I’m about halfway through Mitch Joel’s book called Six Pixels of Separation and in the early chapters he talks about how he started blogging as a way to grow his business and even though it felt weird giving away content for free (he used to be a journalist), it wasn’t long before it producing content for free led to tangible benefits, the latest of which of course is his book deal.
[note: throughout this blog post I use the word "attention" not in a "HEY LOOK AT ME" way, but in the way we choose to give a person attention over other people, or a brand attention over other brands. It is a form of earned attention, not interruptive attention like TV advertising]
This got me thinking about my own journey with blogging and social media and I realised I never shared the story of my first job offer, so I’ll do it here.
This led to me getting called up by someone present at ad:tech and after a couple of interviews, they offered me my first job offer (coincidentally, the company had a colour in it’s name as well). I didn’t take it but I sincerely believe that blogging and starting Social Media Breakfast | Singapore for free led to all these opportunities and it is all these opportunities and connections that eventually built enough of a network and experience to land me my job today.
At job interviews, people have given me flak for not being “entrepreneurial” enough and giving away stuff for free. I think that’s losing the forest for the trees. For me, everything changed when I realised I was now my own TV, radio and print channel rolled up in one. As Seth Godin says “In a world of free, everyone can play.”
As Chris Anderson illustrates in “Free” the first step is using free to get people to pay attention to you, the second step is converting that attention into something of value. This is especially true in the attention economy, as ours is.
My blog and Social Media Breakfast earned me the “attention” that was converted into references, networks and relationships which in turn served as a way to earn more “attention” that was converted into a job.
People balk at free because of their inability to convert the earned attention into something of value.
I was listening to Jaffe Juice #127 a couple of days ago, and it was an episode featuring Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation, two of my favourite podcasters for the “price” of one!
Amidst the many things they talked about, what really caught my attention was how they’re both doing new things. Mitch with his book and Joseph with Jaffe Juice TV. And it really got me thinking about one point:
1) If you don’t experiment you’ll never know, and if you never know, you shouldn’t be in a position to talk about it
Joseph mentions that a prerequisite to work at Crayon (his agency) is that you have to blog. And awhile back , Pat Law asked “if you ran an agency, I would…” and my response was hire people who blog. I just think you really need to know about the medium before being able to advise anyone on what they’re doing.
And sometimes the point of experimenting is just to give it a go and figure out whether it’s an avenue you want to go ahead with or not. With The GennY Podcast, we don’t even have metrics or anything, but I think just us getting together and bouncing around ideas really at least gives us an understanding of what podcasting is, and if it would make sense to bring it to work, school, whatever.
Right now, giving that organisations and companies are so far behind the social media curve, it’s the best time to start “dabbling” in it, maybe just a few hours a week, because that’s the only way you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. Just because something has been working for the last five years, doesn’t mean it’ll continue to work as well as it has been for the next five.
I guess the same lesson goes to all the people jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and just using it as a broadcast medium. Because they never tried and experimented with it in the beginning, they’re late, catching up, and as a result, using it wrongly and plain wasting resources.
If you usually skip weekly link section (published Sunday night/Monday morning, depending which part of the world you’re in), don’t skip it this week because there are two great research pieces, two blog posts and *gasp* one semi-mainstream media post this week. All great reads.
Community Management Online Communities: Establishing A Community’s Culture – As empirical as research can be when it comes to stuff like “community” and “culture”. A must-read for those involved in community management, or thinking about entering it.
THE INTERNET AS A DOMINANT FACTOR IN YOUNG MEN’S LIFE:
* 69% say they can’t live without the Internet, versus just 31% for television
* 40% use the Internet for more than 22 hours a week
* 36% say they can’t live without the Internet for socializing
* 33% say they can’t live without online entertainment
GAMERS AS CONSUMERS
* The average gaming household income ($79,000) is notably higher than that of non-gaming households ($54,000).
* Gamers are willing to pay extra for the latest and greatest: they are twice as likely as non-gamers to buy a product featuring new technology even if they are aware that there are still bugs.
Twitter
Like many other people around the world, I was hooked on the hashtag #mumbai on Twitter following the attacks. The lessons learned from this are everywhere, so I won’t re-blog them here, but it’s nice to see social media tools getting some recognition from big mainstream media outlets like Forbes on Twitter’s Moment.
Blogging
Mitch Joel tells us to Start A Blog Today, and I couldn’t agree more. Especially for those like me, waiting to enter into a very competitive market in this recession economy, it could just make the difference, assuming you’re applying for an enlightened corporation that would recognise the benefits of blogging.
Blogger Outreach
Finally, Brian asks Why Do We Have Blogger Events? and I think he’s hit the differentiating factor on the head. It’s not about randomly inviting people for events, it’s about community building. And that’s the hard part.
As always, share your links with me on Delicious or just leave them in the comments below!
There was an allusion to “Tribes” a couple of times in yesterday’s post, listen to Seth Godin talk about it for more than an hour in this special edition of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. It took me a long time to finish it because my daily commute is five minutes, but so worth it.
Generation Y, Digital Natives & Millennials
Workplace 2.0: Motivating and Managing Millennials – Very short (12 pages total, about 8 pages of content) PDF file on managing millennials (aka: us). It doesn’t actually give much of a “how to”, but it does lead you to understanding us more. I must say he is right on about fervour, hard work and tireless labour. I’d work overtime, for free, for a job that’s rewarding in an industry I’m passionate about.
Digital Natives are here by Mitch Joel – Again, great post to help the people in management understand the digital natives. I feel a lot of people still aren’t ready to accept that our generation is a little bit different and that being constantly connected is more of an empowerment than a distraction. But those organisations who do grasp that, are going to be able to channel us much more efficiently.
Social Media Strategy
The Strategist and Social Media by Kami Huyse – Great slides in there that you should read if you’re beginning to think of a social media strategy, especially points about risks of social media engagement, and the Sea World case study.
MTV to MySpace: Post Our Content, Please – you might remember in my review of the book/rant Cult Of The Amateur by Andrew Keen that he called Viacom (parent company of MTV) suing YouTube a “powerful message”. I say the partnership between MTV and MySpace is a) a more powerful message b) a sign that at least one player in the industry waking up to reality.
The Top Ten Reasons iTunes Sucks – I agree with every single point mentioned here, and it absolutely sucks that Apple obviously doesn’t care what people are saying, with similar issues existing in 2006. At this point I hate iTunes so much, I’d pay money for a programme that would solve these problems.
As always, share your links with me in the comments, or you can find me on delicious.
The travesty. It has been a week since I last blogged! Don’t worry, not a sign of things to come, but rather a sign of a c-r-a-z-y week. I have loads of posts lined up including the costs of not being involved in social media, clarifying my stand on “make sure your product doesn’t suck”, a guest interview with Todd Murray of Active Channel, my worries over FeedBurner, an example of media convergence that I do like and why some people don’t get Twitter, among other things. If any of this sounds good to you, check back frequently or why don’t you subscribe via RSS for free, and have it delivered to you when it’s published? And speaking of RSS…
RSS
Steven Hodson tells that Why RSS feed adoption sucks doesn’t get any simpler than this, and I can’t agree more. The problem he talks about – clicking on an RSS feed sign and getting gibberish HTML – happened to me at least twice before I finally adopted RSS. And there were months in between those instances.
Blogging
I have an audio comment on Six Pixels Of Separation #128 by Mitch Joel, sparked by his blog post which asks when is it okay to delete blog comments? I couldn’t believe the number of people who said “My blog, my rules”, so I turned the question around and directed a question at those very same people: “Would it be okay if a company said “my blog my rules?” and went around deleting negative comments?”. I deliberately didn’t blog about this so that the discussion can take place on SPOS, so do give it a listen!
More importantly, you need to watch this video from Christopher Penn of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast titled Building Blocks of Social Media: Social Media Prerequisites.. Awesome stuff from beginning to end. The Q&A at the end was very enlightening to me. Usually when we deal with social media plans we jump to the solution, Chris’s questions remind us how important analysis is as well. I can’t embed the video and it’s pretty huge, but definitely worth a watch. And the podcast is worth subscribing to as well.
Podcamp Singapore
Claudia gives us a full recap from what went on at Podcamp Singapore. I definitely would have loved to be there, loved to have spoken and participated, but this is a close second!
That’s it for this week, as always, share your links with me in the comments, or you can find me on delicious.
Attending Podcamp Montreal, I was inspired by both Mitch Joel and CC Chapman’s challenge to do something you’ve not tried before, and in my case, that would be a full on video post so here is mine, extending on a theme mentioned at the same session about ranting and calling companies out online. In line with “podcasting from the heart” I did this in one take with no edits. Let me know what you thought and if you’d like to see more of this!
I’m attending Podcamp Montreal this weekend and so far it’s been awesome. I’ve met Mitch Joel and CC Chapman so far and hopefully many more soon to come.
Halfway through Mitch’s presentation I started wondering at the lack of college people at these events. Social Media Breakfast | Singapore may be an anomaly because it’s primarily youth-initiated, but generally, where’s Gen Y?
I noticed quite a few “business” questions today. Like how can my organisation use this, or how would this make sense for my message. People in organisations (read: our bosses) are trying to figure this stuff out, so why aren’t we? Are we safe in the delusion that learning about the 4Ps is going to get us by in the workplace? I was back in a marketing class after not taking one for a year, and it struck me how the stuff being taught is simply not relevant to my (read: Gen Y’s) world anymore.
Getting to the point, we have all these conferences back home that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend. Why don’t we have one by us students for students? And I’m not talking about people like me talking just about social media. Maybe it’s someone in a local band talking about how his blog is attracting new fans, maybe it’s someone with a fashion site talking about expanding her presence via Facebook. Sort of like the way we talked about wellness, food, photography, haikus and social media in our audio discussion.
So for the people in school going out to get a job soon. Or thinking of switching a different job because your finance job doesn’t look as glittery as it did a week ago, what do you think? Do you need social media in your job? Would you attend small gatherings to improve on them and share? Or do you think you can learn it all at work? Feedback please!
When I read about Podcamp Montreal fromMitch Joel’s blog, I signed up instantly! One of the things I wanted to do while on exchange here in Kingston was to really explore the social media scene and see how different it is from Singapore. What a perfect opportunity!
I’m a little nervous because the official language in Montreal is French (according to Wikipedia) and some of the sessions are held in French, but I’m sure there will be enough English sessions to get by.
It’s happening over the 20th and 21st of September (just three weeks away!) so be prepared to see lots of blogging and Flip videos over that weekend. I just know this is going to be inspiring.
Haven’t done this in awhile, but I really wanted to direct you to two resources which I found to be extremely valuable just yesterday.
Word Of Mouth Manual II Dave Balter who co-authored Grapevine (which I remember reading two years ago) has a new book out called the Word Of Mouth Manual Volume II. Since focusing more and more on social media, I had actually thought in recent weeks about re-visiting the book and seeing what is still relevant today. I first came across the link from Mitch Joel and I don’t want to copy and paste the URL here because it’s a unique URL (excellent for measurement), so head on there if you want to download the book for FREE! (otherwise it costs you $45 on Amazon).
Also, the way the news got out was great, targeting a few key influencers online like John Moore from Brand Autopsy, John Bell from the Digital Influence Mapping Project, Todd Defren at PR Squared and of course Seth Godin among others. Given that these posts appeared in my feeds alone, I’m sure spread out over the targeted blogs, many more people interested in communication and word of mouth would have come across it as well. And appearing numerous times in numerous blogs also sends a strong signal: These many people have found it worth their time, it’s probably worth yours too.
Feedly
As always, Louis Gray brings the best in all things feed-related. I’m not going to just scrape the details from his blog because his write-up is so thorough, there’s probably nothing more I can do but to help spread the word by directing you to his coverage. I’ve just installed Feedly and am finding it a lot to get used to, but I can see certain elements I like.
This is late so I’m going to jump straight into it. My choice for the March podcast of the month goes to Six Pixels of Separation for the interview with Seth Godin in #93. I also listened to #94 – #97, and #97 is the episode where Mitch talks about Social Media Breakfast: Singapore, so you might want to check that out as well.
Other podcasts that I really think you should check out:
With that said I also enjoyed Shill’sthoughts on SXSW coverage happening literally everywhere else, and how that feels from people not at the event. I really felt their point of view because I was one of those people getting bombarded non-stop on Twitter about SXSW. Probably something everyone will have to figure out for the next event.
Joseph Jaffe also weighed in on the SXSW coverage and Intellagirl’s challenge in Jaffe Juice #107 as well as facing outward from the fishbowl. An observation which I think is spot on.
Two new podcasts I picked up are For Immediate Release which comes out so frequently I can barely keep up but some good, thought provoking content in there, as well as Inside PR, whose discussion on ethics in PR to be very enlightening in #103 and #104
As always I am open to any and all suggestions for new podcasts to listen do. Just drop me a comment! While you’re at it, why not check out the podcast of the month for February and January as well?
