I'd Rather Be Writing » Podcamp

When Social Media Becomes Hollow

Tom Johnson — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:09:02 +0000

I attended Podcamp Salt Lake City (Podcampslc.org) on Friday for the third year in a row. The attendees have fluctuated. The first year, about 30 attended. The next year, about 90 attended. This year, the attendees decreased to around 45.

Sometimes events just suffer from poor timing. We are all so busy. But I noticed another trend: more and more sessions focused on social media, almost as much as podcasting. Here are a few of the session titles:

Client Attraction with Digital Media
Using social media to promote your content
Leveraging New / Social Media for Personal Branding
5 Killer Press Release Strategies For Your Podcasts

At one point I wondered if the social media club had infiltrated the podcasting crowd. Among the audience, it seemed everyone was genuinely interested in using social media to grow their business.

Thom Allen, the organizer of PodcampSLC, is even considering changing the name and focus of the conference to broaden the scope next year. I mentioned that we could change it to a “Social Media Camp” and include podcasting as a subtrack, fitting it into the larger trend of social media. If we changed that focus, I’m confident we would have 95+ bouncy people attending.

Many of the topics around social media included strategies for increasing your visibility and followers. One presenter laid down a social media methodology: get the reader’s attention, ask permission to interact (via a newsletter sign up), build trust with content, and then use that trust to influence decisions. It’s the same strategy Jason Van Orden teaches.

Other social media tips recommended by presenters included registering domain names in every social media space available, responding to every Facebook, Twitter, and email reply you receive from readers, and maintaining a presence in all major social media spheres, even the untrendy MySpace.

I’m not a huge social media fan, and during one IM moment with Jane, at home with the kids, she said, “I hate social media.” She says she uses Twitter because she wants to interact with her friends, not to “promote her brand.” She wants any “fame” to follow naturally from the content she produces rather than from spending 10 hours a day doing social media networking.

Me too. It’s not that I dislike Twitter or blogging or podcasting or Facebook or the infinite number of new social sites. For me, it’s the idea that social media’s only purpose is to grow your business and readership. I dislike the idea that it’s all essentially a business motive. You build trust so you can influence others and get them to follow you and subscribe to your newsletter. You engage in social media so you can increase your visibility, so people will link back to you, buy your products and services, and so you can take in more money and increase your product offerings. You engage in social media so you can expand your reach and little by little dominate the world.

When the discussion about social media revolves around this end game, I start to feel uneasy. It’s the same ill feeling I had in college when I would speak with business majors. Whereas most of us were engaged in literature or science, business majors seemed to focus only on schemes to make money. Is that how they interpret social media? As another scheme to make money?

I didn’t tweet much during the first half of Podcamp because I simply didn’t feel like it. After my presentation, I was a bit more relaxed and exhausted at the same time. My brain was numb from having stayed up too late the night before preparing my presentation and fulfilling other assignments. But after I ran into an old mission buddy at Podcamp, things started to turn around. I found a second wind and became much more alive. I started asking questions to the presenters, began posting a few tweets, and overall became more engaged.

When I post a tweet, publish a blog post, record a podcast, or engage in any other form of social media, I don’t consciously do it with the intent of growing my readership and increasing my brand or business. I don’t engage in social media for the business-motivated end game. I’m not trying to build trust with readers so that I can later influence them with product or service decisions. I’m just expressing and communicating about things I’m interested in. If the consequence is that people follow me and we interact, great. But my actions aren’t a ploy for influence. Influence comes from being passionate about something that captures you entirely, not from calculating SEO techniques to maximize visibility on every social media platform.

This year may mark the end of PodcampSLC and the genesis of a “Social Media Camp” of some kind. Businesses looking to increase their social savvy will send their marketing team to learn all about the rules of transparency and authenticity. They’ll discover the need for openness and unfiltered interaction with readers and clients. But if the entire social media strategy is built up with an end game of increased sales and customer followers, it will be a hollow endeavor.

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Podcamp Salt Lake City, March 27 — “Interviewing Remote and Local Guests for Podcasts”

Tom Johnson — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:03:09 +0000

If you’re in Utah, come check out Podcamp SLC on Friday, March 27 at Neumont University, South Jordan. I’ll be presenting on “Interviewing Remote and Local Guests for Podcasts.” Here’s a description of my presentation:

Interviewing is an art — one that can enable you to generate high-quality content for your podcast with little effort on your part, if you can find the right guest and ask the right questions. Connecting with another professional either in person or hundreds of miles away can be rewarding and even exhilarating, but you have to know how to ask the right questions (ones that will solicit interesting responses) and understand how to handle the technical details to get the best possible audio. In this presentation, you’ll learn five must-know interview techniques as well learn methods for getting studio-quality recordings even when you’re only connected with Skype.

Podcamp Salt Lake City

For more information on Podcamp Salt Lake City, including the schedule, location, and other details, see the podcampSLC site. It looks like all the sessions will be videotaped, so if you’re too far away to attend, stay subscribed to my blog and watch for links to the upcoming videos.

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Upcoming Presentations, or, Blogging and Increased Visibility

Tom Johnson — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:53:06 +0000

When you blog, you increase your visibility tenfold. And with increased visibility, you’re more frequently invited to speak at events. This year I have a handful of presentations I’m giving at various chapters and events. I decided to add an Upcoming Presentations button on my navigation bar to list them. If you’d like me to speak at your chapter, conference, or other event, let me know.

Here’s my 2009 schedule so far:

February 19. Blogging. Rocky Mountain STC chapter, Colorado. (webinar)
February 26. Quick Reference Guides. Intermountain-STC chapter, Utah. (co-presenting)
March 26. Podcasting. Podcamp Utah.
May 3-6. Blogging (pre-conference workshop). STC Summit, Atlanta.
May 3-6. Blogging (regular presentation). STC Summit, Atlanta.
May 3-6. Quick Reference Guides. STC Summit, Atlanta (co-presenting)
April 7. WordPress. STC Suncoast chapter in Florida. (webinar)
November 5. WordPress/Blogging. STC Suncoast chapter, Florida.

Honestly, I’ve never spoken at so many events in one year. Last year I presented at the STC Summit on podcasting and participated on a panel about marketing yourself in a web 2.0 environment. I also presented on WordPress at Doc Train West and gave a webinar to STC Phoenix about help and web 2.0. The year before that, I only presented on blogging usability at Doc Train West.

So essentially, the number of events I’ve been invited to speak at have at least doubled every year since I’ve been blogging. This points to an interesting phenomenon. Blogging = Visibility.

Visibility is essential to marketing yourself. The other day a reader sent me a long email asking how he could market himself as a technical writer. As a 29-year-old trying to break into the profession, he wanted to establish himself as a technical writer and find a job. Although you can market yourself by attending STC events, publishing in newsletters, passing out business cards, creating a portfolio, and so on, blogging actively about a specific topic probably gives you the most leverage.

The more you blog, the more visible you become. And as your visibility increases, you receive a greater number of invitations. I also serve on the STC Intercom advisory panel. With a small group of other technical communicators, we give suggestions and ideas to the Intercom editors about topics and writers for upcoming Intercom issues. I noticed that when I sit down and try to think about who would be good to write about X, bloggers come to mind first, simply because they are more visible.

So there you have it. Blogging = Visibility and Visibility leads to increased Invitations.

There is one other element at play here: Time. With all these factors (blogging, visibility, and invitations), your amount of Time always decreases, unfortunately.

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Notes from My First WordPress Meetup

Tom Johnson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:22:32 +0000

I attended my first WordPress meetup yesterday. Here’s a 20-second video that Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices took at the event. My wife and I appear at the very end, engaged in conversation with a couple of seasoned bloggers who make their living from a quotations page that gets 200,000 hits a day. (By the way, I found this video on Janet Meiners’ site (aka Newspaper Girl), who wrote an excellent post about the event.)

Click To Play

I learned a few interesting things at this meetup:

You can make a living from the ad revenue from your site. Laura and Michael Moncur run a Quotations Page site, which gets 200,000 hits a day and provides their primary income. They started it in 1994 and use TribalFusion for the ads. You’d think they feverishly add dozens of quotes a day to keep up the rankings, but Laura said they add maybe half a dozen new quotes a week. The key is that they started so early.
The most profitable readers are those who don’t find what they want on your site. They click the ads because your content doesn’t provide the answers. This provides an interesting irony about writing: to make money with ads, stack up your content with SEO qualities to attract searchers, and then leave them wanting more. (Of course, it’s a double-edged sword: if you don’t write useful content, no one will link to you, and your SEO rank will drop.)
Sometimes the ads displayed on your site contradict the actual recommendations of your post. Sure you want readers to click the ads, but … oh the ethics of making money.
Joseph Scott, one of the Automaticc employees behind WordPress, says WordPress 2.4 will offer a total redesign of the administrative panel, a complete UI overhaul that will make strides in usability.
We talked about WordPress’s ability to attract volunteer forum moderators who feel their calling is to help users solve their problems, and they work all hours of the day in this calling. None of us understood the motivations of forum volunteers, but we all appreciated their help. Laura said that people even send her quotes all the time to add to their site.
Text-link ads can hurt your SEO because Google penalizes you for your link relationship with spammy sites. You might make a few bucks from the ad, but it will hurt your rankings, and then your site will lose traffic.
We talked about the dangers of syndicating your content to other sites, such as corporatewebsite.com. If you do a search for your post title, and their site appears higher than yours, you’re losing valuable traffic. (Because of this, I decided to stop allowing corporatewebsite to occasionally post content from my site, even with attributions.)
We asked Joseph why WordPress doesn’t provide more attractive themes. Everyone agreed that most WordPress themes are visually amateur, and some are embarrassing. Joseph said WordPress doesn’t provide more themes in the default install because including themes also means excluding themes. Whenever they make a decision to include/exclude a theme, hundreds of upset people write in angrily complaining about the unfairness of not including their theme. I believe he said WP.themes.net is dying for the same reason.
I recommended that WordPress include the Alex King’s Popularity Contest as a Top 10 Posts widget built into the core, but Joseph said the same thing happens with plugins as with themes: people go crazy when they realize their plugin was excluded. My wife and I were still in favor of the reality check.
Rather than going to all the trouble to customize themes manually, someone recommended just buying a professional one for $50 to $100. It’s well-worth the hours you will spend trying to customize a free one. In fact, the guy I was talking to (Thom Allen), says he often builds sites for clients from themes he buys. About all he has to do, then, is set up the site, install the theme, and input the client’s content. I totally agree with this idea. I’m not a graphic designer, and it takes me a long time to customize a theme. So today I started surfing around for premium WordPress themes and saw one I like here: WordPress Magazine theme. My wife hasn’t given me permission to buy it, and it’s too magazine-ish for me anyway, but I’m on the lookout.
We really appreciated the people who came up to talk to us. We arrived late (and the incorrect address didn’t help — like Newspaper Girl, we also used Goog-411 to find where the restaurant was). When we got there, the two big round tables were packed, especially the one where Matt Mullenweg was sitting. But some outgoing people pulled their chairs up next to our table and were extremely friendly to us, including Thom Allen, who is organizing the upcoming podcamp in SLC, and also Michael Moncur, Laura Moncur, and Joseph Scott.
As a final note, I was really glad my wife joined me for this event, because otherwise I would have felt too nerdy alone.

By the way, if you’re local to SLC and want to get on the blogger mailing list, contact Laura Moncur and she’ll add you.

Feb 5 Update:

Rocky Mountain Voices posted an interview with Matt Mullenweg here (at the same restaurant, I believe). Matt talks about how they monetize WordPress and their new 29.5 million dollar funding.

Upcoming PodCamp in Salt Lake City on March 15

Tom Johnson — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:42:27 +0000

If you’re a podcaster and you live in Utah, be sure to attend the upcoming podcamp in Salt Lake City. Details are as follows:

Saturday, March 15, 2008
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Neumont University
10701 S River Front Parkway, Suite 300
South Jordan, Utah 84095

Podcamp homepage: http://www.podcampslc.org/. Original announcement: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/319547/

I’m learning that several big podcasting names are in Utah, including Phil Windley, executive producer of IT Conversations; and Podango, a podcasting network.