People Who Rock Videos

Kendesi Mohammed and I met at Busboys and Poets a couple of weeks ago and we have been keeping in touch since then. Kendesi is a DC based video producer and club mogul. He helps throw parties and promote up and coming spoken word, rap, music, and modeling talent. We hit on the idea of throwing a happy hour event where we show emerging artists and entrepreneurs how to promote themselves and connect to audiences via social media. Stay tuned! It s going to rock.

Below are my rough notes from some of the PodCampNYC 2.0 sessions I participated in. I hope folks who were not able to attend these sessions find these notes helpful. Note: these were created on the fly and niceties of punctuation, grammar and spelling are not always 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.

Check out the show HERE Join us this Weds, April 9, 9PM EST, as DocPop (AKA Doctor Popular AKA Drown Radio) is drops his new nerdcore album Me Geek Pretty One Day on Jonny s Par-tay. Tracks like LolCats and Gygax will send you into a spiral of geekgastic ecstasy DocPop is the kind of guest we at the Par-tay like to associate ourselves with. When not rocking the nerdcore music world he is dazzles the masses with his amazing yoyo stylings DocPop is Earth s 3d ranked yoyoist. Doc is an artiste and a renaissance geek of the highest order. Like all HipHop moguls, he has his own line of accessories His hand crafted iPod cases fly off the shelves at his etsy store. To find out more about DocPop, check out the DocPop portal at DocPop.org (Above) DocPop s producer skills at work in the now classic Vlog Death Match video featuring MC Slutsky DocPop s yoyo stylings (above) So come Par-tay with us! Here s the details: What: A live online interactive video free for all with Doc Pop, hosted by Jonny Goldstein, and served up with flavor by Scott Stead. Plus, special bonus guest Schlomo Rabinowitz, enabler to the stars. When: 9-10 PM EST, Weds, April 9 Where: www.jonnyspartay.com Why: This is your chance to par-tay with nerdcore star, world third ranked yoyoist, fashion icon, comic book artist DocPop. Need I say more? Be there!

In my 4 days in Austin I met lots of people, performed at the Fray Cafe, absorbed panels, reconnected with people from all over the world, went to scads of parties, got quoted in ValleyWag (OK that s a dubious one), shot heaps of videos, and ran around the Austin Convention Center in a cow suit. Here are some highlights: 1: Utterz Madness I decided to don the bovine togs when Sim from Utterz mentioned that they were trying to figure out which staff person was going to have to don the cow suit, as if wearing a cow suit was a chore, not a delight. I immediately offered to help out, and soon had Scott Stead suiting up. We tore all over the Austin Convention center getting people to moo into our phones as we recorded utterz from every nook and cranny of the building. Here s a pic of Scott experiencing Mitch Altman s Brain Machine. Here s an audio excerpt of the madness: 2) Meeting people: Here are just a sampling of the people I met: Derek Powazek. Dave Delaney Eamon O Connor Max Haot Becky McCrae Andrew Hyde Bryan G. Rhoads Lindsay Campbell and Adam Eland Liz Strauss Jeremiah Owyang Rebecca Caroe Rohit Barghava Adele McAlear 3) Reconnecting with old friends and contacts: One reason that SXSW Interactive makes so much sense for me is that it attracts people from various scenes I ve been part of: Edutech, Performance, Social Media, NYC geeks, Nonprofit Tech, Mainstream Media, Videoblogging, the DC Tech scene . It s a super efficient way to reconnect to all those scenes in one place. Here are some people I reconnected with: Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel Dennis Crowley Lia Bulaong Beth Kanter Robert Scoble Jane Quigley John Geraci Steve Garfield Chris Brogan Susan Kirkpatrick And many more! 4) Core Conversations: Core Conversations are roundtable discusssions featuring anyone who feels like showing up and yapping about a particular topic. I went to one called 10 Ways to Piss off a Blogger led by DC s own Rohit Barghava. 5) Panels: I guess I lucked out: Every single panel I attended rocked. The panel which most entertained me: Worst Website Ever competition. Although my, Happy Net Box , did not win, I do have to give props to Merlin Mann who won with his completely vacuous effort Flockd Up. 6) Meeting Internet Idols Forget Warhol. In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people. Well, I met two people who are famous at least to me. The first is the creator of Little Yellow Different, Ernie Hsiung. OK, actually, my wife is the true fan of this guy. But I felt vicariously thrilled to meet him. His take on gay culture Chinese-American P.O.V. is droll as a soup dumpling The second guy I was thrilled to meet was Derek Powazek who has been encouraging community around storytelling on the web and live in meatspace for years. I got to get a little stage time at the Fray Cafe, where I recounted my true life story of that time when some Belarusian goons beat the crap beat out of me back in the 90 s. Always good fun that story. 7) Crazy Keynote Action: When you come to give a keynote at SXSW Interactive, you better do your homework, and you better be ready for some serious audience participation. It s an INTERACTIVE conference. People expect to be part of the proceedings. The keynote conversation featured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who was interviewed by Business Week s Sarah Lacy. Lacy did pretty much everything wrong. She asked Zuckerberg questions that the audience didn t care about (about the $ and biz aspects of Facebook), she kept promoting a book she was writing, she was overly familiar with Zuckerberg, and then she insulted the audience when they started to get aggravated. Zuckerberg himself didn t help matters with his canned, PR-vetted, answers. Finally, Lacy, extremely ungraciously, succumbed to audience pressure and opened it up to our questions. As all this was going on the multitudes of twitterers and bloggers in the audience were venting like crazy. I was one of them, and I found out later that one of my tweets ended up in the National Enquirer for Geeks ValleyWag. To the charges of being quotable, I plead guilty. Here is the aforementioned crowd, before it got ornery: As many noted, the big screw up was on the part of the organizers of SXSW who should have found someone better suited for this crowd to interview Zuckerberg. It was a grand spectacle though, and I did like the way the audience finally asserted itself and salvaged the event. 8) The BlogHaus: This room on the 3d floor was a nexus of hot A-list blogger action, but open to all. A great idea: One room, continuous food and beer, open to bloggers. Met tons of people here. Heaven. 9) Parties OK, a lot of these were kind of boring tons of people, free crappy well drinks, lousy music, but a few of these were great. NPR s soiree at Austin City Limits had great food and music. The Frog Design party had a great salsa band, and the 16-bit party featured an old time freak show, which while a little disturbing, at least had some character. 10) Fellow pilgrims The cool thing about the festival is that it takes on the character of a pilgrimage. And what is a pilgrimage without companions? As day blends to night to early morning and day again over and over, you find yourself checking in with certain people over and over again to see where they are, what they are doing, how they are doing. For me those people were Gerry T., Scott Stead, Kroosh, and Shashi. It was great wandering the streets, hallways, and clubs with you. Thanks for being there.

Steve Garfield interviewed me about my new project, YourEventMap.Com. Always great to see Steve.

Stowe Boyd (AKA, The Stowe Boyd ) held forth about Twitter last night at the DC Media Makers meeting. He opined that it s useless to explain Twitter to people. You just have to tell them to try Twitter for a few weeks. And if they aren t willing to do that, it s useless explaining it. It s useless to try to describe it Roll up your pant legs and get into the flow for and be there for a while and if you aren t willing to try that, you really won t get this. For a more fleshed out version of Stowe s thoughts, check the video below (originally streamed live from my Nokia N95 phone).

This week you are invited to Par-tay with Aaron Brazell and Jeff Hibbard. Check out this promo from Jeff! He is truly a Par-tay-er. Aaron Brazell is half of the blunt spoken duo at the District of Corruption talk show, where he and Geoff Livingston call B.S. on social media snake oil peddlers. In his spare time he blogs at technosailor.com and isDirector of Technology at b5media. Jeff Aaron(!) is not shy about what he thinks, as you can see in his post Words that need to die in 2008. Our second guest is Northern Virginia vehicular videocaster Jeff Hibbard. Jeff rocks. His enthusiasm and ingenuity shines as he combines driving around in his truck with media making via social video platforms like qik, seesmic, and magnify. I m curious to find out what makes Jeff such an avid and inventive media makers. What: Jonny’s Par-tay, the live interactive web video talk show that puts the social back into social media. Who: Jonny Goldstein Scott Stead, with Featured Guests Aaron Brazell and Jeff Hibbard. How to watch: Just go to jonnygoldstein.com. Interactivity: Interact via the live chatroom and if you have a webcam and a blogtv.com account, we may even put you on via video. When: 9PM EST, Weds, Feb 6.

Mobile post sent by jonnygoldstein using Utterz. Replies. mp3 (Recorded via Utterz while strolling by the White House in DC) Mobile communications and online social networking are getting acquainted and 2008 could be the year that they have a passle of beautiful children. In fact, one adorable tyke that is already turning heads is Utterz.com, the service that lets people audio, video, and photoblog from their phone. Taking it even further, Utterz is an online community with the ability to follow other Utterz users, comment on community members posts, and all that social networky goodness. And of course Utterz lets you post links to your Utterz stuff on Twitter. Both Scott and I are enthusiastic Utterz users. I love the simplicity and versatility of it, and so far, given my old school no-frills phone, have used it solely to record audio and publish it around the web, and I still love it. In addition to Sim, Chris Parandian of mobilediner.com is going to give his take on the best and worst of 2007 in the wireless space, and what he sees coming down the pike in 2008. Chris has a fanatical interest in mobile communications and totally gets the potential of wireless communications meeting social media. What: Jonny’s Par-tay, the live interactive web video talk show Who: Jonny Goldstein, Scott Stead, and Featured Guests Chris Parandian of mobilediner.com and Sim from Utterz.com How to watch: Just go to jonnygoldstein.com. Or come in person and par-tay with us in meat space. Interactivity: Interact via the live chatroom and if you have a webcam and a blogtv.com account, we can even put you on via video. When: 9PM EST, Weds, Jan 9