Dan York on the intersection of PR/communication and the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, Twitter and more – and the way our conversations are changing…
I’m delighted to say that I’ll now definitely be at the Podcast and New Media Expo at the end of next week (and into the weekend) out in Ontario, California. I was debating whether or not to go because I’ll be at AstriCon the previous few days in Phoenix, Arizona. Originally I was intending to just do AstriCon, but I’ve changed my schedule a bit so that I’ll fly from Phoenix to Ontario, CA, on Thursday night so that I can participate in PME events on Friday through Sunday. Taking the good old red-eye home Sunday night.
I went to last year’s PME and very much enjoyed spending time with all the various podcasters and bloggers that I’ve come to know. Should be a good bit of fun this year as well, although my focus will be a wee bit different. One of the various new paths I’m very seriously considering is to head into consulting and may do more with social media work. I’ve already been advising several companies about podcasts, blogs, etc…. I may turn that into something more formal. So my trip to PME will be much more business-focused than last year… and I’ll be looking to talk to a number of folks about potential partnership opportunities. (Are you interested in potentially partnering with me? or engaging my services? Let’s talk. 😉
In any event, most of all it will simply be just plain fun to reconnect face-to-face with so many of the other members of the social media community whom I know now as friends!
If you read this and are going to be out at the PME, please do drop a line as I’m always interested to connect with folks.
Well, I finally did it. After toying with the idea of doing a video podcast for quite some time, I took my trusty Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot camera out onto the show floor of VoiceCon San Francisco 2007 and recorded a quick little 5-minute video with Sachin Joglekar of Sipera Systems. The result is now visible on the Blue Box site and also later in this message.
Like I said, it was shot with my Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera. Imported into the free Windows Movie Maker application, where I added the titles, credits, overlay title with Sachin’s name/title and mixed in the audio of the intro/outro we use for Blue Box audio podcasts. The result was saved to a WMV file. After a quick message to the CAPOW mailing list and a (as always) detailed response from Christopher Penn, I was off and running with the iPod conversion. Christopher pointed me to the free Videora iPod Converter, which will take WMV and AVI files and convert them to the MP4 needed by the video iPod. (Thanks, Christopher!) I synced it to my iPod, verified that I could play it, and was ready to go.
It turned out to be a bit of a trick to host it somewhere. It was easy to just upload it to my LibSyn account where I host all my Blue Box podcasts… that worked great and is how it now wound up in the Blue Box RSS feed. However, I wanted to host it on a site so that I could embed it in pages like this one. My first thought was naturally YouTube, but I found that there is something funky with my firewall that wouldn’t let me use their http upload to upload files. I’m not surprised since I run my own firewall and have some paranoid settings, but it was rather annoying!
Now this was my first experiment and already I can see several things I would do differently, namely:
Record at 640×480 versus 320×240. It would be good just to have a larger picture. (Christopher Penn did highly recommend this in his message, but unfortunately I got that after I had already done the recording.)
Use a separate recording device to record the audio. I had my Marantz PMD-660 with me and I have a nice cardoid mike that probably would have gone far in reducing some of the background noise. On the other hand, recording with the Canon was dead easy.
Several people I trust recommended dropping ~$50 for Pinnacle Studio for video editing and I’ll probably consider that. Windows Movie Maker was surprisingly functional and easy-to-use, but I pretty rapidly ran into some limitations such as the placement of titles, formatting of credits, etc. You have options, but not a whole lot.
Anyway, this was a fun little experiment and I think now I’ll look to give it a try at future shows as well.
Comments about the video are definitely welcome. Feel free to be harsh (but civil, please!).
I noticed two great lists of marketing/PR podcasts coming out lately. Over on his “Web Strategy” blog, Jeremiah Owyang published a “List of ongoing Marketing Podcasts” yesterday that he indicates he’ll be updating. In the comments to Jeremiah’s post, Paull Young notes that as part of the Forward Moving blog, he and Luke Armour recently posted (July 7th) “Forward Podcast 26: A Tour of the PR Podosphere” in which Paull and Luke review some of the various PR-related podcasts that are are out there.
Constantin Basturea has also been maintaining his list of PR podcasts for quite some time as well (and Jeremiah updated his post with that pointer).
All in all a great set of lists for folks wanting to find podcasts related to PR and marketing. (Now if I could just find the time to listen to all these great podcasts!)
What if you have a set of slides that really needs audio to make sense? That all alone doesn’t really work? That was the case with my “story of SysAdmin Steve” presentation that I did back at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference earlier this year. A number of people commented that without the audio, it was hard to really know how it went. This was deliberate, really – there wasa reason for me doing it that way.
Well, I’m now delighted that the SlideShare folks already updated their “slidecasting” audio synchronization tool so that now I can show the presentation in line with the audio. So here it is… in all of its 243-slides-in-15-minutes glory… enjoy my little story (and I think that even if you aren’t interested in VoIP security, you may (or may not) find the story entertaining):
Press the green play button to begin. The first slide starts changing about 3:45 seconds into the show – and then they start changing at a rate averaging about once every 2-3 seconds. I tried as best I could to sync the slides to the audio… I may adjust it in some places (and the cool part is that you can adjust it!).
Feedback is, as always, quite welcome. This was a fun presentation to do… and using SlideShare’s slidecasting interface does let me relive a bit of that fun!
Have you ever heard a podcast or recording of a presentation and wished you could see the slides or materials that went along with it? Or perhaps even worse – you have the slides, but you wish you could know when the speaker advanced to the next slide? Wouldn’t it be great if there was some way you get the audio synced to the slides?
Welcome to the world of “slidecasting”! Later today, Slideshare.net will be rolling out a new audio interface that lets you sync an MP3 file to a set of slides. The process is ridiculously simple:
Upload a slide set to Slideshare.net (after creating an account if you don’t have one)
Click on Edit and then the “Edit Slidecast” tab.
Provide the URL for an MP3 file to link to. (the file will then be retrieved and loaded into the interface)
Use the synchronization interface to indicate the beginning and end markers for each slide.
Preview (if you want) and then publish.
The result can be seen in this sync’d presentation below. It takes the audio podcast from Blue Box Special Edition #16 and combines it with the appropriate set of slides. The slides start changing about 3 minutes into the presentation (since there is the intro and such):
(If you are incredibly impatient and can’t wait the 3 minutes, you can click the arrow button to advance to the first slide and then you’ll see the slide movement.) Other examples are also available on the blog of SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha.
The slidecasting interface (step #4 in my list above) itself is quite trivial to use (click on the image below to see a larger version):
You simply click on the slide you want to sync, starting with the first one, and then adjust the start and end markers with the mouse. You can obviously play the audio (shown by the red line on the image) and then sync the slides as you go along. Very easy to do. It’s all AJAX/Flash/etc. so it just works in a standard browser. Kudos to the SlideShare team for making it as easy as it is.
The interface will still evolve, too. During the beta period (I was a participant), there were some issues found. For instance, I would very much like to sync the audio for my “Black Bag Security Review” presentation since it is a presentation that really needs syncing with the audio to make sense. However, the slide set is 243 slides in about 15 minutes, which works out to about 3 seconds a slide. In many cases the transition is about 2 seconds! However, the user interface only allowed for the smallest interval to be about 5 seconds. For 99% of presentations out there, that’s probably perfectly fine… for this “story” presentation, though, I need that shorter time. The SlideShare folks are looking into what can be done, so hopefully I’ll be able to get that out there soon.
In any event, the slidecasting interface will apparently be made available to all SlideShare users later today and it will be very interesting to see what people do with it. For me, given that I speak at conferences and also record my presentations and put them out as podcasts, it’s a wonderful way to sync the two pieces and give people who could not attend a bit closer of a view of how the presentation went. I could see this being used for corporate presentations… for training materials, etc. I imagine one the primary uses may be conferences that record the speakers and then want to sync them to slides.
A criticism, of course, is that you could just take this type of material and create a video out of it. Either directly record the presentation and slides using a video camera, or use a tool like Camtasia to create a “screencast” of a presentation and then upload the resulting video somewhere. That’s certainly true… although I would wonder if screencasting tools are out there that sync the audio with slides as nicely as this. Obviously you could have the presenter doing the recording on the PC and moving through the slides, which would result in a great screencast. However, this does involve the presenter being involved with the recording, whereas the SlideShare slidecasting capability can take the audio from a presentation and have it be synced to slides much later.
I’ll write more as I use the interface more, but in the meantime, you can head over to SlideShare.net and try it out yourself. The interface should be out of beta sometime today. (We were asked to hold off on blogging about it, but once TechCrunch posted about it, the embargo request was lifted.)
What do you think? How do you see this service being used? What would you use it for? Do you currently use other services?
I just have to post my congratulations to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson for landing a sponsorship of FIR by Lawrence Ragan Communications! As noted in their blog post and also in their social media news release, this is a long-term relationship that will both promote Ragan to FIR listeners and also promote FIR to the many Ragan customers. (Shel and Neville also discuss this in today’s FIR #255.) As a weekly correspondent into FIR, I’m excited for Shel and Neville that they have both the financial backing and also the wider exposure within the communications industry. I think it will only be a positive thing for the show and its listeners! Congrats, Shel and Neville!
On my flight out to Las Vegas, I finally got a chance to listen to FIR episode #250, our tribute show to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out! And I understand why both Shel and Neville were blushing.
You see, Sallie Goetsch and I were running around contacting all sorts of people to see about getting contributions while Lee Hopkins had volunteered to do the audio mixing and post-production. We were getting people to send those contribs into a special gmail address I took out, from where Lee was going to pull the clips. In the midst of this, Sallie was on vacation and I was in the normal chaos that leads up to going on a week of vacation… and in the middle of things Lee’s email server was having problems and was not reliably receiving email from Sallie and I… so it was all a bit chaotic. But the net of it is that the episode was published while I was offline, so it wasn’t until today when I could really listen to it. Mr. Hopkins did his usual shenanigans with all sorts of audio clips and other things… and the contributions from folks were all very nicely done and great to listen to.
The only bummer was that we left out Bryper’s contribution. He was one of the early ones who sent something in… but it didn’t go to the special gmail address and I guess none of us realized that in the run-up to getting the show done. The good news is that you can catch his comment at the beginning of FIR #251. Sorry about that, Bryan.
In any event, I thought the episode (and other comments) were definitely a great demonstration of the community that can be built around a show. I’m glad that both Shel and Neville liked it… and it’s great to see them climbing on with #251 and #252… let’s see where the next 250 shows take FIR!
Ever wonder why I wound up in Burlington, VT, after living in Ottawa, Ontario, for most of 5 years? Well, maybe you haven’t… but that and other items about me are now available in an interview that Martyn Davies has posted as part of his new “Bending the Needle” podcast series. When Martyn was over here and visited me back in the winter, he recorded this brief interview sitting in my home studio. He just recorded it on his handy little Zoom H4 portable recorder which worked quite well. He also took this picture to the right, which remains among my favorite as far as pictures of me go.
Martyn had told me that he was teaming up with Dean Elwood from VoIPuser.org to do a podcast series and this “Bending the Needle” seems to be their work. The subtitle is “Interviews with the Leading Edge Personalities in the VoIP Space” and so it’s an honor to be among the first interviewees he has up there. I’ll subscribe and will be interested to see their other interviews.
What does someone do when they can’t stand the advertisements at the beginning of some podcasts? Why, they come up with a script to remove those advertisements, of course! Given that one of the reasons for podcasting’s success, in my opinion, is the large number of people seeking an alternative to the constant bombardment of ads on commercial radio, it is to be expected that some people would seek ways to get rid of the ads that are now appearing in some podcasts.
This does,however, present a bit of a dilemma. Many in the emerging world of podcasting are seeking ways to make a living though podcasts… to “monetize” their shows (oh, how the linguist in me abhors that word!)… and turning to advertisements is one logical step, assuming the community of listeners will stand for it. PodShow has been one of the main folks out there experimenting with how to monetize podcasts – and it’s been interesting to watch their experiments. But here you have some folks seeking a way to strip out those ads. What’s next? Do we get a TiVo-like MP3 player that can automatically detect and move past ads in podcasts?
It’s a fair warning, though, to people looking at how to market into podcasts that maybe advertisements aren’t necessarily the way to go – at least with the population listening to podcasts these days. (That may change, of course, as more people move into listening to podcasts that are drawn to podcasts primarily for content rather than a dissatisfaction with the way things are today on commercial radio.)
P.S. The irony, of course, ist that the specific ad that Christopher Penn and others in NE Podcasting were seeking to remove is a ad for the “Help Podshow Suck Less” campaign that is effectively Podshow’s effort to involve people in customer satisfaction surveys, etc. to make the network better.
For a bit now, I’ve been meaning to post here that Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson’s new book “How to Do Everything with Podcasting” is now nearing its launch. Last week both Shel and Neville posted about it, but with travelling I wasn’t doing much blogging and added it to my (long) queue of things to write about. If you are not aware of Shel and Neville, they are the duo behind the “For Immediate Release” (FIR) podcast that comes out twice weekly on “the intersection of public relations and technology”. I’ve been providing commentary into FIR for now most of two years as a “weekly correspondent” and both Shel and Neville have become good friends over the time. I’ve not seen their book yet (since it’s not available until June 15th) but knowing them both, I expect it to be both high quality and extremely useful. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it… kudos to them both for putting the time and energy into making it a reality!
I’m delighted to say that I’ll now definitely be at the Podcast and New Media Expo at the end of next week (and into the weekend) out in Ontario, California. I was debating whether or not to go because I’ll be at AstriCon the previous few days in Phoenix, Arizona. Originally I was intending to just do AstriCon, but I’ve changed my schedule a bit so that I’ll fly from Phoenix to Ontario, CA, on Thursday night so that I can participate in PME events on Friday through Sunday. Taking the good old red-eye home Sunday night.
