Session Notes from PodCampNYC 2.0

observed.

Here are links to notes for individual sessions:
Using widgets and social media to market events, generate sales and stimulate sign-ups

Social Contests and Exponential Growth

Securing a Sponsor for Your New Media in the New Media Space

Audio Production 101

The Haiku Project: Using Mobile Phones For Community Creativity

Using widgets and social media to market events, generate sales and stimulate sign-ups

Presenter: Ben Kartzman CEO of spongecell.

Here is a brief audio interview I did with Ben about spongecell:

And here my the text notes from the session:

Point of the session: using widgets to drive attention to whatever. The point of widget is to take content and move content across the web.

Going to talk about widgets as something that can be built on one site and moved to multiple sites.

Examples from audience of widgets:

-youtube rss feed widget

-utterz–listen/watch audio/video posted from mobile phones)

-ChipIn—Donation widget. Makes it easier for nonprofit to focus on their mission instead of how to process donations.

Whatever widget you want to build—depends how you want it to live in blogs, opensocial, facebook.

How widgets can be used to market better:

Example: Fox WFXG community events widget.

Event widget content all about marketing—getting people to get off the web, or to go to a particular and go to an event. Getting people to ACT.

Spongecell, easy for consumer and promoter. Make it easy for your fans to pull that info into their lives (Outlook, Facebook, etc).

Question about data privacy: Can we grab peoples’ data using spongecell? Answer: No. Don’t want to break trust w/users.

—–

Social Contests and Exponential Growth

Jeremy Johnson from zinch.com

Jeremy showed a case study of a contest for college scholarships that increased unique visitors to the Zinch site from 100K to 500K unique visitors over the course of 30 days.

100 or so students were selected by Zinch out of thousands who wanted to compete in the contest for scholarships.

It worked like the NCAA basketball tournament with individual student against individual student. The winner would move up. This continued until there was one winner. The competition occurred over the same time period at the NCAA tournament, to piggyback of of the interest in the basketball frenzy.

Registered users of zinch worth 2 points.
Casual voters votes worth 1 point.
Many people joined zinch to make their votes count more.

Direct competition worked well-one student against another.

Real time vote tally—made it public.

What do they use to broadcast?

We can know everything about a demographic, but we will never know how to use these social media sites as well as the kids. They promoted the competition better than zinch ever could alone.

Goal in creating competition—creating a platform for other people to get really involved.

What motivates people…prize, or prestige….

Zinch seeded them with ideas about how to get their campaign going.

In zinch’s contest, students used social media to solicit votes. For the students: Facebook groups massively important, myspace slightly less, youtube videos important. Articles in local newspapers…

Note: another successful contest:

The BigShotLive.com 600000 uniques a day. It’s a talent contest. People upload videos of them displaying their talent. Winner gets to go to hollywood and get coached on their talent. Friends and family want to promote their kids with talent.
——

Securing a Sponsor for Your New Media in the New Media Space

Presenters: Todd Cochrane and Jeff Hinz.

Note: This session was focused specifically on podcasting, not new media in general. A lot of the advice seems transferable to other new media projects though.

Question:
Should I even try to get a sponsor? A: It is not for everyone

Question:

What’s your content:

Adult or general? If it’s adult, that’s going to narrow your choice of possible sponsors.

Consistency of your podcast:

Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Whatever it is, it’s got to be consistent.

Sponsor going to expect X amount of ad runs per time period.

Your website:

Is it just a blog?

Or is it a branded nice looking website? It’s important to have a nice looking website.

Your RSS Feed: it needs to validate and needs to be getting updated into iTunes
feedvalidator.com to check this.

Finding advertisers:

On your own. You keep all the sponsorship.

Or use a network. It’s hit or miss.

Maybe best strategy is to do both.

Media kit:

Should contain:

Who you are
Who your audience is
set up a survey
age m/f, profession
track record—I’ve done X shows.

How much money can you expect?

Is your audience niche? A niche audience is an easier sell to a sponsor who supplies that niche.

CPM based buys.

CPA cost per acquisition (only payed if people buy)

Proposal: advertisers are going to want a writter proposal.

What are they going to get (banner ad, text link, etc.)

Must get a signed contract.

You have to be a salesman. You have to get behind that sponsor as best you can.

If it’s a company you can’t stand behind, then it’s no deal.

Want to be excited….Biggest problem, hosts not being passionate about sponsor an not selling.

Do you go to company X directly or go to company X’s agency?

It’s easier to go directly to a client.

Execution, execution, execution. Do everything you agree to do. If you do, they will very likely renew.

Report—give them stats. best if they can log in and check it out. be prepaared to give them feedback on a weekly basis.

Suggestion from the audience: businessstat: it’s 20$ a month for good stats.

Engage your audience in relationship to your sponsor. Build it into the conversation.

Roadblocks:

Show’s too small
website doesn’t look good
Make sure the content looks good

Don’t over report!!! Meaning, don’t say you have more listeners than you actually do. Example: you say you have 20,000 listeners and 500 of them take action (e.g. click on a link to the sponsors website from your website). That’s 2.5% of your audience taking action. But if you say you have 5,000 listeners and 500 people take action that means 10% of your audience takes action. That’s more impressive. Be accurate. Don’t over report, don’t under report.

Jeff is a media buyer. The biggest hurdle is a media buyer. Difficult for buyer to recommend a podcast. A lot of clients don’t want to be associated with “User generated content.”

Do you have a valuable audience?
Does your audience take action when you tell them to?
Is it a unique show?
Is it a “digital media” buy or a “radio” buy. A lot of radio buyers would love to buy podcasts and they’d buy it as if it’s a radio spot.

The digital buyers compare it to a banner buy…they are confused.

Most of the media buyers are 25-26 year old kids.

If you treat it like a business and speak to them about topics you are passionate about.

What’ the ROI, can you increase sales? Can you get them to sign up for stuff?

This is why I’m good. This is what I’m good at. This is why I’m unique.

Comic book podcasts connect w/comic book publishers.

Get involved in an affiliate program.

It’s OK to choose not to pursue sponsorship. Then it’s a hobby. Nothing wrong with that.

A big thing is educating clients. They know radio, tv, billboards, but they tend not to understand podcasts and takes work to get them to allocate $. Some big players are doing great, like Proctor and Gamble and godaddy. But most big potential sponsors are not.

Educate them about how your going to motivate your audience and keep that relationship over time. Educate them about the fact is that it’s archived and their brand will be out there for a long time.

Minimum of 6 weeks for a sponsor. A full quarter even better for them to see results from your podcast. If they just want to sponsor you for a week or two or three, forget it. That is an unrealistically short time frame for them to see results.

————-

Audio Production 101
Presenter: Matt Ebel
Editorial presenter: Matt is a suburb presenter and his music rocks. To listen to some of his tunes, check here.

Good audio does not mean filtering audio in your editing program after your recording. Good audio starts with recording well.

“Clear your room. ”

Isolate yourself. Eliminate the competition.

Turn off your cell phone.

Turn off noisemakers—dishwasher, AC unit, laundry machine

Roomates and pets

Late night is good—-let’s people moving around using the bathroom etc.

Seal yourself into a padded room.

Pillow, blanket, towel plug under door.

If you start to overheat, take a break, open the door, turn on the AC and then start again once it’s cooled off.

Use a long cable and put your pc in a the closet. Use wireless mouse and keyboard.

Sound bounce=flutter echo, they bounce around and it your mic over and over again–generally bad.

Two ways to stop the bounce 1) Absorption. ( soft surfaces) and 2) Diffusion (hard, irregular surfaces) breaks the sound up.

Absorption: Auralex acoustic foam. 1 inch pyramid foam is good.

Egg crate mattress pad at wal mart (cheaper)

A tapestry,a blanket—looks nice.

Anything textured and soft works.

Rug

Diffusion.

Auralex panels.

Science panel—-looks better. or you could make it.

Or a bookshelf with different sized mixed up books.

Anything that’s not flat.

_________

How many flat surfaces do you treat?

Vocal booth, drum room cover most all flat surfaces.

Broadcast—not so much. maybe 50-70%

Cover the area facing your face.

auralex.com/pcf

You fill out the form and send it to auralex and they send you your recommendation.
Then you can place your alternative materials there instead of using their product, or use their product.

Next—-Plug stuff in.

Knowing which mic you need.

2 kinds of mic dynamic (cheaper, less sensitive, doesn’t need power) and condenser (more expensive, more accurate (sensitive)

Studio night—goal is to make it seem like you are in the room. pick up all the frequencies. a better net to catch more sound. diff mics have diff pickup pattern.

Cardioid.

Omni directional.

Figure 8 pattten good for an interview w/one other person.

sm58 designed to pick up the human vocal range right in front of it. Ok, for solo podcasting.

nt1a, nt2a (about 250$) diff pickup patterns. needs soundboard w/phantom power.

Blue snowball. condenser mic. good rich sound. cardioid or omni. usb mic. powered by the USB mic.

Rode podcaster—large diaphragm dynamic mic. cardioid.

_________________

POINT THE MIC AT YOUR MOUTH!!!!! Prentent it’s a laser pointer directed at your uvula. Diff mics listen in diff direction.

Be scientific and record—this is my mouth at 1 inch. this is my pout at 2inches etc. and pic the best one.

_____________________

Plosive shield. Wire coat hanger and nylon pantyhose on a hoop and a goose neck to hold it in place–rule of thumb—halfway between your mic and your mouth. be scientific and test where it should go.

______________________

Notes about posture. The better you breath the better you sound.

Imagine a cable on sternum and cable on your tail pulling pulling opposite directions.

Do not SHOUT (unless sound horrible is your schtick). makes your voice tired, and picks up annoying frequencies.

________________________

Setting up the mic.

————
cell phone—electromag interference. turn it off. keep at least 4 feet from sound equipment if you need it on.

___________________

Interface—USB microphones.

If you are using a handheld recorder, the digital recorder zoom H4 highly recommended.

mxl mic mate—converts xlr-to usb and powers condensers via the usb.

———

The Haiku Project: Using Mobile Phones For Community Creativity
Presenter, Jonny Goldstein (yeah, that’s me).

The Haiku Project was something Jonny started as an experiment to see what would happen if he asked people in his online social networks to write and record original haiku poems to the web using their cell phones and the service, Utterz.

Why haikus? Most people in the United States who have gone through school in the last couple of decades are familiar with haikus. Haikus are accessible, don’t take a big time commitment, yet can contain great creative depth and emotional range.

Promotion: Jonny’s blog, Twitter, and Utterz.

Duration of project: The month of February, 2008.

It’s good for the creator to participate in the project if she/he is going to ask other people to take part. If you invest your time, better chance others will too.

Initially asked people to add the tag “haikuproject” to their submissions, but compliance was low, so then just asked people
to have the word “haiku” in the title. That worked better.

Used the mobile phone multimedia blogging service Utterz.com for people to record their poems from their phones.

Results: at least 14 people submitted a total of over 40 poems which were listened to hundreds of times. Also, as a result of the project, Jonny was featured in a Washington City Paper article about DC area haikuists.

Question from audience: How to create a geographically specific contest like this? Not sure.

Finally we recorded a brief collaborative story at the end of the workshop to demo using a cell phone for a group creative audio-project.

More info about the Haiku Project here.

——–

I hope these notes are helpful. If you have any questions, shoot me an email at jonny (dot) goldstein (at) gmail.com.

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