TellTail Signs

On the move

Hey gang -- if anyone stops by this old, darkened blog anymore, you should know I've packed up my things and moved into new digs.  I'm posting over at the Learfield InterAction blog. It's the "official" home for my company's new marketing division.  We're a company of journalists, broadcasters and story-tellers, and we're going to use those skills to create cool, compelling content for the niche audiences our clients want to talk to.

I think this new division is a niche of its own that nobody's really filling yet.  The mass audience is fragmenting and gathering around specialized interests. Those smaller communities are looking for information or entertainment -- and we're uniquely positioned as a company of journalists to give it to them in just the ways they want.  Every potential client, if it's doing its job, has an already-existing passionate audience.  Learfield InterAction feeds that passion with compelling, interesting, entertaining content.

Reason 1,001 to Blog: Free Attention

Last summer, Pennsylvania's Tourism Department got a great idea: hire regular folks to take trips in the state, and to blog those trips.  I talked to someone in the communications department a few months ago, and apparently the "mainstream media" attention for the project was huge.  Which leads me to another reason to start blogging and podcasting now. Blogs and podcasts are hot. They'll garner you attention, just by the sheer weight of the words "blog" and "podcast."  If you keep piddling around and waiting to figure it out, you'll miss out on that opportunity.

And you know what?  You'll end up blogging and podcasting anyway, because it's the right thing to do.  So do it now and get it over with. And if you really aren't sure how to do it, and that's holding you back, just email me and I'll make some time to explain it to you. 

Defining RSS: Personal Media Outlet

Christopher Carfi at the Social Customer Manifesto writes that the NY Times has taken a crack at explaining RSS to the masses.  (That first statement assumes the "masses" read the NY Times, which is questionable, but I digress.)  According to the Times, an RSS feed is "like an email newsletter."  Carfi thinks it's not a bad description: incomplete, to be sure, but a decent way of getting across some important aspects of RSS.

You'd think we'd have this figured out by now, wouldn't you?  I mean, if RSS is so all-fired important for our future as communicators, shouldn't we know how to explain it?  So here's a crack at coming up with something a little more descriptive than "like an email newsletter:"

RSS makes everyone the "editor" of their own personal media outlet.  A radio station chooses whether to run Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken.  A newspaper chooses whether to run Beetle Bailey or Garfield.  And with RSS, just about any content on the Internet is available for you to "run" for yourself.  You tell a site you like what it offers, and RSS delivers that stuff directly to your own personal media outlet every time there's something news.

I like the concept of "personal media outlet," though I'm not sure about the language.  Who hasn't thought, "I would do a much better job of choosing news stories (or comic strips, or columnists, or talk show hosts) if I were in charge?"  Now, we're all in charge, and RSS is what enables it.

Any thoughts on this?

Content won't create itself

Dan Gillmor has basically thrown in the towel on his citizen journalism site, Bayosphere. Gillmor left a great newspaper job to launch the project, which he envisioned as an opportunity for the people of the SF Bay area to collaborate in producing news content.  It didn't work.

I learned some things last year, about media, about citizens, about
myself. Although citizen media, broadly defined, was taking the world
by storm, the experiment with Bayosphere didn’t turn out the way I had
hoped. Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in
collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was
underwhelming. I would do things differently if I was starting over.

This site is not about "citizen journalism," but the subject has some bearing on our effort to produce content for niche audiences.  The lesson of Bayosphere is that people will not generate your content for you, out of the goodness of their hearts.

One of the areas I'm most excited about is tourism marketing, because I really believe that new Internet tools are opening up a world in which tourists themselves are telling stories that "sell" tourism locations far more effectively than canned brochure copy.  Aggregating flickr photos, blog stories, and other comments is going to be a gold mine for tourism marketers who figure it out -- but it's going to take some time.  The content is there -- but it has to be mined.  It won't create itself, as Bayosphere shows.

When is a blog not a blog?

When it doesn't talk about its blogginess.

ProBlogger has a post about how some bloggers love having a blog -- and just can't shut up about it:

What worries me as I surf through many blogs each day is that there
seem to be quite a few bloggers (and some blog networks) who in my mind
are a little obsessed with reminding their readers that they are on a
blog.

Amen! If you ever see me talking up the fact that I have a "blog," and that my "blog" is great because it's a "blog," please find me and slap me.  This is a place to post information about what's going on with online media and marketing -- and it's a place to discuss the various projects we're working on at Learfield InterActive.  (Have I mentioned, lately, that we're starting to find our legs at the VisitColumbiaMo blog, after the first couple of weeks?  I haven't?  Oh, well, we are, I think.  You chould check it out.)

The point is this: nobody gives a flying flip whether you're writing a blog or posting information to a website.  They want to read the article they found via their Google search, or find the stuff you've promised them in their RSS feed. But they're not concerned with whether it comes to them via a blog or a newsletter or a website.  Blogs make a lot of this possible -- but their blogginess is not what makes them valuable.  Their content is.  Their interactivity is. But not the fact that they're called "blogs."

Hat Tip: Amy Gahran

MultiVu - A MultiBore?

Just read about an announcement from PR Newswire: its Multi Vu division it intends to "re-invent" the video news release.


New products extend reach to media and your target audiences… comprehensive multimedia communications packages help ensure success.

Yippee.

Can someone please explain to me why any company should be pouring a lot of money into producing "video news releases" to post at PR Newswire?  Can you think of 1 person in your life who thinks it's a fascinating use of time to click from press release to press release, watching the latest high-tech video announcement from some Fortune 500 company?  Ick.

There's so much promise for companies (and organizations) to reach out directly to a niche audience. But c'mon folks, you've got to give them something interesting. If a canned video news release is the best way a company can  imagine participating in this brave new world, it needs an imagination transplant.

In all the discussion about blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., the missing element is always content.  Every company (or organization) has something to say. The question is whether anyone wants to hear.

Help! Recording skype and/or Gizmo calls

I'm trying to figure out the best way to get some decent sound quality in recording calls I make via Skype or Gizmo.  Anyone have any tips?  And by the way -- if anyone has actually used Gizmo and found it to work well, could you email me or comment here? 

Conversation & Podcasts

Amy Gahran is all about conversation. And she's been musing about how we can make podcasts more conversational. 

Here's what I'd love: I'd love to be listening to a podcast on my MP3 player, and hear something I want to comment on. I hit pause, and then speak my response as a quick voice recording (separate audio file). My player would automatically  encode my comment file with metadata about the podcast episode I was listening to. Then, next time I attach my MP3 player to my computer, my podcatcher software would automatically spot any comments and upload them to an appropriate place on the podcast's web site. Then  they would appear with comments, but as downloadable audio. (Ideally, accessible via feed.)

As I posted in Amy's comments, I'm not sure I see the point of this.  A lot of bloggers have written recently about how blogs are not really as conversational as many people think.  I agree that there are drawbacks for blogs as a one-on-one conversational tool.  It's not exactly "instant messaging."  But as a tool for global conversation, blogs are fantastic. And this is where their value lies.

The point applies to blogs, too.  It's just not a great way to facilitate one-on-one back-and-forth conversation with a listener. And I'm okay with that. All forms of "new media" don't have to be equal in that area to remain valuable tools.

Conference Blogging

Easton at BusinessBlogWire was at the University Private Equity Summit, and blogged the event.  He took away some lessons. Among them:

• Liveblogging is difficult unless you're a world-class typist.
  
• Wouldn't it be nice to make a conference wiki and enlist the help of
  conference attendees in preserving an excellent record of the event?
• I think we'll start seeing more and more conferences - no matter what
  they are about - done completely (or at least in large measure) online.

Not sure I agree with Easton on the last point.  I think we'll see more conference blogs, but there's something valuable about being in the same room with the folks you're perhaps wanting to do business with. Aside from that, let's face it -- there are a lot of parties at these things, and nobody wants to give those up, especially when the boss is paying.

I did something like this with the Missouri Governor's Conference on Tourism.  It was fun, it was a great experience.  And if I do say so myself, it's a pretty good repository of information about what went on at the event -- not bad for a one-man band without an Internet connection in the room.

Why didn't I think of that?

My cousin sent me this today.  Seems Bud Light will be paying money to promote the USA Rock Paper Scissors League.

With better pacing than tic-tac-toe, but with less chance for serious injury than thumb-wrestling, Bud Light obviously saw the enormous potential of the USARPS, helping to fund a tournament beginning this month in bars across the country. In April, 250 finalists will be flown to Las Vegas to compete for the $50,000 grand prize at The House of Blues in the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

This is a great example of compelling content. Sure, it's completely worthless content, and only marginally related to the consumption of beer (except for the fact that drunk people are perhaps more likely to take this event seriously). But it's going to get people thinking about Bud Light.  Now, will this sell more beer? Probably.  Will it sell more Bud Light?  Who knows?  But hey, it's only going to cost Anheuser-Busch a pittance for a ton of buzz.

Incidentally, rock-paper-scissors is an important part of the annual bottle-rocket-catching contest between me and my cousin. One year, we had something like 8 ties before we settled "home-field advantage." Perhaps, someday, the story of that epic struggle will be told in more detail, in the USARPSL Hall of Fame.  One can only hope.