MediaJoltz

There has been a lot going on in my life for the past few weeks about communication and I’d like to touch on what has happened and what I think it means…
GwavaCon with Gwava TV: Gwava a Novell partner who works with Groupwise had a conference called GwavaCon at the end of January in San Diego/Del Mar. I and my husband took part in the GWAVA TV crew. We’ve done video for GWAVA before, but this was a little different because we attempted to broadcast live some of the classes and the keynotes. I say attempted because we still experienced problems with broadband speeds-but eventually found a solution.
What this means: This means that those who aren’t able to make it to a conference aren’t going to be left out. It means that there is content about/for GWAVA and Novell Groupwise supporters that is available across the world. The ability to do this just 5 years ago would have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. Granted, like I said the internet wasn’t the greatest, but that is something that is being improved upon every day.

Passing of a Prophet: President Hinckley, 15th Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints passed away on January 27th.

What this means: Its not necessarily what happens now that was so significant, it was the way this news was communicated. At approximately 7pm MST he passed away. At 8pm my husband, Cammon, received a text from his cousin. Not but a few seconds later I received a text from my brother. And then it was interesting because at the time, we were in the middle of a dinner presentation at this conference and when I looked around I saw those who are of the LDS faith checking their phones as well. There are tons of stories circulating about how Facebook groups were created in a few short hours and the message went out to wear your Sunday best that Monday morning.
How fitting for a church leader who stressed Media Relations and is credited with bringing the church out of obscurity. Thousands upon thousands all over the world wore their Sunday best that Monday-and it was all because of the technology we have been blessed with.

The Pulver Show with Jeff Pulver: Today I participated as long as a could in the Pulver TV show with the guys from Qik.com-live broadcast video from your mobile phone.
What it means: One thing I remember is the London Bombings and how a lot of the footage shown were from people’s cell phones. This Washington Post article talks about how immediate we were able to see what was happening. And not even just video, but with the school shootings happening across the country, how people started blogging immediately. And take a look at the political campaign here in the U.S and how things are changing because the power to produce is no longer just with the big media giants.
What it all means: Because you no longer have to pay millions of dollars to have an online presence, people are able to capture live life moments and share them with the world. This ability to broadcast one’s life is huge. I wonder how I will communicate with my son.

I will write about my hiatus later, but for now, here is my ode to Richard Bliss:
Richard Bliss VP of Marketing for GWAVA, a Novell partner, has an amazing mind. He gets it. He understands the need for businesses to get content and information to their clients/customers AND be accessible for questions, comments and feedback on that information.

I was watching a news report about how the political campaign leaders have been stumbling this year with how much they AREN’T able to control. Take for instance the 1984 Hillary video “Vote Different.”

It was quite a while before anyone even knew who put the video together! Now you’ve got blogs, and wikis and tons of conversations online that can’t be controlled. The report then went into how this is the case for all marketers alike-how they are scrambling because they don’t know how to deal with the influx of conversation that isn’t being channeled THROUGH them.

Richard isn’t freaking out though. His eyes light up when he talks about how cool it is to spread the word about projects, conferences and events. Meetings or conversations with him leave my head hurting-in a good way. He has so many ideas that he wants to try that I have to make sure I record the conversations we have so I can remember everything he has planned!

The difference between Richard and most marketers right now is that he wants to TRACK the conversations, see who is saying what and encourage more, not CONTROL it. I have heard so many people say “but if I put a blog on my company website, I might get negative comments about my company.” I can tell you right now, if you get negative comments on your blog, there are negative comments all over the internet. At least on your blog it is your turf, and you can respond and start putting that PR department to work.

By monitoring the online conversations people are having with each other, we can find out the truth about how people feel about our business/product. And by starting a company blog, a company wiki, and being IN the conversations, you are allowing yourself to be accessible to your client/customer which makes them feel like they can get to know you better, and be more loyal to more than just your brand, but to you yourself. You are also STARTING conversations and provoking thoughts that might have been left otherwise.

Richard is using all outlets of the web to try and spread the word, start conversations and allow people to talk back. His blog: BlissPoint Blog talks about marketing, overcoming fears and what he is up to with GWAVA. His blog allows comments-or I like to call it feedback. The GWAVA TV Channel shares content streaming 24/7 and has a chat room for you to talk about how you feel. He is also on LinkedIn and has dabbled in Twitter and has his own YouTube Channel too. As a client of GWAVA, you would have no problem finding out what is going on with the company on a personal level.

I think this is an excellent example of how companies need to embrace the online world. This doesn’t mean to stop using traditional methods, but adapting new ones and merging the two. Richard understands the importance of using all outlets and taking hold of all opportunities to expand communication to anyone who wants to listen. Way to go dude!

I was out to lunch with my mom and sister over the holiday and we got to talking about how I am able to work from home.

Granted I do feel a little like my mother sees it as lounging around-and while my office chair is my couch, I am up and doing and filling my day with worthwhile work-but she said what she envies the most is that if I am hungry, I can go to the pantry and get some food.  If I want to take a day off, I do extra work the day before or the day after so I can take time off.

She then said that she feels like she would want to start a business of her own someday so she can be her own boss.  I told her to be careful though, that most businesses started because they wanted to be able to take time off or just “be their own boss” don’t have a very high chance of making it.  The best reason to start your own company is to fill a niche that no one else is.  I asked her if she had a niche.

“Yes, a very strong niche.  I feel like I can do something on my own and I have this very strong urge to explore that feeling.”

My sister and I tried to hide our giggles as we explained that we weren’t talking about an itch, but a niche-when you see a hole that you can fill, where you see someone doing something and you see a better way to do it.

“Oh. Well I’ll have to think about that,” my mom said.  “But I do still have this urge to do something more fulfilling in life.”

“Thats great, Mom.  That is at least a start.”

Now go find your niche and scratch it!

Thanks to Michael Wesch for this video and letting us share it over the web.

While I enjoyed very much the classes taught at the Blogging 4 Business Conference in Salt Lake City Utah yesterday, it was the afternoon Keynote address by Gary Goldhammer VP of Edelman that really hit home for me.

Let me backtrack a bit and set the situation up for you from my point of view. I went to the Podcast and New Media Expo (2007) in Ontario, California and while I met tons of people I had been networking with online, I have to be brutally honest and say that I left the conference feeling like the sessions were lacking what I had wanted to learn. Don’t get me wrong, the speakers were all very amazing people who are doing great things, but each class felt like it was a “here is what I did, now go see if it works for you” type of pep speech. New media is still too new for anyone to be an “expert” on anything but I wanted to hear the words “this is what you need to be doing-this is where things are going and this is how to get there.”

I was struggling with these thoughts-not trying to say I am any better than those who presented at the conference either-they have implemented what they have learned and I am just beginning, but there was something missing.

Then I had a conversation when I returned, with a friend who said the Internet was still too immature for him. He said that as a whole it is still being used for entertainment. He is friends with me on Twitter and some other communities and he says that when he logs on, he has yet to find anything anyone is saying really helpful to him. He wants information, not just what you’re doing that afternoon, he wants to be educated not entertained-he doesn’t have time for that.

I had a long argument with him and hung up very frustrated with what he was saying.
Then at the conference yesterday-it all collided together with Gary’s address. He said a lot of important things and here are the few that really meant something to me:
(These quotes are very close to what he said-I couldn’t type fast enough to write down word for word)

“We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened, but the could have happened is where greater innovation might be.”

“What we know is less significant than what we don’t know.”

We are all amazed at what has happened with technology, but what don’t we know about the technology that we have, or don’t have? This kind of boggles the mind. Even ten years ago were people thinking about text messaging on their cell phones as a mainstream practice? If they were, then what is it that they weren’t thinking about? We are preoccupied with getting video on our cell phones, is there a greater technology that we aren’t thinking about instead?

And can we look at the past to determine the future or even predict the future of social media? We can’t, according to Gary. He gave this story that will stick with me forever:

“There was a turkey farm where lived a specific turkey (he hasn’t named the turkey yet, but I’ll call the turkey Fred).
So Fred the turkey wakes up every morning to the farmer coming out to feed him and patting Fred on the head. Fred enjoys this very much and looks forward to this routine each and every morning.
Like clockwork the farmer always gets up and feeds Fred the turkey and pats Fred on the head. This happens every day rain or shine at the same time for 1000 days.
On day1001 like clockwork the farmer gets up and goes out to feed the turkey named Fred. The turkey eats the food the farmer gives him and then the farmer cuts Fred’s head off and they eat Fred for Thanksgiving. How much of this could Fred have predicted?”

Don’t use the past to predict the future, make the future of how you use the Internet the way you want it to be.

I was so stuck on the fact that no one at the PME told me what they are doing or will be doing, just what they have done-that I lost the idea that it doesn’t matter what others are doing, I need to worry about myself. Thinking about my post “The Internet is Crashing: Permanently”, what am I personally doing to make sure I am flexible if either something horrible goes wrong, or if something wonderfully awesome happens-am I prepared to own it and make it work for me either way?

What about my friend? Well from our conversation, I see that he will probably wait to see what happens and then try to adapt. What I don’t see happening ever, though, is the Internet, or Twitter or any application turning into an education only outlet. Look at the TV and Print and Radio mediums. If I turn on Nickelodeon or MTV then I will get entertainment. If I turn on The History Channel or The Discovery Channel, then I will be informed. If my friend wanted these applications to work for him, he needs to turn on the right channels. He would join up with programmers and developers and talk with them throughout the day rather than myself-who not only doesn’t know code, but has done some damage trying to figure it out!

So through this mumble jumble I understand now that I can’t rely on anyone to predict what is going to happen to the future of social media because the past isn’t the future-I have to get in the drivers seat and make my own future. Anyone who wants to join me, I won’t get upset if you go down a different road than I go-just make sure we keep in touch, my screen name on Twitter is mediajoltz!

So before a seminar or presentation you normally find me scouring the Internet for information about podcasting, blogging or new media in general, so I can tout what is going on and why people need to be a part of something big.

Recent discussions though, have led me to look at those statistics more carefully. In my research I have found that while it seems to be growing, we who are of the “new media” space are a very, very small number.

According to Internet World Stats Website there are 6,574,666,417 people in the world today and 1,244,449,601 people have internet access. Normally I say take a look at this stat and tell me if your company is doing something to reach that amount of people who have internet access. But today I ask you, did you realize that only about 19% of the world has internet access?

Here are some stats and the websites I found the stats on the popular applications people are using:

There are 506,331 users of twitter as of Oct 11th 2007, according to http://www.twitdir.com/. Out of those how many are actually active is still unknown. And only 506K when there are more than a billion people who have access to the internet is not that many.
34 million active members worldwide are using Facebook according to the Wikipedia article on Facebook. Once again I would normally say something like “34 million people, how would you like even a piece of those people to become your friends and get on your mailing list,” or something like that. And yet 34 million is still comparatively small.

Now for something thats still very new, we turn to Second Life. According to the description on their webpage only 9,980,489 people logged into Second Life within the last 60 days.

Noticed how I said only. Believe me, when talking to those outside the fishbowl, I normally talk in an excited voice and act like this is huge! But to those of us in it, how many new people do you continue to talk to on a regular basis, compared to the “handful” of regulars?

If you go to the Pew internet Research Company and type blogging in the search function you get a list of different reports. Report number one and six specifically drew my interest:

From these reports you will find these stats:

Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs – a significant increase since the fall of 2005.

Only 8% keep and 39% read a blog. So if you are reading or writing or doing both, boy are you leaps and bounds above more than half of the population of the U.S. Makes you feel special and lonely all at the same time, huh?

44% of adult American Internet users – more than 53 million people – have contributed material to the online world. Content creation in our definition includes creating a Web site, posting material to another Web site for work, family or another organization, posting materials to a personal or another person’s Weblog or online diary. It also includes posting photos, artwork, writing, or audio and video files to the World Wide Web, to a chat room or discussion or newsgroup. The average number of content creating activities for a content creator is relatively small – 1.7 activities – and that suggests the most Internet users are content for now to find a small number of ways to make their contribution.

This stat is the one that got me. “Content Creation” meaning doing pretty much anything to add to the internet, including creating a website-and only 44% of American Internet Users have done this? Way to go those of you who have bravely gone this far!

Some 13% of Internet users have their own Web site. Most do not refresh the material on their site very often: 10% of Web site owners post to their sites daily or more often, but the plurality (42%) update their site once a month or less often.

Okay, for those 13% of you who have a website, lesson to learn-the people who are online are dynamic. Unless you provide fresh material, they have no reason to come back.
I know that stats are not the end all, and there are so many reports that contradict each other, but come on, we have to understand that no matter what the stats say, 9 million or 20 million, the fishbowl is still very small.

I really like what Tom Webster Vice President of Edison Media Research has to say in his analysis: New Podcasting Statistic-Is the Glass Half-Full, or Half Empty? and encourage you to read the whole thing. One comment he makes I have heard myself in my podcasting seminars:

“Though long-time podcasters are tired of hearing this, and probably rejected it two years ago, there is no question that a good chunk of people who might otherwise be interested in podcasts believe that an MP3 player (and, specifically, an iPod) is required to listen.”

I don’t know how many times people have said in seminars, “but I don’t have an iPod.”   It really is amazing.

So what we need to do to help is make new media easy for the non-tech person to access it. Don’t start talking about how they can subscribe to your podcast through an RSS that automatically downloads the episode to their computer through an aggregator… you’ve lost them already! Tell them to go to the website and hit play to listen to your new show, or to read an article you wrote.

Stop talking about podcasting, blogging and new media like it is some foreign thing that only you understand and start talking about your show, or journal-use words people understand, make it simple.

Wow, C.C. Chapman is talking today on his podcast Managing the Gray about how to break out of the fishbowl and stop having conversations with the same people online. At least the title of his podcast episode is called New Clients and Breaking Fishbowls.

So CC says we need to break the proverbial fishbowl and let it crash to pieces so we can just simply get a bigger fishbowl.
So what are you doing to break out of the “echo chamber?” Are you talking to friends and family about what is going on? Do they understand? Does it take more than a casual conversation for them to understand?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now since I was called in to help some friends create a better online presence for their conference-The Wasatch Business Conference. But you see, the people who have been attracted to this conference are not ones who spend much of their time on the Internet. I was told we need to teach them the importance of the online world. This is right within my realm of work-helping business owners create an online presence that kicks butt. The problem is, is that I have found, at least in my area, that the learning curve for those who aren’t ready to be taken into the online world, is VERY high right now. I have narrowed my target audience to those who are interested in learning the importance-not those who really don’t know or care.

Take my mother for instance, the one who is scared of mechanical pencils. Is she someone who belongs online, does she deserve the careful continuous education, even though I don’t think she’ll ever get it? And no, I’m not slacking on teaching her because I’m afraid she’ll read my post about her being scared of mechanical pencils…

Seriously though, are there people like that out there you are working with-are you going to continue educating them or is it time to move on to someone else? How do you know it is time to move on?

Photo provided by www.ellie-miller.com/fishbowl.jpg

Sitting watching the premier of Pushing Daisies last night (we have a friend who did all the 3d composite shots and wanted to show support) I saw a commercial from Orbitz that I have seen often-the person with the floating circle above their heads giving them updates on their travel arrangements. But this time something caught my attention-it said travel updates by real people!!

I had to go check this out. Orbitz, as of September performed an upgrade to their “Traveler Updates” program where now, you get the updates to any selected airport made by real people. Very similar to the set-up twitter has, someone writes about a topic ranging from security line, check-in, traffic-and it gets sent to you as an alert.

Orbitz even called it a community on the commercial. I think this is a great idea and that more companies could follow. You don’t even have to set up a new website or your own alert system. You could simply get an account with twitter.

Now when I mention twitter to some company owner I usually get the weird look like “isn’t that just a social communication thing like IM where people write useless updates about their day?” Well that depends on who you subscribe to. And while Orbitz isn’t using twitter, it is the same idea-and I think it can be useful in several different applications.

The Today Show has joined twitter and posts links to the video segments of their news shows. Thanks to Jim Long because now I only have to find the one that interests me and watch it instead of sitting through a whole show just to get one segment.

A laundry room at a college has a twitter account and updates how many washers and dryers are available.

The Los Angeles Fire Department uses twitter to inform of accidents on the road-which could help you avoid traffic if the radio doesn’t pick it up immediately as well as any other incidents that they are called to respond too. Interesting use of Twitter and they have 300+ people following them.

I use twitter a ton. I use it to keep up with friends, to gather information-it came in very handy when a friend Jesse Stay gave us play by play action on the BYU vs NM game while I was flying back from PME. I wish there was a BYU tweeter on so then all of Jesse’s non-byu fans wouldn’t get mad at him.

Right now I get updates on my phone about the weather in my area. But I only get it once a day. What if I was traveling? Sure I can check online or watch the weather channel, but I think it would be cooler if I got real time updates from people. What if the weather channel allowed for people of their area to post a weather report throughout the day so then I can get real time updates. A 40% chance of rain-well did it rain that day with 40%?

So how can a company use twitter? I want to forward you on to a great post by PR-Squared on an interesting way a Pharmaceutical company can use twitter and hopefully it can get your mind working on ideas too.

PR-Squared’s “Social Media Tactics” Series…Using Twitter to Create & Inform Communities