Archive of waxing
Holy hell was I wrong about the layoffs at Revision3. Both Martin Sargent AND Sarah Lane were laid off as well as others. That’s surprising considering that Sarah Lane was a guest on TWiT this week and Martin Sargent was a guest of This Week in Media this week. Within a week, they’re both gone from Revision3. Eight others were laid off as well.
Kevin Rose wrote a blog post about it titled Changes at Revision3.
Before you read this, know that I posted I was wrong the following day.
If you haven’t heard, Revision 3 has shuttered Internet Superstar, Pop Siren and Pixel Perfect and will no longer be re-distributing Epic-FU or Wine Library TV. Jim Louderback wrote about it at the company’s official blog with a post titled Changes to Revision3’s Programming Lineup. All of these moves make sense.
Pixel Perfect hit its end of life after extinguishing its topic of conversation. There only so many Photoshop tutorial videos that one site can do. You could argue that these episodes will live on as evergreens because the show doesn’t address the news or current events. Instead, the show appeals to the long tail. With over 100 episodes, they could pull the show off the net completely and sell it, but they won’t go that route because it’s not the current business model.
Internet Superstar will either come back in another form of show with Martin Sargent as the host. People love that guy, and the staff of Revision 3 have a pretty good lock down on his career online. I suspect that this show is being shut down for the same reasons that Pop Siren is being shut down, or Martin finally got a TV deal and can’t continue his obligations at Revision3.
I bet producing Pop Siren is a bitch. I bet it’s exhausting producing a daily show about different websites and make it original. The subject material probably got stale to the audience. Finding fresh things and people to talk to on a regular basis takes a lot of man hours that could be better used getting advertising or researching shows that are better watched like TekZilla. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see a PopSiren like segment during TekZilla.
If only to publicly acknowledge a friendship, I never understood why Wine Library TV was on Revision3 at all. If you’re going to watch Gary Vaynerchuk, you’re going to watch his full show. I bet they saw little to no traction with the condensed versions of the show and the editing time could be better used elsewhere. Or the summer interns who were editing the show now have to go back to school and can no longer work for free. Epic-FU has a community surrounding it, so it never made sense to put on Revision3. It split the community that watched the show. If Revision3 was serving the content from their servers, this will cut down on bandwidth usage in both cases. This means not having to serve the long and condensed versions episodes of Gary’s show and not having to serve Epic-FU at all.
All things considered, these changes probably don’t mean any job loss. I doubt that Bert Monroy was working full time for Revision3, and Martin Sargent will most likely stay on unless he got a TV gig somewhere. Sarah Lane has a steady job as the director of production and is ready to hop on any show at any time.
In the meantime, Revision 3 Beta is cruising along with content being created by independent producers for free or virtually free. Revision 3 can continue to epand by buying those shows a la carte and not have to pay producers, crew and hosts salaries.
This summer and into the fall I’m doing quite a tour of PodCamps and conferences. I’ve been to Boston, I’ll be in Philadelphia, Montreal, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and possibly Denver. It’s left me a lot of time to think about how these conferences can improve the experiences that their communities have. This is just a short list of things I’ve observed and heard from speaking to people who have gone to more of these than I.
1. Don’t start a blog unless you plan to maintain a blog.
This rule seems like such common sense to me that I almost didn’t include it on the list. Instead, I made it first for a reason. Nothing reflects more poorly on your conference than when someone comes looking for information, finds your blog and sees that it was last updated a month ago. Often, I see conference blogs that aren’t updated for months at a time before the event or after the event. The blog isn’t just a source of information for the people who are attending, but it’s a source of information for everyone who knows that the conference is happening.
At Social Media camp on August 7th, 2008 Saul Colt of FreshBooks in his presentation said that the number of people who know your event is happening is more important than the number of people who are attending. This is not only true, but speaks to the fact that you need to have information on that blog that is helpful to those attending and those who are just watching from afar.
2. Make sure your schedule is posted before the event
Unconferences are defined by the people who attend. The names and topics of the talks on your schedule are what draws people in, especially if you are going to have a track that is special to the conference. PodcampNYC ‘08, as an example, had a track that was created for educators. If that was not announced well in advance, there would have been no way to attract that specific audience.
If you are going to be putting on a conference BarCamp style where everyone signs up the day of the event to speak, that’s okay too. If you are going that road, just make sure that where the schedule would be, you explain what is going to happen on the day of the event. This way, you are still giving out information to the people who are unfamiliar with the style of sign ups.
3. Use the content created at the conference
The official rules of the unconference require that content created at the conference be licensed using the Creative Commons license Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike, yet the websites of the conference so rarely use the content that is produced by the attendees. For each camp or unconference that I attend, I usually write up detailed notes about my experience. There is nothing stopping the people who maintain the blog of whatever the event was that I attended from using the text of that blog post. It’s licensed under Creative Commons and it would help drive more traffic to the event’s site and be beneficial to my own. I would appreciate it if they linked to the original post and directed people to my blog to leave comments have have discussion, but that’s about the only restriction that I would put on usage of the posts. This not only encourages people to blog about their experiences with the knowledge they might be included on the official conference site, but it also promotes the individuals who blog about the events.
4. Make sure there’s dependable wifi
I haven’t yet been to a conference with wifi that was reliable. I understand the difficulty of maintaining a network with hundreds of people constantly hitting the routers, but I also know that it’s possible. Often organizers will say that written into the contract for the facility was a guarantee that wifi would work and stay up for the duration of the conference. Does that include a downside guarantee as well? If the wifi fails or never works (as was the case at Social Media Camp NYC) is there a percentage of the site fee that is returnable? Will the site provide a technician or have someone on call to help fix the issues?
Perhaps it would be worth it to find a sponsor for the wifi. Make it their responsibility to provide internet access to the conference. This way they can take pride in the fact that they were able to succeed where others have failed in the past.
5. Highlight your sponsors
A spot on a t-shirt isn’t enough thanks to pay to a company who is providing the funds to make your conference happen. These are the people that believe in your cause or your ability to draw the right people for their message. Give the sponsors a table to present their company in a constantly high traffic spot. If you can identify a place that people will congregate, make sure that’s where your sponsors are located.
Is a .jpg on your site enough attention to pay the people who are providing the funds to get everyone together? Perhaps not. Where’s the digital version of the high traffic hang out spot at the conference? MAke sure that your sponsors have a presence. Maybe it’s the wiki, maybe it’s the blog, maybe it’s the Twitter account, but make sure that the people who are enjoying your conference from afar are also shown who is making it possible.
recently the number of repetitions on average it takes for an advertisement message to sink in was estimated at 12. How can you figure out how to include your sponsors in your message enough so the attendees, both physical and virtual, get the message from your sponsors?
6. Provide information for local food and points of interest
This is double important if there are people coming to your conference from outside of the area. A list or map of local eateries and pharmacies can go very far to help welcome an out of towner to your city. It might not be necessary to go as far as Chef Mark Tafoya did for PodCampNYC ‘08, but a list of the places in the immediate area of the facility can go a long way. This is just my preference, but try to stay away from national chain restaurants if possible. The local places provide a better sense of the neighborhood and and usually cheaper than the national chains.
You might also want to consider contacting local food establishments and getting delivery menus. Maybe they would be inclined to offer a discount on the food ordered if they could be the only place that had menus distributed throughout the day? I would have killed for some delivery pizza instead of going out to lunch at PodCamp Boston 3 when it was 95+ degrees outside.
7. Update your site throughout the conference
There was a conference I attended that did not update their site at the beginning of the conference or during the entire weekend it was taking place. Instead of letting readers and visitors know that the event had started, the main post on the home page was heralding that the conference was due to start tomorrow. That’s extremely frustrating that those of us who are media makers and decide to throw a conference cant keep our own sites up to date. It’s bush league stuff and we can’t allow it to happen.
8. Think about including a dedicated blogger in the organizational team
If your organizational team cant find the time to blog r contribute content to your site, perhaps you should think about bringing someone in who’s main job it is to disseminate information. You could call them the Propaganda Czar or just the official conference blogger if you like that better. It’s like finding a community manager for your company. This is someone who would interface directly with the attendees before, during and after the conference.
9. Jump into the stream
What’s second best thing to attending the conference? Virtually attending of course. Sites like UStream.tv or Stickam allow us to break down the geographic barriers that prevent a lot of people from attending conferences, so why not use them? We recently started using this for the NYC Podcasters Association and while we had a modest showing our first time around, we were able to prove it worked. It also allows the people who cant attend to contribute to the conversations by asking questions or making comments. It also gives the people watching a chance to spread the word about whatever is going on at the conference.
Issues present themselves, especially the wifi issue. This is another sponsor opportunity. If you can find someone to provide EVDO cards, then you’re already on your way to streaming success. Finding people to monitor the chat room is even more fun because then the people who are remote can participate just like everyone else.
10. Tag the world
You need a good way to track the content that comes from your conference and deciding on a good tag might be difficult. The PodCamp Montreal organizers recently changed their tag from #podcampmtl to #pcmtl to save characters of Twitter. This was a good idea in my eyes, partially because I suggested the change.
This way, the organizers can search across the net to grok the content related to the conference. you can see how well this works by searching for “pcb3″ on Twitter, Flickr or Technorati.
Chris Cavs interviewed me for a blog post about personal branding last week. Much like all topics internet related, I had an opinion on the use of the term “personal branding”. In short, I hate the term on the basis that it makes me sound like a business. I’m not a business. I’m Rob Blatt.
Chris might have said it best:
I am not a logo, a name, a design. I am me.
It seemed like two years ago, a few influencers on the internet decided they were going to speak about themselves like they were a company. They nearly forgot everything that made them influencers to begin with and forgot the fun side of being a person involved in a community. The idea that you are an individual was placed to the side and suddenly we were all managing our personal brands. I have enough managing my self-esteem, let alone what esteem others hold me in. I mean, isn’t this exactly what our parents and teachers told us to avoid doing when we were children? The only person’s opinion that matters is your own, not someone else’s. I’m pretty sure if I called my mother and said that someone thought that I was a loudmouthed asshole, she would ask what I think about myself.
I’m not talking that we should call this turd by a different name to make it smell better. I’m talking about casting that turd aside and starting fresh.I’m not happy with calling what you think of me my brand and there are plenty of others who think the same way that I do.
It’s not possible to be a super hero. Give it up. Super heros have powers that make them different from the rest of the population. You’re also most likely not a rock star. I gave up my dreams of being Gene Simmons, James Hetfield or Dave Grohl years ago. They are rock stars. You’re still a human being at the end of the day and there’s nothing you can do to change that.
So here’s my proposal. Everyone should take a few steps back. Forget branding. Put marketing on the shelf. Be awesome. Treat others like they are awesome, because they are. See what happens to what other people think about you when you treat them like they are just as awesome as you.
Are you going to be awesome with me? With enough of us, we can start something.
Updated:After Chris Cavs’ awesome comment listed below I added the rock star bit in the 5th graph.