All your listeners? My listeners, whatever. Again, if you get a second, I’ll link over to Six Pixels of Separation that features the session from PodCamp Montreal.

To everybody that I met at PodCamp Montreal, to the listeners of the show who came up to me and thanked me for doing the show, I don’t think I could accurately express how touching that is to me, how important that is to me to have listeners come up that I’ve never met and say, “C.C., that homework assignment you gave a year ago changed my life,” or “I’ve been listening for a long time and you really helped me get going. You keep me motivated.” That motivates me to keep going and I absolutely love hearing it. So, please, anytime you want to tell me that, I ain’t going to mind. I love hearing from listeners and meeting them, especially when I give them a hug or shake their hand, that’s always a plus. Yeah, I’m a hugger. It’s the way it goes. So, lots of links, lots of love. PodCamp Montreal was a lot of fun. I hope they do it again. It’s a very cool city, one that I hope to see more of. I have some very close friends there that it was good to see.

Until next time, I am C.C. Chapman. This is Managing the Gray. You guys take care.

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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.

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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.

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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.

- Originally posted on ManagingTheGray.com -

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Transcript for Managing the Gray #41
“Calculated Risks and Taking Chances”
Originally Posted on September 12, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Top of the morning everybody. It’s C.C. Chapman coming to you from the new C.C. studios here. Yeah! I’ve moved since the last show. This is episode #41 of Managing the Gray and I’m very happy to be here. There are a lot of things going on in my life right now. So, today we’re going to be talking about everything from risk to happiness to career changes to all those things that I’m going through right now. I had several people email me including John Swanson who sent me a very, very nice message encouraging me to share this. He wasn’t sure if I was going to share this sort of things and I had planned to. I get a lot of feedback from a lot of people and I’ve gotten a lot of messages over the past couple of days. Wait. I realized some of you may not know the news.

So, I have resigned from Crayon. I am leaving Crayon, a company that I helped form and launch and get going. Maybe I didn’t help form it, but I helped get it launched and all that. It’s been a great year. It’s been an up and down year, but it was the right time to do it. It’s honestly something I had thought about for quite some time and knew that was going to happen, but with moving the house, putting down a gun for hire free agent on a mortgage application doesn’t quite work. So, I stuck it out and I’m leaving. I wish them nothing, but success. I know they’re kind of changing themselves now. So, I hope Crayon goes on to do success, the guys there, the ones that are left I really like. I really appreciate it. I hope they do great things. There are still a lot of great ideas there. So, we’ll see what happens and keep watching them at crayonville.com and see what they’re up to.

Me? So, what am I doing? I’m taking a chance. I’m taking a risk and it’s something that I think applies to anybody who listens to this show is the fact that risk happens. You need to embrace it and be okay with it, but there’s a difference between a calculated risk and just throwing it out there and hoping things work. You got to think about things like this, especially when it’s involving your career. You’ve got to really think about the long-term implications. You’ve got to think about where you’re going to go, what you’re going to do. Can you do this? I mean things like financially, can you do it? I mean I just bought a house and I’m still selling my old house. It hasn’t been sold yet. So, there were lots of financial decisions in this, but at the same time don’t think just short term. You’ve got to think long term.

What I’m trying to get at is these are things you need to think about for whether it’s a project you’re about to do, whether it’s a career change, whether you’re going to college and trying to take your first job. You got to be comfortable with taking a chance and taking a risk because let’s face it. Depending on how old you are, you’ve got plenty of time to fix it. If you make a mistake, we all make mistakes because sometimes mistakes happen or chance turns out to be bad or risk doesn’t work in your favor, in which case you just have to change it around, get going and going again. The key is that you can learn from it. We’ve all heard the thing you can make mistakes, just don’t make them twice. That’s true. Learn from them.

I know pretty much any project I’ve ever worked on, things haven’t gone quite the way I thought and you learn from it and then on the next project you don’t do that and you learn from it again. We’re all learning. Anyone who says they know all the answers is wrong because everyday things are changing it. I was talking to someone the other day and I was talking about what I’m very excited about where I want to stay freelance for a while is I get to help companies, people, individuals “get it.” Her response was, “Yeah and that means first realizing that getting it changes every two weeks,” and that’s very, very true.

If you’re thinking about doing a career move, if you’re trying out a new project, just calculate the risks, really look at the things and look at it from every angle, analyze it. What I always like to do is, “What’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s the worst possible thing that could happen? What’s the next worst possible thing?” Once I get those out of the way, I can really figure out, “Okay, how can I avoid those two worst things?” Then I can focus all my energy on the positive because if you’re thinking about taking a risk, there are always a million positive outcomes that can come of it, but think of the two worst. Look at those and then do everything possible to stunt them out and move forward. That’s my advice.

Now, I get a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls from you guys. Oh, I get yelled at when I don’t give the comment line out. It’s 206-309-4729. That’s 206-309-GRAY. There. I get a lot of questions like I’m not happy in my job, what can I do to leave. If you’re not happy, get out. There are so many jobs out there. There are so many opportunities out there. You can make your own opportunities. I’ve always had this rule that if I get up in the morning — if I get up for a solid week because we all have those days you get up and you’re just like, “Oh, I don’t want to go.” We all have those days, but I’ve always had this thing that if a solid week happens and I just don’t want to be there or I’m dreading it, wherever that job is, that means it’s time to get out. It’s not worth it. Happiness is way too important and life is too short.

You’ve got things in your life that you do that do make you happy. Mine, it’s my family. My family comes before everything and they make me happy. If I’m not happy, then I know something’s wrong. I mean I knew I made the right decision to move on when two days after I resigned, we were sitting in the living room and Laura looked at me and I go, “What?” She goes, “I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time.” When your wife notices something like that, that shows you that I made the right decision. I know I did. So, really look at your happiness. Figure out what makes you happy. Know what you want and what you don’t want, especially if you’re looking to move to a new job because let’s face it, right now, I mean I’m not going to lie, I’ve gotten some offers for jobs already and I’ve turned them down because I know what I want and more importantly, I know what I don’t want. For me, I’m a driving guy so a commute is like the ultimate hell for me. I hate commuting, especially like a long commute. It’s such wasted time and wasted opportunity in your life and it’s such a life suck. I hate commuting. The other thing, the rule I’ve told everybody and I’ve done this when all things started going crazy, I won’t leave New England. It’s just not an option. That’s just my personal rule. I mean those are my two rules. I don’t want to commute and I won’t leave New England. Those are my two rules. I won’t leave New England because it’s where all my family is.

It’s funny. I remember I had a company courting me a couple years ago and they were like name my price. I’m like there is not a single dollar value on this planet that will get me out of New England and it’s true. I just won’t because there are too many things that are more important than money and no job is worth leaving the things that are important to me. Think about that for you. Maybe it’s right down the list. I mean I keep a paper journal. I write down things all the time. It’s the old pro and con sheet. Again, this can work for projects too or company strategies. Think about these things. Life lessons, baby. It all ties back together. It has to do with business. It has to do with new media. It just does it all.

One thing too is if you’re thinking about leaving a job or you’re thinking about taking a risk, be realistic. I am not one of those guys who can just throw caution to the wind and just jump out of a plane. I’m going to check the parachute. I’m going to check the airplane. I’m going to make sure I know what I’m doing. Just think about the big picture and think about the long-term implications of what you’re doing. Sometimes a little risk can snowball out of control and the next thing you know, you’re drowning, you’re just going insane. You don’t want that. I always like to think long term. I like to think, “If I make this decision now, how could that affect things 6 to 12 months out or even further?” I can’t do the five-year plan anymore because stuff is changing way too fast. I’m lucky if I have a 6- to 12-month plan because things are changing so rapidly and the technology changes every month, day, whatever you’re talking about, but really be realistic. Look at it objectively. One of the neat things that I’ve always been able to do is take the creative, take the crazy rainmaker idea, go crazy, and then look at it from the realistic side of things and say, “Can this happen? Is it the right thing to do?” I did a lot of those thinking over the past few weeks, a lot of those things.

If you’re going to take a risk, especially if you’re doing it on your personal side, you’ve got to have the buy-in of the people you love and care about. I could not have made this decision without Laura. Plain and simple it wasn’t. We talked long and hard about it. She’s funny. She had the ultimate faith in me. It’s kind of crazy to have two mortgages and suddenly quit your job with nothing lined up. We’re talking about risk and taking a chance, but I knew it was the right thing and she was okay with it because we talked about it. She knew why I was doing it. She knew the reason. She knew where I was going. It’s funny. I thanked her. I said, “Thank you for believing in me,” because it’s a leap of faith on her part to believe in me, but what she said came back to me. It blew me away. She said, “You’ve never given me a reason to not believe in you.”

That meant a lot and that’s kind of personal. Yeah, this is showing I’m kind of wearing my life on my sleeve, but that’s what I’m about. I mean C.C. Chapman is an open guy and I share you guys and I’m hoping you’re getting something out of this and I’m hoping those people out there who said, “C.C., we’d really want to hear your side…” If you’re looking for dirt, you’re not getting it here. Just get out of the way because I’ve had plenty of people ask for that. Really make sure the people around you, your support network whether it’s your friends, whether it’s your family, make sure they’re involved and they will help you. I know right now, if you’re listening, I know that there’s like one person you could think of outside of your direct family that you’re like, “I could go to them and ask.” I have those people.

When I was ready to make this decision, there were two people that I knew I was going to call and chat with and I did and I talked at length with them. It helped reaffirm my decision and that’s not a bad thing. If you’re thinking about taking a risk or a chance, reach out to somebody. See what they think. Tell them because they might go, “Are you insane?” but then when they realize it’s a really truly good idea or good risk, they’ll embrace you, they’ll help you, they’ll give you ideas because that’s what true, true friends are about. They may be Internet buddies. They might be lifelong buddies from school. It doesn’t matter. You know who your trusted people are. Talk to them. Work with them. Chat about what’s going on because sometimes just getting it out of your brain — I find it very helpful to just get the idea out of my brain and just bounce it off to somebody. Just see what people think about it. That’s important.

Now, one thing I am going to push. Things are not going to be given to you. You have to make your own opportunities. I’ve heard from so many people over the past year doing this podcast where people say, “Oh, C.C., I want…” they expect things given to them. There is no such thing as a free lunch, right? Well, I’ve had free lunch before, but let’s face it. You need to make your own opportunities. None of this stuff is given to you for free whether you’re talking about growing a podcasting audience, whether you’re talking about influencer outreach to get your product out there, it’s not going to happen overnight by magic. Yeah, once in a while, Tinker Bell swings by and dusts it with pixie dust and all kinds of cool things happen, but in most cases you’re going to have to work very hard to make your opportunities. I’ve worked my butt off these past few years, really getting myself out there, getting my brand to where I want it to be and I want to take it to the next step and you’re going to see things in the new future taken it to the next step, but that has been a lot of hard work, a lot of hours, a lot of late nights.

You guys ask how I get things done. It’s late night. It’s the Mac on the couch with a beer at midnight going, “Okay, now, what do I need to do?” You’ve got to work hard. Opportunities sometimes will present themselves and, yeah, I’m finding out now that it can be out there. Sometimes just raising your hand will get you noticed, but you’ve got to work hard. Make your own opportunities. I cannot stress this enough. You’ve got to do it. Get out there. Reach out to people. Reach out to your network. Actually, use a social network for what it’s really used for. Find people. Interact with them. Make friends. Have a dog that barks in the middle of your podcast, things like that. Just work hard. It’s amazing what a dog will do to distract you.

So, I think this is a perfect time. I want to play a comment from Paul Colligan.

Paul Colligan: Hey C.C. It’s Paul Colligan. I just listened to your show about are we selling ourselves too short, new media selling itself too short. Yes, we’re doing that. That’s the problem and the problem is if we don’t get together and prove what our value is, scream what our value is, shout what our value is, then the traditional media is going to keep thinking they can buy us off for a case of beer or something like that. So, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to realize the value of what it is that we have. Now, the [unintelligible] changed in a number of ways. It used to be we associated value with the equipment that produced the value. Movies are better than home videos because the movies were produced over a multimillion dollar budget, whereas, the home video is a $300 Handycam kind of thing. Let’s face it, podcast, like you said, they’re basically free. So, what happens is a lot of times we associate the content as being basically valueless because it’s created basically free.

That’s not the case anymore. The technology is becoming ubiquitous. That’s what we wanted, that’s what we dreamed for, but the value of what we do with the content, the value of that information, that’s where all the power is. Second Life, one of your favorite hangouts, the technology is great, yes, but it’s what the people are doing with the technology that gives Second Life all its value. It’s the exact same thing as podcasting. So, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to realize how much value we have. We’ve got to only charge for that value. We’ve only got to let people purchase what we have to say at the value that we’re worth and then these things will change. It’s scary sometimes to realize, to charge what you’re worth. It’s scary that someone will say no. It’s scary that someone will invalidate you. Whatever the term is you want to look for, the fact of the matter is new media is worth it. Let’s stop selling ourselves short. Great show as always, man. Sorry I’m a couple of weeks behind, but it’s just too good not to call it on. Talk to you later, sir. Bye.

C.C. Chapman: Thanks Paul. Thanks, Paul, for covering up Roxie barking. You’d think with the new studio that I’ve got here, I’ve got doors on this studio, I’m just not used to shutting them so they are now shut and the bus went by so hopefully she’ll be quiet. What Paul was saying, it plays into it too. It played into the whole value discussion that we’ve been having for a while, but also plays into your worth and determining your worth. I’m having to face that now. I had someone yesterday call me up and say, “Hey, C.C. I want you to do this and this and this and this. How much is it going to cost me?” I stopped and I realized, “Crap! I got to think of these things now. I need to think of rates and things like that.” How do you determine that? Sometimes in today’s world, it’s not just based on talent or experience. It’s based on a lot of things. You can ask 10 different consultants and they will all charge you totally different things. It’s kind of interesting and that’s a problem I’m dealing with right now and I’m going to figure it out, but it is definitely something that, like Paul was saying, it applies to podcast, it applies to everything. I think you’re going to see a lot of discussions about this.

The Podcast and New Media Expo, newmediaexpo.com is coming up at the end of October. I know there’s going to be a lot of chatter about that. The Association for Downloadable Media is having its first public meeting there. I will definitely be in that. Profitable Podcasting, there’s going to be a meeting by Paul. There’s going to be a lot of great sessions, a lot of great conversations. Trust me. There will be lots of things going on there both in the Expo floor, in the Marriott and just all around. Homefry Breakfast, by the way, any Managing the Gray listeners, we’re going to have breakfast at the Spire on Friday morning down the street, basically have breakfast before the conference opens and you’re all invited. I can’t believe I’m going to say this. The invitation’s on Facebook. Wow. Email me and I’ll get you details.

So, there are lots of opportunities going on. There are lots of conversations going on about how do you value your content. I just got back from PodCamp Philly a couple of days ago. What was interesting was there wasn’t as much talk about that there because most of the people there weren’t even into podcasting yet. Me, Mark Blevis, and Linda Mills did a session on highly effective new media and one of the first questions I asked was “how many people is this your first PodCamp” and easily, easily 90% of the room, 80-90% of the room raised their hands and I asked “how many people have never done a podcast” and it was a little bit less than that, probably 70-85%, but it was still a lot. So, there was a lot of new people coming in and learning about the technology and figuring out “does this work for me or does it not.” They’re going to be asking the value question before you know it, how to get sponsors, how to get…

There is so much talk about that and I think you’re going to see a lot of changes. I’m curious what gets announced at the PME. There are always big announcements happening. I know a couple that I’ve heard rumbling in the background so it will be interesting will anybody get more money, will people be joining new networks, will companies be merging, will there be new technology. Who knows what’s going to go on? I’m looking forward to it because it’s a business opportunity for me too now. Going the gun for hire route, the mercenary role now, I’m looking for work. I don’t have one. As of Friday, two days from now, I don’t have a paycheck anymore so it’s going to be kind of interesting to see where things go and I’m excited. That’s what I want you to think about is get excited about what you’re doing. If you’re not excited about what you’re doing right now and you want to do something more exciting, do what I was talking about earlier. Look at the risks. Figure out what’s important to you, what’s not important to you, what drives you nuts, what sucks your life blood away. If it sucks your life blood away, you don’t want that and whatever you moved to. You don’t want to work with that. You don’t want to play with that. Do you see a project coming down the pipeline that gets you excited at your company? If so, go after it. Raise your hand and say, “I want to be part of that.”

If you see one that you know is just going to suck every living day out of you, avoid it like the plague. Try to get away from it, but when you see something that excites you, go after it. Work hard, work very hard and make it work. Make it yours. Make your opportunities. Take the chance and just get out there, kick butt and have fun doing everything you’re doing. Be passionate about it. Passion is what drives everything or it should. Passion drives everything I do, everything I do, everything I live, breathe, and do whether it’s making dinner last night, spoiling my wife, or it’s recording this podcast, or it’s seeing a movie, or it’s painting a painting, or it’s writing my book, which I finally get to do more of. I wrote a bunch on the train the other day. It felt good. Chase your passions. Use that energy. Figure out what makes you happy and just go do it. All right? I can’t stress that enough. Seriously. Right now, write down what you hate and you love what you’re doing right now. That’s your homework. Just go do it and think about it. I tell you, if the side of the hate is longer than the love, you’ve got something you got to think about.

Call me up, 206-309-4729, or drop me an email at managingthegray@gmail.com. I would love to talk to you and hey, you want to hire me? You’re not going to hear me say this every time, I promise. Cc-chapman.com has got all the contact information. I would love to hear from you. I would love to work with you and if you think you’re too small, don’t. I’m very much excited about working with people, individual bands, movies, companies, whatever it is, other agencies. Heck, I’ll come in and do a pitch with you guys or facilitate brainstorm sessions. Whatever it is, I just am excited to work with such a variety of new people. That has me giddy with glee. Giddy with glee, C.C.? I don’t think so.

Anyways, guys, you take care. I will be back very, very soon. Until next time, swing on by managingthegray.com. All right? Go out. Be passionate.

Originally posted on Managing the Gray 

Posted in Transcript | Comments(1)

Transcript for Managing the Gray #40
Assigning Value and Monetizing Your Podcast
Originally posted on August 6, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Well, good morning everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #40. Hey, it’s C.C. Chapman here in MetroWest Boston. It may not be morning for you, maybe night, evening, who knows what it is? Whenever you’re listening to this, I hope you’re having a good one. I hope it’s a sunny day, beautiful day, and things are going well for you and I hope you’re having fun playing on the new media playground like I am. It’s a Monday morning here in Boston. It’s episode #40 of Managing the Gray and I wanted to get this out before the week starts, before the week consumed — you know how that happens sometimes? You have goals and things and then your week just kind of completely consumes you or even if just a day consumes you? I’m not worried about the week necessarily even though I’m headed off to Florida this week, not for vacation. It’s all work, no pleasure. Well, probably some pleasure, but who knows, but heading down there.

I knew this is going to be a fun show because I know I was going to get some quality feedback in the last show where I was talking about selling yourselves short, talking about Jaffe’s iPhone and all that. Of course, no audio comment from Jaffe. I see the guy in person, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be on my show. Anyways, lots of people called in to the comment line, which, again, in case you don’t have it, is 206-309-4729. It’s 206-309-GRAY. We love hearing from you, anything you have to say. We would love to hear from you. I’ve got tons of comments today to play. They’re very long. They’re very insightful. They say a lot.

The topic of selling yourself short and monetizing your podcast and bartering and all that. That’s one thing I want to say upfront too because there was a lot of discussion on the blog as well. I have zero problem with bartering. I am a huge fan of bartering. I once did some — this was a long time ago now I think about it. I did some logo work for someone in the early web days and they paid me a Best Buy gift certificate. I don’t remember why. There was something with their accounting. I said, “Buy me some Best Buy gift cards,” and it covered the cost and I was cool with that. I think bartering is an amazing thing. It’s worked for centuries. I have something you want, you have something I want, let’s trade and I’m okay with that. I have no problem with someone giving an iPhone for an episode. I think that’s great. It was just a particular podcasting question I thought that was selling that one short. Actually, let me play that comment right here because it fits before. Can you tell I’m just kind of flying by the seat of my pants today?

Mike Wills: Hey, C.C. This is Mike Wills of Mike’s Hotdish at nextgenerationofradio.com. You were talking about selling — are we selling ourselves short as podcasters and, you know, I would honestly have to say I have no idea. I think the people who have it in marketing and people who know what advertising costs or whatever knows what they’re worth, know what their show is worth, know what their audience is worth, and so on. I think people like me who are just your average everyday person or a programmer or just a geek or whatever, we sit back and like I don’t know what my show is worth, I don’t know how to charge for it, you know, just in general that kind of information.

So, we just “Hey, I’ll give you 20 bucks to advertise on my show.” “Oh okay. Yeah, sure. Great!” That’s income. We really don’t care, but, yeah. They don’t believe the stigma of “Oh gosh, you guys are so cheap, we can have [unintelligible],” you know, whatever. Anyway, I guess it all comes down to we as podcasters, most of us don’t know what we’re worth so we don’t know if we’re selling ourselves short or if we’re too expensive. Maybe we need comparison to radio and television, I don’t know. Is the audience worth more than them? I guess those are some questions that I don’t know and hopefully someone could figure out an answer for. On that, keep up the great show. I enjoy listening and I’ll see you guys next time. Remember, the nextgenerationofradio.com.

C.C. Chapman: So, that’s what I was getting at. What I’m getting at is that each podcaster has determined the value for themselves and yeah, I know a lot of it, especially if you’re just starting out, you don’t have a value. Any money that gets thrown at you is more money than you had yesterday. I used to say that and I still say that that anybody who fights the idea of monetizing your podcast, what I always say back to them is, all right, take your favorite product, company or charity or cause, I don’t care what it is. Think about it in your head right now. Now, tell me. If they came to you and said, “We will pay you to talk about us. You get to talk about it how you want. We’re not gonna push an ad down your throat. We’re just going to say, ‘Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Podcaster, here’s money to talk about us and you already love us.’” There is not a person on the face of this earth who wouldn’t take that and I’m sorry if you say you did. You wouldn’t, but it’s true.

The point is you’ve got to figure out what is good for you and it is different. A guy who’s just sitting around doing this in his spare time might charge different than a soccer mom doing a podcast who might charge different than a corporation doing a podcast. Just to give you an idea, I mean when we’re talking about advertising on television or newspapers even just banner ads on major websites, you’re talking about thousands and thousands of dollars for one run or a week run.

One of the things I’m suggesting to you, I’ve heard Tim and Emile Bourquin over Podcast Brothers talk about this, is if you go to a company, a major corporation, if you actually get to the point where you’re looking for sponsorship and you go to a company and you say, “Hey, would you like to sponsor my podcast for a month? It’s four episodes and it’s going to cost you $500.” They’re going to laugh at you because they’re going to know you’re not taking yourself seriously. You’re an amateur and that’s not a bad thing. You can be that way. That’s a great thing to do. What I’m getting at is if you actually go out to look for sponsors, they’re not used to dealing in those little small numbers and they’re not going to take you seriously. It’s weird. I wish I remember the company because I know Tim Bourquin talked about an example where he was going out asking for sponsorship and it wasn’t working. Someone told him, “You’re not asking enough.” He actually went out and added some thousands to what he was asking for and the first person he asked came back, “Oh okay. Sure,” because they recognize that dollar figure and it was shocking. It’s sort of weird. You see that too sometimes when you’ve been on work and whatnot. It’s not always the cheapest one. It’s sort of strange.

I was talking about bartering and what I mean is it’s a great thing and I think it’s okay. If someone wanted to give me something to sponsor Managing the Gray or Accident Hash, One Guy’s Thoughts, I’d be cool with that. Perfect example, a very pertinent example would be One Guy’s Thoughts. If Panasonic or JVC or Sony wanted to give me a camcorder to be like the official, you know, at the end I would put “camera provided by company X.” I’d be all over that. I’d be cool with that.

Heck, week two or three of podcasting ever, way back in 2004, I reached out to a musician’s friend and said, “Hey, I know nothing about audio equipment. What if you gave me a mixer and a microphone?” That’s all I was asking for, for my computer and I would say “equipment provided by musician’s friend” on every Accident Hash out there. They said, “Sorry. We’re not interested in this podcasting thing.” They blew it, didn’t they? I mean for what cost me $200, was I selling myself short? Probably not because it was exactly the perfect barter and they blew me off. They said, “I don’t think so.” I remember they actually said, “Sorry. We’re not interested in getting involved in podcasting,” at that time. Now, they have podcasting packages. That’s what I was trying to push them to do, but it’s what I’m getting at. That I thought was a perfect barter.

I still think if a camcorder company wanted to donate a camcorder to One Guy’s Thoughts, I’d be down for that discussion to talk about it because I think it’s a great thing. Now, would I automatically do it? Maybe not. It depends. It depends if it’s a brand I knew or not. I just want people to start thinking different. The key is that you’ve got to start thinking about yourself a little bit bigger, a little bit different if you’re going to monetize. If you’re one of these people who don’t want to monetize your podcast, this whole episode is probably going to drive you a little nuts because we are talking about that concept today.

Of course, my good buddy Christopher S. Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, I’m glad he called in because I knew he’d have thoughts on this.

Christopher Penn: Hey, C.C. Chapman. This is Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, PodCamp, and Marketing Over Coffee. Regarding your comments about why new media folks are selling themselves short, I think it’s a sociologic phenomenon more than anything else or a psychological phenomenon, I’m not sure which is the correct term. As individual, $1000 is a lot of money, $10,000 is a lot of money, and $1 million is a heck of a lot of money because we’re used to dealing with smaller amounts in our personal lives. Podcasting and blogging are inherent with personal media.

We have our individual shows. So, if somebody shows up at the doorstep with $1000, it seems like a lot of money to us. Corporations are used to dealing with things that have 7, 8, 9, 10 digits in them and $1 million per ad spent is like the [unintelligible] cream cheese budget for Manhattan banks. So, for podcasters and bloggers to get out of the mindset of small sponsorship, they have to start thinking like a corporation. It may even help to sit down and legally separate out your podcaster, your product from yourself. Look at it as a company will look at it. Okay, here’s the ROI, here’s the AdSense, here is the operations budget, and things like that. Then with a more dispassionate look, understanding that you are not your show and vice versa, you can start to ask for more competitive sums of money as other forms of media.

Like I said, it’s a big part of the fact that it’s personal medium and we treat it as such, but it’s also a corporate professional medium as well. I know the Financial Aid Podcast, $20 million in loan volume last year is a heck of a lot of money and more than I’ll make this year or in the next several years combined, but for a loan industry that’s still a small amount of money. Even so, it would be worth it to a bank to acquire that $20 million worth of loan or whatever it is going to be for this calendar year. So, the money is definitely there as long as you think of yourself or at least your show as a corporation and do business to business work as opposed to business to personal work because that’s going to lead to trouble. Talk to you soon. Take care. Check out my stuff at financialaidpodcast.com, marketingovercoffee.com, and podcampboston.org. Take care, C.C.

C.C. Chapman: Thanks Chris, yeah, and quick plug for PodCamp Boston. We’re up to 324 registrations as of this morning. So, please check out podcampboston.org and register. It’s going to be a huge event, October 20… Chris is going to kill me. October 26 I believe is when it is, October 26 through 28, [unintelligible] VON Boston. It’s going to be a really good time. Chris reminded me of a trip. Ewan Spence and I were on a train in Germany talking about the fact that more people need to think about themselves as businesses. Now, I’m not talking about you have to go out and get all incorporated and all that, but what I’m talking about and Chris was kind of talking about is to treat yourself like a business. If you’re thinking about monetizing your podcast, you need to make business decisions. You need to think long term. Don’t sign a contract that locks you into five years unless it’s some really good money because the world’s going to change. I mean really think long term. Yeah, right now I might have 10 to 50 listeners. Where might that be in a year? I don’t know, but you got to think about that and just think about growth, especially if you’re going to sign a long-term sponsorship deal. Really think about it.

One of the things too that I see people do sometimes is they just take stuff for free and advertise it on their podcast, which is fine, but think about it. What are you getting out of it? Not much. Maybe you’re getting some free product. It depends on what it is really. I would give away lots of things on this show if it was something I personally believed in. I don’t want people to think about that. It’s funny. Part of me, I’ll be honest, was a little jealous of Jaffe that somebody actually came to him. I think that’s great. I was trying to think of what could people give me to sponsor an episode. I don’t know. I was trying to think of something I wanted and nothing came to mind. I don’t need the Xbox 360 or the big screen TV in the living room. I would take both of them, you know? I still think if Canon stepped up and gave me lenses or Sigma or someone will give me lenses for my camera to play with, I would even return them. I think they would be cool, but not really pertinent to Managing the Gray, but that’s another thing. It has to be pertinent to your show. Whoever the sponsor is should be pertinent to you. Think about it.

I have turned down sponsorships that I wasn’t interested in because — the ones that I’ve turned down have been personal reasons, I didn’t believe in the product or something I didn’t want to be showing. That’s something you have to think about too. So, one of the things I told you, there’s going to be heavy comments. Again, if something just clicks in your head, what was that number again? It’s 206-309-4729. It’s fun because I got a lot of different comments from a lot of different markets. This one was talking about music.

Rob C: Hey, C.C. This is Rob from the Fixion Media Advertising Network. That’s fixionmedia.com. I’m just off the hills listening to your recent podcast, “Is New Media Selling Itself Short?” I have to say it is. I liken it to the independent music scene where there’s a lot of great artists, a lot of great people who are trying to start independent companies and whatnot, but nothing really connects unless you’re connected to big business. At the end of the day, it’s an inferiority complex that we have to deal with as a smaller niche or subculture or underground movement of sorts.

In my case, it’s been an uphill battle since I deal with hard rock and heavy metal music and we’re only recently starting to look for publishers to expand within more of a demographic range, you know, the male 18 to 49 and whatnot, but at the end of the day, those corporate buzzworths said the demo, the male demo, the age group, or this and that, we’re not focusing enough on coming together and on operating together. That’s one of the reasons why I started my ad network. I started publishing an online music site called blistering.com in 1998. I find it pretty hard getting advertisers and really just surviving. Pre-dotcom boom is a lot easier to make a dollar off a banner ad and everything just kind of came crashing down at one point. So, what I did was I teamed up with another site called blabbermouth.net and we basically split everything down the middle. His site was about five times bigger than mine, but we just split all the advertising revenue down the middle. He had more traffic than I did. We aggregated our audience and a couple of years later, we ended up signing a couple more sites and now we’re representing 20 websites in the music space and interest is improving. I guess people are picking us up on Nielsen, on comScore, word of mouth, through our properties, and so on and so forth.

So, we represent an audience of millions now and from the client or brand agency perspective, we’re more of a viable source to deal with. I think podcasters and bloggers, anyone involved in social media or creating social media tools or interacting in any way whatsoever is truly the old adage of networking and know your neighbor. Team up and start a site with 10 amazing marketing bloggers or whatever the case may be. That’s the only way you’re going to get your voice heard. It’s the only way you’re going to have some sort of authority in the industry. At the end of the day, your words will speak for themselves, you know? And everyone’s words will speak for themselves, but that affiliation is that creating your own mafia or something like that. It’s a smart way to go in the business sense. That’s pretty much what I have to say about this. I love the podcast, C.C. Keep Managing the Gray going strong.

C.C. Chapman: That ends real fast. That’s another way to do it. I thought that was another great concept, the fact of affiliation and bringing yourself together. This is why things like Blubrry, PodShow, Kiptronic, Tripod, I know I’m going to forget a whole bunch of them, but these networks formed to pull — that’s exactly the model. I mean those PodShows are part of the model. I know guys, part of the model, and all these other ones from day one was pull these shows together and then when you go to an advertiser, you can say, “Look, you’re not just gonna buy on this one. Sure, you’re gonna buy across these 10 shows, 20 shows,” depending on who the advertiser is. It’s a great model and there’s nothing to say that you can’t do it on your own. Blogs have done it for a while. Why haven’t podcast? Rogic is the only one I can think of that has done a completely independent network. They’re personal friends. I’ll put that out there right now, Nico, Bob, Cat, Matt, all those guys, Mark. I’m forgetting a bunch of people, but the fact that they pulled together and they banded their shows together… I don’t think they’ve ever pulled together just for advertising. They pulled together for a lot of reasons.

The concept of tribal communities that cavemen did in the old days and we’ve been doing ever since, why can’t it work in new media as well? People cluster together. They work together. This goes beyond just monetization. You can work together. I know I have my small core group of people that I bounce ideas off when I want to cause some trouble or try something new. I have these core little groups of people that I trust and know and share similar interests with. Why not do that out in the podosphere? You can do that right now. If you do tech podcast, there’s plenty of people you can connect with. Maybe you have a super uber niche, but maybe there’s somebody else out there. People shouldn’t view things as competition. There’s room for everybody. Look at how many music podcasts are out there and here’s people pulling them together. You look at the parenting podcast, that’s a perfect one that should be pulled all together so people can come and get a parenting channel, I don’t know what it will be, about parenting something. You would go to one website and they could get a combined feed of all these select parenting podcasts. Marketing is another perfect example. I know we talked about Kapow at one point. Is there something we could put together on master feed to pull all of Kapow together so people could just describe the Kapow — I love saying that for you, thank God for the pop filter — and get all the shows. There’s a lot to do with pulling together and banding and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m talking about niches. One of the things I also talked about was the concept of the ADM, the Association for Downloadable Media. Evo Terra, God bless his soul and God bless his beautiful wife, she’s a sweetie, had some thoughts on that as well.

Evo Terra: Hey, C.C. It’s Evo Terra of podiobooks.com and funanymore.com, listening to your comments regarding the Association of Downloadable Media and some other organization you mentioned. I share your same concern. We need to make sure that not only these things happen for big, huge podcasts, but also little podcasters as you mentioned, but my take on this is if it all goes in one direction and we continue to look for what happens for the big guy, well, what happens for the folks that are big or maybe they’re small but they’re doing something different.

Podcasting can be more than two dorks in a microphone or even one dork in a microphone. Not that I’m saying it should be you, but there are some people not to mention like podiobooks.com, for example, I’ve got about 137 different titles up there right now where people are using podcasting, the medium, to get their audio books in front of a brand new audience for free. I guess what I’m trying to say is [unintelligible] and the reason that I’m thinking of joining one or both or all that come across is to make sure that we don’t pigeonhole podcasting into something. There are a lot of different things that I’ve seen that are completely unexplored out there in this magic podcasting. I think the distribution method itself is interesting enough that we need not just make it something very basic. On the other side, I think it’s very important that we do have standardized ad units. I work in online advertising as that’s what brings me most of my income and I wouldn’t be able to do my job if it wasn’t for the Internet Advertising Bureau. I would be going through and figuring out what would were the standard sizes of units that we should be using and how long they should be and the file size and a lot of things like that.

So, yes, we do need those standards, but I want to make sure that, as you mentioned, the little guy is taken care of and like I’m concerned with that people are doing something unusual and different with the podcasting method, I want to make sure our needs are met as well. So, that’s why I’ll be in there fighting my flag and making sure that all voices are heard. Ciao!

C.C. Chapman: Amen. Amen! That’s why I love Evo Terra. He’s like me. He wants to make sure everybody’s voice is heard, not just the big guy. I agree with you. If you’re not familiar with the Podiobooks model, podiobooks.com is such a killer idea. I’m talking about the network idea where Evo and I know there’s other people involved and I’m sorry to them because I don’t know their names on the top of my head, pulled together audio books. Everyone knows the Sigler and the Hutchins and the Nemcoff names when it comes to Podiobooks, but there’s a whole bunch of other authors out there that people may not know about. If you go to podiobooks.com, you heard, he said they have 137 I think titles up there where you can get these audio novels and they’re getting at it all the time. That’s just screaming for appropriate advertising to put into it. It also seems like a lot of possibilities for acquisitions and if I was a book publisher, I’d be listening there to every book that came out because you could get a feel and find some new authors, but that’s just me. Hint, hint.

I agree with you, Evo, about the Association of Downloadable Media sense. I was really hoping I would have a comment from them for the show, but I didn’t unfortunately. That’s why I kind of held off hoping certain people would comment on this and they didn’t, but that’s okay. I talked to several members because I am officially a member of it because I want to see what they’re doing and keep an eye on it and be involved with it. Not only are they going to try to standardize some metrics and whatnot — it won’t work for everything, that’s for sure. I know the way Financial Aid Podcast measures their success versus Podiobooks versus me is very different, but at least getting some metrics out there. Just the number of listeners, I would love to have a standardized way of doing it because everybody throws numbers out there. “I’ve got 10,000 a month” or “I’ve got 100,000 requests per day.” Those are very different numbers. They don’t mean the same things. If we can just even get some standard things like with web stats, it took a while to get hits, page views, unique visitors. It took a while to get that type of stuff. We need to get there from podcasting to make people talk numbers across the board easier.

The other thing too is I hope these associations take it to the global concept because podcasting and new media in general is completely global. It’s not a US-centric thing and most of these associations and networks for that matter seem to always start very US-centric, which I’m fine with. I’m sure there are legal ramifications and corporate ramifications, but you got to remember this is a global concept. There are people around the globe and podcasting is borderless. What I mean by that is I know of several major sponsors and one comes to mind that sponsored several podcasts, but turned down another because of where it was recorded. It was recorded in Europe and they said, “Oh, we only want US-based podcasters.” Completely missing the point that there are people around the world right now listening to this.

Yes, I am in Boston recording this, but who cares? I could just as easily be in Singapore like Mitch Joel just did on the beach. I could be Mark Hunter up in Scotland. I could be somebody in China, maybe not China. I don’t know if they allowed podcasting yet. I could be in Cape Town, South Africa, like the ZA Show. I mean I could be anywhere, but the fact my listeners could be global and advertisers need to wake up. One of the things too while I’m thinking of that, advertisers are more clueless than podcasters are as far as selling themselves short. Marketers don’t have a clue what they’re doing with podcast. I’ve seen very, very few sponsors do it right, realize that this isn’t just another media buy. It’s not the same thing as buying television. It’s not the same thing as buying a print ad. It’s not a 30-second middle-of-my-podcast radio spot. That doesn’t fly, people. Advertisers have got to figure out that this is a unique medium and work with the podcasters in the community to figure out a way to do it right, to do it in a way that people are going to pay attention and actually care about your product.

That’s where I think things like when I was talking about the camera idea for a video podcast — I know when Kevin Smith did his Train Wreck, which were his video diaries leading up to Clerks 2, it was sponsored by Panasonic. At the end, it said “cameras provided by,” that made sense. If there was a 30-second commercial at the beginning of every episode advertising Panasonic cameras, I would have flipped it off. I know MTV does that. It drives me nuts. MTV has these little 30-second podcasts, video podcasts, kind of like highlighting news and I love watching them, but at the beginning of every one, there’s a 20-second — I’m not going to name the product, it’s like a moisturizer thing, but there’s a commercial and I’ve now gotten to it. I know how long it is. I just fast-forward through it. I just skip it. I’m like “I don’t want to watch this.” It’s stupid. They could be much better done. So, advertisers, wake up.

One more audio comment.

John Havens: Hey, C.C. This is John Havens from Blog Talk Radio and also PodCamp NYC. I wanted to comment about your show “Is New Media Selling Itself Short?” from July 27th. My answer is yes. Period. We are all selling ourselves short as content producers if we do not look into ways of monetizing, if we want to monetize. I did a show on about.com with my podcast. It’s still up. I think it was April and I’ll look for the episode number if anyone wants to go there, episode #33, I interviewed Justin Kownacki from Something to be Desired. He’s got an amazing videocast. One of the things we talked about was whether or not content producers should charge. So, people listening, the universal answer all of you will say I know is “no, of course you shouldn’t charge.” The second you charge for your podcast even if it’s a buck, you will lose your audience. Okay? So, first of all, I want to say I understand reality. This is the nature of what the era of the Internet, where we are right now.

Right now, if you charge as a podcaster, if you were to call it the premium podcast and you say, “I’d like $1 per episode,” the majority of people will say, “Well, you’re an idiot. No one’s gonna buy it,” and they might even get offended, “How dare you charge for your content?” First of all, there is someone who I do respect. It’s the guy who runs a show called The Roadhouse Podcast. I believe that’s the right title. He charges $1 I think it is, forgive me if I have this wrong, but I really like this model so I want to give him full credit. He charges $1 for a version of his show with no ads and it’s a higher quality sound rate because it’s blues music or he lets you listen for free, but he has ads and the sound quality isn’t quite as high. Now, I think that’s brilliant because what’s that saying to a listener is — that, to me, what it’s saying is, “I’d like to get paid and if you want a version that’s really listener-friendly, pay me a buck and that helps pay for the cost of the effort it takes to make it.” I think that’s a great model. Okay? So, he is monetizing. Most people when they hear about that, podcasters that I talked to, think it’s fantastic. However, now, if he just said, “Please pay me $1 for my episode,” again, most people would say, “What are you talking about? Of course not.”

All right, now, here’s the thing. As C.C. pointed out, on your episode C.C., when you create a show, it has inherent value because of who you are and how well you produce it. Okay? I say how well you produce it because we’ve all listened to a musician who may not be the best technically, but we still love their music and we’ve all listened to musicians for instance who are great technically, but we don’t feel they have the heart. Okay? So, if you are producing content that people loves and they want to download, first of all, amen. Awesome. Keep it up whether or not you want to monetize. But if you want to monetize, talk to your audience and tell them. Be honest. “I would like to monetize. I would rather do my podcast and work at, whatever, Starbucks or at my corporate job. If this is something you’re willing to pay for, let me know.” Always talk to your audience. I would never say just start charging. Okay, C.C. If this records for some reason, I left like four long messages. [Unintelligible] We all know I talk too much or leave long messages. So, I’ll talk to you about this. Bye.

C.C. Chapman: I hadn’t listened to that one all the way through. John, that’s the only one that came. But there was good stuff in there. There was very good stuff in there. I didn’t realize, what’s his name, Tony was doing that with The Roadhouse Podcast, which by the way, if you guys like blues at all, The Roadhouse Podcast is amazingly blues. I’m not a big blues guy, but I can dig it and he does an amazing job. I’m talking about a well-produced podcast. Check that out. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Great, great show. Good guy too, very standup individual, which I like. John bring up some good points there too about different models for monetizing. It doesn’t have to be advertising and seriously, we are in the puppy days of this world. Remember when people said no one would ever buy music online, Apple is doing horrible from that. Forget the DRM question. That’s a whole other question, but people are buying music.

It’s the same if you want to buy podcast because let’s face it, you’re listening to podcast right now, but we’re still in the echo chamber where maybe we wouldn’t pay for it, but I guarantee you if I made it so that someone could do pay-per-view subscribe on their television set — I bet a lot of you people have TiVos and DVRs that pre-record stuff that’s automatically there. I would lay money on the fact that if you could stand in front of your television and say, “I want to subscribe to Tiki Bar TV,” I’m trying to think of some big, you know, or GeekBrief.TV, come on, any of these things, it will go “Okay, that will cost you 5 bucks a month” whatever if you get premium packages, people would do it and it would just show up on their television sets. That’s podcasting. People, it is. That’s where things are going to go. It’s going to get to that point.

There are certain shows I would pay money to subscribe to. Maybe I get them early, I’ve seen that model before. What I’m getting that is people outside of the podosphere, people who are not producing podcasts, those millions of people who haven’t found out about it yet, they would pay for these things. Part of me says because they don’t know any better, but part of me says because that’s the model they’re used to and it is a model that we’re going to get to at some point. There’s going to be a point where you’re going to pay — a video podcast is a perfect example where maybe I can download the iPod version for free, the little screen, but I thought if I want the Apple TV version, I’d pay something for it. It’s a higher res, it’s more bandwidth. I see that model working. I think it’s a great model and I’m waiting to see someone try it. Now, for me, it’s got to be the right content or I won’t buy it, but that goes for anybody.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — we’ll wrap this all up because it’s going really long for a Managing the Gray — the key things I want you to take away is if you don’t want to monetize, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing saying you have to monetize at all. I love the people who have no aspirations to monetize. It’s fun. You’re doing it strictly for the pure fun of it and get the information out there and podcasting and new media is a whole [unintelligible] gives you a voice. That’s okay and that’s cool. Those of you who do want to monetize, start thinking like a business. I’m not saying you have to go get lawyers and accountants, but just think and what I mean by that is always think long term. Think “what if my podcast suddenly explodes and get hugely popular? Do I want to be locked into a contract for $50 an episode?” or whatever the number is. I’m not going to focus on numbers. Assign a value to yourself. If you have questions, talk to like-minded people and they will help you. “What do you think about this?” Maybe band together. It’s funny.

Managing the Gray has been around now for over a year and it sort of saddens me that it has never had a sponsor, not kind of saddens, it does sadden me. Have I actively gone out looking for sponsors? No, I haven’t, but it sort of bothers me as having a new media and a business-focused podcast, I seem to think that my audience would be a perfect audience for the appropriate advertisers to reach out to and I’m extremely open to advertising, sponsorship of the right type. Seriously, email me, managingthegray@gmail.com or cc.chapman@gmail.com, happy to talk about it, happy to barter. I’m open on all sorts of things. People seem to miss the opportunity a lot. You know me. Come on. I work for Crayon. We live and breathe thinking of creative solutions. So, I’m more than happy to figure out something that works for my audience because I’ll tell you, somebody comes, “Hey, I wanna drop a 30-second spot on your show,” it better be a product I’m really into and it better be a really good 30-second spot, and even then, I don’t think so. I’ll stick it at the end. You know? That’s the way we roll. I just want to put that out there.

One thing too before I go. I got an email, trying something new here. I’m not endorsing this because I’m still playing with it, but there’s this new company that is testing out podcasting on-demand via cell phones. This episode would be long to listen to on a cell phone. If you’ve got a pen and paper, here’s a number I’m going to give you. If you dial +1, because in the US, 5637735510, if you call that number, you can listen to Managing the Gray on-demand. Say, “I want to listen to this episode.” Now, what I’m curious about is when this episode is going to be up there. I’m not sure if they’ve set up a way that they get notified yet. This is brand new. Someone who reached out and said, “Hey, C.C. Would you be interested in playing with us?” and I said, “Yeah.” It sounds pretty cool, especially if it was a short podcast. People could do it sitting in an airport, “Oh, C.C’s got a new Managing the Gray. I can get it off my phone.” You just dial it up and you listen to it. So, try it. The number is 563-773-5510. I just want to put that out there in case you want to try it. Please give me feedback because I want to give it to the company because I tried it out. The quality is obviously not the same quality that I’m recording because it’s going on the phone. I get that it gets compressed.

Also, I’ve had for months, I don’t know how many of you listen to it that way, phoneshow.com. On the left-hand side of managingthegray.com, there’s a place where you can put in your phone number and as soon as I upload, it’s usually a couple of hours after I upload, they will send you a message to your phone with a link to listen to the show, which is cool too. Phoneshow is doing some very cool things. I dig those guys. All of these, unpaid. I hate now.

By the way, I will put this out there right now. Any time I’m being paid to say something, I will say so. If I don’t say so, it’s not paid. I had someone the other day, I forget what I was getting giddy about, some product, and like, “Hey, C.C. Is that a paid endorsement?” No. The rule of thumb is I’m not going to tell you every time it’s not paid, but if it is paid, I will tell you. When somebody gives me a sweet hi-def big ass camera to film my video podcast or someone gives me a new toy or something, I will tell you. When I get the iPhone paid for, for a year. I don’t know, I don’t need anything, the Sony VAIO laptop, I don’t care, I will say it’s paid for. That’s my promise to you. That’s transparency. All right?

This has been a really long Managing the Gray, definitely a different one. Next time, we’ll be talking more about new media. We’ll be talking about all kinds of fun stuff, not all about the money because it’s not all about the money, but I’m going to get out of here. Again, comment line, 206-309-4729, or managingthegray@gmail.com. Everybody take care. Have a good one. Hope summer is going well for you and I’ll be back really, really soon.

Originally Posted on Manging The Gray 

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Transcript for Managing the Gray #39
“Is New Media Selling Itself Short?”
Originally posted on July 27, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Well, welcome everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #39. How’s it going? It’s a beautiful Friday here in Metro West Boston and my mind’s been really going kind of nuts for the last few days. This has been a strange week. It seems like it’s been a strange week for a lot of people out there. Between Twitters and blog posts and just IM conversations, it seems that everybody is having a rather stressful week and I’m right there with you.

Today, I’ve had these ideas floating around and it’s all Clarence’s fault. If you haven’t checked it out, go out to doyouknowclarence.com. Clarence Smith, Jr. is a guy that Eric Rice introduced me to. He said, “Dude, you have got to meet Clarence. You have to. You guys are both from the Boston area and you both will connect. I know you will.” And we did. We connected in over four hours of conversation and stuff and the idea of Do You Know Clarence was launched, but what’s amazing about Clarence is he’s one of these individuals who says it like it is no matter what. I mean all of us, I’m a pretty open and honest guy. I will share my thoughts if you asked for them, but at the same time I usually think about what I’m saying, whereas I might if I really disagree with somebody I’ll really stop and think about it before I say it, not necessarily sugarcoat it, but sometimes I say it differently. Clarence is one of those who just right upfront, boom, what are you doing, and he asks the tough questions and I love that. There’s a Boston Tweetup, [unintelligible]Tweetup. It feels very weird, but it was a Meetup where a bunch of people on Twitter got together at Boston Beer Works and it was great, good conversation, and then we rolled down the street to No Reservations screening.

No Reservations is this new Catherine Zeta-Jones movie and was it Aaron Eckhart? Is that his name? I don’t know. It’s a date movie, total perfect date movie if you’re looking for a date movie this weekend. The whole topic today is about podcasters in new media not selling themselves short and investing value in themselves. The No Reservations screening was a perfect example of this. Kathy Maister does this thing called StartCooking.com. It’s a video podcast and full disclosure, I am involved with it. I help them out. I give them advice and help with the social media and whatnot. What was cool is Warner Bros. saw Kathy and a bunch of other food podcasters who were in a Boston Globe article. Warner Bros. came to Kathy and said, “Wow! We want you involved in the screening.” It’s a cooking movie. They reached out to her. It wasn’t a token reach out. They did a real reach out. They were giving away screening passes on the radio, they mentioned “hosted by StartCooking.com’s Kathy Maister.” I was like, “That’s cool!” I mean in the print ads, in the radio ads. What they did was they didn’t just say, “Hey, you wanna come host this for us?” They embraced it and they treated her with the respect that she deserved. I thought that was great and Kathy did a great job hosting it. It was an okay movie. It’s not my cup of tea honestly. The little girl in it, I guess she’s from Little Miss Sunshine, which I still haven’t seen, but she was adorable and she was so good. It was a nice night and it was nice to see a video podcaster getting some respect.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it and Clarence got me thinking about this stuff, talking about with all the podcasting networks and all the social media friends’ networks and blah, blah, blah, and it got me marinating a lot of things. Seriously, go to doyouknowclarence.com. The stuff he says, it makes you think. He doesn’t just say it for the sake of saying it. He makes you think and I love that.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that it seems that new media all over the map — it’s funny. People seem to be happy with little things, tokens of appreciation, little sponsorships, and I’m thinking it’s time to start thinking bigger. I don’t think you have to monetize. I’m not talking about that type of thing, but if businesses are out there listening to this, yeah, you can probably get an ad buy on a blog or a podcast for cheaper than you can in a magazine. What I’m starting to say is that people should start realizing that your voice is important. I don’t care if you have 10 or 100 listeners, I don’t care. They’re your listeners. They’re yours. They’re your community and it’s up to you to determine what gets said to them and it’s kind of important that you think about that. Yeah, I’m doing everything stream of consciousness today so I hope I’m making sense. Let me play this comment from Jay Moonah. He sent me in a comment. It kind plays into this. Well, you’ll see. It’s got to do with something Jaffe did recently.

Jay Moonah: C.C. Chapman, it’s Jay Moonah. Hope you’re doing well. I just want to call in to kind of get your take on the Joseph Jaffe Across the Sound iPhone thing, which seems to be a big deal. I’ve seen a lot of stuff on Twitter and in blogs, things like that today. Obviously, we’ve heard Joseph’s comments and not to get [unintelligible] against Joseph, I think he’s a very, very smart guy. He has a very, very good podcast and obviously deserves whatever he can get in terms of sponsorship. I just think the whole thing seems to be getting blown kind of out of proportion. I mean essentially the guy got 600 bucks sponsoring an episode of his podcast and I mean good on him, but I don’t think it’s a big revolution personally. I’d just be curious to hear your take. I mean it’s cool that he got an iPhone and lucky him. We don’t have them in Canada yet, so I am a little envious in that sense, but, yeah, I’d just be curious to hear your take on it. Is this really a revolution in podcasting sponsorship or not? I’m curious to hear what you think. Anyway, hope to see you soon, man, and take care. Bye.

C.C. Chapman: So, for those of you who don’t know what he’s talking about, Joseph Jaffe, who happens to be my boss at Crayon, but he also hosts Across the Sound and on an episode a couple of weeks ago — I don’t think it was a couple of weeks ago now. He said, “Hey, if anybody sends me an iPhone, you can sponsor an episode of Across the Sound,” whatever company sends him an iPhone and he got one within 24 hours, he had them. Actually, I think he got two of them from different companies. Now, I think this is very cool. Don’t get me wrong. I think that’s very, very cool. Now, on a personal note, here’s where it falls down. Joseph’s already got a phone. He’s got a phone and now he’s got an iPhone and he has to pay now to have that iPhone. Doesn’t seem like much of a sponsorship to me. I mean if someone wants to give me an iPhone and pay for the two-year contract on the phone, then I’d be interested. I don’t want to pay for something like that. Oh, I got a cool toy because I don’t know if you know, but you can’t activate the iPhone without activating it via AT&T and I know you can deactivate it, but if someone wants to do that, they could sponsor an episode of Managing the Gray maybe. I don’t know. We’d have to talk, but the point Jay raises is one that I think is true. Is it a big deal? I don’t know. I think it’s a cool idea what Jaffe did. Now, personally, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It was a company and I cannot — I wish I could remember. I’m forgetting what it is right now. Custom Scoop, maybe? I think that’s what it is. Now, they get a plug on my show. But what I’m talking about is the fact that they got a cheap ad buy, 500 bucks, 600 bucks, whatever it is and they get a whole episode of Across the Sound. I think Across the Sound is worth more than that per episode perhaps. I just think he’s selling himself short and I don’t think it’s anything revolutionary at all. I don’t. I know Jaffe’s going to hear this. He’s going to be pissed at me, not going to be pissed, but it will be a fun conversation.

What would have made it revolutionary? What would have made it revolutionary is if Apple said, “Joseph, here. Here’s an iPhone. We’ll sponsor it.” That would have been revolutionary, but they didn’t. It was another company who happened to be able to buy one. If the actual company had stepped up to the plate and done it, I think that would have been great. I think that would have been revolutionary. I’d be singing it to the high mountains. That makes no sense, but the fact that a company did it doesn’t shock me that much. I think it’s very, very cool, but I think a lot of people would see an opportunity in that if they like the show. I’m sure I could say — I can’t think of a gadget I want right now. I would like a Nokia N95, but do I need it? No, and I don’t want one because it don’t work in my network, my phone network, so I better replace it.

This whole thing got me thinking is that people are selling themselves too short nowadays. I don’t know what it is. If you’re thinking about monetizing your podcast or your blog and that’s up to you because I don’t think you have to, but if you do want to and you do have a committed audience and you take this seriously, you’ve got to figure out what your price is or get an idea about it. I just hate seeing these people. I’ve seen some sponsorships be extremely small, extremely small and it kills me because a big, big company who has plenty of money couldn’t pay money for this. It’s sort of along the lines of I saw Cameron Reilly yesterday from The Podcast Network. He twittered something about, it was something like, “Why does a magazine with glossy pages and a huge circulation think I’ll write an article for free?” It’s the same concept exactly. They have money. Big companies are starting to find out that podcasters will take anything from them because they get excited. Just be careful of that. Just make sure your value is there. I know there’s this new Association for Downloadable Media that’s being formed and there’s another one being formed and I don’t know which one’s right, I don’t know which one’s wrong. You’ll see my name associated with the ADM because they got me involved, but I haven’t been involved because I haven’t been — it’s a long story. I don’t know if it’s the right thing or not. I honestly don’t.

This episode of Managing the Gray seems like it’s going to be pissing off more people, but it’s not that. I’m trying to be open and honest and get the conversation going. I don’t know if the ADM is the right idea. [Unintelligible] it is. Anything that gets big companies together to realize new media is an important thing and start getting some metrics, some ideas, get the ideas in their head to show that this works, I’m all for, I’m all for. Is this organization the right one? I don’t know, but we’ll see what happens. Personally, anybody who steps up and tries to make things move forward in this space I’m cool with as long as they keep the ideas and they protect the little guys because I don’t want any association. I don’t care what it is. I don’t want any association or company to forget that mom or that kid who’s just doing a podcast for the heck of it, but suddenly gets an audience and is doing it strictly just for fun. I want something to be for all of them. If all of a sudden the only focus of podcasting is on making money and on big corporations and big shows, then we’ve lost because all it is, is old media transitioning to a new generation and that sucks and that’s not what I want. I want to make sure everybody has a place at this table. That’s one of the cool things about new media is that the cost of entry is nil. You get a laptop nowadays, you pretty much have everything you need to do a podcast or to do a video podcast or to get involved with a blog. You can do them all with nothing and I don’t ever want the cost of entry to ever be any higher than that. I hope that stays that way and I hope it stays pure and I hope everybody gets along and plays nice together in the playground and all that jazz.

This is going to be a short one because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do this. I honestly sat down this morning and said, “Do I want to do this?” because I know getting my thoughts out there might upset some people, but at the same time I had to get them out because it had been bubbling up inside. I look at the landscape of new media. It excites me. I get really jazzed about it and I want companies to start doing it right. I want to see more company podcasts, but I want to see them being done right. I want to see more virtual worlds, Second Life or otherwise, PlayStation Home, Kaneva, any of these things. There are a lot of things going on and I’m looking forward to it. One of the things I’m going to start doing I realized is all my conferences I’m going to, they’re all blogging, they’re all podcasting-related. I want to get outside the fishbowl. I want to talk to people who have no idea who I am or what I’m doing. I want to get out there. I saw one in Vegas the other day that I hadn’t heard about that I want to go to because nobody’s talking about it. I want to go to the small town. I think I want to do like a New Media Camp up in New Hampshire, the Upper Valley where I grew up, where people don’t know about this stuff, but I think it would be great to get people going. I want to get more grandmothers doing podcast. I just want more and we’re not getting there and I want businesses to realize and respect the people in this new media space.

That’s Managing the Gray for today. I’m sure I’m going to get comments, managingthegray.com, or you can call me up in the comment line, 206-309-4729. Thank you for listening to my little — it’s not really a rant, it’s just an honest brain dump I had to get out of my head. That happens to me. Everything just gets filled up and I got to dump it out and I hope you enjoyed it, but I would love, love, love your feedback. Please. You can also email me at managingthegray@gmail.com. I would love to hear you. I’m sure this is going to kick off some interesting conversation and I would love to hear from lots of people involved in this space, especially from anybody. I had someone in the other day say, “I’ve been hesitant on calling you for a long time,” because they were worried about their voice not being heard. Please, all. You too could save a child. That’s what my voice just felt like. So, it’s 206-309-4729. You guys take care. I’ll be back really soon.

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Managing the Gray #38 Transcript
“Idle Well and Book Reviews”
(original post & podcast)

C.C. Chapman: Sure, I’ll try to help you. Hey, it’s C.C. Chapman here at Managing the Gray, episode #38. Getting it right out of the way, if you ever want to call in questions, comments, concerns, any of that stuff, the number is 206-309-4729. I’ll say it again later. I’ll put it in the show notes, but I just want to get that out of the way because everyone’s always saying, “C.C., you forget to say the number.” I apologize.

So, how are you guys doing? I’m really jazzed this morning. Show notes work good for Managing the Gray, but sometimes it’s just better just to have topics. I’ve got all these papers, just a couple of topics today I want to talk about. I’ve got a great call in from Whitney Hoffman, lots of things going on. So, what was really exciting, what I want to talk about today is something I’m watching happen quite a bit. There are new tools coming out everyday. I swear everyday or at least once a week, I’m getting a new invite to some new tool. Last week seem to be a really crazy week. I mean it was insanity. It seems like there was a bunch — I mean MrWong, 8apps, Pownce, Demonoid, Skitch, Stitch? No, Skitch. I’m trying to think what else. It was a crazy week and things are blowing up and people are getting very, very busy trying to stay on top of all these new tools. Now, it’s exciting to try these new tools, but I think what’s key is you’ve got to figure out what works for you and what’s important to you. I mean what are you going to do with these? It ties into the whole social media burnout thing I was talking about and it’s funny because I’ve started changing my opinion a little bit.

One of the things I always talk about is the fact that I think you need to be on every one of these, to at least have a presence so people can find you. Now, I think that’s still true with the social networks, things like the Facebook and the MySpace and whatnot where it’s setting up an account, but now things like Twitter and Pownce and all the copycats that are going to come for those, I’m not so sure that you need to be on all of those. Granted, try them out, figure out what works for you, especially if you’re a company. You need to at least check them out so you understand what you would recommend to a client. “Hey, this is why I think this one is the right one for you.”

I have a Pownce account. I don’t use it very often. I use it every so often. I go out there to look at it, but it’s not what’s being used right now. Twitter seems to be the microblogging tool of choice for me personally and the people that I want to follow and pay attention to. Pownce is out there. It’s still being used and I go in there every so often, but I find I go in there once a day, maybe twice a week. Twitter, I’m in there all the time. I tried them both and I figured out which one I like. Same thing goes with all these other sites. I trashed Facebook left and right, trashed it, just totally trashed it, but what’s interesting is after the initially wave of everybody just having to do stuff, now I’m seeing it started to take shape. I see people leaving groups or people who are joining these massive groups and now everyday I see people who have left groups or they have created groups, very fine tuning what they’re using Facebook for and I think that’s very interesting because I’m watching it and I’m seeing it become a little bit useful. I like the homepage that shows you what your friends are doing. It’s very interesting to see photos and what people are doing. Still, it tells me a little more information I need on things. I’m seeing it for event promotion working very well. We’re doing a Missing Pages movie premiere on Crayonville on Thursday. I know Mark Forman posted something there. So, it takes this Second Life event and makes it way outside of Second Life. It’s pitched as a movie premier. The Second Life location is a secondary aspect of it, which I thought was great, so people who may not even have ever seen Second Life are excited because it’s a movie premier and they get to come to it. The fact that it’s in Second Life is just — it will be a barrier for some, but it will just be a quick barrier for most hopefully and they’ll come in and they’ll take part in it. So, Facebook is working with that.

This 8apps thing, the thing that excites me about 8apps — it’s the number 8, 8apps.com. What excites me about that is I like the collaboration part of it. It’s not really there yet. Somebody called it it’s like part Facebook, part Basecamp, but doesn’t have the project management pieces in it that Basecamp does. What I do like about it is the instant collaboration idea in it. It’s got kind of a neat brainstorming tool like virtual sticky notes page I thought was pretty cool, but guys, it’s brand new. I’m already seeing people trash it, but I’m more of those let’s-wait-and-see, let’s-let-it-evolve-a-little-bit. I don’t even know if it’s officially beta or alpha, whatever it is, but that excites me, a social network where people are working together. 8apps is one of those things where I haven’t given in yet to just let anybody be my friend. I’m only kind of acting with people that I actually want to work on projects with. It’s only got — what is it? Three apps in there now and the fourth one is coming. I’m curious what the other four apps are going to be. It’s an interesting concept and I’m going to keep watch of that space because I think it’s going to be interesting and I’m excited by it.

Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about is I’ve got some giveaways for you today. Thoughtout.biz is a very cool company. They’re mainly known for the PED stands, the PED2, the FlexPEd. What these are, they’re iPod stands, but they’re not just for iPods. What’s cool about them is they are these heavy metal stands. I have one for my iPod, but it expands. I’ve seen people put their Treos in it. Does an iPhone fit in it? I bet you it does. I haven’t tried it because I don’t have an iPhone. Anybody want to give me one? No, I don’t want an iPhone because I don’t want to pay — what I hate about — I won’t rant on the iPhone right now. Thoughtout.biz does a lot of very cool things and one of the neat things they make is a MagStay Pro and when I got the MacBook Pro, Mike sent me over some of them. He said, “Dude, you’re gonna want one of these and I’ll give you a few for your Managing the Gray listeners.” I’ve heard people slam these. What it is, you know how you’ve got the magnetic thing for your MacBook Pro? If you have one of the new Macs, it’s a magnetic power cable. It just pops out. It’s a magnet. So, that way, if someone trips over the cable, it doesn’t pull the whole laptop off the desk, but what I found and it’s funny what this is. It’s just a little plastic contraption that works with your MacBook Pro and what it does is it keeps it in there and in the tagline is “Sometimes, a magnet is not enough,” and I asked myself, “Doesn’t that kind of go against the reason of why the magnet’s there?” He’s like, “Yeah,” but they’ve seen these to be very popular for people who have to leave their laptop on like when it’s rendering. If it’s rendering video or something, the last thing you wanted to do is get unplugged if you leave it overnight or leave it for a few hours. I’ve had that happen where it’s come unplugged and I didn’t know it and the battery started draining on me, so I can understand what these are and I’ve got a few of them, so if you want them.. You can go to Thoughtout.biz and check it out and see what they’re all about, but drop me an email at managingthegray@gmail.com and I’ll give away a few of these. I think I’ve got three or four of them I can give away for you and I’m more than happy to give those away because I love Thoughtout.biz. They do a lot for the community I know for the longest time. They may still be running this. When you bought a PED2 iPod stand, you get to pick a free podsafe CD that they actually bought from the artist. I think that’s great. They’re doing great stuff for the community. I’m more than happy to give these away.

So, hey, one of my favorite women in the world called in and left me an audio comment, so let’s get right over to Whitney Hoffman.

Whitney Hoffman: Hey, C.C. It’s Whitney Hoffman from the LD Podcast. I just read your recent blog post on what it’s like to start working remotely and how it can be difficult sometimes. One of the things that is really interesting, Alex Hillman from We Know HTML around here in Philadelphia has this thing called Independence Hall and he has a bunch of different people even working on different projects sit together at a coffee shop or some other place that they can kind of do this co-working thing where everybody who is doing independent projects can kind of work in one atmosphere and keep themselves on track because sometimes the distractions of home can really lead to a lot of procrastination or just it’s hard to put yourself in that same sort of see-I-am-at-work mode sometimes. So, sometimes going to a different place and sitting down and doing concentrated work for a fixed period of time really works, but maybe some of that kind of co-working environment stuff might be good, get together and try doing things remotely now that you have that new fancy laptop and see how it goes. If you want to learn more, you could look up Alex’s Cream Cheese Sessions after the Jelly Sessions, which I think are very similar in New York City where people get together and do this co-working thing together. It might help everybody out, so just an idea. Take care and I’ll talk to you soon.

C.C. Chapman: So, I think it’s a really neat idea. I’ll find the link and put it in the show notes over at managingthegray.com, but I understand what she’s talking about. Working at home is difficult. You’re by yourself. You don’t have that human interaction. I mean I’m using video tools to talk to my coworkers everyday, but it’s not the same and I think it would be kind of cool to get — I like the concept of all these people who happen to be working on independent projects just happen to get together so they’re in a work environment and they can socialize a little bit. I would love to do one of these out in the MetroWest area. I think it would be very cool, get together in a coffee shop. It would be great to meet some other people. In a cross spectrum, get out of just the podcasting and blogging community, just people working on independent projects, whatever they may be. If anybody’s interested, email me. I’d love to chat about it because I think it would be pretty cool and I would love to get out of the house. God, would I love to get out of the house because it does get to you. One of the neat things is I’m moving in a month and I cannot wait because my office right now is — it is an office, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not cut off from the rest of the house, so it’s got foot traffic and it’s my wife’s office too, so when we move, I actually have my own office with doors on it that shut so I can actually sort of separate that office-home time. Shut the door and just cut off the rest of the world and I’m looking forward to that because I think it will help separate things.

Now, one of the things I want to do here, I like doing book reviews so I do it. I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’ve been trying to unwind and one of the things I think is very important for people is to learn how to unplug and unwind or like I call it, idle well. My dad and I last summer when we went camping, we said, “We idle very well.” What I mean is we would just be lying around the campfire or lying around on the hillside for hours on end, not even reading. We’d read a little bit, we’d write in our journal, but then we’d just lay and your mind just wanders and the creative juices, which are just the nothingness juices, are great and I think one of the things that new media is doing right now is it’s making it so people don’t do that. They’re afraid to do it. “I can’t get offline. I’m gonna miss something.” Yeah. Yeah, you are going to miss something, but guess what? It’s the web. It will still be there. This past weekend, I unplugged for the whole weekend. I unplugged all technology on Friday morning and I didn’t turn it back on until Monday morning and you know what? It was okay. It was all right. There was no emergencies, no fires, nothing blew up. It was okay and you need to do that and I cannot stress how much that reinvigorates you and get you excited. Trust me. As I always talk about, it’s rebalancing. I have to get back out in nature quite often to rebalance myself because if I don’t get out there, I go insane. Trust me. I came back Monday morning yesterday. I was all excited and I said, “You know what? No one’s gonna suck this energy out of me. I refuse to let it happen,” and I didn’t let it happen. That kind of translates — book review, C.C., idling, where did you go with that?

It transitions into the book that I think a lot of people are reading right now called The 4 Hour Workweek. It’s funny when a book gets hot and gets trendy and where it teaches you life lessons and teaches you different strategies. It’s funny. You can start telling who — like there’s a philosophy in there about checking your email twice a day and setting an out of office message, an automated response, that says, “Hey, I only check my email at noon and 4:00,” blah, blah, blah. I’ve seen this from two of my friends already. I got the response, I’m like, “They reading the book.” I know they’re reading the book because it teaches you that philosophy. What I think is interesting about The 4 Hour Workweek, and this is my personal opinion on it, I think it’s a great book, but what I will tell you is like just like every other book out there — it’s the same advice I give new parents. Anytime a buddy of mine is going to be a parent for the first time and they’re freaking out about what book should they read, da-da-da, I give the same advice and I will do the same in new media, read everything you can, read it all, consume it all because everyday’s got different tactics, then figure out what works for you. Take little bits from getting things done. Take little bits from The 4 Hour Workweek, take the bits that work for you and leverage them fully, use them all the way for you. Don’t think you have to take a whole philosophy and use it totally.

That’s one of the reasons that I haven’t found the right religion for me because I take bits and pieces from all sorts of different religions and mush them together and that’s sort of my spirituality. I haven’t found one religion that contains everything for me. Everybody’s got something good in their religion and I like that and I pull it together and I make it mine. Same thing with The 4 Hour Workweek, I love the concept of it. I think he’s totally right. He talks about the new rich. I don’t necessarily know that term, but the fact that you can work from anywhere, you can get it done. You don’t have to always be connected. Things will survive with you no matter who you are. If you surround yourself with great people to do the great work, things will get done. You do not have to be there watching and hovering over every little thing. He hasn’t really said this, but it’s something I believe. You hire the very best people and then you let them run with stuff. It’s a painful lesson. It hurts to let go and delegate, but if you’ve hired the best possible team or in The 4 Hour Workweek he talked about outsourcing it, as long as you’ve got people who are capable of doing the task, step the hell back and let it happen. Let it happen. Do your thing. Let these other people do the things and then it will all work out. Trust me. I like a lot of things of it. I started reading his blog. I like his philosophy. He’s a little cocky, but that’s all right. He can be cocky. He’s earned it I guess. But The 4 Hour Workweek I definitely suggest reading. It’s a very interesting book. It’s worth consuming. It’s worth going through. Warning, it could be dangerous to some people out there. It’s one of those books I honestly think you could sit down and read and go, “Oh. Uh, honey? I need to make some changes.” Warning. I’m warning you now. If me telling you to read this book causes you to get divorced or scare your spouse, not my fault, not my fault! All right? It’s definitely worth checking out. I will link to it in the show notes, of course. You can buy it anywhere. It’s all over the place. It’s a very interesting book, a good read, and definitely a different way of life.

The other book I read recently is called “Rule the Web” by Mark — I’m not even going to try his last name, not going to do it. Fr — no, I’m not. I’ll put it in the show notes. He’s one of the founders of Boing Boing. I got sent a copy of this book because I thought it’s something pretty cool. It’s called “Rule the Web: How to do anything and everything on the internet – better, faster, easier.” It’s a really good book. It’s more basic than I was imagining to be honest with you because it’s really bare — I’m going to give this to either my dad or my mother-in-law because it explains — it’s very well organized, tips and tricks. It’s like “how do I find an address on the web?” A lot of people don’t know that. How do you find the address of someone you’re really looking for? Lots of tips like that, tips on maintaining your computer, tips on web pages, email, all the basic stuff or questions that — the way I would answer is — it’s all of the questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask because they know they’re going to be giggled at for asking it. There are some new +1 level stuff. What I like is there’s one section where he went out and asked a bunch of other people for their one best — Ask Cory Doctorow His One Best Tip, and I thought that was very cool. It’s a neat book. It’s paperback. It’s trade paperback I guess what you call it. I really enjoyed the book. I read it really fast. I’m more skimmed it more than anything because I knew a lot of the answers already, but I wanted to see what he had to say about things. Definitely one of those things for if you’re trying to get somebody involved in the web, maybe you need to buy it for your executive, I don’t know. I shouldn’t say that. I’m generalizing. That’s kind of mean. For someone who thinks they know the web and they’re getting into the web and they’re getting excited by it, this could be a great book to get them to the next step because I guarantee you — warning though, they’re going to read the book and go, “Dude, did you know?” “Yeah, I knew that.” “Oh, wow!” You’re going to get a lot of those moments and that’s okay. Just embrace it. Roll with it. It’s definitely a book to get people excited about the web. I think it’s another one of those books that could change people. They’ve read it and just get all giddy and excited and try to do more things.

So, those are the things I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to get in touch with you. I hadn’t talked to you a little while. I’ve been doing some interviews lately. I’ve got a great one coming. I’ve got some more interviews coming up. I’m doing more of them. I tell you. Thank you again to all Managing the Gray listeners and readers who helped me figure out getting a MacBook Pro. The Mac has definitely been a great investment. I haven’t gone totally Mac yet. I mean I’m recording this right now in CastBlaster on my PC. PC is still my main computer, but the laptop is rocking, really getting used to it, really excited. Audio Hijack Pro, that alone, if you’re into any sort of audio production makes the Mac almost worth it because it makes the Internet — I don’t know if it’s worth spending a couple of grand for this $30 program, but it’s very cool. A program that simple and that cheap does such an effective job of recording audio. It’s very exciting to me on that.

Hey, if you haven’t seen yet, one of the things I’m going to start doing is — I’ve been doing One Guy’s Thoughts, which is my video podcast. It’s sort of my personal podcast that kind of catches all things, but one of the things I’m going to start doing on that is making sure I record — now that I’ve got my workflow going and I’ve got the camera and I got everything going the way I want to, I’m going to start doing interviews with people at these conferences I’ve got upcoming. I’ve got the Second Life Community Conference coming up and a PodCamp Philly is coming up, PodCamp Boston, PodCruise Miami, lots of things coming up, Virtual Worlds 2007 Fall, lots of things coming up and I want to start videotaping the interviews and doing more than just me speaking head stuff. So, I’m going to be looking for that so if I stick a video camera in your face next time we meet, warning. Hey, if anybody knows where I can find a Zoom H2. I want to put this out to the listeners. I’m seeing all these reviews about it. My Edirol is pissing me off and so I’m thinking about getting one of these Zoom H2 recorders. I don’t know if they’re necessarily for sale yet because I can’t seem to find them anywhere, but hey, if anyone’s got a tip on where I can find them, let me know because I want to buy one. They seem very cool and I want to use one. I want to definitely try them. I like the fact that they’re made to record 360 degrees, so I want to try it with a table discussion or some other things.

So, that’s going to wrap up Managing the Gray. Again, you can email me at managingthegray@gmail.com or you can call in the comment line, 206-309-4729. Of course, managingthegray.com, it’s got more than just a podcast going on. I’m writing content up there, linking the stuff, transcripts go up there. Hey, thank you guys for listening. Thank you for telling your friends. I’ve been getting some really nice emails from new folks who are just discovering Managing the Gray and discovering me and I’m having a great time meeting you and getting to know you. Please, you can find me in all the networks. My About page links to almost all of them and cc-chapman.com is my regular blog if you want to swing on over there. You never know what you’re going to get there. So, take care. Have a great day and get out there and play on the new media playground. All right? I will talk to you very, very soon.

- Originally posted on ManagingTheGray.com in case you see this scrapped onto another site -

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Transcript for Managing the Gray #34 “Call-In Mania”
Originally posted on May 23, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Good morning everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #34. Before we jump in to the show today, I realized I have not thanked them in a while and it is about time I do. I try to do it every few shows. I got to give thanks to the people who helped me do the opening credits of Managing the Gray. You hear it all the time, it makes you recognize the show, and you probably do not know who they are. The music is by Madsumo. You can check him out at madsumo.com. He is a very good friend of mine. The voiceover is Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV. If you are into gadgets, if you are into technology at all, I highly suggest subscribing to Geek Brief, a great show. Cali is a great friend, a great woman, great stuff. Madsumo is awesome too. I love you, buddy.

Managing the Gray #34 is going to be a little different today. I just twittered that I am going to feel like Mitch Joel with hair. Six Pixels of Separation is a great podcast, which I am sure you are listening to. If you are listening to this show and you are not listening to Six Pixels, something is wrong. So, go listen to that. Mitch is a good boy of mine, good friend. He does lots and lots of call-ins and lots of call-ins is not what I usually do around here. I got a backlog of them and I apologize for not playing them sooner. Also, Mr. Rutter, the show notes will have the phone number in it. Just so you have it now, it is 206-309-4729. That is easier, it is 206-309-GRAY. Give us a call. Send in your questions, comments, whatever you want.

We have got tons of them today and I will get to them in just a minute, but one thing I just want to get out of the way right now is a quick thing. It has been going on the past couple of days and it has been really bugging the bejesus out of me. That is the whole thing about blogola. I hate the term. I hate it with a passion. It stems from the whole payola concept, record companies paying DJs to play their songs, which really bugs me. Someone threw the term blogola in relation to the Nikon campaign or any of these other campaigns where [unintelligible] influencer outreach. Nikon gave out some of their cameras or D80s I think they are to bloggers out there and said, “Hey, here’s a camera. Go write about it. Go take pictures and have fun.” They did not tell them they could not say anything negative. They did not tell them they had to blow smoke and say all positive things. They said, “Here, go take pictures for six months and at the end of it, if you like it you can buy the camera or you can send it back. It’s up to you. Here, play with it for six months.” They did not tell them they had to blog about it, but let us face it.

You give a blogger a toy or a gadget, you can them out to a nice dinner, you show them a good time at a conference, anything the blogger does in her life, anything, whether they stub their toe walking on the street, they are going to blog about it and talk about it. So, if they have a new camera to play with for six months, they are going to probably talk about it. There is nothing wrong with that. In my mind, as long as the blogger or the podcaster says, “Hey, Nikon gave me this camera.” End of story. Done. Then I know that, yes, they have got it, and, yes, maybe they are a little more motivated to be positive about it, but I do not care. It is different and I am a firm believer there is a difference between journalists and bloggers. I am sorry. There is. Are some blogs turning into journals, more towards like that? Yeah, probably, but at the same time not. It is different. It will always be different. For companies out there who might be thinking about doing a blogger influencer outreach, email me, cc.chapman@gmail.com. I will be happy to talk to you about ways I think that you could do it right or do it wrong. I would be more than happy.

I had lunch with some executives several months back and the hot topic was, “C.C., how would you like to be approached? Would you be comfortable with this?” I told them it is really simple. Find out if I am the right person for whatever it is you want. Read my blog. Listen to my podcast. Do at least a little bit of research. Do not just do a Technorati search because that is ridiculous. Get to know me at least a little bit and then contact me. Do not send me a form letter. I know there is going to be form letter pieces to it. That is fine, but say, “Hey, C.C. What’s up?” da-da-da-da. Show that you have actually read or listened to me and then say, “Hey, here’s what we want to do.” I am going to know. It is okay. Do not try to be cute about it. Do not try to be coy. Just be straight up, “Hey, we want to send you X. Would you be interested?” da-da-da-da. It is not wrong to say, “Hey, we would love if you happen to talk about it.” Do not say you have to. Do not say you have to say positive things. Do not do any of that. Just be honest and say, “Hey, we want to give you something,” or whatever it is. The same thing with Vista laptops. I thought those were fine too. They sent them out and said, “Here, talk about them.” They did not have to say that. I am sorry. If I get a gadget in the mail tomorrow, I do not care what it is. I would probably be talking about it. It is just the nature of the beast.

Do I wish more people were objective and showed both sides of it? Sure, I do, but that is the way it rolls. Listen, influencer outreach is a good thing. It is a positive thing. It is something I think more companies need to do and be creative in doing it because just giving it away and letting people play with it only goes so far. Teach them how to use it. What if Nikon went out — they did do it actually, Nikon with their D-something other product, this picture town. They took a whole town in South Carolina and gave them all cameras and go shoot life. That I thought was even more powerful because it was saying, “Look, anybody can use our cameras. Don’t get scared by the fact that it is like a big professional camera. Anybody could use it.” So, there. I just had to get that out of the system this morning because it was funny. It was on my mind. There was a lot of Twitter traffic about it yesterday. I saw Eric Rice’s post this morning, an amazing post that I agree with totally. I will link to it in the show notes over at managingthegray.com. I just had to get that out of the way, get it out of the system. It is early morning here. I have not had enough coffee yet.

Influencer outreach is a good thing. Companies, do not be scared of it. Bloggers, podcasters, anybody in the new media space, if you are on the receiving end of one of these outreaches, do the right thing. Disclose it. Say that you are doing it. Say that you are involved with it. When in doubt, tell. What I mean is, if you are going, “Do I have to disclose this?” Yes. If you asked that question in your head, the answer is yes. Just say, “Hey,” da-da-da-da, “I’m doing some work with…” or “Hey, I got this sent to me.” It all takes just two seconds. Just do it.

Okay, call-ins, because I have got a ton of them. Here is the first one from a good buddy, Ed.

Ed Roberts: Hey, C.C. This is Ed Roberts from Looking out the Window and Kansas City Weather. Just [unintelligible] to listen to your PodCamp New York presentation [unintelligible]. I already have a ton of respect for you, brother. That presentation that you put out there, if there was any type of, I guess I can say — it is kind of hard to get it out from the doors, but if there was one source that I would direct people to be better interested in what new media is, I think that presentation just nailed it completely. I am flabbergasted. It was spectacular. Thank you so much for that. I am actually listening to it on my way out, storm chasing here in Central Kansas. Great listen and I just want to say thank you so much. You hit it. You always have. I tell you, there really is no other person that I can think of in the world of podcasting that really can, not only has the passion and understands new media, but really knows how to speak from the heart and explain that. I just want to say thank you for just you being you and you leading the charge and a lot of this stuff about new media. Take care, my friend, and I will catch you later.

C.C. Chapman: I need that little ego stroke after my little mini rant there at the beginning. I just realized I ranted. I do not usually rant on Managing the Gray, but I am passionate about it and that is what it boils down to. Ed, hey, thank you for the comment. If you guys did not catch that, in the middle he said he was out storm chasing. He was not exaggerating. Ed Roberts chases storms. He actually had some amazing photos from the tornados that hit recently. It is KC Weather Podcast and Looking out the Window. Looking out the Window is a music podcast. Great, great stuff, Ed. Thank you, thank you for the call. It felt good. You can call in too, 206-309-4727. Lots of call-ins today. So, let us keep it going. This one made me very, very happy. Someone is smitten in their homework.

Jerry Harrington: Hey, C.C. This is Jerry from jerryharrington.net or jerryharrington.net@gmail.com. I was just calling in response to your homework assignment from PodCamp NYC. While I was not at PodCamp NYC as I am from Chicago, and so I am looking forward to PodCamp Chicago Land, I did here your homework assignment via Managing the Gray, via the video of your presentation posted online. I very much appreciated getting to watch that and I wanted to let you know that in response to your homework assignment, I left an audio comment to Mitch Joel’s Twist Image Six Pixels of Separation Podcast just a little while ago. Now, here I am, leaving my second audio comment on a podcast. Hmm…maybe this is a dangerous slippery slope. Anyway, thanks C.C. for the encouragement and for all of your insight. I really appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: See? That is what it is about. Jerry, you get an A. Everybody gets an A when they do homework in my world. I have no other grades, but an A. Listen. If you are new to Managing the Gray and you did not hear my PodCamp presentation, what I said at the end of it was, the homework was to go try something new in new media. I said it could be something crazy, signing up for a Second Life account or it could be building a website or recording a YouTube video. What Jerry did was he called in to a podcast. It is just like leaving a voicemail. It is so easy. You just call up and that is how you become part of the conversation. Jerry, I am very proud of you that you took that step because I know that it is a weird thing. People are like, “Well, I got nothing to say.” Sure, you do. If you can talk, you have something to say. Will people listen? That is a whole other game, but everybody has a voice and that is what is fun.

Jerry, I have psyched. I am more psyched that you called another podcast and then called my podcast to tell me about it. That makes me happy. I did not care for the first person who did homework based on listening to the presentation after the fact. I have had one or two people do the homework from PodCamp who were there, which is great. Actually, it is someone that afternoon. See, there is the power, the power of this new media playground that I keep talking about, the fact that you can just try something out. It is a little scary at first. Remember the first time you get on that slide or that tire swing thing on the chains? It scares you. It is kind of freaky, but you get out there. You try it and suddenly you realize, “Wait a minute. That wasn’t so bad.” What is really magical is when you do something and you go, “Oh, that was fun. I wanna do that again.” That, boys and girls, is where the fun really gets going.

Chris: Hey, C.C. This is Chris in Indiana, a new listener. I just listened to a couple of your podcasts. I really truly enjoyed them. We run a small consulting business based out of Indiana. Most of our clients [unintelligible] are more corporate public relation types. We would really love to hear you kind of expand a little bit more about — I mean you could go on really for hours about all things that specifically political campaigns do wrong in the digital world, but if you think there is somebody who is doing it right or at least kind of sort of got it, would love to hear your insight on that, Republican, Democrat, Green Party, Libertarian, whatever. It does not matter. I would just be interested in hearing your thoughts on who is kind of doing it right and some of the opportunities that are out there for people that are running for office that they really should be connecting other folks. Anyway, I would love to hear about it. Thanks.

C.C. Chapman: See, those are the types of listeners that I love, the ones that, they are not podcasters, they are not Twitterers or Second Lifers. They are just doing the work and they are interested in this topic. So, thank you for calling in. Politicians who are doing it right, I could take that a lot of ways, but no. I think it is too early, to be honest. I think it is still too early. What we are seeing this year in particular, especially on the Democratic side, I guess Republican too but they got a little late start, is that they are testing the waters. They are trying things. I know I have seen Obama and I have seen Edwards on Twitter. Obama did something in Second Life that was horrendous, not horrendous, just it was like somebody said, “Oh, let’s do this,” and did not really investigate the medium before doing it. Everyone is doing YouTube videos, which I applaud them on. I think it is great. I know Hilary there for a while. You could not embed her videos, which was just stupid, put the video out there, but do not let people share it and show it to more people for you. Hello? I think it was a little early and I do not think anybody is doing it right. Everybody fails. Everybody politician failed because I posted it. I posted a — and this offer still stands. I want to get any political candidate. I do not care what party you are. I do not want to talk about politics. I want to talk about how they are leveraging new media. I did a blog post about this and I put everybody’s name in it I could think of and tagged it so that whoever is doing their web monitoring for them, which they should — every political candidate, if every political candidate does not have somebody on their staff who everyday does nothing but ego surf for that person, they are failing.

They should be knowing what is being posted on Technorati, Twitter, Podzinger. They should be using all those searches that we use to do our ego surfs to get that information and then following up on things. It just makes no sense. I want to interview some politicians. I talk about leveraging new media. I think we are going to see people do more of it. I really do. I have heard lots of discussions on the Second Life angle, ramblings of different politicians in different parties coming in, which I think is interesting. I have only heard one that I thought was really, really cool, but I have a feeling their campaign backed down out of it, unfortunately. I think you are going to see a lot more people. I would like to see people leveraging Twitter more or that concept of microblogging or more blogging, more Meetup functionality, those types of things. I think meshing them all together, I think — who is going to be the first politician who has a true portal, meaning you love this candidate, here is everything you need, everything, one click links to here are all of the spaces you can connect to us and share us. Here are the banners. Here are the graphics. Here are the stake in the ground science to put on your Second Life lot or your there.com or Kaneva or anything else lots. Here are some audio promos you can play in your podcast for your candidate. They do them on the radio, why not do them on podcast? Here are the banners. Here are the graphics. Here are the videos you can embed. Here are the commercials that you can embed. Give all that content out to the people and then let them do with it what they want. Yes, some people will take it and trash it, but they are going to do that anyways. There will always be trolls who are in the bad mood and politics bring out the best in everybody, right?

I do not think I have seen anybody doing it quite right yet, but that is where I think it needs to go. Just try all these things. The cost of investment — I talk about this a lot, the cost of investment is your time. It is not that huge to put it into a social network or something else. When I see what politicians are spending on, all these television commercials that after the first couple of times we all zone out and actually grow to hate. I am already hating a certain politician who is already running campaign ads here in Massachusetts. That drives me nuts. I already was not going to vote for him, but it does not matter. The point is I am already sick of these commercials and how much they are spending on those commercials. Take that budget. Take one day’s television budget. Whatever your national budget is for one day of television campaigns, take that and I guarantee you I could show you how to use new media to leverage it, whether it is me, whether it is Crayon, whatever. This is not a business pitch. What I am saying is take that money, it is not free, and leverage it. Get somebody on your staff. This new media playground is full of people who would love to — I remember back when I heard that Rob Walch from podCast411 and the iPhone Podcast now, I love it he is doing that, when I found out he was being the producer for Senator Edwards’ podcast way back in the day, I thought that was amazing. Why not reach out to this world, find out who is into politics and hire them. Let us go. I hope that sort of thing answered your question, but it is true. Nobody is standing out in my mind right now as really leveraging it. There is so much potential. I do think it is early. I think come post Labor Day, when we hit the fall, I think you are going to see things start up a lot more and certainly come January. Everything is going to go into full gear and we will see it everywhere and we will not be able to escape it.

Now, we have had guys call in all day. You can call in too, 206-309-4729. See, I am making it so people cannot miss it because I have been told I hide the number. I actually put it on my website. So, here is someone I love to death and her voice [unintelligible], Heidi Miller.

Heidi Miller: Hey, C.C. It’s Heidi Miller from the Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter Podcast. I was looking to your May 1st episode. You said something at the very end that just had me — I am in the car right now and I was going, “Yes, yes, yes.” It was a revelation that I just realized myself and it was something about, you know that feeling at the playground when you are on the swings and the person next to you, there is no reason that you think this person cannot be your best friend in the world just because they happen to be on the swing next to you. This is a combination of two things that I can relate recently and that is — first of all, I am really feeling the power of social media. Long story, but this weekend somebody who was originally a listener of a podcast of mine, she came to my house and fixed all the stuff around my house just because I have put up a posting on my personal blog saying, “Hey, I need to have my studio soundproofed and I need some doors fixed. I’ve got these couple small things. Who should I call to do this?”

It is a listener to the show who came in and we spent a whole afternoon hanging out, fixing things, so it was awesome. Another friend of mine was telling me that when she wants to kind of get her spirits lifted and she is feeling a little down on herself or life or work or whatever that she goes on the playground and swings on the swing. It is free and she swings as high as she can. I thought, “Well, I need to do that.” There are two things together made me realize that a lot of times, people who know me from the podcast or whatever, I tend to put them in a category of “that’s a business contact,” or “that’s a person I need to have X type of relationship with.” When you said why is it that not everyone you just happen to swing next to on the playground cannot be your best friend in the world. Well, [unintelligible] best friends in the world right now and we have met exactly twice in person. What you are saying that really made me realize I do need to just — everybody [unintelligible] is so cold. There is no reason to be standoffish. There is no reason to just not be 100% myself and be silly. I do not have to be well focused. I could just see myself and you know what? Why not just treat everyone you meet like they are next to you on the swings and they are going to be your best friend forever in your whole life. So, thank you for bringing that out, C.C. It totally made my day.

C.C. Chapman: Well, that totally made my day. I had not listened to the end of the call-in. I listened to the beginning of it and I am glad. That is why I do this podcast. People ask me all the time, plain and simple, I do this because it seems that people like what I say and I like to share what is in my head. It comes from the heart and the head. I agree with you fully. You do not know who you are going to meet that is going to turn into the most important contact in the world or who is going to put you in touch with somebody. I have bumped into people in airports, on the train, at conferences that at the beginning I am just like — it is one of those, “Hey, cool. Nice to meet you,” da-da-da-da, exchange business cards and nothing more than that, but then you get home and you start exchanging emails, you find out more about the person, you find out that you have got a connection that you had no idea about. That is what we are talking about here. It is what I am blogging about. It is what I am podcasting about. It is what I am trying to write my book about. All the call-ins today and everything, what really makes me happy is I am really glad that I did the title of the PodCamp New York presentation as New Media Playground because people are connecting with that. I was not sure if people were going to get the concept or I knew they would get it, but I do not know if they would really get it. It seems that people are getting it. I was not positive that was going to be the title of the book, but it sure as heck is I hope now going to be, but we will see what happens. I really like that the analogy seems to work for you. It boils it down because we were all kids once, right? So, we all get it. It is about connections. It is important. Be a connector. I got a call-in about that from someone who is connecting via LinkedIn and it worked for them.

Michael [Spielsinger]: Hey, C.C. It is Michael [Spielsinger]. I just finished listening to the spring cleaning episode. First of all, I wanted to say [unintelligible]. Second of all, I do not know if you remember we had a whole email exchange back and forth about my father and multiple sclerosis. I just want to let you know actually he is doing much better, but I also wanted to wish you condolences on the loss of your grandfather. Finally, I just wanted to let you know, as far as the power of LinkedIn, which you mentioned in this episode, I actually finally took advantage of one of their newer features, namely the Answers. Or is it Questions? I do not remember which. Either way, you post a question and people in your network or even out of your network go ahead and answer the question. Actually, I posted a question about something that I was looking for and I got an answer back from somebody in your network and actually made a connection out of it. That just goes to show the power of the new media space, the instantaneousness I guess. Is that a word? I do not know. I just wanted to thank you on that. The connection by the way was Colin Brumelle. I remember the last name strangely enough, but I was a little sketchy on the first one. Actually, I did something, which I have never done before so it is a milestone for me. I actually picked up the phone and called the number on his blog and had a little chat with him about the service. It turns out he does not even work for the company anymore that provides the service, but he was really, really nice enough to take time out of his schedule and talk to me about it. I just wanted to thank you for that. All right. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: Have you guys used the questions and answers on LinkedIn yet? It is a very, very powerful way to connect. What it is, is you get to ask a question about anything. You name it. I have seen everything from gathering people’s information, “What do you think about X” to “Hey, can somebody recommend a Y?” People just answer. It is amazing. It is a great way to pull and poll your network. It is a great way to get a whole bunch of different people’s opinions. The fact that you connected with someone through my network I think is great. I think it is great and you picked up the phone and you called him. Kudos. I am still not a phone guy. I got to get better using the phone. I just do not. I do not know what it is. I just do not. If you are ever trying to get a hold of me, email me and do not MySpace me. I do not read those messages often enough. Gmail, cc.chapman@gmail.com, will get a hold of me, trust me.

I think LinkedIn is a very powerful medium. I like leveraging it just for the connections I get and I love it just to keep track where people are. When you get a new job, you do not always [unintelligible] everybody, but I find out about people through LinkedIn getting promotions and getting new jobs and where they are. What I love doing is going, “You’re working for who?” and I go click and I read about the company and I am like, “Oh, cool. That’s great!” It is a neat, neat tool and I am glad you got the connection through it. Again, it is about being connectors. My buddy Mark Forman, I hope I get this URL right, he is starting a podcast about connecting and I am very excited about it. I believe the URL is aconnector.com. I will check that while I play the next audio comment, but I am pretty sure that is what the URL is. It will definitely be in the show notes. I cannot wait to hear it. He has not done one yet, but just the concept of it, Mark is really into connections, doing communities, all the way over in Taiwan, which is great. It adds international flavor to it. He is from Brooklyn in Taiwan, so it makes it all international. I think it is very cool that these networks — and I love hearing success stories. Any success story you have ever have, please email me or call it in. Either way, share your success stories about how new media is helping you. I would love to share them with my listeners because that is further connection. Maybe your success story can help somebody else or it will motivate somebody else to try this stuff. That is what it is all about. Take this next guy, Scott Monty who I think is going to go on at some pretty cool things.

Scott Monty: Hey, C.C. Scott Monty here. I hope you are doing well. Hey, I had a great lunch with you and was glad to just kind of share the mind space with your or share the playground as it were. I wanted to comment on a couple of things on your spring cleaning show. I thought the analogy that you used with the new media playground is certainly a strong one. I wanted to acknowledge that you have been going through kind of a difficult time with just life in general. In the midst of playing in the new media playground, life does happen. There are some things that are snags whether we make some mistakes in the new media space or quite frankly personal lives just tend to get in the way. I liken this to being in the sandbox and just getting sand in your pants. Sometimes life happens and the [unintelligible] in your pants. Well, what do you do? You pick yourself up, you wipe yourself off, clean out your pants, and you get back into the sandbox for another day. Maybe try some new toys, learn how to not get sand in your pants the next time, but it is just part of a learning process and part of the fun that goes into it. The other thing I wanted to also acknowledge was being a huge Gmail user. I have actually become a big fan of GTD Gmail. That is Getting Things Done. It is a Firefox add-on that if you go to the Firefox Add-on page and you search for GTD, you would be able to find this really cool add-on to your Gmail account that allows you to really segment things with labels in a much more efficient way than you can simply with using stars or just using the labeling system that Gmail gives you. Check it out. You might want to provide a link. I do not have it at hand, but you can certainly provide a link in the notes if you can find it. All right. Keep up the great work. I enjoyed seeing you and certainly, as always, enjoy listening to your show. Take care. You can see me at scottmonty.com. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: Scott is fun. He is a listener of Managing the Gray and we met face to — I think that was the first time we met face to face, it was the Boston Ad Club earlier this year. We got together for lunch a couple of weeks back. Just grab chilis, had some lunch, great conversation. Scott is a neat guy. I am getting to know Scott better. It is great because he is totally leveraging the new media space. I love your analogy. I already blogged about this, the whole sand-in-your-pants. It is great. Scott, I am going to put that in the book and I am going to credit you with it. I promise. I know you are going to give me permission to use it, but I am definitely going to give you credit for it. It is a great stuff.

I think it is going to wrap up Managing the Gray. We are at 29 minutes right now. Wow! This is definitely a different vibe. I hope you are okay with it. I had this pool of listener comments that I have been neglecting and I really want to get them out to you because if I do not pass them along then I am doing something wrong because that is part of the whole connection and sharing and getting it all out there. This was definitely a little different. Managing the Gray usually focuses on the topic of the day, but today the topic of the day was you guys, the listeners, the people out there who are learning in the space, getting excited about the space, trying new things, falling down, making mistakes, getting up, learning from those mistakes, and then doing it better the next time. I had this CEO that — I still to this day respect the hell out of him. His name is Ben Levitan. When I worked for James Martin + Co., he was the CEO. He was like, “Failing is fine, just learn from it.” The other thing he always told me too that I will always remember about Ben was he used to say, “Listen. I don’t care who you are in the company. You can come up to me and tell me I’m doing stuff wrong. Tell me I made a mistake. Tell me I just made the dumbest decision in my life, but you have to tell me how I can do it better. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear you complain.” Exactly. If you are not doing it, you cannot complain about it. What is up? Does anybody work for…? I just thought of that. I do not know where Ben Levitan is. His name is Ben Levitan, works for James Martin + Co. down in Virginia, and I know last time he was up in the Boston area. I should find him. I bet you I can find him on LinkedIn. I am going to find out where Ben is. Maybe a listener works with him. If you are, you are a lucky individual because Ben was a cool guy, definitely shaped a lot of things in my mind.

Anyways, this is going to wrap up Managing the Gray. Of course, 206-309-4729 if you want to call in, or managingthegray@gmail.com works just as well. If you really want to get a hold of me — I keep these separate inboxes because sometimes it is a lot easier, but if you really want to get a hold of me, cc.chapman@gmail.com is the quickest way to get a hold of me. It is the account that is always open in the tab in Firefox, always. It is the first one I see, so send it there if you need something immediately. Until next time. I will talk to you very soon, managingthegray.com, blog content going up all the time, Twitter, all kinds of stuff. I am going, guys. I will talk to you soon.

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Transcript for Managing the Gray #36 “Playboy Comes to Second Life”
Originally posted on June 12, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Hey, today, we’ve got a special Managing the Gray. I am on the phone with my good buddy Marc from Green Grotto. How’s it going, man?

Marc Girolimetti: I am doing fantastic, although I need to tell you that by next Tuesday, or actually by the end of this week, Green Grotto will go through a name change.

C.C. Chapman: Yes, so tell me and my listeners about — I mean there is a reason. We first connected at a Second Life event here in Boston. Tell people what, well, I know you’re going through a name change and all that, so tell me who you are and who you’re with and who it’s going to become and all that jazz.

Marc Girolimetti: That’s awesome. Yeah. Let me just back the history up a little, back it up like we’re a dump truck right here, so get the sound effect of the backup beep ready, toot, toot. Green Grotto basically really was founded as almost you could purely say a Flash production studio/interactive strategy firm. So, basically, that interactive strategy, we work with our clients, how do we most effectively slot into their interactive campaigns. We weren’t the company going out searching for the all-encompassing sort of agency of record campaign. We were just trying to get in and do really cool stuff because in reality, we didn’t want to do the boring stuff. We felt like doing websites had become a commodity and since we were experts in Flash, we would try to find solutions for our clients leveraging the technology. Even though we were positioned as an interactive agency, it was interactively Flash. It’s funny because then everyone was like, “Well, what about AJAX?” I’m like, “Well, we know Flash.” We’ll just avoid AJAX for a while and leave that for the hardcore open source folks.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: But, in reality and all kidding aside, you know it worked out for us where we were able to get into some pretty decent firms and do some really cool stuff with that expertise. We can do everything from like a Flash movie regarding a product presentation to sales. We did a prototype sales tool for the Alienware corporate sales team, which was really neat. It never got off the ground, unfortunately, but it was basically where it was sort of customized for each salesperson and there’s a little CMS on the backend where the salesperson could plug in all the content that they wanted to present to their potential client and the ActionScript, they just go out and call it in, so there might be a custom movie, there might be custom imagery, custom navigable content and whatnot. It was really a neat thing. Then we moving forward have done a few projects. We were subbed for this, but every small agency gets subbed.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: To build games for FedEx and so we worked with their sort of branding and design agency and then we kind of came in with the expertise to make that thing live and breathe and work and be fun. That’s the stuff that was just so super cool. It was in conjunction with like the NBA and we did a golf game for the PGA and a racing game with NASCAR and FedEx to push their whole Gibbs Racing that they sponsor. That’s a lot of fun stuff, at the same time that’s sort of a growing firm. Even though there is plenty of money in the Flash world, we kind of, I wouldn’t say got bored, we were just looking for a new challenge.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: It just happened to be in conjunction with a potential client had come to us and they were shopping around a pretty cool idea to build their own sort of 3D virtual environment, but specifically catered to retail and essentially creating virtual malls, really niche, now that’s obviously wide open, a Second Life would-be or Kaneva would-be, which kind of encompasses everything as in a real replica of life. This would just be the part of you that goes to the mall on Saturday and it’s obviously Macy’s or, in your case, the Apple store. What happened was, as the business plan was being shopped around, we were researching sort of costs and timelines and gaming engines and everything that would take to sort of get this at least a working prototype up and off the ground and in that research came across Second Life and all of a sudden… I am personally looking at it almost via the goggles, let’s say goggles, let’s go back to my college days, the beer goggles, the goggles of a competitive analysis. It’s funny just kind of looking at Linden in Second Life as competitors. I signed up for those. If anything, even though I might look at them as competition, it’s pretty cool. Part of the competitive analysis is just to get in and get a feel for it. The other part of it was this is really neat and I kind of started to fall in love with it. I’m playing around and whatnot and then all of a sudden it feels like within a week, American Apparel happened. All of a sudden it just completely put my thinking at a 180-degree turn and so I’m like, “Damn! We could use this. Second Life, even though it’s a sort of gaming-like environment, social network and whatnot, this is really a platform.” Since they have this sort of low barrier to entry building tool, it was kind of a short learning curve. For a firm like us who work with Maya and Max, we understand 3D modeling tools. “We could use this for our clients.” Man, look at American Apparel. Heck, I have an entire drawer dedicated to American Apparel products. I’m like a huge fan actually. You should see my baby’s drawer. She has more American Apparel stuff than I have ever seen in any one life, which is actually good. If you have a kid, get them the good cotton from America.

C.C. Chapman: There you go.

Marc Girolimetti: But, anyway, the bottom line is, it’s just super cool and we just started talking internally like, “Maybe we should approach our clients with this.” The media just took it and ran with it and just made it so easy for us. I’d like to say we really busted our humps and you do have to knock on the doors of these essentially Fortune 1000 companies, but the reality is, they’re smart people, they’re reading the press, they know what is going on, and so you can drop those two magic words, Second and Life. It’s like getting off the plane at Fantasy Island and t.A.T.u. is there, just saying, “Come vir, come meet vi boss.” It’s pretty fantastic and, man, now I really want to create a Roberto Montalban avatar.

C.C. Chapman: You need to work on that, man. Get on that.

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah. God, let me keep that in mind. I won’t tell you what celebrity we recently did because I want to land the gig first.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, okay.

Marc Girolimetti: But it came out pretty well considering we kind of had to whip it up in a flash. It just sort of took off, just took off internally, it took off with sort of enthusiasm, and it took off for who we were talking to and just really opened the doors. The neat thing for us as coming from the sort of interactive strategy background and production background, we were able to approach deals totally differently beyond just being builders and that’s really what got me so excited because we could apply all these theories and lessons learned over the past 10+ years that I’ve been in this space to what we’re offering our clients and so it ends up becoming this really cool service offering where, “Yeah, we can do this build out for you, but guess what, we can do all these other marketing strategies and we can sort of do cross marketing across other channels that you have or currently utilizing whether your corporate MySpace page or if it’s a blog or a podcast or anything,” or if you have, let’s say in the case of Playboy, you have a magazine that goes to a lot of people and say, “Let’s do some cross promotion there.” Being smart enough to leverage all of those channels is just really the way to do it. Of course, now, I’m giving away all the secrets to our competition, but of course…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. That’s one of the things why I connected with you right away when we first met because we’re both Boston guys. When I saw you give a presentation, you were talking about Second Life and you were saying things that I’m always saying as well, the fact that it’s just an extension. It’s another place for you to be. It’s not the end-all, be-all for your brand no matter what the brand is. We just talked about integrating blogs and podcasts and everything, which is what I’m always preaching and I’m like, “Yeah, I get this. This guy gets it.” I know we’ve had some great conversations over lunch whenever we can actually get it scheduled to work. It’s just been fun. I think there needs to be more people out there and you guys were an interesting mix, the fact that you could build and you did. I also like the fact that you grew out of being Flash and went into Second Life. You still do the Flash stuff but the fact that it wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s do the Second Life stuff and Second Life is the only option for everything.”

Marc Girolimetti: Right, right, exactly. That’s the best part about it is that we sometimes will approach with Second Life and we’ll walk out with, “Maybe this isn’t right for the client, but look at these three other options as far as interactive in general is concerned that we could jump on.” You establish a relationship and as long as they like you and you sort of have proven the quality that you are trying to sell, then they are way more open to discuss it, which is fantastic. It’s really funny like I’ve done enough speaking engagements regarding this stuff, the Boston thing. I actually kind of got invited to a New York event even though I wasn’t on the panel, but I really shut my mouth off. I will keep everyone nameless but there was what’s considered competition there speaking and they were just going down the wrong path and they just didn’t recognize the people in the room. They really kind of came out from the buildings approach and the people in the room are all ad people and ad people don’t want to hear how the heck it’s built. They just want to know how it makes their clients look good.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Marc Girolimetti: I piped up a lot and just started talking to that and afterwards you have a lot of people start just coming up to you and asking for the proverbial business card and just saying, “Man, you really are speaking to us.” To tell you the truth, sometimes we can get indirectly to a client and then sometimes we have to go like do a Crispin if we want to get to a Volkswagen or Burger King or somebody and that’s perfectly fine for us. It’s good to be able to educate the people who are landing the multimillion dollar agency record account. It’s always good to get them on your side and to educate them and have them understand it. I got invited to speak to Disney out in Burbank and same thing. There were 40+ Disney execs in this room and a lot of people were kind of talking just about specific environments. We went across the gamut of virtual space. We even talked about, Disney Toontown, Virtual Magic Kingdom, and even World of Warcraft. I was sort of there to kind of talk Second Life, but I really just kind of talked about how to leverage virtual space and if it’s the right choice for you. Again, afterwards, that’s when everyone came up to me and just said, “You were the one person who spoke to how to actually take advantage of this.” I get what it is. I get that wow of the game, you got a battle and it’s like little Lord of the Rings. I’m sure I probably just insulted a million World of Warcraft people.

C.C. Chapman: You probably did, yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: I really can’t say Lord of the Rings because now they have their own virtual online game now.

C.C. Chapman: That’s right, yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: It’s just that you got to figure it out. You got to look at it as a medium to communicate a message and whatever that message is whether it’s branding or sales or survey, Flash interaction, you just got to figure that out and then how to leverage the platform and discuss with the community. The bottom line is the entire web has been flipped on its head and it’s not at all about content push anymore. It’s all about content creation, which means people feel totally empowered. I mean, literally, since that last presidential election when the bloggers just exploded onto the scene, that’s how bloggers really came to the national attention and became part of our lingo. It really kind of made everyone feel like, “Hey, I actually do have a choice here and I really can influence something and I can really speak intelligently and not have to worry about getting them crying, get out for 10 years gig at the Globe.”

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Marc Girolimetti: Doing the local beat until X columnist either plagiarizes or gets fired or gets too old and just die.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, it’s amazing. I love the fact — it’s weird that it took up political election, but I think you’re totally right that people’s minds have begun to change and they realized people could say things. When you saw bloggers getting quoted on the news and stuff, it was like, “Wait a minute, what just happened?” It’s very cool and it’s going to be interesting to see this next election, I think you’re going to see tons more video content, some bloggers are going to video tape something they are not supposed to and post it and all hell is going to break loose. It’s going to be a blast to watch.

Marc Girolimetti: Right. Actually, I almost lost my mind yesterday. I think it was like something on CNN and they essentially cited a Wikipedia post.

C.C. Chapman: Oh no.

Marc Girolimetti: I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” I was like, “It’s okay to like look at it, but you should never ever in a million years cite it.” All of a sudden I felt like I was watching that episode of The Office.

C.C. Chapman: That is just wrong.

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah. I was like, “Okay, that’s going a little too far, guys,” especially when you have a sister who used to work with Encyclopedia Britannica.

C.C. Chapman: Oh no.

Marc Girolimetti: Talk about investing and making sure the facts are correct.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, no kidding.

Marc Girolimetti: Oh, man, but it’s funny. It was absolutely funny, but it proves, again, that mainstream media, not even America, just mainstream everywhere is sort of understanding the power of the people and really [unintelligible] back to us and it’s really neat that that can happen. It’s funny because you’ll see that the traditionalists get really mad that it’s happening. I know, C.C., you’re not a big sports fan, but I’m sure you know the name Curt Schilling because he lives about two miles from your house.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: He blogs now and he has a pretty good blog.

C.C. Chapman: Wait! I’m a sports fan. What are you talking about? I’m just not a big baseball fan.

Marc Girolimetti: Well, all right. See, you live in Boston, buddy. It’s like a sports fan means you better be a baseball fan.

C.C. Chapman: Sorry. Hey, dude. I grew up rooting for the Orioles, I’m sorry.

Marc Girolimetti: Oh man. That’s okay.

C.C. Chapman: The only New England team I root for — oh, I root for the Red Sox when I’m rooting for baseball sometimes, but I’m a Miami Dolphins football fan die hard. I root for the Bruins when they’re actually playing halfway.

Marc Girolimetti: Oh God. Let’s not talk about hockey. It’s the greatest sport to ever watch on television and it’s horrible now. I can’t even go there. Anyway, Schilling blogs and he is an intelligent dude and he can write some really insightful things. Dan Shaughnessy, old guard from the Boston Globe and his nasty attitude, he hates Schilling, everyone knows it, Schilling hates him back, and then goes and like rips the Blogger community in a column and generalizes it to the point where, “Oh, every guy who reads a blog or everyone who blogs is just some sad, out of work bum living in his parents’ basement.” That’s how out of tune he was in kind of really playing their personal cultural stereotypes. It’s just ridiculous because that whole living in your parents’ basement joke for Internet people is like 10 years old and it’s like, “Okay, buddy. Let’s step up to at least 1999 for me.” That’s the kind of stuff that just amazes me. There will always be some sort of backlash and resistance to things like what we’re involved in, but the bottom line is, it’s here, it’s happening, it’s everywhere.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Marc Girolimetti: The cool thing is you go to ESPN’s website now, they are podcasting, the Boston Globe, Bob Ryan, Jackie MacMullan; they’re some of the old guards. They did a podcast. Bob Ryan is blogging now and one of my favorite podcast in the world, aside from yours of course, is Bill Simmons, the Boston Sports guy who writes for ESPN. I have known Bill since he worked at, what was that, whatever that AOL property, Boston Virtual City or whatever.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, I remember. City Search? No. I know what you are talking about. I can’t think what it was either.

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah. He had this tiny little column on a small AOL property that he was writing out of his apartment in Charlestown and the guy in a few short years parlays that into a writing gig for ESPN.com, ESPN the magazine, he got a book out of them. Now, he does a podcast and he loves it. The opening line to his podcast is fantastic. He said, “I love this because I don’t have to leave my house.”

C.C. Chapman: Exactly. It’s what it’s all about.

Marc Girolimetti: Right. He talks to some really cool people. He had one with Marv Albert, the great basketball announcer. Last week was one of my personal favorites. Alton from The Real World: Las Vegas was one of his guests. He is buddies with Adam Carolla now. It’s really cool that a kid like that who just loves to write, hated working at The Herald, turned what was essentially blogging before blogging, and has really kind of embraced this technology, which is fantastic. It is nice ABC Properties and Disney eventually are getting involved at this level. It’s encouraging to see because then agencies like us, when we go into those terms trying to sell them on something, they get what we’re talking about and then they have living examples that we can cite.

C.C. Chapman: Now, I want to shift gears. We can talk about this all day, but we’ll never get to — well, the reason I really wanted you on today and you already let it slip a little bit, but I want to go in the direction of you got a very cool client that you’re bringing into Second Life. When this goes live, it will be up and it won’t be a secret anymore. I want to talk about, first off, who is the client that we’re talking about?

Marc Girolimetti: First of all, actually, let’s take it a step back because we’re missing question two; that’s question three. I want to quickly answer the name change.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: Green Grotto has agreed to merge with agency that is often called Sentient Services. We’re actually going to retain the name Sentient. Basically, Sentient is really kind of a knowledge research branding advertising agency, not heavy strength on production and toward new media work and that’s where we really come in. We’ve been talking for a couple of months about trying to figure out a partnership and it just wasn’t clicking and someone finally suggested, “Why don’t we just band together and make this happen?” I sat on it for a while and kind of weighed the pros and cons and then eventually I woke up one day, after like a month load of sort of weighing in all these conversations we’ve had, it just clicked in my head. I really figured that it could benefit both of us, both of our growth plans, better service to our clients, more creative and talented people on staff, and could be a real powerhouse. One of Sentient’s biggest clients that they bring to the table is Dell. Dell is a famous company that kind of made the Second Life explosion so it’s good to work with these firms and so this is the good lead in. Here’s what I think salivated the deal for them is the Big Kahuna client of Playboy. It actually started with — it’s funny because Playboy is Playboy is Playboy. They have a ton of brands and they have corporations under the umbrella and we kind of went in with the dotcom folks and that’s who we sort of really started everything with, but now, even prior to launch… They’ve seen all the progress that we’ve done and we’ve had millions upon millions of conversations. They are already sort of going across the entire corporate umbrella and trying to figure out how we can make this virtual experience work for them and really from next week when it launches to 12 months from next week have it look totally different than what the first impression will be to what the next series of impressions will be because it’s definitely going to be cool, it’s definitely not going to be these one-off splashes, one press release, one event, and see you later, we’re going to let our sim collect some cobwebs. Everyone will find out — by the time this podcast is up, a lot of people will probably see this, the neat thing about it is we really approached it as a way for people to connect with the brand, celebrate the brand, and experience the brand.

C.C. Chapman: I know I can hear people right now who are listening to this going, “Oh, great. Second Life is already deemed as nothing but sex and gambling and now we’re gonna have a whole sim of nothing but bunnies walking around and sex.” I just want to make sure because I know people are thinking that right now. They are going to Playboy and they’re like, “Oh, furries! I got to get a bunny suit, and now I’m like, “No, no. You guys don’t really know the brand of Playboy,” and I know from talking with you guys, I mean that was really important to Playboy that this wasn’t about sex and naked women. The brand is so much more than that.

Marc Girolimetti: You’re absolutely right. Actually, to tell you the truth, that’s how we approached it. We approached them and said, “Look, we can do…” Let me just get on my dirty trucker ranting mouth language, women in a bar kind of thing. We said to them, “We don’t want it to be all tits and ass,” because that’s going to be the expectation and we want to surprise people. To me, as a fan of Playboy, I always envied the — to me, the number one thing that I think of and this is like sort of like how well they’ve done a job of creating some mystery around the brand, is that it’s such an inclusive property that you see these pictures of mansion parties and aside from David Spade and James Caan who are at every single one because they have nothing better to do, you see all these super celebrities, you see all these beautiful people, you see Hef, you just see people having a good time and it’s not just like a giant orgy, it’s not like a scene out of Caligula, it really just is fun, it’s celebration, it’s relaxation, having a good time. It’s kind of hanging out with like-minded people because the one cool thing that they’ve done with the brand is really make — at the end of the day, sex is the most natural thing for any living organism on the face of the planet and somewhere along the line, humans really screwed up the ability to talk about it in a real comfortable setting. They really just kind of throw things out there that are very common, very natural and it just happens to be that they have become absolutely 1 million percent famous for these pictorials. You can’t blame them. They’re some of the world’s most beautiful women and at the same time some of the best photographers who have ever walked the face of this planet are doing these gigs for them and it makes it so much more than hot women over 60 that you see at your local triple X store.

C.C. Chapman: You know what you need too do? It’s funny. You just gave me a dangerous idea when you were talking about the photographer. I’m sorry, this is how my brain works. A while back, I’ll admit, I’m not a Playboy subscriber, but I know that they…

Marc Girolimetti: You really should be.

C.C. Chapman: I know I should be, work on that. They have I know like Kevin Smith did a pictorial. He shot the pictures and other…

Marc Girolimetti: Right. André 3000 from OutKast did one too.

C.C. Chapman: I think they need to do an influencer outreach and get those of us who are Flickr addicts to shoot photography for them. I think that would be a cool idea.

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah, it actually would. That is a great way to kind of reach out to the people and via a new media channel. That’s really everything that we’ve been talking about and, God forbid, think of how many thousands of men and women would kind of kill for that gig.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, that would be amazing to actually have — I would love to shoot in one of their sets with real cameras and stuff. That would be amazing. Never mind the naked women angle.

Marc Girolimetti: Right, right, you know you’re absolutely right. That’s the cool thing about it, but that’s what people think about and that’s how you change some brand perception and, yes, when we did the hype banners three or four weeks ago, the entire blogosphere and all the mainstream media like everyone was a chatter and everyone was so ticked off that they didn’t know what was going on, which let me just tell you it was just genius and I will not pat myself on the back for that one.

C.C. Chapman: I remember. I was actually in New York at Crayon’s offices and all of a sudden, our chief creative officer, Steve Coulson, turns to me, also known as Gideon Television, he’s like, “Dude, have you seen this?” I’m like, “What?” I looked over and it’s one of what you just called the hype banner, which I think is a great name. I looked and I laughed. He goes “What?” I said, “Uh, I know the team behind that.” I didn’t say anything and he was like, “What?” but, yeah, you’re exactly right because all you did was — which I think was a great marketing gimmick or a tactic, if it’s a better word, where you put out all these banners that said Playboy is coming to Second Life. You said nothing, nothing at all, which I thought was genius.

Marc Girolimetti: Right, right. The only thing that we did beyond that was link it to a splash page that collected an email address and we have collected thousands. I don’t know. I’d love to just sort of throw it out there with some of the other agencies that have brought [unintelligible] in and see like what kind of customer gross they’ve done on sort of an email marketing level because that’s what we’re doing, collecting email addresses so you can start communicating with these people on a regular basis. We had within three days, the number kicked 1500. It’s incredible.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: It’s been three weeks and that number just keeps going up and up and up. That means there are real fans out there. There are people who are really interested in it and they really want to participate. Of course, that makes me nervous because when the numbers are in the thousands that means we’re going to crash our sim. Come on, Second Life. Let’s get some technical limitations taken cared of, but actually, no, the neat thing is we’ve got some really great people constructing this and we have some lowdown things on that sim. This is what I’m calling it because this is what it’s like, it’s the virtual velvet rope. We’ve got a virtual velvet rope out and we’re kind of limiting how many people can be on at one time and then as one gets off then you come in. The one way I want to kind of — we have to re-script it and set it up like real life club, so if you’re one dude and then there are five beautiful women who are trying to get in, that one dude goes to the back of the line and the five ladies come in. We got to figure how we pull that off because I’ve been on the short end of that stick before.

C.C. Chapman: I think Managing the Gray listeners would love to hear. Obviously, one of the biggest problems that gets mentioned about Second Life is, “Oh, I can only have 50 people on the sim,” the numbers, how many people, blah, blah, blah. How did you talk to someone like Playboy about that topic? I know it came up at some point. I’m sure it comes up with all your clients.

Marc Girolimetti: Of course it did and you know what? I have been on the soapbox for a while at least until late last year. Because Second Life is delivered over the Internet, a lot of marketers look at it with traditional Internet metrics and this is like sort of compare all your ROI analysis comes into play here, so when someone goes out and drops $100,000 on sort of a 10-site media campaign and has 40 million page views and a CPM rate of $1.25 because they’re serving up 1.2 million ads in this tie-in and another 500,000 over here, everyone looks at it with those mass numbers and the stake it made, you can kind of fault Linden for this and you can fault us too as agencies because we need to use some numbers to get people all fired up, right? It’s that damn total registered user number.

C.C. Chapman: Yup.

Marc Girolimetti: That thing as it pushes higher and higher and higher, people just assume in their heads that 7.5 million people are at my disposal.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: They think that they’re all going to come and they’re all going to hang out. They’re all going to show up. It’s just not the case. You have to educate them fast or you’re really going to screw the pooch as far as your relationship is concerned and so we completely just tell our clients, “Do not think in terms of numbers. Do think of numbers, but you have to think of them in a different way.” A thousand people is a lot different than a million people on Yahoo! where you ran your banners, but to tell you the truth, people who are on Yahoo! are searching, they’re shopping, they’re using their mails. They’re not 100% dedicated to your banner. This is a dedicated space, which means you have their undivided attention. Your responsibility, once you get their undivided attention, is to lock them in and keep them there and your metrics really need to be measured by how much time is spent with your brand. With all the work we’ve done, we haven’t done nearly as much work as the sheep and the moos and everyone else out there, but the clients that we have brought in to SL or have helped promote in SL, they’re averaging over 30 minutes per user with their brand, and that’s an insane number. I mean that is a sitcom on television and NBC, they only have 20 minutes out of that 30-minute time slot to revolve around their brand on TV and then there is 10 minutes of 30- to 60-second ads that a marketer has to connect to you and that’s television. It’s much less time on the Internet. If you have 30 minutes, in some cases 45 minutes, in some cases an hour, of someone’s undivided attention with your brand, I don’t even know how to put a number on that because it’s so new and it’s unbelievable. I’m about to swear, I’m about to drop the S bomb and I just bit my tongue, but it really is. It blows my mind every time I see it and I absolutely think that is really the key and that’s like what’s going to shift the mindset because once you realize you have people dedicated to that amount of time, you can get in there and you can talk to them. If you just want to push content, you can give the right content to them, but you can also show up and start having a conversation and start getting some real serious input from obvious fans of your brand. To me, those 1000 people that spend so much time with your brand are the 1000 most important people for the rest of your brand for the rest of your life and that’s it because they’re going to help guide it, they’re the ones who love it, they want to be around it, they want to celebrate it. That is how you win. At the end of the day, that’s how you win. At the same time, that’s how a small client of ours, RatePoint, which is a five- to six-person start up just outside the city here, they built a really cool toolbar that kind of ties the best of ratings along with social networking on the web and came in and we built a really cool little avatar to avatar ratings application for them. Instead of building that and just leaving it as is, they asked us like, “Well, how do we get our name up there? We’re not GM. We’re not AOL. We’re not Reebok. We need help. We’re the little guy.” I just figured out there, I said, “It means absolutely nothing to your brand and what you do, but let’s build a little café and let’s have some live music events just for the sake of getting people to hang out with your brand.”

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: All you have the opportunity is you can start delivering your HUD to these people while they are there at the show and then the artists are going to get really fired up for it because they want people to give them real time feedback vis-a-vis the ratings application. The artists start chatting up about it during their live performances saying, “Hey, please give me a rating after the show. I’d love to hear what you think.” All of a sudden, they’ve got live performances six nights a week, every night at 7:00 Eastern Time or 4:00 p.m. SL Time. The smallest crowd I ever saw there was about 30; the largest crowd I ever saw there was about 73. They’re there for an hour, an entire hour to hang out and watch this new addition. It’s really neat. They’re engaging the community. They have given back to the community. The musicians are allowed to build their fan base. They’re allowed to get more gigs out of it. Some of the people who have played at their café were booking for the Playboy launch. It’s a really nice circle of investing in the community. My point being is that RatePoint for a while literally look at the SL traffic numbers and how they have that wacky system and because they had so many people spending so much time with their brand, they were crushing every single corporate sim in Second Life as far as traffic was concerned and it was amazing. GM and Pontiac are considered one of the more successful ones and they were killing them and they were killing AOL right when AOL launched. AOL has a pretty cool content consumption heavy area and they just weren’t getting the traffic. When I was there, they didn’t have nearly as much traffic. It’s just really a cool thing to have like David and Goliath’s story to share with future clients whether they are big ones or small ones. It’s just sort of, here’s an approach, here’s how you engage these folks, and here’s how you grow and sustain.

C.C. Chapman: Back to Playboy for a second. I’m just curious because by the time this goes out, it will be live. What can people expect when they go to Playboy? Is it an island? Is it a location?

Marc Girolimetti: Let’s talk more what’s not to expect. What not to expect is tons of tits and ass and tons of sex and sexual content, anything that the mind instantly goes to when you think Playboy. This is really an opportunity for people to just hang out and connect with the brand and really meet some cool people and have a good time. The first thing we did, and this is actually I think is a really cool, a big cool, for like a company like us bringing in a large corporation in, is we shaped the island in the form of their bunny head logo.

C.C. Chapman: Nice.

Marc Girolimetti: That’s not a pretty little image you see on the map. That is literally how the island is shaped. We made it all white fence because everyone thinks the rabbit head is — you can see the black and white pretty much so. We really played up to the ultimate image in their brand is that rabbit head and there was no way we weren’t doing it. When we figured out a really cool way to make it happen technologically wise, it just made everyone’s life just so much better because just to be able to pull it off was something great. You get there and it just varies experiential. There is a centerpiece to it and the centerpiece really is — this is one of the big things that you may not know about Playboy. They have a huge online store. They actually have two. Thy have Playboy store which is at Playboy.com is really kind of targeted to the men and it’s not necessarily men’s products. It’s products for men who are typically buying for their girlfriends and wives. Then there is a new store that they have that we’re helping the brand is called Shop the Bunny and Shop the Bunny is all Playboy products for women. It’s really deep that they have kind of over the years, especially in the last 10 years or so, there’s just such an acceptance of that brand, especially with females and so let’s target them, let’s give them some products. There is a huge array of products and you think it is obvious it is lingerie. Well, that was the one thing because it’s just been beaten to death inside Second Life. It’s like, what’s the point? At the end of the day, unless there is like some really cool custom design that you can only get at the Playboy store, it all looks like Victoria’s Secret or Frederick’s of Hollywood or a lingerie boutique at your favorite street in any city. It was sort of pointless. At the same time, I was like why compete on that level because then the community is going to complain that we’re just coming in and trying to crush the competition.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Marc Girolimetti: They have all kinds of neat stuff, jeans, they have T-shirts, they have polo shirts, they have really cool cami tops, everything that you can get anywhere at any store and anywhere in the world, but with the bunny head logo on it. They have these Capri pants that have bunny head stitching on the back pocket, so neat little things that are totally exclusive to them and their brand. What we’re doing is we have a virtual version of the product and you can dress up our avatar in some really cool cute outfits.

C.C. Chapman: Can you buy the bunny outfit?

Marc Girolimetti: No. We’re keeping that special.

C.C. Chapman: I thought you would. I wasn’t sure, but I had to ask.

Marc Girolimetti: Let me just answer this and then we’ll go to that. There are accessories like jewelry and belts and all that neat stuff and then there are some shoes and there are even items for men as well. The neat thing is the store has been set up like a boutique. We didn’t base it on any design. Actually, Playboy does have physical stores and one recently launched in London, but we said we do not want to copy the store kind of like American Apparel did their Tokyo store over. We figured it was just, “Why?” We have all of this freedom to do what we want.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Marc Girolimetti: We just kind of put our heads together and just came up with a really neat design. It’s actually an open air store and there are basically sections like if you walk into like cooler Macy’s stores where Ben Sherman has a section and Lacoste has section and Calvin Klein has a section. We set it up almost like that, but it’s really men’s, it’s accessories, it is women’s tops, women’s bottoms, things like that. At the same time, kind of like the American Apparel store, you can link off to their website to the buy product for yourself.

C.C. Chapman: Good, good, good.

Marc Girolimetti: We’re really tying it all together. At the same time, we just didn’t want to stop at the store so what we’re doing in the center of the store is actually this. It’s a bunch kind of lounge couches and there’s a little water fountain, but there is a multi promotion space. One of the cooler things, and I do not know if you remember this and I only know this because my parent were telling me about it, back in the day Hef used to have a TV show called Playboy After Dark. It was filmed in the Playboy clubs that were in a bunch of cities around the country including here in Boston. It was almost like Hef’s version of the Johnny Carson show without all the comedy and variety stuff, but his guests would be Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, classic icons who were part of his network and it was a really cool way to talk about after dark lifestyle, hanging out, going to jazz clubs, listening to cool music, hanging out with beautiful women. They recently re-release a boxed set of that TV show and to me it’s like the coolest thing and it just brings back a ton of memories, not really. I’ve never been to the clubs or seen the show, but older people in my family have spoken about it and they have neat vivid memories they had about it. I can remember my dad telling me once, he was like, “You might think Playboy is all just a bunch of naked women, but there used to be this TV show and I used to watch it and it was really great.” I only knew Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin from Cannonball Run when they were older and washed up.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, my God.

Marc Girolimetti: He kind of explained it all to me. He said, “It was really neat.” We are helping push that boxed set for them and keeping with that open air spirit, and this is actually one of my favorite things, I don’t like to make people wait a long time to sort of maneuver around Second Life, but we built these sort of air tubes that serve as elevators and it takes you to the upstairs lounge and it takes only a few seconds to get up there, but it’s a really neat thing to see because your avatar gets placed in this glass tube and so everyone can see you kind of get risen up and it automatically takes you up. It is just a neat little piece of user experience that really serves no purpose.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: But to make people say, “Oh, cool!” It just makes them happy and they know it’s like something special and something unique.

C.C. Chapman: Cool.

Marc Girolimetti: Upstairs is really a lounge area. There are sort of floor multi media areas so there are going to be some Girl’s Next Door stuff. Actually, there is one really cool thing that I think a lot of people will be into. There is going to be one video screen dedicated to Ask Hef and it is something that is kind of buried on their website and I’m like, “No way, man. This thing is the coolest.” Basically, we’ll have a link off from the site, it’s basically an email address, and you can ask Hugh Hefner anything.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, cool.

Marc Girolimetti: They basically pick the best of the best and film his answers, so we’re going to stream his answers and so we’re trying to work on, “Hey Hef. Maybe you can do one question that came from Second Life.”

C.C. Chapman: That would be cool, yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: Just to let people know that they are totally included in this process. It’s really neat things like that. Again, Hef is the icon of the Playboy empire.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, by far.

Marc Girolimetti: To have this ability to learn more about him is really important and it is important to me as a fan and it is important to them as an organization because it just puts a different side to what people might think he is.

C.C. Chapman: I’m curious because one of those things, once people get beyond the naked women, one of the things I think of when I think of the Playboy Magazine specifically is they have some of the best interviews on the planet, bar none.

Marc Girolimetti: Absolutely.

C.C. Chapman: Are you guys leveraging that?

Marc Girolimetti: Oh, they are THE best interviews.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. Are you going to leverage that at all somehow?

Marc Girolimetti: See, this is part of like the phase-in approach. It’s not going to be the “there now,” but we will definitely be kind of taking advantage of that in the future.

C.C. Chapman: Cool. That’s what is interesting too when you and I talked about this before over lunch, I was really happy to hear that this wasn’t a PR thing, this wasn’t a “let’s have a big bang and then hope it all goes well and then we’ll let it fall apart.” You guys were actually up front thinking about phases, thinking about “we’ll do this and then this will happen.” You were thinking long term, which is the way I wish more people thought about this from clients.

Marc Girolimetti: Right. This is the thing. There are going to be two different reactions to this approach because there are going to be people who are going to be pissed that we didn’t blow our wads with it.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Marc Girolimetti: There will probably be another small group that will be pissed because there’s not a lot of porn. Let’s just throw the P word out there for them to consume. Well, there are a million other places in SL where you can enjoy that.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. If you can’t find that, you’re not looking hard enough.

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah, go buy your XCite HUD and have a good time with it. The bottom line is I think some people will be mad because of that and then some people are going to be so hyped because it’s almost like we’re giving them a taste and instead of the law of diminishing returns of like the more licks you get on an ice cream cone, the less you like it. Well, it’s true.

C.C. Chapman: I guess I’ve never heard that before.

Marc Girolimetti: Hey, you know where I got that from? Babson College, buddy.

C.C. Chapman: I was waiting. I’m like, “He’s going to say Babson. I know he is.”

Marc Girolimetti: I got to plug my alma mater and I got to plug your former employer.

C.C. Chapman: What class were you?

Marc Girolimetti: What was that?

C.C. Chapman: What year were you for all the Babson people listening?

Marc Girolimetti: Oh, man. I’m a 1996 baby. Let’s go mid-1990s, Netscape 1.0, that’s when I became an Internet geek.

C.C. Chapman: Nice.

Marc Girolimetti: What we’re going to do is consistently add flavor to it. The neat thing is and I can’t confirm or deny anything, but we’re going to allow people inside a lot of exclusivity that they’re known for like Halloween parties, Mardi Gras parties, Super Bowl parties, things like that, do a mixed reality event. Who doesn’t want to see what the heck goes on inside maybe at the Mansion or in fact just a party or at The Palms in Vegas where they just reopened the Playboy Club and things like that? People are going to be so fired up to be able to participate. I think the demand is going to be there. We’ll have to make it VIP only and really make it special for people that they’re going to fight and scratch and claw their way into it and try to bribe people to giving them their ticket, you know? It’s really going to be so much fun over the course of the next 12 months. They have made a hard 12-month commitment to this and so they are sort of going [unintelligible] internally to really figure out how we’re going to make this work. The neat thing is we know some things that are coming down the road and some things we don’t because we just want to shift and plan on the fly and figure out what might be working and what might not be working. The other thing is like what is going to be launching next week will be ever changing once a month. We’re going to treat it like a real retail store. We’re going to roll in new products as they come online. We’re going to take things up that aren’t selling well. We might pick things out that are selling well just to add some exclusivity to that product. We’re thinking of having maybe some custom designs made, one month only get this product, and things like that to just get people back into the store, back buying and kind of getting these really cool unique products that otherwise they have no other opportunity to obtain.

C.C. Chapman: I love it, I love it. Just so people know — some people who are listening are going to be like, “Wait a minute. These guys are competitors to Crayon. Why is C.C. having them on here?” I’m just like, “No. We sat down and talked and I’m like ‘I got to get you on Managing the Gray because you get it and it’s obvious Playboy gets it,’ which is great.” I am a firm believer that there is plenty of business for everybody out there, especially for people who get it, who aren’t just out there, “Oh we’re going to build this four-sim huge thing.” Then you are going to abandon it after a month. That’s pointless.

Marc Girolimetti: Well, right. The biggest thing, I actually had a conversation with someone today and like his approach was, “Well, how do we deal with all this backlash?” I’m like, “What backlash?” He’s like, “Well, there’s all these companies complaining about negative experiences.” I go, “The only two people who are to blame for that are their agency who screwed up and them who maybe didn’t ask the right questions.” I go, “No one else is at fault.” I was like, “How does anyone know to show up at Reebok or Adidas when they didn’t even put as much as a press release out?”

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: “What am I going to do? Use a search engine? ‘Oh, I wonder if Reebok is around here?’” No, it doesn’t work that way. It’s totally the agency’s fault for not understanding what they need to do. I’m going to stroke your ego a little, but you guys did a fantastic job at Coca-Cola and you did it because you just came at it from a way that I think caught people off guard with how they thought Coke should interact in Second Life.

C.C. Chapman: Right, right.

Marc Girolimetti: But when you think about it, it’s so freaking logical. It’s like, “Well, what do you think about when you think about Coke?” You think about vending machines. It really is so iconic.

C.C. Chapman: Thank you for that. It was a lot of fun watching the reactions we were ready for the given brand backlash that we prepped Coke for like, “You’re a big brand. You’re gonna have a huge target on your heads coming in.” I got to tell you. It was a lot of fun to see blog posts from people that we expected would slam it. You can see them trying to type and go, “I want to hate this, but I can’t because they’re not being jerks about it.” It was so much fun to watch. Yeah, there were questions and whatnot, but I agree with you that the brand itself should not be blamed for these things, it’s whoever brings it in. It’s not like Coke or Playboy is just going to open up shop in Second Life on their own without talking to anybody. It doesn’t work that way. There’s always somebody in between.

Marc Girolimetti: Right, and we’re supposed to be an expert.

C.C. Chapman: Supposed to be, right or at least fake it pretty good.

Marc Girolimetti: Right. That’s the thing, just so many funny things I see. Microsoft came out. Everyone knows who probably did this and I’m not trying to slam them by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m just trying to make a point here. When Microsoft came out with that Visual Studio event and whatnot and there were some actual ad banners that were posted, at least on New World Notes for that. Thank the Lord because that’s like the first step you should make and that’s really cool and I’m glad that you get it, plus you’re supporting people who are making a living off of the success of Second Life in general. Kind of like the eBay [unintelligible] going on where all this kind of spinoff companies that are like little remoras on the whale shark that is Second Life and they’re just feeding on it and it’s great and that’s what should happen. That’s the beauty of the Internet, but here’s someone who in past agency experience has done over 100 projects with Microsoft Corporation. I know their design guidelines like the back of my head and at the same I always make a joke that Microsoft owns 80% of my house because that’s how much work I’ve done for them. I looked at it and their logo, the Microsoft logo in that ad banner was in violation. The first thing I saw and the first thing I noticed, anyone who has ever worked with Microsoft and their logo knows exactly how that thing has to be placed and how much distance it needs from the top edge and the side edge and the bottom edge, wherever you are placing that damn thing and it was totally in violation. I actually from the kindness of my heart shot a note over to them to let them know that, but to me it’s like I don’t expect you guys because you didn’t really start off with an agency background and so you may not have ever worked on projects where you’re asking for branding and design guidelines because Second Life is almost free and independent of that.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: It’s not like working with print and the web and whatnot and so you just may not have thought to ask, so I figured I’d try to be helpful. The bottom line is, you got to know this stuff. There are certain levels to like the relationship with these clients that if you really want to get entrenched and you really want to do a lot more work for them, you really have to get them as well and getting them allows you to properly execute on these campaigns, to communicate them and introduce them to this community and then build an audience around it.

C.C. Chapman: Oh yeah, man. Oh yeah. Listen, we’re coming up on an hour. We’ve been yapping.

Marc Girolimetti: I know. This is like the longest podcast ever.

C.C. Chapman: It is going to be by far the longest Managing the Gray ever recorded.

Marc Girolimetti: That’s so awesome.

C.C. Chapman: Is this your first podcast you’ve been on?

Marc Girolimetti: No. Actually, you know what? The first time we ever met at that Boston event?

C.C. Chapman: Yup.

Marc Girolimetti: When Linden showed up, some audience member had a portable recorder on him. He’s like, “Can I interview you for my podcast?” That was actually my first one.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, that’s funny. I wonder if it was Bryan.

Marc Girolimetti: The kid from Monster?

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, Bryan Person, yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, right.

C.C. Chapman: That’s funny. I’m just trying to think what podcasters that I knew were there. Bryan, that’s funny. Bryan’s good like that.

Marc Girolimetti: No, it was good. Being my first one, I was breaking the cherry and I was a little — actually, in your case, let me just say breaking the Cherry Coke. I was totally caught off guard. I had just spoken for an hour so I’m like, “Ah, whatever.” but it was good. It definitely wasn’t my best, but this is definitely — I love this stuff. The bottom line is I just like talking to you. We have a really good rapport.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, we do. Yeah.

Marc Girolimetti: Really easy and that’s why we can go on for hours when we open our mouth.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, I know. Well, man, I thank you for coming on today. I have a feeling you’re going to be back because I know you are itching to do this and this was definitely a lot of fun. We got to do next time in person over beers or something.

Marc Girolimetti: Oh, that would be cool, the drunken podcast.

C.C. Chapman: That would be dangerous.

Marc Girolimetti: You know what’s awesome and you probably have the same problem that I do? Ever since we started having children, our [unintelligible] alcohol was like absolutely through the basement.

C.C. Chapman: Yes.

Marc Girolimetti: It’s going to be like a three drink minimum and we’re going to be completely flaming, [unintelligible] people and getting ourselves fired.

C.C. Chapman: But those are kind of fun sometimes.

Marc Girolimetti: That’s true. It would be awesome. It’s recorded history.

C.C. Chapman: All right. Before you go, because I actually don’t know the answer, where can people find out more about you and your company? I’m not sure what the URL is anymore.

Marc Girolimetti: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, the new company name is Sentient Services, so you can go to sentientservices.com. We’re starting to make some changes. I think they’re going to put my bio up there and Eric’s bio, so we’re going to start adding like the Green Grotto client roster to their roster list.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, yeah. What’s your title going to be now?

Marc Girolimetti: I stepped down as CEO, which is fine. It’s kind of a really rough job to tell you the truth, but I’ve been doing it for two years. I mean it’s two years of blood, sweat and tears.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Marc Girolimetti: As a CEO of a startup, you got to think about everything right down to payroll and finances and banking and credit and all that crap. It can get crazy. I’m going to be the head of creative, so Director of Creative, Creative Director, I like to call myself…

C.C. Chapman: Oh, come on. What you have been putting in your emails?

Marc Girolimetti: Chief Creative Monkey.

C.C. Chapman: Yes, there you go. That’s what I like. I want to see that on a business card. I think that would be great.

Marc Girolimetti: I’m going to push for that. I think maybe they will rename the podcast, C.C. and the Creative Monkey.

C.C. Chapman: Ooh. Uh-oh, there goes the rumors. “They’re starting a new podcast!”

Marc Girolimetti: I know exactly and you know what? That totally brings back, we’re going to be an animated cartoon from the 1970s. We’re going to have our own crazy shaggin wagon.

C.C. Chapman: Nice.

Marc Girolimetti: I’m going to be saying “Doinks!” all the time.

C.C. Chapman: We need a mascot to go with that. Oh wait, we got the monkey. What am I saying?

Marc Girolimetti: Yeah, exactly.

C.C. Chapman: Is it going to be like Great Ape or something?

Marc Girolimetti: As long as I can be like Gleek, I will be totally psyched.

C.C. Chapman: Nice, nice, a little pop culture reference there.

Marc Girolimetti: There you go. I’m full of them. That’s what happens when you’re in your young 30s.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. I hear you, man. Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you for coming on Managing the Gray. Everybody, definitely go check out these guys. I’ll be honest. As of this recording, I have not seen the Playboy sim yet, so I’m looking forward to it, so check it out in Second Life and thanks for being on the show, man.

Marc Girolimetti: All right. Thank you sir.

C.C. Chapman: All right. I will talk to you later.

Marc Girolimetti: All right, take care.

Posted in Transcript | Comments(0)

PodCamp NYC Presentation Transcript -
The New Media Playground
Given on May 4, 2007

Audio from the presentation here.
PDF & Video here.

C.C. Chapman: Hey folks. I am back again really quick from Managing the Gray #33. Now, I will tell you something a little different, just a little quick intro, then we are going to jump right into the content because what today is, this is my PodCamp NYC presentation I did. PodCamp New York happened a few weeks back and I gave a presentation that I call the New Media Playground. It was a lot of fun. I had a good time. It was a big packed room, lots of fresh faces, which I love to see. I love to see all these people I did not know in the crowd. It very much excited me and I have to give a huge props because I got hooked up with this audio because I did not get a chance to record it myself, Chris Cavallari go out to filmosity.com. Chris Cavallari recorded it all, videotaped it, and that is coming soon. He will be sharing that. He heard me talk about the other day that I wish I had an audio recording and he said, “Dude, I’ve got it on the computer. I can spit it out for you,” so he spit it out.

Let me tell you, Chris is a great guy. We have finally got to meet at PodCamp NYC, but we have been talking for a long time. If you are looking for someone, a videographer, someone to film your commercial or maybe to film an interview with you or anything where you need a camera and some great video and story telling, please contact Chris. Christ is a great guy, he does amazing work, has great equipment, has a super attitude, and he gets new media. Let us face it. Video is a very, very powerful medium right now across the board and it always has been. So, I will put the links in the show notes to his site, but it is filmosity.com. There goes my cell phone beeping. It must mean I have email. So, anyways, please check him out. Chris, thank you very much. Listen to the presentation. It is a big room so the acoustics here are a little strange. It is 45 minutes because I am so happy I wanted to keep it 45 minutes. It is how long it was supposed to last and I hit it, which is good, because usually I am way under or way over. So, here we go.

When I am in presentations, there are a couple of things. I talk really fast because I am excited about what I am talking about and I really hate saving questions until the end, so please just spit them, “C.C., shut up. I got a question for you.” Please ask them. I was not even going to have slides because I really want to just kind of have a conversation about what is going on in the world, but then they said — this was a couple of weeks ago, they said, “C.C., you’re the only one that has a projector. You better have slides.” What is cool, you will see them in a minute, I put out a call on Twitter and — yeah, nothing has to be said, but please feel free to record and do whatever you want. I do not care. Some people get touchy about that.

Audience Member: [Unintelligible].

C.C. Chapman: No, feel free to Twitter whatever you want. I will read it later because I cannot Twitter right now. I did just Twitter a minute ago so I am all good for the hour. I lost what I was going to say. Oh, I put a call out on my blog, on my podcast, on Twitter, saying, “Guys, I got to do slides at PodCamp New York and my whole topic is this new media playground. Take pictures of yourself on the playground and send them to me. I’ll stick them in the slideshow.” So, everybody you are going to see in this is, they are podcasters, they are bloggers, they might be a listener, they might be just a reader, but they took a time and take a quick snapshot and send it in. That is kind of proof of what I am talking about is the fact that it is not about the monetization. It is not about the ads. It is not about the number of listeners, viewers, users, or whatever you have got. It is about the community around it and the fact that we are all here. “Yeah, right.” That is my thing. It is going to be fun because this is a new presentation that I have not done. It is actually kind of a prototype for the book I am writing. I kind of get it out there and see if it works. So, this is me. I am C.C. Chapman. I am the vice-president of new marketing for a company called Crayon. We are a new marketing agency here in New York, in Boston, London, San Francisco, Second Life and we have nine employees. We work wherever we want. I am also the host of several podcasts, Accident Hash, the music podcast, Managing the Gray…

Audience Member: Woohoo!

C.C. Chapman: I love it. Do we have home fries?

Audience Member: Yeah!

C.C. Chapman: There are home fries? All right, my listeners are called home fries. I saw some strange looks. “What? What’s he talking about?” Managing the Gray is a new marketing podcast. It talks about new media, everything I talk about here. U-Turn Café happens once in a while. It is an acoustic coffeehouse podcast. One Guy’s Thoughts is something new. It is a video podcast that I have threatened to do a lot more of, so I am looking forward to doing that. I am also the owner of the Dirty U-Turn Café on Second Life. If you are ever looking for music, there is a concert tonight. If you are not here like you should be, partying tonight, hanging out, meeting more people, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, dirtyuturn.com. There are three great artists from around the world playing at the U-Turn Café tonight, live music, lots of fun. Please go. Oh, and speaking of that, before I forget, tonight the party is at 7:00 at Slate. They asked me to make this announcement. They have got some really cool raffles they are giving away. I have seen copies of audio programs, wine, autographed Scott Sigler books, copies of Ancestor autographed by Scott Sigler. They are not out yet. You cannot get them. I want one, but I will not be there. They are going to be giving you raffle tickets at the door. If you are interested, show up at Slate, raffle tickets. It will be a good time. Slate is a good time. Just do not stand at the top of the stairs or they will yell at you. They are kind of mean about that. We learned that last time.

One of the things I do on my presentations is I am a firm believer that if you cannot put your whole presentation in one slide, you do not know what you are talking about. It is pointless. You are going to be rambling about stuff. So, when I tried to sum up what I want to get to you guys is new media is open to everyone, so have as much fun as possible, always help others, and if you make money doing it that is okay too and that is cool. There is my under 140-character Twitter version. I had to count. The guy sitting next to me on the train was going, “Dude…” He was looking at me, “One, two, three…” PowerPoint does not have a word count function, Word does. If you are not familiar with what Twitter is, it is a little SMS or micro-blogging community that has kind of taken way too many of us to a level of addiction. If I say a technology or anything, please stop me and ask me what I am talking about. I had to get down off the stage, too. I hate being behind the podium.

So, what the heck is the new media playground? It is the concept of this community that I think. Remember when we were all kids, we go to playground. We play. We make best friends within five minutes. That little kid next to you like, “Oh, he’s my best friend, mommy.” You go home and you play and you just met him. That is the world as we live in right now. Hopefully, you have done this today. You have met somebody completely brand new and you have talked things like, “Oh, we got to follow up,” or exchanging business cards, your emails, maybe online. I am meeting people today that I have never met face to face. Mark Wallace and I email and Second Life for months and I feel like I know them. It was not until today that I met them face to face. It is all about the community.

I love this picture. This is John Wall from The M Show. He is around. He is not here so I can ridicule him. He was the first guy — [unintelligible] giving him a call out because he was the first guy who sent me one of his photos. Everybody had sent me pictures of their kids and I was like, “No, no. I want you playing on the playground.” John hooked me up. This is about the community and it is your community. Are people in this room here who have never blogged or podcasted ever? Oh, wow. I thought there would be more. This is your community too. Do not think because you have not done these things yet that you are not part of the community. The fact that you are here in an event like this, you are part of the community. You are officially now. You are members. You are stuck. It is addictive. I will warn you, so be careful. Your time is gone. The most expensive thing about any of these technologies is time. Forget how much money audio equipment cost with community podcasting or Second Life, all that stuff, uh-uh. It is time. You have none of it. It is gone because you are going to get so passionate about whatever it is you are doing, you are screwed, but it is great.

Also, please keep in mind. This weekend is a perfect example. There are a lot of big company people here. This is exposure. Every time you go out, you are representing the community, that whole thing about one bad apple ruins the cart, it is so true. Someone interviews you, someone talks to you in the street, “Oh, you’re a podcaster,” and you do something wrong or you are in Second Life or you are twittering, I love saying that, you can ruin it for everybody. Just keep that in mind. It is a big thing, but it is true. You can go from being nobody to being interviewed by a major publication just overnight. Just keep that in mind. It is kind of weird sometimes for people.

This, I love saying, this is my new tagline, Burn the Suit & Buy a Laptop. People always ask, “How can I get in this community? How can I start doing this stuff?” You do not have to burn the suit. I hate suits, so go for it, but the fact is it is a mentality. If you are going to play in new media, you have got to get out of your “this is the way it has always been done so I have to do it this way.” You cannot. There are no rules right now. People think there are. Things are changing so fast. Two months ago, nobody was using Twitter. Right now, I guarantee you there is some new tool out there that we are all going to be raving about in a couple of weeks. I saw stuff out there that made me excited. It happens so fast. I have not figured it out. You have not figured it out. Nobody has. It is evolving so rapidly so you got to get out of that mentality that big corporations know the right way and I know the right way, no, no. The laptop mentality is just a fact that if you are really going to be in new media, you can work from anywhere, anything, wherever you are in the world. That is a powerful thing and dangerous thing because then unplugging is difficult. I work from home. My commute is walking from my coffeepot to my office, 100 yards. When do I ever unplug? That is a hard thing.

Audience Member: That is a big house.

Audience Member: There is a football.

Audience Member: 100 yards.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, shit. New media [unintelligible].

Audience Member: [Unintelligible]?

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. Mike works with me at Crayon. He is like, “Dude, you’re getting paid way too much.” Speaking of that, I did not think about it, but you are here. Sorry, Mike. I am going to call you out. One of the things that is really important about new media is your passion, your drive is what drives everything. Mike here works with us at Crayon. He has zero experience, real world experience, but he came up to Joseph Jaffe at a conference and said, “Dude, I want to do this. I got no experience, but I want to do this.” He was passionate, he was persistent, and he works for us now. He is learning as he goes. I will take street smart over book smart any day. I used to get in trouble with my HR department because I would say, “Anybody who has a GPA on their resume, I don’t want it,” and I meant it because I never got good GPA and I did not care about it and I do not.

So, what are some of the toys? Because new media — this may be called PodCamp. It is kind of a misleading thing. This is not about podcasting. It is about new media in general. It is about crazy people playing — Whitney is not in here. Where is she? There she goes. Whitney is in the back hanging off the — I love this picture. Some of the tools, podcasting, blogging, virtual worlds. It is not just Second Life. There are other ones out there. There will be more tomorrow. IM’ing, Twitter, ARGs, which are alternative reality games. Nine Inch Nails is doing one right now where you do not know the lines between reality like I might give a clue right now for one of those games and you would actually go find that website that would take you to something else. They are kind of cool, they are kind of weird, but they are very exciting. Mobile of course is huge. All you guys have PDAs and phones. They do everything. It is going to get more and more. You can create content. What I am trying to get out here is whatever content you can create, then go across all these platforms. You can create a blog. You can create a podcast. You can put it through every one of these. Just think about that when you are creating your content, whatever it is. The fact that there is more out there than just probably whatever you are creating. I make a video. It has to only go on my video podcast. No. you can play in virtual worlds. I mean I have a moving theater on my island.

We have had one video podcaster. I know, I am opening up the door. We had one video podcaster ever asked if they could play their stuff in our theater. Why has not anybody else approached us? It is kind of weird.

Audience Member: On our island?

C.C. Chapman: On our island?

Audience Member: Over at Crayon?

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Audience Member: It is not on Dirty?

C.C. Chapman: It is not on Dirty. In Second Life, our company Crayon has an island, Crayonville. I am also part-owner with Mark Wallace, John Swords, Mark Barrett, and Jeremy Vaught. We own this thing called Dirty. Come by. It is fun. It is not what it sounds like most days. What?

Audience Member: [Unintelligible]?

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. No dropping vowels. I hate that. Yeah, Dirty. Go to poddirty.com. It will bounce over to a SLurl. It will take you to our landing area. We have all kinds of random people. That is great.

Be yourself. This, I cannot stress enough. I had this conversation with somebody the other day. She said, “Listen. I want to do a podcast about Second Life.” I said, “All right, cool.” She goes, “Yeah, but there is already SecondCast and there is already Second Life Podcast.” Who cares? I said, “Have you seen how many music podcasters are on lately? I still do one.” That is important. The fact that you each have a unique voice no matter what content you are producing. It is really, really important to just be yourself. If you are going to do a fake self — so many comes in mind who is doing a lot of things under a different personality, but they are consistent like that. Good or bad, I do not know. Be yourself, be passionate, and be honest out there. Figure out to yourself what is your level of okay. People always ask me, “How are you okay giving away so much information about yourself, your family?” There are boundaries that I do not share and I keep those in my head, but I also think it is fun when I get comments from people saying, “C.C., I’m watching your kids grow up on Flickr.” I love that. Do I worry about them? Yeah. I mean, I do, but you also are never going to hear me talk about what town I live in. I am kind of vague about certain things. There is room for every voice. Nobody should ever, ever say, “I can’t do this because someone else is already doing it.” It is ridiculous.

There is another whole problem — there is. I mean, how many music podcasters are there. There has got to be, I do not know, 10,000? 5000? There is a lot.

Audience Member: More than 21.

C.C. Chapman: Is it 21? Okay. So, it is 21,000+ music podcasts. People are saying, “How do I get through the clutter? How do I get noticed?” You just answered the question. You get noticed. Not the music, you. You are the host. You are the person running that content. This whole term A-lister, I frigging hate. I hate it. I read people because I connect to them. I listen to their podcast because I connect to them and what they are saying and what they are doing. Whatever it is that you are passionate about, just do it. Do not get caught up in the fact there is other people doing it because let us face it, there is always going to be somebody else doing it. Whenever I talk to you about podcast, they are like, “I have nothing to say. What would I ever talk about?” I always ask, “What are you passionate about?” On a weekend, if you could anything, what do you do? What is your hobby? Everybody has got something. I say, “All right. Do that because either no one else has done it or there are other people out there who are going to like your spin on what this is, your model airplanes or cooking.”

I just heard a great new podcast and I cannot wait to watch it. She is not here, but she asks people to send in dishes to make and she cooks them. They always think she does not how to cook. People are always trying to give her something she will burn. It is a video podcast. Fearless Cooking I think it was called. I cannot wait to watch that. There are a million cooking shows, but she has got a different slant on it. Plus, she was too nice. I got to watch. This is fun. You are unique. Everybody in this room is unique. Yeah?

Audience Member: [Inaudible] if you have multiple interests and wants to do a podcast [inaudible], how do you broadcast that? Do you use the same ones just because it is you and they are all [inaudible]?

C.C. Chapman: Wow. No. I was talking about [unintelligible] building yourselves brand is something that is really big to me. It depends. I hate saying that as an answer because it is a cop out, but what I am getting at is you need to decide. I have four podcasts, right? Do I publicize them individually or do I publicize them under me, is that what you are saying?

Audience Member: Right.

C.C. Chapman: I personally recommend, most of the time, I like the fact of building around you. If you go to my website, I have a blog, it is kind of my personal blog. I have had it for six years, but right there are buttons for everything I do. I try not to add too many of them, but they are right there so everybody knows. You will also see, look at my album art, it always says “hosted by C.C. Chapman” or “brought to you by” or whatever. It is always built around my name. If I blew my reputation, those shows are dead. That is the way I think about it. I like it because I am building myself and I am myself and I am comfortable with that. I think companies can do the same thing. You see this a lot with production companies like movies. Sony does it all the time. They never have a separate website. Everything always redirects to sony.com/whatever and that is a conscious decision they have made. There is good and there is bad and I could talk for hours about this self-branding. I personally like watching a brand be built around a person. People get kind of freaked out about brand. I am not a brand. Well, you are. There is a great — I do not know if it has happened already yet — the social economy speech. I know it is one of the panels. If it is this afternoon, I highly suggest seeing it or go out to PodCamp Toronto’s website. Julien Smith and Chris Brogan did an amazing speech on social economy and the fact of how you and who you link to, what you write about, the content you create, how that is the new economy. It has nothing to do with money. I highly suggest checking out…

Audience Member: Sunday, 10:30, PodCamp Toronto. We have got archives.

C.C. Chapman: There you go. They videotaped and audiotaped everything at PodCamp Toronto. It is such a good speech because it is kind of changes the way you think about things, the fact that everybody you are making — it is an economy just by what you are doing and what you are talking about and what you are creating. I do not know if I answered that totally.

Audience Member: You did good.

C.C. Chapman: Okay. So, something else. For people who — because I was not sure if it is going to be a room of newbies or not, one of the things I always tell people, they are like, “How do I get noticed? How do I get it outside of the clutter?” The easiest thing I say is make it easy for you to be found. Do not be invisible. Part of that is the web stuff. Be on every search engine imaginable. Put yourself in a social network. Is MySpace going to bring you a lot of viewers or listeners? Probably not, but you should be there. What I always tell people is social networks take — how long does it take to sign up for a MySpace account? Nothing. It takes you a few minutes, but what if that one person goes to MySpace and goes looking for you and cannot find you and you are not there, you did not take the two minutes to set up a webpage. I mean, come on. It does not take that long.

Do I use MySpace a lot? No, but do I have an account out there? Yeah. Actually, I have one for myself and one for every one of my shows. I do not care about how many friends — I do not care about that stuff. I just care that if someone goes looking for me, they can find me. Also, it protects your brand whether it is your personal brand, your company brand. Try this some time. Go out to Twitter. Twitter is a perfect example because people have not touched it yet. Start putting in some brand names. See how many of them are actually the brand or if there is somebody else or if they do not exist yet. I know I have registered what I wanted to protect because I did not want somebody else to take it on them. You need to do that wherever you are because everyday something new is happening. Christopher Penn, he is speaking five times today. Go see anything he talks about because if Chris is paying attention to it, you have to pay attention. That is my rule. If Chris says, “Dude, check this out. It’s where I go.” It is usually a new social network.

Get yourself out there. Make yourself easy to be found. There is someone else in the audience who is in this picture, comedy4cast.com, great comedy podcast, one of the guys hiding in the barrel. It is good to see somebody else here. So, walk the talk. I knew I would get at least one [unintelligible] in here. It is Britney Mason, by the way, if anybody does not know who she is. She will appreciate that.

So, walk the talk. The community, we are a fickle bunch. We will you call you out in a heartbeat. If you are just talking about, “Oh, I’m doing this,” or “I’m doing that,” or “I’m working with the community,” I love that phrase, “We’re working with the community to do it right and not screw people over,” you have got to really do it no matter what you are doing. Get in there. Be active. Be vocal. This is the biggest thing when people ask “how can I break out,” it is going to an event like this or going out to a discussion forum, being active. You cannot just come out and say, “Here I am, listen to me.” That does not work. You got to connect with people. That is why I love getting business cards at these things because it takes up my train ride home listening to new stuff. I cannot wait to see all these new people. It is events like these where you go out and you meet the people in the community. I look out in this room. I love the fact that I am looking out in this room and I will not recognize a whole lot of people. That excites me because if you are only seeing the same people all the time, you are not getting more exposure, you are not getting more listeners, people are not knowing who you are. You are not expanding on community. Go out, play, meet. I was going to say play with people, that was not going to sound right. Socialize.

Last night, I was ready to go to bed, but I was like, “Nah, I got to go over to Brooklyn and see this amazing indie singer play.” I am sucker for music and I knew there is going to be at least one other person there who I will want to meet. That was a long cab ride, but it was worth it. She is out here now. Natalie Gelman, she is walking around. Oh! Natalie Gelman! I did not know she was back there. If you want hear great music, Natalie Gelman was amazing. I had never heard her play before last night, but somebody recommended her. He said, “C.C., you would love her. You would love to hear her music.” I went, “Okay,” because it was somebody I trusted in the community. That is all it takes. You get that personal recommendation and that will happen. You will blog about something. You will create video content about something and people are going to trust you. On the flip side of that, I did not put this on my presentation, you have to really be responsible about that. I have learned that where I had a guy recently come up to me when I was in Nashville and he said, “C.C., I have to thank you. You made me quit my job.” This guy is probably 45 and I said, “Okay. What were you doing?” He said, “I was a VP of a big company making a lot of money and they just didn’t get new media. I kept listening to you every week and I decided screw this. I’m quitting and doing my own thing. I’m gonna start consulting. I’m going to school.” I just stopped. My wife nudges me afterwards and says, “That blow your mind?” Yeah, it did blow my mind. If you do not think you have that power, too, you do. People are going to connect to you. Here, you talk about a product. Here, you talk about a band or a venue. All of you are hopefully going to leave and share your thoughts about PodCamp New York. One thing you say or do a post could effect if someone else comes to another PodCamp ever or checks out podcasting. Some advertiser could read your blog. Just think about that. If you are saying you do not have a voice, you do. You all have a voice. Do not ever think, “I only have 100 readers. I only have 50 subscribers.” It does not matter.

I give props to my buddy, Eric Rice. I am paraphrasing. I still do not know who said it first, but he is where I hear it from. He says, “Learn everything you can and then share it with everybody who asks for help. Don’t ever say no.” It is funny. I do this a lot. If someone emails me and says, “C.C., how do I do this?” I will stop and help because you have to. You have to help people because let us face it. We all were new at something and it took somebody helping us to do it. Second Life is the perfect example. You go in there and you are lost. You have someone show you around, it makes a world of different. Same thing with anything else in new media. You have got to help the other people. Please, please do it. I always give Eric props. He loves that.

It is. It is all about the people. It is about everybody in this room. You never know when a simple conversation is going to lead to something bigger and better. The guy in the coffee shop, the girl in a coffee shop could be a client, could be a sponsor, could be an advertiser. You do not know. I got my job in my new company for meeting one person, meeting a person once at a conference. He liked my music podcast. I liked his marketing podcast. Six months later, I am working for him. That is all it took.

Audience Member: [Unintelligible].

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. What he said is share your information about yourself. You do not know who you are going to meet. It is very true. We were at the Podcasting Expo in California, which happens in end of September. Great, great conference, podcastexpo.com or newmediaexpo.com. We did this experiment. We walked into everybody we saw with ear buds and asked, “Hey, have you heard of podcasting?” This was away from the conference area obviously. We talked only to random strangers about podcasting. We were shocked, too. We met one person and probably at 20 we stopped. It was two years ago. If I did that now, I would be really sad if that happens. Talk to people and say, “Hey, I do this.” If you are a cooking show and you see someone shopping in the grocery store buying something you are buying, talk to them. Do not be afraid to talk to people. I know people always take podcasters and bloggers as introverts, scared of the world, you guys are all out here. Talk to people. Do not just go to sessions and then scurry away. I mean you see someone you do not know, talk to them. Does everyone know who is sitting near them right now? Probably not.

Audience Member: Is it for the name game?

C.C. Chapman: You play the name game, exactly. I have homework for you all later. Do not worry. There is a homework slide. We will get to that. Get out and meet people. Do not just stay in your comfort zone. If you only go to podcasting conferences, no. Go outside. Talk to people. Interact with people. I love talking about this stuff when I go to my kids’ school and I get all these blank stares, “What are you talking about? You work at your house in pajamas? What?” and I do. I mean they do not get it. Talk to people. Get outside and talk to people. I do. If I am in line at a Starbucks, I talk to the person next to me always. It freaks them out. Except if I am on a plane, I hate talking to people on the plane. I do not know, that is just me, or on the train. That is a great way, too. Watch Ask a Ninja on a train, you get the best looks. I scared this little old lady last time. I was watching Ask a Ninja and I was laughing out loud. She looked over and I turned it and — is there anyone not know what Ask a Ninja is about? Do you ever watch Ask a Ninja, askaninja.com? Hysterical video podcast. Just crazy stuff.

All right. Monetization happens. We have all seen the other shirts of Shit Happens. That is what some people feel about monetization. There is nothing wrong with getting money for what you love to do. What I always tell people and I am adamant about this, think of something that you are really passionate about, an organization that you support, a charity you support, or a product you really, really love genuinely. If they came to you and said, “I want to pay you to talk about us and you do it your way,” there is not a single person who would say no. If you say no, I think you are lying. If they say, “You can say it how you want, be honest about it.” There are advertisers doing that, who says, “Hey, can I send you this product and you review it?” or “Here, make a commercial for me. Do it the way you want.” I have an advertiser right now and I have no rules except that I have to say I am sponsored by them once a show. That is the only rule. I have turned down sponsorships that I do not believe in. I had a really nice opportunity from a car manufacturer who is SUV and I said, “No, thanks. I don’t want to promote SUVs.” It was a personal choice, but maybe if it was like a hybrid or something I would have done. I would have probably talked about it for free, but they are going to give me money to do it, I mean… I love podcasting. I love talking about music. Will I get paid to play music? Hell, no. That is another whole conversation we will not get into.

I am not opposed to making money doing something I love doing and you should not either. I know it is a really, really touchy topic and the money will come maybe, if not there yet. I am not going to lie to you. All these people talking about these big, big deals, it is a little exclusive right now. It is not working to the level that it should be working I do not think. I do not think the advertisers, we will get to them, I do not think they get it yet. There are companies out there — I mean I am sponsored so I know they are out there, but am I sponsored to the level that I think it should be? No, and I think that goes for a lot of stuff the key being, you choose. If you are not comfortable with it and you are doing it just for the money, I would not do that, but that is part about being real honest. I hope the advertisers wake the f*** up. Why would not an advertiser want to do that? Unfortunately, they do not realize that yet. They also seem to realize when they do want to sponsor something, they seem to way too often go, “Oh, I’ll give them a couple hundred bucks because they are just a podcaster,” or “It’s just a blog ad.” I really hope that if you ever get the position where someone wants to advertise on you, really stop them and figure out what your worth is. Is it worth a couple hundred bucks? It depends. It depends who you are. Each of us have to make that own decision, but really think about it. If a huge brand comes to you, you do not want to know how much it costs. I thin it is about, what, $2.5 million this year for Super Bowl ads to get aired? Let alone how much it costs to actually produce it. We talk to people about Second Life sometimes and they are like, “Oh, I got $1000. I want an island built.” They think because it is virtual that it costs less. It does not. The same goes for everything else.

Audience Member: C.C., what are the advertising success stories besides you? Do you think MommyCast is a success story?

C.C. Chapman: MommyCast was a huge success story. MommyCast are these two — Paige and Gretchen, they are down in Virginia. They have got sponsorship from Dixie Paper Products for $100 grand for a year. The thing I love about Dixie, I actually met the guy who did the media buy so I got to ask him. They told him, they said, “We don’t want you to ever do 30-second spots. We don’t want you to go ‘and I’ll use Dixie.’” They did not want that. They branded their website. So, it said “brought to you by Dixie” and then Dixie kept sending them products nonstop, papers and cups and what-not. Some shows, you will hear them talk about something. “We tried out this new cup or this new plate,” and they honestly talk about it whether they like it or not. Dixie knows that it is their demographic. The major people who listen to MommyCast are mothers, paper plates, cups for birthday parties. They did a cross commercial where they did a birthday pack. They were doing a contest. I think it is great. I think they are a success story. I think when Rocketboom did the auction I think that was a huge success story. Rocketboom is a video podcast and they auctioned off their first ever advertising. They had not taken advertising yet. They put an auction up on eBay and I forget how much. Is it $80,000? $40,000? All right. For a week of advertising. I thought that was a great first step. I know they have done more since that. They are an interesting one to watch because they have gotten so much exposure and mainstream knows and everybody is watching them. They have been really good at it. They could just plaster their thing. I am sure they can take advertising with the snap of their fingers, but they are being good and they are only taking ones they want and people who value their brand. I think that is very good of them to do that. Yeah?

Audience Member: Plus, you have to add the residual nature of podcasting, which advertisers do not seem to get at all.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, if you fit the — she is talking about the residual data, not data, it is the wrong word.

Audience Member: Yeah, it is the residual data. I can pick up a podcast from MommyCast that was done three months ago.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. My most downloaded podcast of Managing the Gray is six months old because people keep finding it and discovering it and downloading it. I did not have an ad in that, but if I did, it keeps being told about and people keep hearing it. Advertisers do not get that. They think print magazine it is gone, 30-second spot on television, it is gone. It is much bigger than that, podcasting specifically is very different. Same with blog posts. They do not seem to get the fact that if I wrote about a product or you wrote about a product that Google picks that up. It is funny. Full disclosure. Coca-Cola is a client of mine. I love Cherry Coke. I have loved Cherry Coke forever and Cherry Coke Zero came out and I was like a kid in the candy store, “This stuff is great,” and I blogged about it. Just out of excitement, I took a picture and a couple of weeks ago somebody twittered it that if you search on Cherry Coke Zero, my blog post came out number four in Google. I love it because I sent it to Coke. I am like, “Guys, you are not doing very good search engine optimization. Come on. I’m number four.” It is funny because they passed it on to the brand manager. The guy I sent it to was [unintelligible]. I would love to get an email from Cherry… If they sent me free Cherry Coke, I would talk about it all the time, but it is a perfect example of the fact that I just blog posted and took a Flickr picture because they finally had it in Boston. They did not have it yet. It is out there when people search on Cherry Coke, they find it. That is a really simple example that a simple blog post can help a brand. I am not saying it is pay-per-post. God, do not think that is what I am talking about.

If you do not know what pay-per-post is, there are companies out there who will pay you to talk about their product. You want to make some real easy money? They will say, “Here, write about my product and I will give you X number of dollars.” I hate it. I think it is wrong. Do not do it. I am just saying it is out there. There are other companies who say full disclosure. BzzAgent is a big one where they are all about word of mouth. I actually really like their company because they bring you in for campaigns to promote a product. They want you to buzz it on. They do not care. Starbucks is one of them. They would say, “Talk about it in your speech or whatever you do.” They will also say, “Make sure you say it right up front you are doing this as part of a campaign,” full disclosure. I think there is a big difference between saying, “I am talking about this because they sent me free product,” as opposed to just going “I love this stuff,” and it is just not genuine. Part about being honest, it is your reputation and it is your brand, so keep it in mind. Yeah?

Audience Member: C.C., in my day job I work in a heavily regulated industry. I work in pharmaceuticals.

C.C. Chapman: Drug dealing.

Audience Member: There is a heavy resistance to go into this because there is that disclosure that usually happens at the end of the ad that is not willing to be taken by all podcasters. They do not pre-roll, they do not post-role. Have you found that at Crayon? Is that something that you guys are up against?

C.C. Chapman: Oh yeah. We are against their all regime of being strict. It is funny you mentioned that because I had not thought of this. I just saw a drug company doing a podcast. Tylenol PM is sponsoring, oh crap, what is it? It is Anji Bee.

Audience Member: Chillcast.

C.C. Chapman: What?

Audience Member: Chillcast.

C.C. Chapman: No, it is not the Chillcast. It is her other one. Unwind? Is that what it is?

Audience Member: Yes.

C.C. Chapman: I never thought about it. She is talking about Tylenol PM in her own voice and there is no “Tylenol’s danger.” There is none of that.

Audience Member: It is over the counter.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, that is true. It is over the counter. Okay. Still, when you run into this no matter what company you are in, the fact that they are scared to do this, they are scared to let go of their brands, they are scared to, “What do you mean you want to actually ask people how they feel about our product? We’re gonna tell them how they feel about our product.” That is the way the world has worked for so long. It is not just pharmaceuticals. It is everybody. People are starting to wake up. Let us face it. What I am finding a lot in my day job is — what is happening in a lot of companies you see is you see a champion like yourself. You know darn well that if you sniff even a little bit what someone was thinking about, “Oh, advertising in new media?” you jump all over. You would go, “Yes!” There are those people in every company. That is how a lot of people we interact with from our company, someone who is really passionate about this and wants to do it. They are like, “How can I do this?”

You are starting to see those little cracks. The more senior the person, the better because they can make stuff happen, they control budgets, but companies are coming around. They are seeing this. I do not think I am turning a blind eye to it, but at the same I do not think they totally get it and that is kind of what I am talking about. Go back to your company, wherever you work and talk about new media. That [unintelligible] blogging and podcasting and all that, I guarantee you, one of those can help your company, whatever you are doing. There are lots of creative ways to do it. I worked for a college before I did this and they could not understand why having students — it is a college where your first year is one class, one big class. It is really kind of cool. It is a business school. You start your own company. You learn finance and marketing through having a real company. I was thinking, “Oh, you should have students blog their experience through that.” They would not do it because they were worried about the honest voice. What if they said this part sucked? That is honesty. It is okay.

Audience Member: C.C., I probably saw some of this, but what are your feelings about political campaigns and there are sections with sort of more grassroots media that is made about their campaign? They are thinking about the Obama appearance in Second Life where someone connected to the real campaign. There was also a grassroots effort to bring together Second Life where you just support Obama with no association with the official campaign. I think we are going to see more of that as you get closer to the elections where they are going to want to use new media to put out the brand of their candidate. Meanwhile, there are going to be a lot of grassroots efforts that are going to be creating media around the messaging of John Edwards or Hilary or whatever and at a certain point, the campaigners are going to be wanting to control or lock down how your messaging, once getting out and about, Hilary’s package on foreign assistance or something.

C.C. Chapman: I think it is a really good question. We saw at the last big campaign, blogging was like the hot thing, Howard Dean with his blog and what-not. I think you are going to see a lot more candidates embrace new media like Obama when the whole 1984 parody. I never saw Obama say anything about it. He let it happen, which I liked. The fact that Senator Edwards or his staff, I do not care which it is, twittered back to me a response to a question I asked in under a minute blew my mind. I had to go blog about it. I think they are going to start being more hands off and let it happen. I hope they are. I think the smart ones are going to realize that they are not going to be able to control it no matter what they do. I think it is what you saw this year. I will pull Jeff Pulver who said it is the year of the YouTube president. They did not have a press conference. They did it on the web first. It is going to be really interesting to see if candidates figure out how to leverage Second Life and virtual worlds in general besides having a box with posters and stuff. I really want to see someone who can really do it like a true town hall I would love to see and do it around it. I do not know if they do it. I hope some of them are thinking enough to do it. I like to think they are. I am sure they are. The same thing with podcasting, I mean Obama and Edwards have been podcasting for long, long times. I do not know if any other candidates are podcasting or not. I know those two are.

Audience Member: The Governor of Massachusetts has a podcast.

Audience Member: In UK, David Cameron who is the leader of the opposition has a video blog and his followers basically vote questions that he answers every week and he answers the top five questions every week through a video blog.

C.C. Chapman: I do not know if everyone heard. She is talking about in the UK, there is this — I forget it, sorry.

Audience Member: David Cameron.

C.C. Chapman: David Cameron does a video podcast and he has people basically via something like Digg or Pop, “What are the top five questions you want answered this week?” and he answers them. That is awesome. That would be great. That is something that needs to happen more. The Obama thing that just happened, it was a disappointment. The grassroots thing was better. People just talk about the candidate. It is funny when you see like they all have MySpace pages now, but I think part of that is the same thing. Why would not they? I have said this earlier. Why would not they sign up for a MySpace page? Have it every way they can. I think you are going to see also lots of things like Meetup. I am in this area, let us get together. I would love to see things like Twitter, when Twitter starts getting proximity like Dodgeball. “I am in this area and I am a support of candidate X.” What Dodgeball is, is you can actually get profiles and it knows based on where I am right now with my phone and what-not, you can connect with people around you or similar tastes or profiles. So, why not do it around a candidate?

Am I getting close to [unintelligible]? I feel like — ah, yeah. 1:45. Thank you for all the paid questions. No, your homework. All right? Talk to strangers. No matter what your mother told you, go talk to strangers. Follow up with every one you meet today. Every single person you get a card from, a minimum, drop them an email. This is true of anybody you meet outside of the conference, too. Follow up with whoever it is. Just send a quick note and do not do a BCC to everybody. Do not do that. Worse yet, do not put them in the To: line, that is even worse. Follow them up and say, “Hey, it was cool.” I always recommend writing notes on the business card where if you talked about something specific, you can reference it. Write back to everybody. Try something new. It does not have to be a full-blown podcast. Try just videotaping yourself and talking to a microphone. It does not have to cost you a lot of money either. Do not ever think that. I forgot to put that in here. Everyone is always going to go, “C.C., what do you use for your podcast, man?” I am like, “I picked a microphone that looked cool and the mixer that everybody else was buying and it cost me $200 and I use my desktop PC.” That is what I still use.

I did not know if I was going to be doing podcasting for a long time and I still use that. So, try something new, maybe something just reading a blog or commenting on a blog. You can comment on a blog. A lot of people do not. Go out to YouTube and watch some random stuff. Go to Blip.TV or Network2 or any of the service, watch something new. They all have recommendations and see what people are checking out and check it out and then email me and let me know what you did. “C.C., I tried to podcast,” or “I have an avatar on Second Life and I lost one of my clothes and I have a box on my head. What do I do?” Seriously, I would love to hear back from you. I am on the web. I make it really easy to find me. I am everywhere. I will post this. If you want a copy of this presentation, give me a card, I will follow up with you. This will also be on my website. I always put up presentations afterwards in case people want them for whatever reason. Please, do not ever, ever, ever, ever, and this goes true for anybody, do not ever say, “Man, I wished I had talked to that person. I saw them and I didn’t.” Go talk to the person especially on an event like this. Just walk up and say, “Hey, what’s up?” Just start the conversation, get talking, have fun, and get playing. Enjoy the playground. It is a playground on purpose, at least on my mind, so have fun. All right. That is my presentation.

Originally posted on Managing the Gray in case you are reading this somewhere else.

Posted in New Media, Transcript | Comments(4)

Transcript for Managing the Gray #35 “Every Day is a Good Day”
Originally posted on June 6, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Hey everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray. Today, it is a little different. I have missed you guys. I have missed talking to you all out there, so today there are no show notes. Literally, there is nothing written down, just some topics in my head, some things I have been thinking about. I have got some great audio comments, just a whole bunch of random things that I want to talk to you here at Managing the Gray because one of the neat things about new media, I talk about this all the time, one of the neat things about new media is that there are not any rules. It is not like a 30-minute sitcom where we have to follow some formula and everybody has to agree with you. You do not have to. That is what is awesome about what we are doing here. You make the rules. So, one day I want to do a 5-minute show. That is awesome. The next, I want to do 30. That is cool. You want to try video? You are cool when you do it. All that stuff is great. You want to call in the comment line? You can do that too. It is 206-309-4729. You can call on in and ask me anything you want.

We have got some cool audio comments today all over the map. It has been a busy — quick update on what is going on in ccville. It has been very busy. Crayon is rocking along. We have hired some new staff, which is great. I am very excited. I am actually headed to New York tomorrow with Scott Monty who is our newest crayonist. We are actually taking the train out, which would be cool. We actually hung out yesterday. He is here in the Boston area, which is great as well. He is out in MetroWest. He is brought on board as sort of an account director relationships manager. I do not know what his official title is. I personally do not care what his title is, but I just know he is going to be doing some great things for us. I am psyched to have him on board. It will be fun to ride out on the train tomorrow with him. We are getting to know each other more, which is great. That is part of the fun. I always talk about you make friends online, you meet them in Twitter and Second Life or not, but when you get to meet them face to face, it is always better when you get to that point. Now, I am to that point with Scott, which is great. Big meeting tomorrow in New York City for Crayon, good stuff. I actually got a great interview for the next Managing the Gray that I am doing this afternoon. At least I hope it goes great, let us word it that way, which should be very cool. That is only reason I had to get one of these out is because I wanted to record — because the interview that I am doing, it is time stamped, not barcode, that is the wrong word, but I am just going to push it out next week. I wanted to get something out before then to you guys and girls because I miss you all. So, all is well, still doing One Guy’s Thoughts, which is my video podcast. It has been kind of my new media playing now.

One of the things I wanted to talk about to you [unintelligible] I did get my Mac. I got a MacBook Pro and thank you to everybody who chipped in and gave me feedback. What was great was, I talked about this on crayonCast last week, Apple dropped the ball. You got to apple.com. They will sell you the Mac, they will sell you the MackBook Pro, but what they will not let you do is really compare which one you need. Now, sure, they give you specs side by side, which I love. I hate it when sites do not do that. You cannot actually get the tech specs right side by side and compare them. They do that great, but I was not sure which one I needed. I had no sell for me to know which one I wanted. So, I went to managingthegray.com. I posted a blog post, I Twittered about it, and then all of a sudden all these people gave all this great feedback. I know this one mom, her daughter is graduating from high school and wanted to get her a Mac and she had the same question. She came and she was reading all the comments. I love that my question helped somebody else get their question answered too.

That is where the power of the Internet and Google or whatever search engine you want. I am not just pimping Google, it is my personal choice, but what I mean is like last night I was working on the book and I am writing and I am like, “Wait a minute. Macs don’t have a delete key.” Yes, they have delete, but the delete key on the Mac is the same thing as backspace on a PC. I am like, “Where is the delete key? The one that takes the cursor and deletes things forward, kind of sucks it back, couldn’t find it.” What did I do? I went to Google. I am like Mac, delete, key, backspace, Windows, or something, some random keywords and I found it with one click, which was great. It is function delete, by the way, does it. Two buttons, whatever. That is pretty neat. All these connections. It was on a blog post that I found that out, by the way.

All these posts, people are sharing information. Sometimes when you are posting information or you are doing a video, whether it is audio, when you are putting these things out there, it is for people to find to discover and to get your questions answered months, years, and millenniums after you post it. Who knows? Think about it. All this audio that we are creating and this video that we are creating, our kids are going to see this. Our grandkids could see this. I laugh to think what my kids are going to think about when they go watch something I made with Random Foo Pictures when they are teenagers, when they can actually watch it because it is rather violent, some of the stuff. I wonder what they are going to think of their dad, but I am okay with that. That is what I am getting at is the fact — it is one of the reasons I do transcripts of all my podcasts is because that gets the information out there. Google finds it. It indexes it. It is a lot better than my show notes usually are.

So, think about that. Whenever you are creating content, it is going to last. It is going to be out there for a while. Yes, the Mac, I am liking it. I am getting used to it. It is very different. The keyboard, I am not used to it. I did get the MacBook Pro if I did not say that. My main decision? My main decision was because some people that I trusted their opinion said, “C.C., you’re gonna be running Second Life a lot, I know you are, and thus the upgraded video card that’s in the MacBook Pro is the way to go.” No, I am not mad that yesterday Apple released new MacBook Pros. You knew it was coming. I knew it was coming at some point, but I kept getting sick of waiting. Let us face it. Any computer, it is out of date the minute you get it out of the box and plug it in. This MacBook Pro has got more than enough juice for me. It has got 3 gig of RAM. It is wired. It is more than I need so I am good to go.

I am very proud. I got another homework assignment came in.

Bobby Hewitt: Hi, C.C. This is Bobby Hewitt from creativethirst.com in New Jersey. I would like to follow Jerry’s call with my homework assignment submission for you. I am in New Jersey and I did not get over to the New York PodCamp. I am so sorry. I really did want to go, but I do have a good excuse. I was on a family trip in Memphis with my wife and her family. I am calling you from Skype. This is my first Skype call and it is you. So, that says something then and that is my homework assignment, but I did also blog about my trip to Memphis, Tennessee, a little bit about branding, a little bit about marketing. You could check out my blog at creativethirst.blogspot.com. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: That is awesome. See what I mean? Trying new media, it is not painful. Of course, what blew me away was at first I thought he was in the car. It sounded like you were in the car, but then to find out it was a Skype call and that that was your homework assignment… Let us face it, people. That is great! I know some people out there are going, “A Skype call?” but for that individual, a Skype call was a big step. It was something new. It does not have to be groundbreaking or earth-shattering. Business is same thing. You guys can try it. How many businesses out there have a Skype-in phone number, a voice mailbox that people can use to Skype to call, or a regular phone call? My office number is a Skype number. Nobody knows that. It does not matter. It answers with voicemail. Skype can be your thing. Congratulations for your first Skype call. I hope it was not too painful. It was good quality. That was good. Skype can barf sometimes. Who knows? That is very cool.

One thing I also want to talk about today is blogger influence or influencer outreach, whatever you want to call it. There is a right and wrong way to do it. There have been all kinds of flak happening about the Nikon D80 campaign and blah, blah, blah. I am not going to focus on the campaigns, but I am just going to focus on a couple little — it goes beyond giving gifts. I just want to give a tip to you out there listening or your business or whoever you might be who is thinking about reaching out to bloggers and podcasters because this goes beyond the Nikon thing. It goes beyond the Edwards campaign thing that happened. Make sure you know who you are writing to. That is all I am going to say. It happened this morning as a matter of fact. I got an email to the Managing the Gray account, which it was the totally wrong email to get me at because it was about music.

What bothered me about it was the fact that this was a management agency that an artist that I know very well had connected with and the management firm was sending out the email. The problem was it talked to me like, it tried to be personal, but it was totally form letter and the fact that I read the artist, I am like, all I wrote back, I did not want to slam, I just said, “Hey, man. Say hi to so and so for me,” because I know when he finds out, he is going to be like, “Wassup?” Know who you are reaching out to. Take the five minutes to do the research. If you are going to do a blanket, I am not going to call it spam, but if you are going to do a blanket outreach to bloggers you do not know, that is fine. It is okay. Sometimes you need to do that. Do not do it [unintelligible], be very good about it, be very cool about it, but know this. You are probably not going to get very good results. If you take five minutes per person you are reaching out to, to at least research them, find out where they are in the world, read some of their blog posts, listen to a podcast perhaps. Most bloggers out there have an About page, so you can get what you need in that first five minutes. Find out who you are talking to and make sure when you are reaching out to them, you are reaching out to the right person.

Between that, between what happened with the — I realize I am talking at the podcast so you may not read the blog. The Edwards campaign reached out to me and talked to me like I had no clue what was going on in new media. Maybe it was my bad for assuming that they are reaching out to me because I talked about the Edwards campaign. I have blogged it. I have Twittered it. I have podcast and talked about them left and right, so when they contact me and say, “Hey, we’d like to talk to you about doing more stuff online.” I just assumed they had read, heard or someone had pointed it out to them, so they knew who they were talking to, but the minute I got on the phone with them, they did not have a clue. I was just another warm body to them to talk to and that was it and that pissed me off. I blogged about it, but I blogged about it constructively and the great thing is the Edwards campaign read it, stepped up to the plate, and became part of the conversation.

I hate when companies, big, small or individual do not get involved in the conversation. If people are talking about you, you need to get in there and talk back. If you do not, you will be viewed as elitist or stupid. You pick. I do not care which, but you will be viewed as one or the other. You have got to monitor the conversation. You have got to get involved. Make it personal. Make it professional, both ends of the conversation. When you first contact the person via email and when people are talking about you, you got to get involved in the conversation in all the spaces. Yes, it is going to take time. Yes, it takes commitment. Yes, sometimes there are loopholes. You got to get approval for saying certain things. I do not care. The point is you have got to get involved. If you are not involved, it is bad. It makes you look bad. It makes your company look bad. There is a ton of companies out there that I respect that just dropped the ball on this, dropped it horribly. I was psyched to see people behind the Nikon campaign and people behind the Edwards campaign getting out there and getting involved in the conversation. Some other companies, I cannot say that about because they have not. There are huge conversations happening and they are just not paying attention to them. They are just ignoring them. That is stupid. I know sometimes that is an approach for a company or an individual. I just do not agree with it.

Well, I just kind of went tangent in there, didn’t I? But here, one of the things I am a sucker for is productivity. I love any tool, resource, technique that gets me to be more productive. I am not a big Getting Things Done type of guy. I have read it. That structure does not work for me. It works for other people, but I love hearing about new tools or techniques. So, if you ever have any, send them in. This is one that I have had on my radar and I have checked it out, but I am psyched that a Managing the Gray listener both is sharing it and using it to get in touch with me.

Dave Delaney: C.C. Chapman, it is Dave Delaney calling, loving the show as always. My website is davemadethis.com. You can find all my little things, my projects there. I am just calling with a very, very, very cool tool that I cannot live without now. A friend of mine told me about it at work and I am hooked. It is called Jott.com and what it is it is a free service, and I love free things, where you get a phone number. You just sign up, you fill in the blanks, sign up for it online at jott.com and then they give you a phone number, it is like 1-800 or whatever, and you call that number and leave a message to me or myself or somebody else in your book. I only have myself. I leave myself a message and then that message gets automatically transcribed into an email and then sent to me with the built-in audio player within the email so I can hear my message again. The transcriptions are not always perfect, but it is a message you left, so hopefully you can understand what you are saying. Again, you can play it back if you totally cannot recognize what it transcribed. So, very, very cool tool. I actually just used it listening to Managing the Gray where I called myself because I am driving. I called myself and jotted a couple of notes from the episode. Yeah, it is a perfect way to remember things. I hope that is handy and it is also handy for career professionals if you just met with somebody and you want to leave yourself a note about that person that you met, another perfect way. Anyway, keep up the great work, buddy. I love your show. Talk to you later and I will see you in Second Life one of these days. I am in there now. I just got to figure out my way around, still flying naked. It is a little embarrassing. Okay, later.

C.C. Chapman: Okay. Quick Second Life and then I will get back to Jott. Go to your Inventory. Go to Clothing. Then you can right click or open Apple click on any piece of cloth and choose where. There. Now, you will not be naked. Get some clothes on, my boy. You fly around naked, you are going to get in trouble. Nothing screams noob like a flying naked man. That is a bumper sticker. All right. Jott. Jott is pretty cool. I checked that out awhile ago. For me, I am not a phone guy. I am just not. I do not know what it is. I am not a phone guy. Ask anybody who does business with me. If you want a quick response from me, email me at cc.chapman@gmail.com. I will respond faster than a phone call ever will.

Yes, my inbox is getting cleaner, but still a little backed up. Do not take it personally. There is nothing wrong by the way. I will publicly say it. There is nothing with you sending up a follow-up posting, “Hey, C.C. Did you get this message?” and put the text in again. Nothing wrong with that at all. That often jars me to go, “You idiot. You blew responding. Get on it.” Jott though, I think it is very cool what he was talking about. It does work very well. Literally, you get a phone number, you call in, and then it emails you. I think the little thing he mentioned there in passing was the fact if you just met with somebody, you could call and leave notes. That I think is a cool idea. Or you just interviewed someone or you met someone at a conference. There are lots of possibilities there. Personally, I am a notebook guy. I always have a notebook with me. I am not a hipster PDA type of guy. I am a notebook type of guy, paper notebook is what I am talking about, not my Mac, a paper notebook that I just write things down in all the time. I was showing Scott Monty yesterday and he was cracking up. It was funny because I was actually showing him the first page of this current notebook I have was January 9th this year. I have a checklist of things I needed to do and I put them in pink, I must have had a pink highlighter that day, and none of them are done yet. They are not “me things.” Whatever. I write things down.

What productivity things do you use? What tools can you not live without? I still have not found a really good to-do list. I would love a little applet or something that sits on my desktop that I could just — I have seen tons of them, but none of them do what I want. I just want a little to-do list that I could have as a little window or widget, whatever, on my desktop that I can just type things in, but then it also syncs on the web so when I am on the road, I can get that to-do list. Better yet, you really want to make me happy? That I could have this widget on three computers or however many computers and it is syncing up via the web or I can get to it via the web and see my to-do list. That is the dream widget. Is it out there? I have not found it, but I am thinking people would want it. There are so many possibilities there, but I am curious what your productivity tips are. If you have got them or there are tools you love, put them in the comments. This will be up on managingthegray.com. Put it in the comments, tools and links, because that way you can put the links in right there or call the comment line, 206-309-4729, and tell me what you are into right now because I always am looking for new tools that help me and a Facebook group is not going to help me.

Daniel Johnson Jr.: Hey, C.C. Chapman, this Daniel Johnson Jr. calling you from Cincinnati, Ohio. I just finished listening to your recent Managing the Gray where played a lot of listener comments and I definitely appreciated hearing everything. Also, about the — I am walking the dog here. The dog just found another dog. [It wants to run loose]. Sorry about that. One of the things I love about Managing the Gray and what Cali Lewis talks about at the voiceover at the intro, what you talk about in the show, is there are no mistakes. Actually, it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I have on my blog at journeyinsidemymind.com, “Do not fear mistakes; there are none.” It is attributed to Miles Davis, legendary jazz trumpeter. It is interesting because I can actually feel a lot of parallels to my attractions to jazz, specifically as it relates to improvisation and also with new media. See, in jazz, you have a melody, but a lot of it has to do with chord and chord progression. You do have some boundaries that you try out, kind of in traditional jazz I suppose, and you are able to do whatever you want to do within those boundaries, but Miles Davis was one of these cats that tested those boundaries, pushed them, tried to see where else he could go and I think that is one of the things that made him a legendary influencer in jazz music as well as music culture in general and also to me as an individual. [Unintelligible] I just want to say thanks for Managing the Gray, the podcast, and for helping us to understand more how we can manage the gray. Make it a great day, my friend.

C.C. Chapman: Miles Davis, teaching us about new media, of course, and Daniel Johnson, Jr., long time home fry and Managing the Gray listener. I appreciate it. Walking the dog. See? That is what is cool about new media. I was actually working on a chapter last night called Burn the Suit & Buy a Laptop, that is the name of the chapter, and one of the things I was talking about is the fact that that phrase is part mental and part physical. The mental part is you can create and consume new media from anywhere in the world, anywhere you might be. It is getting easier and easier as phones pick up podcasts and download music and all this stuff. Have you seen the new Verizon — of course, it got my attention because it involves Prince who I am a huge fan of. I kind of laughed about it and then I went, “That’s cool,” where there is this new Verizon service called Song ID where you hear a song on the radio or in a television commercial, you hear a song somewhere and you are like, “Oh, that’s cool. What is that song?” You hold up your phone — I have not used this service yet. I am assuming it is an application you run or you call a number or something, but what you do is you hold it up and basically your phone hears the song and it IDs the song and tells you, “Oh, this is so and so.” What is cool is, the way they are using it is Prince’s new single. You could hear it on the website, hear part of it, and then buy using the service to ID it, of course, what you can do, you can buy the tracks, but in this case you get it for free. You get the new Prince tracks. I thought that was really cool. There is another example of where — what would be really cool is you could be like, “Oh, what’s that theme song they’re playing on that podcast?” or “What’s C.C. playing on Accident Hash?” Would that not be cool? I bet you they do not have podsafe artists yet in the database, but you are getting there where the fact that we are consuming and creating everywhere we go.

You do not think I am serious? You go on vacation. You are taking photos, right? You are uploading those photos. Maybe you are uploading them right away. I saw a guy the other day, a friend, a guy I met at PodCamp New York. He was uploading photos from Jamaica and I think he happen to just take all the photos off his card and just upload without editing them first because there was someone there I do not think he wanted public and they disappeared later, some very nice pictures of his beautiful girlfriend. I do not think they were supposed to be on the web, but that is what I mean. Media was being created. He was in this little hut in the ocean that obviously had an Internet connection. Maybe he was doing it via his phone. Who knows? But you can create media wherever you are.

It looks like microphone boom has decided that it wants to start letting the microphone drop. Maybe it is getting a little old. Anyways, that is what is on my mind today. This has been Managing the Gray and I would really want to thank you guys for tuning in, wherever you are. That is a question I have not asked a lot. I asked it on Accident Hash awhile ago. I am curious where you listen to Managing the Gray. Is it a gym thing? Is it in the car commute thing? The three places I assume people listen to podcast the most is exercising in some form whether it is walking the dog like Daniel Johnson or the bike or something like Mitch Joel, either exercising, at your desk on the computer, or in the car. Those are probably the three most prominent places people listen to podcast, but where else are you listening? Is there some place? On a plane? Any type of commuting? Any sort of traveling? Let us word it that way rather than just a car. Exercising, traveling, working, desk, sitting, sitting at desk, maybe you are not working, maybe you are goofing off. I am curious where else you are listening to Managing the Gray. If you are really determined, take a picture of your iPod or wherever you are listening to. I love getting pictures of where people are listening to stuff. It is always fun to see. I will put it up on the blog or I will put it on Flickr, all that stuff.

Until next time. I am C.C. Chapman. The call-in line is 206-309-4729. I have been told I do not say that enough so I am saying it more, Mr. Rutter, there you go. Things are going good and I hope they are going for you too. If they are not, listen. I woke up this morning kind of in a grumpy mood. I will leave you with some wise words that the medicine man from the Crow Nation out in Montana said to me once, said to our class in college. He said, “Any day you wake up that you’re not sick is a good day,” and whenever I get up and I am having a bad day, [right off the bat] I say that, I think about — literally, this morning, that popped in my head. I went, “You’re right. There’s no reason to be mad today or be grumpy. It ain’t worth it.” Get out there. Create media. Have fun. Try new things. Interact with people and help build this community. Make the new media playground full of more toys and I will talk to you next time. See you soon and have a good one.

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C.C. Chapman: Hey everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray  for May 1, 2007. Yeah, I know I do not usually put out dates, but it is May day today. I realized I was talking with the kids about it being May, so I figured, “You know what? Why not throw it into the opening of the show,” because it has been a little while since I have been here.

Now, since we last sat down together or we were in the gym together, wherever you are listening to this because that is what is cool about podcasting — I have been away. I have been dealing with a death in the family. My grandfather passed away. That is why I kind of disappeared off the grid for a little while. If I owe you an email, I promise that is coming back soon. It is just I have had a really hard time getting back in the groove of things. I have got a lot of things on my plate. I am just trying to get back in the groove because as fun as the new media playground is, life sometimes forces you not to have fun and sidetracks you from things. You just got to get back on. That is what I have been doing and it is a little bit slower than I am used to because usually I am one of those guys that just spring right back. Sometimes you cannot and it is just the way it is. Thankfully, I am surrounded by people, I work with people who understand that and embrace it and are okay with it. They know that it is not slack. It is just life. We are getting there and I am really excited to be sitting down the mic today. It is a beautiful day. The call-in line is always open. It is 206-309-4729. If it is easier to remember, it is 206-309-GRAY. Call in your comments, your feedback, your questions, your answers, anything you have got. I have got a huge pile of them. We are not going to focus on them today. I have other things I want to talk about.

So, I was sitting there going to start up Managing the Gray today and I said, “What do I want to talk about?” “What do I want to focus on?” As you know, one of the things about Managing the Gray is I like each episode to be focused on something. Here in the Chapman household, we are getting ready to sell our house. We are in the process of selling it. For those of you — I realize I said that the other day on something else and I freaked out some of my friends. We are not leaving the MetroWest area. We are just moving for a big — we are upgrading I guess. We are moving into a bigger house. We do not know where we are going yet. We are going to stay in the same town though.

This weekend, we got a huge dumpster, those big industrial-sized dumpsters, and we cleaned out the house and I could not believe that we filled this thing. My dad laughed when he showed up. He is like, “You’re never gonna fill that,” and we filled it. It was not a goal. It was just we wanted to get stuff done. They got me thinking. I mean it is spring cleaning mode and I thought, “You know what? There’s some definite tie in here to spring cleaning and new media,” so I thought we talk about new media spring cleaning today.

Just some tips on things that you can do. You can go out there right now. You have been cranked and you have been grooving. You have been playing with all the toys, but sometimes you usually need a pause and you need to do some spring cleaning. It is very, very true. These are just some tips and tricks, advice. Maybe this is partially like a Lifehacker or life hack or 43 Folders, kind of all together. I am not comparing myself to them because I love that stuff. Those sites are amazing. I will link to it in the show notes, but Lifehacker and 43 Folders are very good productivity websites and they are full, chuck, chuck, chuck full of information. I love those sites. They are two of the blogs I read very, very carefully. I skim lots of blogs. Those, I read.

First off, you have got to spend some quality time with your blog, your blog and your social media sites. I am going to group them together, but they are kind of different. What I mean is go through your blog, make sure you are up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress or Movable Type, or whatever you are using. Make sure you are up-to-date. Make sure it is cleaned out. You only run plug-ins you want to run. Your spam is cleaned out. Just kind of touch it up, look at it, make sure everything is right. If you are going to play under the covers a little bit, see if your keywords are still right, your description of your website, all the meta, the meat underneath the covers, make sure that is all up-to-date and it is the freshest thing you want. It is a perfect time. You forget about it. You set it up when you did the blog probably. You probably forgot about it. Really go look at that. If you are using WordPress under the theme, you just go Theme Editor and look at your meta. You do not have meta. If you are going, “Whoa, what is that?” Look up meta keywords on the web and figure out what you need to do because that helps with search engines. Yeah, I know it is not as important as some other things as it used to be, but make sure it is right.

Also, on social media sites, figure out what you are getting out of each of them. MySpace I have pretty much given up — not given up on, but I have let it run wild. Someone ask me as a friend, I have them. That is fine. I do not care who you are. I do not need to know who you are. That is what MySpace is. It is a place to post bulletins. It is a place to find people. Is a place, more importantly, for people to find me. I do use my top choices, top friends, I do use that specifically to put friends, but I have kind of let that — it is just happening. It is there. I do not spend a lot of time with it. If you messaged me through MySpace, I might not see it for a week. It is a bad way of doing it, but then something like LinkedIn I take very seriously. I have a lot of connections on LinkedIn, but I only connect with people that I actually know and I have met. I do not have to know them very, very, very well, but I like to connect with people that — I mean when I go to conferences, I love connecting with people afterwards. That is what LinkedIn is for me.

So, just take a minute. Look at your social network sites. Figure out what each one is doing for you. Do you have all the right information? Make sure your information in something like LinkedIn is updated. You want your profile to be as up-to-date as possible. Make new connections and all these things. Most of these tools now have emailing import. Now, I am not saying go spam your friends, but what I am saying is something like LinkedIn I go every so often and I have it sucking my Gmail inbox to see if anybody new that is on my connections that is in LinkedIn. I love that feature because it lets me go, “Oh, I want to connect with them.” So, you can get that going.

Something else you should do is stop, sit back, and seriously set goals for yourself. Whether it is your blog, maybe it is your company, maybe it is your virtual world space. Figure out what you want to do with that space in the next year. You have got a few months left in the year, so just stop and figure out by the end of 2007, what would I like to be doing differently? Maybe it is more readers, maybe it is posting more often, maybe it is winning an award, maybe it is being on — someone talks nice about you or writes an article about you. Whatever it is, seriously set goals. You do not have to publicly share these goals. If you want to, it is even better, but actually take a hard fast look at where you are in the new media space and figure out where do you want to become at the end of the year. It is something you should do anyways. You should do it every so often. I try to do it every six months, just try to look forward. I set bigger goals too, but I also set six months out, what do I want to be doing in my life, what do I want to be doing in this space, and it is something definitely to do. Get out there and renew your connections. I cannot stress this enough. Who have you not talked to in a while that you would love to talk to? Maybe it is an old podcast you used to email back and forth with. Maybe it is an old online buddy. Maybe it is someone you bumped into in Second Life. Whoever it is, reach out and renew that contact with them. We all get caught up. We all get busy. We all do not talk as much as we would like to. So, take your time, find somebody. Go look through your address book right now. Pause it or whatever. Go look at your address book and find someone that you have not talked to in a while and just draw them an email and say, “Hey, I was just thinking we haven’t talked in a while.” I guarantee you that person is probably thinking the same thing or if not, they are going to go, “Yeah. How you doing, man?” Take the time. Reach out because this space is all about the people and you want those connections to keep going.

I’m sorry, I feel like I am going to sneeze. I cannot believe I just sneezed on a podcast. I apologize. That is so bad form. See, the editing people will go back and edit that out. I am not going to unless it is really bad. I do not edit anyway. So, I apologize for that. I guess my body is doing some spring cleaning. Wow!

Okay. All right. Back to the show. I was talking about renewing connections. Make sure you keep those connections. Renew them. Find somebody. Making new ones is another thing. Clean out your inbox. All right. Get that inbox cleaned out. Now, listen, I know we all have inboxes that are huge. What I love about Gmail personally is I archive stuff. I just say “Archive,” get it out of my inbox. Go clean out that inbox. If you have unread inbox, emails in your inbox that are over a week old, go reply to them right now and then get them the heck out of your inbox. One thing I know, if you use Outlook — I have gotten used to Gmail where you can just archive and it is still there easily, Outlook does not have an easy way to get my inbox out of here. What I used to do and I still do is create year folders. If you do not have project folders or people folders, if you just got miscellaneous that you need to keep, I highly suggest just create a 2007 folder and if it is easier, create key 1, 2, 3, and 4 underneath it. Take that email and dump it. Dump it into those folders. It is still there. It is just not in your inbox. Having a cluttered inbox is not a good thing. I know I have some very close friends who listen to this podcast who have inboxes from hell and they scare the bejesus out of me. Seriously, get that inbox cleaned out. You have no idea how much happy that would be. There is a certain point where you are just not going to be able to hide all your email, but you should try to. Get that inbox cleaned out.

Also, get organized. I am looking at my desk right now. It is actually not that bad at the moment. I am one of those guys who do not believe in the messy desk philosophy. I have always had a messy desk. It is just part of my process. It is just a part of the way it is, but try to get organized even if it is your own organization method. I also highly recommend going through your computer and getting organized. Buy an external drive. They are super cheap nowadays. I just bought a terabyte external hard drive for under $500. Actually, I think it was $400, but get an external hard drive. Back up your files. Clear out stuff you do not need. I had seven years worth of photos on my computer. There is no reason for that. I do not need it. I took those off. I kept just the last year on my computer and put the other ones on the backup drives and burned a DVD so I would have archives of them too. Do not worry. I do not trust it to one drive; that is dangerous. Clean out. Uninstall programs you do not need. You know that software you thought, “Oh yeah. I’m gonna need that,” and you have not used it in a year, delete it. Just get it off your computer. You can always find it again. Seriously, do some spring cleaning on your computer. Your computer will love you for it. I am not going to get techie, but make sure your virus is up-to-date and your spyware prevention is up-to-date. All that stuff. Get all that stuff done.

Huge point: Get out. Get out! Get off the computer and socialize. Meet people. Meet them face to face, shake their hands, buy them a drink, and say, “How are you doing? I’m so and so. What’s up?” I cannot stress that enough. Listen, there are events going on all over the place. Upcoming.org lists a bunch, I like that one, Craigslist. There are all kinds of things. Find an event happening near you and if there is not an event, start one. Literally, just throw it on your blog and your podcast, anywhere you can, and go, “Hey, I’m gonna have a beer tonight at XYZ bar and anybody who wants to talk new media, come hang out.” Somebody may not come and you will be all alone, but then you can meet somebody else. Start something. There is nothing saying you cannot start something and there is stuff happening all over the place.

I watch PodCamps pop up everywhere. I am going to PodCamp Miami, which I think I have talked about here, podcruisemiami.com, in December. We are going on a cruise. It is very inexpensive, by the way, very if you are looking for a great weekend. The guys at Binary Star Music got a great deal. Check it out. It is going to be a lot of fun, a lot of new media folks are going to be down there in Hawaii in Sheraton just ripping it up in the Bahamas. I cannot wait. What I am getting at, there are events popping up everywhere. I see PodCamps happening everywhere. Start a PodCamp. I mean you could do it whatever it is, but the key is to meet people. There are events happening at your library and your college right now near you. Please go meet people.

Finally, try something new. Have fun. I mean I am starting to get back, to really, really, really get into video podcasting. If you are curious, it is oneguysthoughts.com. It will take you right to PodShow. It might be easier just to go to feeds.feedburner.com/oneguysthoughts. Some people find the PodShow interface a little confusing. Either one, there is both. I have started doing that and it is not focused on music, it is not focused on new media. It is just focused on me and whatever is on my mind. I am having a lot of fun with that. So, try something new. It could just be something as little as go listen to a new podcast. Just this morning, I discovered teenbizideas.org. What is the official name of the podcast? It is not that. It is TeenBiz: Small Business Ideas and Tips for Students, but it is at teenbizideas.org. It is a new podcast focused strictly on helping student entrepreneurs succeed in small business. I think that is a great thing so I just started listening to that this morning. They sent me an email saying, “Hey C.C. Will you give us a shout out for our podcast to play?” I was like, “Well, I got to go listen to it first.” I listened to it and it is a great idea. Try something new. It could just be listening to a podcast. It could be reading a new blog. It could be something totally non-new media-related, but the key is to get out there and try something new. Have fun with it. It is spring. We have all been bears hibernating for the winter. Let us get outside and be those frisky bears having fun. Maybe that connects with going out and socialize. I do not know.

Speaking of going out and socializing, I have got this great listener comment from a very, very good friend who was a chance meeting. Chance meeting. We met each other at Podcast Expo last year, which by the way is happening again later this year. I will be speaking at it, podcastexpo.com, in Ontario, California. It is going to be a very good time. I am looking forward to speaking there and I am looking forward to seeing my friend Jason there who last year all of a sudden we just met and we started talking. He knew who I was. He listens to the show. He said some of the kindest words I have ever heard in my life. He bought me tea and what is funny I had drunk tea once and I was with Amanda Monaco and her husband. He gave me his box of tea because I was from Boston and the card said do not throw it in the river. I still have the box because I drink it and I have since gotten to drinking tea, but Jason sent this very poignant comment. It is very long, but it is very from the heart. Jason does A Buddhist Podcast and he is so mellow and he has got a great, great story in here so I wanted to play this for you. Please give it up and listen to Jason.

Jason Jarrett: Hey, C.C. It is Jason Jarrett from England. I have been meaning to call in for some time, but things have been mad busy around here lately. I love the new social media. I love the connections we make and the crazy ass things that we can make happen like patching our friends into a recording session with Jimmy Golding using Skype or even the twitter.com/fishdog saga. I fell into this world quite by accident. I found out about podcasting through what I call that mystic click, when you are online and you are curious and you click to find out what that button does or where that link goes. I found myself listening to shows and getting pulled in. I would gather so much information without realizing that it happened. I became a local hub of information about social media, a whole new understanding of what was possible. It really reminded me of a feeling I had when I first heard [unintelligible] in 1994 and found myself looking at the Lycos search engine for the first time. So, when I had started podcasting, I was putting Buddha study lectures together. It would take a lot of effort to do. Now, I wondered how I could give the lectures so that more people could hear them. Every time I heard a podcast, I want it. It would be great if someone did one about Buddhism. Eventually, I realized that somebody was me. If not you then who and if not now then when.

So, I started. I bought some basic equipment. I figured out how to get sound out to one end into one ear then later into two ears. I put a site together to house it, all the time not thinking more than 20 or so people would ever listen. After two shows, I found out about Libsyn, thank goodness. Just in time before the numbers went crazy. When we went out to the PNME in Ontario last year, we did not know anyone. I had no idea of the great friends and connections that I would make and that I still have. While we were there, I flew out to Sacramento to visit some listeners who have become great friends, email, IM, Skype. It is all pretty incredible. Texting you when you came over to London to make sure that you were okay and hooking up at JazzFly with Karen and Laura and then nights later seeing you [unintelligible], Accident Hash, absolutely mad. Being able to read out poetry from the talented Matthew McMillan, fantastic children’s poetry. Playing new podsafe music from great artists who have earned the right to be heard like Geoff Smith, Matthew Ebel, Laura Clapp, Black Lab, Jimmy Golding, Kevin Reeves, the list is endless. Along the way, I learned a lot from other people too. I learned a lot from your show, Managing the Gray. I learned a lot from [unintelligible], from Podcast411, there is no end to the great material this leaves. You just got to find it and then feedback.

So, in today’s batch of emails, there was one that really lit up my morning and that was written from a remote location in Oregon from an elderly lady who is partially sighted and she receives the podcast on CD from friends. They record it and they take it out into the middle of nowhere where this place is and they give it to her. This lack of broadband access has not even stopped the penetration of new social media. Reading her email and being encouraged to continue was really moving. So, new social media. It is a privilege to be involved. Thank you to everyone I have encountered and everyone I will and thank you, C.C. You really are a breath of fresh air.

C.C. Chapman: They take the podcast on CD to her. I love that story and I love Jason. The thing is that soothing voice, I am telling you, abuddhistpodcast.com is that voice. If that does not put you in a Zen-like chill out mode, I do not know what will. That is what I am talking about. Jason talked about the mystic click, which I think — I did not catch that the first time I listened to that audio comment. It is a great philosophy. I know exactly what he is talking about, we have all done it, where you click on a link or you read something or you heard something and you went [gasp]. It is the first time I clicked into Second Life and Eric Rice whipped out a skateboard and jumped on it and skateboarded up the roof that I went, “Oh wow.” The first time you listened to a podcast, the first time you got an email, the first time you typed something in Google and the results came back, the mystic click. I like that Jason. Also, Jason [unintelligible] about the connections, the connections we make, the connections we keep, the fact that friendships, the fact that very powerful connections can be made through social media and are being made through social media. He is right. When I went over to London, he was worried sick about me and was emailing me to make sure I was there okay. His wife does an amazing podcast at joyrise.podshow.com. It is one song a day and there is usually some very insightful — whether it is poetry or quotes, just beautiful stuff. I interviewed her. She was just like, “You can’t interview me!” Yes, I can and it is great and I love — I have not met their family, I have not met their kids yet. I cannot wait. When I left England, Jason actually gave me a box of candy for Emily because he knew she liked candy. The little things and these are the type of powerful connections we are making through social media and everyone needs to keep it in mind. Anybody who questions it is missing the point and not on board and probably not listening to this podcast, so it is okay because this podcast is for those people who do get it or want to get it. More importantly, this podcast is for people who want to get it, who want to embrace it, who want to play on the new media playground and have a good time.

When I gave my speech at PodCamp New York, which I am still trying to get audio of to put up as a podcast, one of the things I talked about is the philosophy, the playground, is that remember when we were all kids and you could go in the sandbox and you could make friends with someone immediately and you were best of friends, you were on the swing for five minutes and you were instantly friends, that is what social media is like. Yeah, there were always bullies there, but you know what? The bullies connect and they go off on their thing and get bored. That is the key.

So, that is Managing the Gray for today. I thank you guys all for listening. One last thing before I go, I realized — yes, an open shill for a minute because I have not told the Managing the Gray listeners about it so I just want to put it in real fast, Crayon launched a campaign with Coca-Cola that you can go to virtualthirst.com and check out. What I am very excited about it is, is that it has everything and nothing to do with Second Life at the same time. What Coke is looking to do is they want you the consumer, you the user, you the drinker, you the person who thinks Coke is a new thing to use your imagination, forget physical boundaries, forget every rule you know. If a Coca-Cola “machine” could vend you something, what would it be and then that is going to be built into a reality in Second Life. I talked about Enviga pogo sticks or a Dasani water slide. You can now see them. I am not talking about machines. I am talking about an experience. It could be anything. We have prototypes in the world too if you want to see. We gave this assignment to four builders and they came back with totally different things. We have got a dance bottle. We have got an old vintage truck. We have got this Coke machine when you click on it, it builds a whole world around you.

That is the fun and I am hoping some Managing the Gray listeners would submit ideas. Literally, if this you went, “Oh, I got an idea!” You can just email it to entries@virtualthirst.com. You can create a video. You can create an audio comment. Do not send the audio comment to me. Sorry, do not do it because we are involved in the judging. I do not want to know who does what. It is all anonymous. Send them to Coke. Go to virtualthirst.com. You will have all the information. You can create a video. You can do all that stuff. Submit them in, get them in, and please take part. If you are in Second Life, if you are curious, go to virtualthirst.com, you can come in to the link. It is virtualthirst.com/launch. It will take you to the Pavilion where you can check out the prototypes, hang out, chat, have a good time. We are going to have lots of parties, some socialization, but it is not all about Second Life either. It is about having a good time and using your imagination. So, check that out. I had not talked about it here on Managing the Gray and I want to make sure my listeners new about it. There is a post on managingthegray.com about it if you want some more information, but I had to get that out there.

Again, the comment line is always open. It is a great phrase. 206-309-4729. You can email me at cc.chapman@gmail.com and as always, if you are around on Thursdays, Thursday morning if you got nothing to do and you want to come talk to me, Coffee with Crayon happens every Thursday morning in Crayonville Island. Just go to crayonvillesecondlife.com, it will pop you right there. Come on in. It is 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. That is 6:00 a.m. Second Life time. Just come on in, say hi. We usually have 30 to 35 people there just chatting about whatever topic of the day so if you got a question or you want to learn something, you are a student and you want to pick somebody’s brain, that is a great place. Heck, I am waiting for the person that will come up and say, “I’m looking for a job.” You would have a whole bunch of people there who might be interested in hiring you. You never know. I do not mean to turn it into a career fair, but that is using the space differently. Do not ever think inside the box. Use your own imagination and have a good time. I will be back really, really soon with another episode of Managing the Gray. Tell your friends. Get them to subscribe. Go to managingthegray.com. Really click-easy. Get it up there. Post reviews on iTunes. Do whatever it is you need to do to spread the word on Managing the Gray and I will love you for it forever. You guys take care. I will talk to you very, very soon.

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C.C. Chapman: Welcome everybody. Back to Managing the Gray #31, and because I always seem to forget to give it out at the top of the show and everybody always asks, the call-in number is 206-309-4729. You can always just call in, say, “What’s up?” and managingthegray@gmail.com also works for audio comments, but the call-in number everybody says I bury so I am putting it up front for you so you cannot miss it. I will put it in the show notes. It will be on managingthegray.com. I will make it so impossible for you not to call in, that is the goal right?

So, I am fresh back from PodCamp NYC or PodCamp New York. PodCamp NYC is what is known by the cool kids, I do not know, listen. PodCamp was a lot of fun and I wanted to give some reactions to it because I had a really good time. The first ever PodCamp I have ever been to is PodCamp Boston, which was the first one, where it all kicked off. One of the things I loved about it was the community vibe of it and PodCamp New York lost a little bit of that because it was just — just the sheer volume of it, when 1300 people register for an event, the community is going to be a little bit tougher because it is going to be spread way out. I think, what I mean is, at PodCamp Boston there were four or five speeches going on at any given time and only for or five so you were seeing the same bunch of people over and over again. We kept coming back to the main room to see each other. Here in New York, there were 10 to 12 talks going on at any point so people were spread out all over the place. You did not see everybody all the time.

There was a lot of things like, “Oh, I didn’t know they were there,” or “I didn’t see them.” That just tells you that things were spread out, but it was a great event. The organizers did an amazing job. What was very cool about it was there were so many fresh faces. One of the things I loved about the unconference vibe is the fact that they are happening in locations all over the country and all over the world and that excites me because what is neat about it is the fact that local people who may not be able — the college students, that is the perfect example, someone could not afford to fly out across the country to another event — because it is free — can just stumble at an event, come down to an event, a PodCamp or another unconference type of vibe in their local market and I think that is very powerful. I saw a lot of college students there and a lot of people who were just kind of there figuring out what was going on. I asked lots of people, “What are you doing here?” “I don’t know. I’m just here to find out what’s going on.” Exactly. That is the vibe and I think it is very cool.

One of the neat things is I got to do a presentation, sort of brand new presentation of mine, called the New Media Playground. It is sort of like a working title for the book right now, but I have not been able to focus on the book because it is the thing that gets pushed to the backburner, but it was a fun presentation and people seem to really react. What was neat was I was in the big room and there were a lot of people in there and a lot of people I did not know which made me even more excited. I was really excited to see fresh faces. There is nothing better than being up and speaking and people nodding and agreeing, going “Yeah!” The video of it is up. I think there is going to be another video because I know there were at least two video cameras going. What I mean is this video camera, the one I have seen, is at an angle right in the other one’s video camera. It is up. I will link to it on the show notes.

I really felt good about the presentation. It was kind of laid back because of the way it was set up. I got down on the floor and just walked around with a microphone. It felt much more relaxed. If you went to PodCamp, I gave a homework assignment and listeners of Managing the Gray, see I almost did it, Managing the Gray can do this homework too. What I told everybody was I said, “Meet everybody you can, talk to strangers, just walk up to people and say, ‘Hey, I’m so and so, who are you?’” That is what is cool about it. I also said try something new, go out, try Second Life, try Twitter, try blogging or podcasting if you have not done that. My speech focused on all new media not just podcasting because I do not think — any one of these mediums is so niche.

I want people to play on all the toys. If you go into the playground and you only played on the Jungle Gym everyday and only the Jungle Gym and never anything else, that would be kind of boring. I want people to play with the other toys and so I told them to try something new and then I asked them to email me and tell me how they did. I am very much looking forward to — I have gotten one email so far that said, “Homework assignment.” It made me smile so big. I am very much looking forward to that. If you are subscribed to the Managing the Gray feed, you would have gotten my PowerPoint presentation yesterday as a PDF file. It came down the pipe so you can look at it. What is cool is all the people in the photos are people that listen to the show or know me or something because I put out a call on Twitter and the blogging and what-not saying, “Send me pictures of you playing on the playground,” and I put them in the presentation and added a really nice flavor mix to the presentation I thought. I was very excited. If you are in there, I am glad. Thank you very much for sending it in.

Oh, I keep talking about Twitter. If you have not used Twitter, twitter.com/cc_chapman is my Twitter. Feel free to follow me. That was something else I wanted to talk about really briefly was Twitter and the concept of social networks and where they are going. Some people treat them differently than others and what it boils down to is I had a moment this weekend at PodCamp New York where I walked out, I met new people, I saw someone talking to someone I knew so I walked up and said, “Hey, what’s going on?” and this woman says hi and then yells at me. She said, “C.C., I’ve been following you in Twitter but you don’t follow me.” I said, “Well, sorry, but I don’t know you.” It is interesting. Certain social networks I am on and I think you should be on more for the fact of just being there.

One of the things I always tell people is make it impossible for people not to find you. What I mean by that is it takes a whopping three to five minutes to set up any social network account. Take your pick, LinkedIn, MySpace. LinkedIn probably takes a little bit longer because you want to put in more professional information, but it only takes a little bit of time to set up an account and even if you never, ever, ever, ever log back into to that account, you want it so that if someone goes, “Hey, I wonder if they are on LinkedIn?” and they search for you that they find you and that there are links to where you do want, where you do maintain, to your website or your blog or your podcast. Send it with MySpace and Facebook and all these other things where you do not have to have an active case.

Someone the other day said, “C.C., you are on Facebook? Really?” I have had a Facebook account from since the days I worked at Babson. Of course, I have a Facebook account, but they just did an API that would suck in my contacts so I said, “Let me see who’s on Facebook,” and it sucked in my Gmail contacts and said, “Here’s the people on your list who are also on Facebook. Would you like to invite them to be your friend?” I said, “Sure.” It took me two seconds to click a button that said select all of these people on Facebook. Why would I not do that? So, now we have got connections going. Do I think Facebook is going to save my life? No, but it is another connection. Things like Facebook, I have let kind of just free form pretty much. Unless it is someone I really do not like, which I cannot think of anybody, I want to add them. LinkedIn, it has to be people I have met and interacted with. MySpace, I will link to anybody. I will take friend requests from anybody. I barely check unless it is blatant spam, but then there are things like Twitter where I am actually treating Twitter — same thing with Flicker. Those are two networks where I only follow the people I really, really, really want to follow because otherwise it is information overload. It is a tough call, but when someone adds me on Twitter, I go and look at them and I am like, “Do I know this person?” and I try to find — because Twitter allows you to link to a blog. I go out to the blog and if I do not know who they are I will not start following them, but I will pay attention. I will watch for them and if they come on my radar, I will ad them. I just wanted to stress to some people out there that social networks are used differently by different people and different social networks are used differently.

Same thing with Second Life, I have a ton of friends in Second Life and I will add you as a friend a lot quicker than I will on something like LinkedIn or Twitter. It is a decision for each person to make, but it is something you should think about and make a decision for your own because, yes, there is now a button that I could click one button and it would add everybody who is following me on Twitter to add it to me following them, but that would kind of make Twitter un-useful for me. Right now, I am following people that I definitely want to know updates from, whom I definitely got a connection with. Please do not take offense if I am not following you. It is nothing personal. I will keep an eye on you. Do not worry, I am always watching. It is a social network thing. I know I have gotten a pile of requests from Twitter since coming back from PodCamp New York and I have not approved or disapproved them yet because I have not had a chance to check you out, so give me a chance, all right?

Now we have got some call-ins, 206-309-4729, some very different topics. Which one do I want to do first? We will do this one first because it is a long-time listener.

Francis Wooby: Hi CC, this is Francis Wooby talking to you from inspirational [unintelligible] Nunavut up in Canada. This is my first comment to Managing the Gray, but I am a long-time lurker and like all of your listeners I really appreciate the fantastic work that you do for us. In your latest episode, you featured a great interview with Chris Penn, one of the drivers behind the recent Bum Rush the Charts campaign. It was a good discussion covering their successes, their lessons learned, and I really appreciated his candor about falling short of their number one position mark as well as his appreciation for the real impact that they had, nonetheless. Now, in a weird way, I am glad that Bum Rush the Charts did not reach its objective of conquering the number one position. I am speaking strictly as a layman here in respect to the music industry and I only have a limited knowledge of how things work there, but with that in mind, I cannot help but wonder if a complete victory for the campaign would have generated more suspicion of the charts and doubting their legitimacy than would have created a positive buzz for the band and social media in general. In other words, I guess I am just wondering if it could have wound up looking like iTunes was simply manipulated by a few techno savvy individuals, which would have reflected poorly on the band and on social media. Now, to my mind, the more moderate results that they did end up with are more plausible for the general public, yet still very impressive in what they imply about the potential power of social media. Anyway, that is just sort of half-thought, half-question. C.C., again, thanks for all the wonderful work that you do here on Managing the Gray and in all of the other reaches of social media that you energize. Take care and talk to you later.

C.C. Chapman: Thanks. He was talking about Bum Rush the Charts and it is funny because I do not know if I want to go back and look at Bum Rush the Charts too hard to be honest, but I think you are right. If it had hit number one all across the things, it probably would have been — there definitely would have been more attention. Would some of that been more negative attention? Of course, it would. Success always generates haters, I guess, would be the easiest simple way to put it. Personally, I think Bum Rush the Charts was most successful because of the fact that it broke so much new ground all over the place, different markets around the world; that excited me.

One thing that did not get as much fanfare, I do not think — I mean I should not say as much, but it seems like only certain people knew about it, but it was as successful was Scott Sigler’s “”Ancestor”" book thing where “Ancestor” Attacks Amazon, which was kind of the same thing, but attacking Amazon instead of iTunes. This was planned long in advance. Scott is an amazingly smart guy, scottsigler.net, if you are not familiar with him. What it is, is Amazon updates their book charts every hour and so he had everybody buy his book “Ancestor”. He does podcast novels. If you are not familiar who Scott Sigler is, he does podcast novels or podiobooks — take your pick of your term, I do not think one has been coined “the” term yet — and they are amazing. “Ancestor” was something — it probably was a year ago. It must have been at least a year ago that it was out as a podcast novel and every week he put out a new chapter and it came out in print on April 1st and he asked everybody, “Do not buy it until April 1st. Wait to buy it.” So, he had this rabid fan base. It is like the horse in the gate of the Kentucky Derby just waiting to pump out and then on April 1st at noon he opened the gate and said, “Everybody buy it,” and everybody went and bought it. What was a beautiful sight was seeing “Ancestor” and “EarthCore,” another book he wrote, being number one and two on the horror charts. It got as high as number seven on the overall Amazon charts. Now, that is pretty impressive because there were two Oprah Book Club choices in there above him and Harry Potter was above him, so take those three out. The “Ancestor” did amazing. I am very proud of Scott. Scott is a personal friend of mine so I am very excited about him.

Somebody asked me, “Will this work with any book?” Maybe, it depends. It cannot be a book that is already out there. I am firm believer in the fact that it cannot be and why? Because one of the things was this was a need. Nobody had this book in print yet. Thus, he already had a fan base waiting to buy it. He just said, “Wait and buy it on this specific day,” and that is why it worked. If he already had the book out there for six months and then he said, “Hey everybody, go buy another copy!” it would never have worked because his whole hardcore fan base that would be the tip of the spear to this attack would already have bought it and it would not have worked as well. There is a supply and demand, basic economics, and it worked out in this case. Is it going to work for other books? Of course, it will. If you already have a fan base and you have got a book and you want make a little ripple, go for it. Did that make a huge ripple? I do not know, but I know it helped Scott. I know it brought more attention to Scott and his writing, which I think is great. Mark my words, Scott Sigler, if he does not, some publishers are clueless, I really hope, I firmly can say Scott Sigler, if he was writing full time, would be right up there with the Koontzes and the Kings without a doubt. “Infection” was just an amazing — “EarthCore” is still my favorite, but “Infection” is a close second. His “Rookie” right now is doing as amazing. Let us play another audio comment.

Rich White: Hello C.C. This is Rich White with the Greenbush Education Service Center. We are an education service center in Kansas. We serve schools, teachers and students, our main customers. We are huge fans of Managing the Gray and frequent visitors of Crayonville in Second Life. A few comments and then a quick question. We have a core group of us about five or six on an organization of about 500 working on new media and encouraging the use of it in schools, web 2.0 in schools and such, but we have been conducting blog training to teachers over the past year. We have been at it for about a year and a half. We are getting ready to start a little mashup university type series of trainings for students that teach them how to use iMovie and things of that nature to generate media for Google and YouTube to tell stories about their experiences.

We have been really pushing the tech integration classroom both with formal trainings and with the Take Two podcast that we operate, which is taketwopodcast.us where we share our technology and new media type experiences, suggestions to the school community, teachers and administrators. We recently entered the world of Second Life actually. By listening to Managing the Gray, your experiences in Second Life really encouraged us to get in there. We bought some land. We have about 4000 square feet now and we are just about a week into that and so we are anxious to see what we can do there. In the way of kind of building relationships of like-minded educators, I would assume that those types of educators are in Second Life that we are trying to meet up and share ideas with. One of our big questions is basically to kind of get your thoughts and opinions, some suggestions regarding additional resources we could use to further push the ideas to the school sector. I know they lag a little bit behind the public sector. How do you deal with the generation differences or some of the things you would suggest, the 50-cent reactions to some of these things? We had recently suggested adding RSS feed to a master calendar of events of trainings that we are offering. We kind of looked at that like we had two heads sometimes with some of the stuff we suggest. How do we get past that in terms of the message? I am sure you see the older generation has real issues sometimes with embracing in the way of communication and idea sharing. How do we kind of encourage that and get them past maybe some of their fears about that?

C.C. Chapman: I do not think it is a generational thing. I do not. I think it is either get it or you do not. I know college kids who do not get it either that is why I say I do not think it is a generational thing. How do you sell new media? I think the root of your question is how do you get people jazzed about new media and all the things you can do? Real easy. Do not talk about the technology. You asked, “Can we add an RSS feed to the calendar?” Nine out of ten people are going to go, “Huh?” They are going to roll their eyes and be confused, “RS what?” Get the technology out of there. When you are trying to sell people on a new idea, new media, forget the technology. People do not care about that. The way to pitch a calendar is, “Hey, what if we made it so somebody could click once and every time we add something new to the calendar that fit what they wanted, they would automatically be notified or it would automatically be added to their calendar and they could decide whether or not they want to keep it or not?” That will get people excited. They will go, “Oh, yeah that’s cool.” Yeah, you and I know under the covers it is RSS and an iCal, but they do not need to know that. Same thing when you talk to a CEO or an executive, someone who controls the pocketbook, controls the checkbook, talk to them about — one of the biggest things I know when I was in college, you always wanted more people on your newsletter or to engage more, your open rate, and those types of things. Start saying, “Hey, what if I can get X number more people signed up or I could get more people engaging on this website?” What you were talking about really was using RSS feeds to get more people to view a page or something.

Again, avoid talking about the technology. Get into the technology later and get them to the right thing. Sell them on the benefits. Tell them what the benefits are of using whatever medium it is. This goes true for whether you are talking about a YouTube campaign, maybe — I almost said viral marketing, I hate that. Whether you are doing influence or outreach, whatever you are doing, tell them how it is going to help them. Put it in terms of things that they currently do. How is it going to save them time, money, how is it going to bring more people into the door, more eyeballs to them, put it that way and avoid the technology. I think that is the way to do it. It is the biggest way to do it. The minute you start talking about technology, you have already put a barrier up between you and them if they do not understand it and you are going to spend more time discussing the technology and what it means and how to do it rather than what you are really trying to get there, which is how it is going to help them. That is the important thing and that goes for no matter what you are doing. It really, really does. Talk to them on the level of them, not you, not the cool gadget, them. This is true even outside of new media. When you are talking to someone, never forget if you are trying to sell them on something, always focus in on them. The conversation is never about you, it is never about your company, it is never about your product, it is about them, how they are going to be helped by your solution whatever it is.

Congrats and welcome to Second Life, very cool, 4000 square. You have got a lot of land. Educational institutions, I cannot stress this enough. If you are going to be buying that much land, honestly think about buying an island. Here is the reason — and I am talking to educations and non-profits for a second — the cost of buying land is expensive, especially if you buy it on the open market in Second Life and 4000 square, you paid a pretty penny for that I am sure. What I am getting at is, Linden Lab gives discounts, severe discounts to educations and non-profits. I know this has changed a little bit because it was over a year ago and prices have gone up a little bit, but I know at Babson we bought an island, a full blown island, and paid for a year of maintenance up front and it was like just over $3000 for 12 months and that is not much. Think about that. If you are an education, you get really big discounts. When you go to the land store, it is kind of buried at the bottom of the page, but it is there.

Islands give you the ultimate level of control and even if you do not need that much space, if you are buying 4000 meters, that is going to add up rather quick and you do not have full control and you do not know who your neighbors are going to be. It is definitely something to consider. Take that to heart if you are an education or non-profit. Companies think about it, too. It is not as cheap, but that is the main argument I give people when they are debating. They are going to buy a huge plot. If you are just going to buy a little plot of land to play, that is fine, but if you are doing a serious investment and you are thinking long term, buying an island is the way to go most times, mainly for two reasons, you completely control it so you can do whatever you want to it and the biggest thing is you control your neighbors. You do not know what is going to pop up next. Those are the two biggest reasons when people ask, “Should I buy an island or should I buy a big chunk of land?” and cost sometimes plays in that.

Well, that is going to wrap up Managing the Gray today. I want to say hello to everybody that I met at PodCamp New York. If this is your first time listening to Managing the Gray, welcome. It is very cool to have you here. Managingthegray.com is where you can find out more. Very, very excited about everything going on in the world. It is just a good time. I met a lot of great people. I have not even done my own first rule of conferences is send an email to everyone you got a business card from. I have them right here, the promise. I refuse to do a massive BCC, that is why it takes me a little longer and my first priority was uploading all my photos. If you do not know, I am a photo junkie and now that I have a digital SLR, Canon Rebel XTi for those of you geeking out in the crowd. See, I try to avoid technology. I uploaded them all to Flickr and I had so much fun taking photos. I am still learning my camera so it was a lot of fun. I got to see a lot of new faces. Always remember, ask if you can take your photo. I had one person all weekend say no and that is cool, but I respect your decision.

So, you guys take care. Please call up the comment line anytime you want. The comment line is always open. It is 206-309-4729 and that sends an MP3 right to me. You might hear yourself on an upcoming episode of the show. When I get the audio from my presentation, I am going to push it down the feed to you guys so you can hear it. I have already been asked by several listeners. Yes, I will do that when I get the audio, all right? So, you guys take care. Keep embracing new media. Seriously, get out on the new media playground, play on the swings, the Jungle Gym, try that thing that scares you. I always hated that spider web thing you have to climb up, you get too high and it starts swinging, I always hated that thing. Try it. Have fun. Enjoy this time. It is a very exciting time out there. All this talk about Bubble 3.0, I just want to smack somebody. Just have fun. Figure out what works for you. Play with it, if it does not work, move on. Do not slam whatever it is. Just play with it. You do not like it? Try something else. There is room for everybody. There are enough toys to go around. I will talk to you next time. See you soon.

Posted in Transcript | Comments(1)

C.C. Chapman: Well, hey, welcome to Managing the Gray #30. Today is March 23, 2007. It is the day after Bum Rush the Charts happened. If you are not familiar what that is, bumrushthecharts.com, it was this kind of a new media experiment where everybody got together, tried to get everybody to buy a single song on iTunes on a specific day in order to get this group up the charts, get them on the radar, show that the podcasting and new media sphere could pull together to elevate an independent artist on the charts to kind of mess with the system. What I wanted to do is this morning, Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, one of the guys behind the event, we had set up a time to talk, to kind of look back and look at its success. This is not just about Bum Rush the Charts, just using that as sort of a case study or as an experiment for how you and other companies can do experimentation.

We barely talked about the campaign. We talked about lessons we learned from it and things that he specifically learned about it, lessons learned for any campaign that you or your company might be thinking about doing in the new media sphere. So, sit back. It is about 26 minutes. We just kind of sat down and chatted this morning. It was very, very cool. I am very, very excited to turn it over and let you guys hear it. Wow! I just kind of choked on myself. So, this is going to be a little different interview. I do not get to do it very often in Managing the Gray. Get your comments and get your questions in managingthegray@gmail.com and I will talk to you very soon. Here we go.

So, Chris, welcome to Managing the Gray. Good to have you on the show again.

Christopher Penn: Good to be back.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. You have done it. You have hosted it yourself and now we are actually sitting down to have a conversation through the power of new media. I would rather be doing this over a real cup of coffee, face to face, but we will take what we can get today.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely.

C.C. Chapman: So, what I want to talk about today is yesterday was Bum Rush the Charts, which I think everybody who listens to this podcast knows what I am talking about, but more of the fact — I do not want to focus on the “Dear M” questions and the this and that. I want to focus on it from a new media experiment angle. What went right? What went wrong? How the lessons that were learned in this one little initiative can be carried forth and companies or individuals of any size can learn from it? I think this morning you did a great job of kind of your first initial thoughts on Bum Rush and where it goes from here and what it could have done better and I would love it if you could share that with my listeners.

Christopher Penn: Sure. There were really six, I guess, key learnings that I came up with when it comes to how the campaign went. The first one and the most important I think is the whole thing on transparency. I think in any kind of online campaign, we find it so with Bum Rush the Charts, but really in any kind of online campaign, transparency is the key. By that, I mean disclosing as much as possible, as much as you feel comfortable doing. One big area where the campaign I think started off a little shaky was in the whole issue of how the band was selected and how it was chosen whether there was any kind of backroom deal, which there was not. Black Lab turned out to be a fine choice for the campaign. They were very generous, their willingness to contribute to the scholarship fund and stuff. Transparency is — I like to call it the transactional currency of trust. The more trust you want to build, the more transparent you have to be, the more you have to share information. I like to call it like your first date with somebody, right? You are sitting down at dinner. You have two people who are just staring at each other. It does not work very well. You have a very short dinner. What happens is it is just a natural thing, it is part of a conversation and that is what new media is. It is a conversation. You share information, they share information. You build trust and you do that by being transparent on things and that is where I think the first lesson was.

C.C. Chapman: I love your date analogy. I think that is hysterical because it is so true. It is something everybody can relate to. It is funny because talking about being in a conversation, literally just now as we are sitting here, I just got an email that came in from someone that says, “Today is Bum Rush the Charts Day.” They got the right date in it though. I do not know if it got held up in their email system or what, it is actually dated March 22nd. It says, “Today, March 22nd.” So, the conversation is still going on and the experiment continues, which is okay. I just had that literally just came in and I was like, “Wow! Today is Bum Rush the Charts.” I will not say who it is. I will just let them know offline.

Christopher Penn: That is awesome.

C.C. Chapman: What you said about transparency is key and people think it instantly means disclosing financials and all that, but sometimes it is the littlest thing like you said to me, how a band was picked, which was I do not know how it was picked. It was just kind of random is my understanding. It was not like there was any process, a detailed process or anything like that. I think what companies can learn from that is the fact that if you are going to go out and do something, disclose everything or as much as you can. Obviously, there is a how-much-can-you from a risk standpoint, but at the same time I think you are right, the more you give and show the more trust you are going to build instantly.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. The more transparent you are, the more conversations you have. I mean one area that was especially a challenge in the campaign was dealing with the social media or the social news network I should say like Digg and reddit and stuff like that. There is a lot of conversation on them, all these different conspiracy theories and stuff like that about the campaign and I think the more transparent the campaign or any online marketing campaign can be , the more likely there is that — you will always have the river of negative news, the naysayers and stuff like that. That is human nature, but the more transparency you can build, the more trust you can build from the outset, the more you will have other people who are I guess allied with your views or your perspective or your campaign efforts will step up and refute those claims and say, “Hey, no, no. This is the real story right here. You’ve missed the point.”

C.C. Chapman: It is funny. Actually, I had a friend the other day. We were discussing that exact topic. It was interesting because what he was saying was the fact that he said, “Listen, if you come out and whatever you do, all the naysayers, they are going to attack you. You have a choice. Either you can defend, you can go on the defensive and start answering those things right away, or you can wait a minute.” His theory was the fact that if you wait, your advocates will step up and step forward and do the defending for you as opposed to if you were to jump and defend, it gives the advocates no reason to do so. They may not as full force. It was a theory that I have been thinking a lot about because I think it can argue either way. I do think it is true though that your advocates will step up and defend you for you, but you got to make sure you have those advocates.

Christopher Penn: Yeah. You got to make sure you have those advocates and you got to make sure they are clear about the message and about what it is that you want to communicate to people.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. There is nothing wrong in having an advocate defending you improperly.

Christopher Penn: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: That is almost worse.

Christopher Penn: Yeah. It is putting someone else’s foot in your mouth.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, exactly. That does not taste very good at all. That kind of segues into a good point, too, is the fact that I think no matter what your campaign is, whatever experimentation you are doing in the new media space, there is always going to be negative backlash. Some people like to just complain for the sake of complaining. They like to hear their own voice. What is your feeling and what would you advise to a company that is thinking — and I am talking about doing anything in the new media space, whether it is video, Second Life, whatever it is. How do you think they should prep for things like that where there is guaranteed to be some negativity no matter what?

Christopher Penn: It is funny. A long time ago, part of my training was a sales training with the whole Tom Hopkins training thing and that was when I was doing human resources recruiting. So, you have product that can talk itself out of a sale, which is very interesting. One of the key points in the sales training was that an objection or a criticism or something like that is a good sign. It is a sign that the audience is engaged because the worst press that you can get is no press at all, complete silence. You throw it out there and everyone ignores you.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: At least, if people are talking about it or trying to talk to you, even if they do not necessarily communicate in marketing language that you are used to…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Penn: At least, they are talking to you. It is up to you and your skills as a salesman to turn those things around, to either mitigate them or turn them around to positives. For example, there has been a lot of conversation today about how Bum Rush the Charts was a failure, we did not hit number one on the charts and strictly speaking, you are absolutely right. We did not hit the objective of being number one on the iTunes charts, but we did accomplish an awful lot particularly when you think about getting on to the top 10 charts, in some genre’s top 100 charts, in a number of countries around the world, and doing it all on the $800 budget.

C.C. Chapman: Right. You just propped a whole bunch of other questions on that one little topic. Which one to attack first? I think any project I work on, I always try to really upfront have the conversation of, “How are we going to define success on this project?” I advocate that you should always have more than what is the loftiest goal because if you are not setting your goals high enough, then what is the point of going after them in the first place? As well, what are some other successful — I think this campaign definitely was a success on a lot of factors because the awareness that it raised and the fact that you saw an unsigned band right there among all these other acts that are signed, they have huge budgets and huge money to spend, showcased the fact that it was a success. Did they hit all the goals? No. Let us face it, most of the goals we set on projects, the highest, those ones you stretch do not always get met, but when they do, it is extra sweet, but your fact about the money is another great one. What cost $800 for this?

Christopher Penn: There were exactly two press releases, one on PR Newswire and one on Market Wire, each $400 a piece. They were not taking into account obviously time and labor and effort.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: In terms of raw, out-of-pocket money, it was two press releases and that was it.

C.C. Chapman: Right. That leads to the thing that I have talked to companies, I have talked to individuals and they are always worried about the cost. Yes, let us face it. You have to spend money sometimes. You do not get stuff for free and time and resources and intelligent people to do it. To hire the right people is going to cost money, but at the same time — I have had these conversations with clients where they are like, “We only have X number of dollars to spend.” I would rather be given that number upfront and figure out a campaign that works inside of that pocket rather than them going, “We can’t do anything with this amount of money.” There is usually plenty of money to do something with.

Christopher Penn: Exactly.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah and it forces creativity. You look at the indie film market. People get more creative when they have to. I have heard filmmakers talk about when they had the big budgets, it was harder to get things done than when they run a shoestring and being creative because creativity is a very, very powerful thing.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. Creativity and adaptability. I mean $800 for most companies I think is probably a rounding error on the refreshment’s budget.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly. It is not even a slush fund bucket. Come on.

Christopher Penn: Exactly. Exactly.

C.C. Chapman: One little thing, I want to go back to we were talking about the negativity thing. One of the things I know we have talked about in other context before is the fact that companies, if you are going to come into this space, reach out to the space, focus groups or your advisory panels or just even this whole litmus test just to kind of gauge what do people think of this campaign or your company. How do you feel about that idea?

Christopher Penn: I do not think the focus group idea is a good idea so much as using the new media tools that are out there already.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. Focus group is a bad term. I do not want a roomful of people with green M&M’s. Yeah, sorry about that.

Christopher Penn: One of the best things that you can do as a company is to plug your company’s name in Technorati and Google blog search and if knowing is talking about you then obviously, you have a lot of work to do. If your stuff is out there already, you want to find the people who are being critical of you. You want to find the people who have something negative to say or just critical to say about you and engage them, talk to them. Do your homework first, research them and say, “Okay. This person is talking.” For example, the student loan industry, they say that this lender company gives kickbacks and that lender company…

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: Sends people on Caribbean trips. You find out what is being said and know in advance some of the arguments that are going to come against you. Talk to those people and engage them. Really, it is as simple as having conversations, “Hey, I know that you were talking about me on your blog and I’m not upset about it. I would like to talk to you more to see how you got the information which made your decision and what I can do as a representative of my company to not necessarily change what you’re saying, but to understand more about what you’re saying and why you’re saying it and what we can do as a company to, in the future, be more positive.”

C.C. Chapman: Right. It is funny because in Crayon, we call it a conversation audit where we go out and see what people are saying about you and we kind of dig deep into it and what-not. Would it not be cool if a company actually contacted like you directly after you have slammed them. I know I am trying to think, I never had a company, excuse me, I had that one company, a small company come to me who played in the new media space when I plugged some of this, “We’d really like to correct your assumptions on this,” but I think it would be amazing if big companies did more of that because you know the person would blog about it right away. “Well, so and so just reached out to me. I didn’t know that would ever happen.”

Christopher Penn: Look at what happened with… oh, gosh! I cannot remember the guy’s name. He was a big user of Google AdWords and he was sayings how AdWords was such a headache for him to manipulate all these campaigns. Somebody at Google, not even a senior exec, just a product manager sent him an envelope with a packet of Advil and then saying, “Sorry about the headache.”

C.C. Chapman: I have heard about that. That is awesome.

Christopher Penn: He is like, “Holy crap! Google just sent me a packet of Advil.”

C.C. Chapman: The closest thing I had to happen to that was I remember Eric Schiff posted a photo on his Flickr site about — it had a picture of dark chocolate covered Altoids before they were generally available and I made a comment going, “Man! I wish those were available in Boston.” I got an e-mail from Altoid’s PR company and said, “Give us an address and we’ll send you some.” Sure enough, I had Altoids show up one day and I am like, “Sweet! That is awesome.” Very different from the Google thing, but the same kind of concept that they saw someone who would probably evangelize for them and fed it as well which is another great thing.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. I think one of the things that we took from the Bum Rush campaign as well as these other example is that you should not focus just on the people who you believe to be I guess the cliché is the A-listers, but…

C.C. Chapman: I hate that term. I hate lists or “The top 100 on Technorati.” I do not care.

Christopher Penn: Exactly. The thing that most companies do not realize is that your next rock star, your next evangelist is out there and they are not on an A list. They are being somewhat quiet, probably staying a little low under the radar and stuff, but if you engage them smartly and you talk to them, you will have a rock star on your hands who will do more for your company’s credibility than any amount of money you could spend.

C.C. Chapman: Right. Now, in kind of on that, so Bum Rush the Charts that is going out there to the podosphere and blogosphere and everything, one of the things that I think is really interesting and tougher for companies to figure out is how do you get those people to blog and podcast or to talk about you? In Bum Rush the Charts’ case, follow up and actually buy and purchase. I know a lot of companies will talk about, “Well, that’s nice they’re talking about us, but are they buying our product?” I think that was one of the lessons learned and this was the fact that, yeah, everybody was talking about it. There was no problem getting that mindshare for Bum Rush the Charts. Anybody in this space knew what was going on, but the amount of buzz, the amount of talk did not convert to the amount of purchases that were hoped for. How do you do that better, how do you get them from that, “Ooh! Neat!” to “Oh, I wanna buy” or “I wanna engage” or “I want to go.” The call to action, how do you get that call to action to be stronger?

Christopher Penn: It is interesting. The call to action, we tried to make a sales [unintelligible] that was as simple as possible, for example, an apply button or a purchase button that unless you were literally physically blind, you could not have missed. What I did not realize though is that and this is one of the criticisms on the social news sites is that there are a lot of people who do not have iTunes installed even if they own an iPod. There are a lot of people who were unwilling to use the iTunes sales mechanism or were unwilling to trust the IODA referral mechanism and things like that. Again, it goes back to transparency and disclosure and saying, “Hey, this is exactly how we got it set up. This is how it is going to work. You should know this in advance so that there are no surprises for you when you go into the process.” Here is something else I did not know though that it has radically changed my position on — we had a quick off-the-back-of-the-envelope number from Corey over at IODA last night.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Christopher Penn: About 7000 tracks sold through their affiliate link. What I did not realize is that affiliate link does not work outside the United States. So, in countries like the Netherlands where the song was number 5…

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: For rock and number 35 for the entire country of Netherlands yesterday, we will not see any of those sales until the final report has come back in from Black Lab. So, the fact that this was such an international sensation, I think it was number 9 in Germany, 22 in Canada, is just unbelievable. We cannot see that right now, so we are awaiting the sales data, which could take up to a month because…

C.C. Chapman: At least.

Christopher Penn: Apple has to report back to the band and stuff like that.

C.C. Chapman: I think a month is being optimistic on that from when I have talked to bands in the past. I know it could take up to three months sometimes.

Christopher Penn: Yeah, exactly. In this case, I do not necessarily know that the call to action was not there and that the sales portion did not go through.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: It may be considerably great, but the other thing that happened a lot especially again outside of the United States is that people went straight into iTunes. They did not bother going to the Bum Rush the Charts page. They heard about it, they heard the mind share and they just went right in and bought it themselves.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: Which is bad for reporting and tracking, but good in a sense that people took action and I think if you are a company looking for a way to convert mind share into action, having multiple avenues as long as it gets back to you bottom line or having multiple actions even ones you cannot track is good. You just have to trust that the community will come through for you.

C.C. Chapman: Right. I think another thing to keep in mind is that even if you do a campaign that is targeted to the United States, targeted to a specific state even or a demographic, the fact that if you do it in the new media space, it is instantly of a global nature whether you meant to or not. You learn that with the title of this campaign.

Christopher Penn: Yes. I found that Bum Rush in America means one thing. It is actually a pretty archaic term for a sort of an unruly mob, but it means something very, very different and slightly more explicit in the U.K.

C.C. Chapman: We got to be careful about that next time. It was really interesting because I know I sure was heck was not expecting to see, I mean the results in places like the Netherlands and Italy and Germany. It was pretty amazing to see it explode in those areas that we are not expecting. It was almost a happy, not an accident, but it was a happy result that was not expected.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. It was not planned for either. That is the main thing. It was not planned for.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. I think that was something to expect, expect the unexpected to happen. I think anything that someone does in the new media space should be viewed as an experiment. Things are not going to work the way you wanted. You are not always going to get the results, but as long as you keep track of everything, have an open communication about it and then when you are done, really stop and really, really look at it for what it is and think, “Okay. How can we do this better next time?” It might be a totally different campaign, but you are definitely going to learn things. I know you and I talked already about this, this morning earlier the fact that we hope people really look at it honestly and objectively rather than saying, “Woohoo! It was a roaring success,” or “Oh, it sucked and failed.” Honestly and objectively look at it is an important thing for any campaign you do.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. The nice thing about the campaign is that the people who were the organizers really do not have a vested interest. There is no bottom line profit that we have to worry about.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly.

Christopher Penn: Companies, especially marketing departments, do need to be able to step outside of their own bubble to look at something objectively and say, “Yeah. Okay. Our sales were not as high as we wanted,” and that requires a lot of buy-in from senior management…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Christopher Penn: To accept that they are willing to take the risk. We spend a week or a month on this campaign and it might not go anywhere. If you are willing to take that risk, eventually with a good scientific method and research, you will get it right, but it requires experimentation.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah. I really hope more companies start to put together an experimentation budget, put aside a little money even if it is just a little money, put it aside to spend it every quarter or even once a year. To try something outside of the comfort zone would help a lot and be ready — I can hear people rolling over right now on the account of me, be ready to lose that money. You might not get it back. You might not get the results you want, but would it not be better to experiment than rather like betting your whole brand on it? I think there is a lot of potential there to experiment and not be scared to try new things. The other thing, too, that is funny is I think these companies can work with companies and individuals out there to help them kind of figure out what is the right experiment. I have seen companies do this where they think they have the answer and they just go forward and do not ever ask anybody and it is the worst idea in the world. Once in a while maybe it is the right idea, but I do not know. Risk is one thing. Luck is another.

Christopher Penn: Right. I think more than just the money, I think if you want to have the best success in new media to try it out without betting the whole farm, create an SBU within your company. Create a little…

C.C. Chapman: A what?

Christopher Penn: An SBU, separate business unit.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Christopher Penn: Or a skunk works team or whatever you want to call it, but create a team of people who you basically give them, “Here are the legal guidelines we want to give you, so that you don’t get us sued, but other than that, take our brand and run with it, see what happens, see what results you generate and hey, if it works out, great. If not, then we acknowledge that it did not work out as well.” It is exactly the same principle as Google’s 20% rule or 3M’s 20% rule.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Christopher Penn: Take the time and see what happens and acknowledge it, give those people a lot of free reign.

C.C. Chapman: Amen. I know Google is the perfect case study because some of the most amazing things have come out of those experimentations. Let us face it, if there were not mad scientists out there to do an experiment, we would not have half the drugs and half the things in the world that we cannot live without nowadays. The same thing with new media. That was a weird analogy. It just came out of my mouth, but it is true. You have to experiment. Things are going to blow up sometimes and you are going to make a mess of your lab, but you got to keep pushing forward and try new things and not be scared to experiment is what I guess I am trying to drive home.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. If you do not experiment, your competitors are going to run over you immediately.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, yeah.

Christopher Penn: My company would not even exist if it had not been for the fact that our CEO at his previous company said, “Hey, I want to try out this whole internet thing,” in 1997. They all said, “Well, why don’t you go do that on your own?” and he did.

C.C. Chapman: There you go. Yeah. That is what happens. Most people will accept a certain amount of risk especially if you can frame it in a way that they can see some ROI if it succeeds. The good managers, the mavericks out there in the workplace, which is a great book by the way, I just realized I quoted a book title. The mavericks get it and they are willing to try it. I hope anyone listening to this podcast is one of those people who want to try things in their job day to day.

Christopher Penn: Oh, yeah. I think probably more their problem is convincing their supervisors to understand and to try things. Really, the only thing that cannot be said enough is that if you do not try it, somebody else already is right now and if you are not out in front, the view is not great.

C.C. Chapman: Amen. Yeah. The view only change for the lead snow dog.

Christopher Penn: Exactly. Bum Rush the Charts, this is a good example actually if you want to talk about getting your company to try something. Bum Rush the Charts, if you are in a very competitive vertical like the student loan entries are very, very, very competitive vertical, billions and billions of dollars on the line. So, it is tricky to try and play in that arena because if you make a misstep, you could seriously damage and lose hundreds of millions of dollars, but we are playing in this area in unrelated verticals. Bum Rush the Charts, PodCamp, all these different areas that we are playing with, testing things out, testing our ideas out and we have no competitors from the financial industry in new media because it is not hitting anyone else’s radar. We can try stuff. We can contribute positively to community without having to worry about every single competitor scrutinizing our every single move. We tried some stuff that I will tell you straight out has not worked. I do not talk about it, but it is out there. We have been trying Twitter and things like that. Some stuff works really well. Bum Rush the Charts has been a good experiment. PodCamp was a fantastic experiment.

C.C. Chapman: It continues to be a great experiment.

Christopher Penn: It continues to be a great experiment.

C.C. Chapman: I think PodCamp is a great example because every time they do it in a different city, it changes.

Christopher Penn: Oh, it is a different event.

C.C. Chapman: It is a totally different event because I heard somebody the other day say, “Why would I want to go there when I’ve been to this other PodCamp?” I am like, “It’s always different because it’s organized by different people.” It is very organic. It is so cool to just see it evolve every time.

Christopher Penn: Absolutely. Absolutely. For my company, it gives us a chance to throw ideas that we have out then and have a conversation with people who are in new media marketing come back to me and say, “Chris, that’s a really stupid idea. Why don’t you try this instead?” The benefits come straight back to the bottom line.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Christopher Penn: If you have a manager who is hesitant to play outside your vertical, you may be very surprised by how well it works.

C.C. Chapman: All right. Well, Chris, this has been great. I am glad you can come on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to do this. So, where can people find out more about you?

Christopher Penn: You can find my day job stuff at financialaidpodcast.com and my personal blog at christopherspenn.com.

C.C. Chapman: So, the end of the conversation got cut off. So, I need to jump right in there as soon as he was done because we also talked about seeing each other at PodCamp New York, which is coming up. I just want to thank Chris, financialaidpodcast.com, christopherspenn.com. Of course, it will be in the show notes, do not worry about that. They will be there as well. I would love your comments, call them in at 206-309-4729 and get those audio comments in and your questions. I am not sure what happened at the end of the conversation there. Skype was acting a little wonky, you can hear the microphone was going up and down, you can hear some sounds, but we do with what we can. It is an experiment, right? That is what the theme of the show was. We are going to be at PodCamp New York City, which is April 6th and 7th. It is going to be a really good time. I cannot wait for it and I hope to see you there. Chris and I will both be there so will a whole bunch of other people in the new media sphere, so if you want to come play in the playground, come out. It is a great event. It is free, free and free. Okay? Podcampnewyork.com, I will put it in the show notes as well. Thank you again to Chris. Thank you to everyone who took part in Bum Rush the Charts and as you can see, new media is nothing to be scared of. Get out there and play in it. We are all having a good time. I will see you next time here on Managing the Gray.

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Welcome to the brand new world of digital marketing consumer-generated media and no control PR. The rules of engagement are no longer black and white. You need to change, to evolve, to manage the gray, and how do you do that? You let C.C. Chapman help you.

C.C. Chapman: Well, good morning everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #29. I am C.C. Chapman from a very gray overcast MetroWest Boston. We got a storm brewing. I do not know where you are in the world, but if you have winter, you know that feeling where you go outside and you can just feel the impending storm? It has got that vibe. There is a Christmas flavor in the air? That is the way it feels right now. Forecasting 10 plus inches of snow tonight or this afternoon. It is going to make for an interesting drive up to New Hampshire if I do it