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A funny thing happened on the way to the radio station this week.
We had a great guest lined up, but were informed a day before that that time slot –7 PM Arizona time — was being preempted because the station, KFNX, had a prior commitment to carry the University of Arizona basketball game.
Rather than take a hiatus, I decided to pull out my trusty Zoom H4N and record a podcast with my co-host Derrick Mains. It happened to be a fitting week to talk of the launch of a baseline study by his company, GreenNurture and Miller Consultants. (More details here at the show web site.) This podcast also includes a report from Heather Clancy, our second on-the-ground correspondent.
- Listen to the Podcast here:
- Or find the podcast on iTunes: http://bit.ly/itunesyour3bl
The irony of this is, the radio show grew out of a weekly podcast! So, using social media-based format to broadcast a ‘show’ is more than a fall back. It’s an integral part of what I’m doing in radio in the digital era.
“There’s nothing quite as insecure as a television anchorman.”
Kent Dana, the news anchor for Channel 5 (KPHO) in Phoenix, and previously anchor of Channel 12 (KPHX), retiring after a 30-years work in the news business.
“This is the biggest investment we’ve made in a national launch … “This is not your grandmother’s instant coffee.”“
Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, on the launch of Via, the instant brew
“rather than submitting their images and videos to mainstream media organisations, they post them online on Facebook, Twitpic, or wherever their friends are likely to see them.”
Robin Hamman, visiting journalism fellow at City University, London, commenting on the social media use during disaster and tragedy.
“This whole things has been quite scary.”
David Letterman, admitting he had had an affair with an employee.
“It is a whole other universe of risk.”
State Rep Steve Farley of Tucson, on texting and driving, as Arizona considers a bill to ban it.
“… Which is another reason why news operations don’t publish all the good news we hear about. There would be no room for the rest.”
E.J. Montini, commenting on All the Good News Fit To Print.
“But you have to remember if you have a conversation on the wall, you could be opening up the entire conversation to the public.”
Robyn Itule, an account manager with Armstrong Troyky, a PR and Ad agency in Phoenix
‘Then out of nowhere this big wave, as tall as the sky, hit.”
A 21-year old woman in the Pacific Island of Samoa, on the devastating tsunami that hit the area, followed by an earthquake in Sumatra.
“There’s always truth in snark.”
Chris Brogan, during his presentation at New Media Atlanta, commenting on the back-channel tool, BackNoise, saying “always confront the thing you are fear most head-on.”
As we come to the end of May, two things with huge implications have shown themselves.
THE FIRST was the Wall Street Journal’s faux pas, trying to force a set of rules on their journalists who’ve started adopting social media into their work flow. Just one of the rules, that ‘Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter‘ sounds like it was written by someone who woke up yesterday. Or didn’t hear about the ‘95 Theses‘ published ten years ago. Not this one, but in this book!
THE SECOND was the launch of a company called Blink.lk. It’s a new media company in Sri Lanka, launched by a former journalist and longtime friend Tyron Devotta. (Full disclosure: I am partly involved in it, at least in sentiment.)
One of their first posts on the blog –that has fittingly preceded the main web site–was called “Mainstream No More.” It’s written by a staffer, a former reporter. She expresses the struggle this switch involves. Today, anyone in the storytelling business has to get under the hood of social media and see what makes it so compelling to the audience. Or as Jay Rosen aptly called them, “the people formerly known as the audience.”
If people though that Obama would trot out the message of Hope, and yes-we-can for an grad audience, they were wrong.
It’s about change, not hope.
“Question conventional wisdom and challenge old dogmas.”
Hard task ahead, not just for people like these 11,000 people entering the work force. I try to put some of this across in my resume-meets-social media seminar, but taking risks is hard, scary at this time. But guess what? I know of two people who are doing just that.
One guy is starting what most people would call crazy –a media company. He happens to be an ex-journalist. The other guy has a great model for mobile marketing, using the phone as a scanning device. I asked the journo, if he has a business plan. He says yes, but it’s not exactly a plan because he intends to tweak it as he moves ahead. Conventional wisdom tells me this is risky. But that’s exactly what we need in a recession: Unconventional wisdom. He was not forced into a career change. He shifted gears before he was forced to.
As Obama sums up his speech –it’s 8.25 pm Mountain Standard Time– I know that Obama is lighting a fire under an audience beyond this stadium with than formula.
It’s YASN –Yet Another Social Network. It’s called Kluster.
But this one caught my interest not only because it’s in the realm of decision making, but because it’s more about productivity and collaboration, and less about befriending people.
Besides sounding flaky (“What is our business model? don’t worry we are not like the others… we actually have one, we promise.”) they have thought the process through with “phases” (that are deliverables,) “sparks,” (solutions and ideas) and “amps” which refine the imperfect sparks. The network has its own currency, measured (or rather awarded) in “watts.”
Will Kluster be a lot different from, say, Innocentive, the “open innovation” community? Today is a defining moment, since Kluster is officially launching the company at the TED conference.
The new media will rewrite your job description before your boss does. That’s the reality of many professions, particularly those connected to or dependent on information industries –and which aren’t?
Change is hard, and threatening. Digital culture is fraught with problems as I noted in my assessment of The Cult of the Amateur, but that does not mean we ought to fear or reject it.
Jeff Jarvis, a professor in journalism makes an interesting point (Fighting the future) about naive and dangerous thinking within J-schools right now, about the kind of experimentation newsrooms in print and electronic media need to indulge in to participate in the era of democratized content.
Most jobs today require collaboration and sharing, but digital culture is making us do it in newer ways. Almost every meeting I sit in includes a discussion about setting up a wiki. Photo sharing isn’t just for amateurs or for building albums to share with grandma. Many of the Pros are on to this. I found this picture (on the left) covering the recent California fires. It’s from a collection of images by Alex Miroshnichenko, a freelance photographer based in Southern California, who’s made them available on Flickr. In case you cannot recognize it, it’s a melted stop sign.
Speaking of sharing, Christopher Sessums director of the office of distance education at the University of Florida is someone who blogs on EduSpaces, a social networking site around education. His job description goes as: “Coordinating resources for faculty & administrators to produce online degree programs & courses.” But he refers to himself by two words: “change agent.” His thinking is indeed all about adapting to change, writing on topics such as the future of knowledge portals - how library web sites need to be a cross between Wikipedia and Amazon.
“Imagine a space where librarians upload mp3s, pictures (png, jpg), text (links to texts, outside sources/links), movies (mpg, mov, wmv). Associated with each file “pile” is a place for users/librarians to add comments, additional links, photos, user feedback/conversation.”
More like chief disruptor.
What does your job title say about you? Seat warmer or change agent?
A real estate agent I met last week has an interesting story. He had moved from Washington state a few years ago and got himself hired as a pizza delivery driver. Not to support himself, but to force himself to learn the roads in the Phoenix metro area, fast.
I thought this was a great example of how, sometimes we need to put ourselves at the ground floor just for the learning experience. Easier said than done. We tend to narrow our learning experience: hang out with ‘people like us,’ subscribe to only the content that matches our professional interests (with RSS, iGoogle and other widgets.)
Getting into the pizza business for Steve was not about the (pardon the pun) dough or the toppings. It was about how to reach customers. His future customers!
We think of design and designers are some special gift, or a craft that only few are called to perform. Wrong! I was blown away by listening to Tim Brown of Ideo who expounded on just this subject.
“We’ve lived through 50 or 60 years of design being “owned” by designers. We were this priesthood of people that get educated to be designers. We were the ones ‘allowed” to be creative…And now technology, particularly the web and open API’s and all other kinds of technology is allowing more normal people to participate in the design process.”
Brown went on to say “designers better look out because we’re gonna have to participate in it in a very different way than we’ve been used to.”
So I was impressed at this new participation fostered by he Tech Museum of Innovation which focuses on technology and innovation, has dived into virtual worlds –specifically Second Life, where you could become a virtual curator, and even exhibit your work in-world. It believes in both ‘spontaneous’ design and a more structured, disciplined approach.
The old ‘priesthood’ has to be worried!
“Who wants to hear from a PR person who spins stories for a living?” That was Barry Kluger‘s rhetorical question to a class of film students at ASU last Thursday. In case you haven’t heard of him or read his column in the Arizona Republic now and then, Kluger is the managing partner of the Kluger Media Group here in the Valley. (Formerly handling corporate communications and PR at Prodigy Inc. and before that at VHI.)
Kluger was there to get students fired up about entrepreneurship, and how to break into the market dominated by big ticket names such as Disney.
Kluger made some good points, specifically:
“If you can’t beat them, quit. Go beat the other guy.”
Seth Godin fans will find this slightly reminiscent of some of the arguments in his latest book, the dip, as in “Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt-until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.”)
“Creativity has no residency, no locale.”
“Don’t try to out-Disney Disney.”
“It’s all about finding the right audience.”
Kluger came back to PR now and then, to put an asterisk on the craft that he stressed will only get you so far unless you take risks, push the envelope. “Try a few stunts, do something different,” he urged, and left off with this gem:
“He who whispers down the well
about the things he has to sell
will never make as many dollars
as he who climbs the tree and hollers.”
If you’re a writer, designer or a ‘creative marketer,’ who would you list as your top five influencers/friends? Whom do you bounce ideas off? Whom do you not mind sharing your ‘dumb ideas’ and secret projects with?
An IABC-er in Trinidad and Tobago, Judette Coward-Puglisi has a post that speaks to this from an entrepreneurial angle. It’s called Five Persons Every Entrepreneur Should Know. They are:
The Cheerleader, the Mentor, the Networker, the Nay-sayer, and the Tech-guru. Definitely worth a read.
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