Category Archives: Social Media

Creating “Tweetable Moments”: Public Speaking In the Age of Twitter

When you are preparing to give a presentation at a conference or other event, do you think about how your message will appear on Twitter?

In writing a comment the other day to Mitch Joel’s great post, “9 Ways To Elevate Your Speaking To Black Belt Level“, one of my points was that you need to think of “tweetable moments“.

The reality is that we live in the age of Twitter and for those of us who speak publicly, we have to pretty much assume that there will be those in the audience who are “live tweeting” out whatever we are saying. This is obviously particularly true for “social media”-related conferences, but I’d say it’s true for most all the events I’ve been to recently.

So as a speaker, the question is:

If you were to look at the Twitter stream AFTER your talk,
what would you want it to say?

Are there particular catchy phrases you can work into your speaking that tie into your message and would be easy for someone to type into Twitter? Are there particularly dramatic stats that you can provide? (And not only speak but perhaps emphasize through a well-done slide?)

Dan York, Director of Emerging Technologies, Voxeo

Flickr credit: adunne

I remember a very clear direct experience with this concept back in June 2009 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I was on a keynote panel, “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise“, with among others, Marcia Connor (a.k.a. @marciamarcia). We all said our various pieces during our conversation, but Marcia had some clear, concise zingers that, sure enough, were the major items that were tweeted and retweeted.

Ever since then, thinking of “tweetable moments” has been something I’ve given thought to in advance of every presentation. Naturally it doesn’t always work… we can only hope that people will pass along our message… but it’s definitely been something I’ve thought about.

For those of us who have been around for a while, we always used to think in terms of the “sound bite”… what’s the one memorable phrase or part of an interview or news conference (remember them?) that would get picked up for radio or TV? (remember them?) You crafted your patter in part so that there would be those moments in your talking that you would hope would be the ones to be picked up and played. Now it’s the same thing… only we’re talking about “Twitter bites”. It needs to be WAY under 140 characters… and something someone can type really fast since they are live-tweeting out your talk.

What about you? Have you given thought to how your message will appear in Twitter? What do you do to prepare?

P.S. If you are seeking a speaker on a topic related to social media, communications/PR, the “cloud”, the open Internet, telecommunications or other topics, I’m always interested in presenting to new audiences. Give me a shout!

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Cleaning Out Your Queue! (of blog posts)

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Do you have a queue of blog posts waiting to be written? Do you come across great articles on the web and say “I should write a post about that!“? Do you scan your Twitter feed or Facebook NewsFeed each day and see 10 different links you would like to write about?

Do you wake up each morning with your head exploding with stories to be told?

What do you do with all those story ideas?

Do you…

jot them down on a piece of paper? In a Moleskine, maybe?
save them as bookmarks to a service like del.icio.us?
save them in a service like Evernote?
save them in a text file on your local system?
record them as “to do” items in a task manager?
leave the links open as tabs in your browser so you can find them? (which works great until your browser crashes)

What do you do to build your queue?

My own way is a bit of many of those. I’m a big user of Things for task tracking on my Mac and so I’ll write in there of posts I want to write. I use a keyboard shortcut to copy the URL into the notes of a task. I also will save bookmarks into my del.icio.us account (yes, I still use it) and have a special tag there I use for things I want to write about. And yes, I do leave links open in various tabs in my browsers. I also write almost all my posts offline using MarsEdit and so I will actually have a local queue of partially written posts right there.

BUT… the key question is…

DO YOU EVER CLEAN OUT YOUR QUEUE?

This is honestly something I struggle with myself. Each day I probably have 15 new ideas for posts … and time to write maybe 3 or 5 (or less). The queue I have stretches on to hundreds of post ideas… some of which are quite frankly no longer really relevant now that so much time has passed since I wrote them down. In talking to some folks about this, some suggestions are:

SET ASIDE SOME TIME TO REVIEW YOUR QUEUE – AND WRITE – I’m trying to block out a couple of hours each week where I just go back into my queue and try to pound out a couple of posts. I might even reach back to something 6 months old that I still think is worth sharing and commenting on.
SHARE YOUR QUEUE – Sometimes the question you have to ask yourself is: What is more important? That the story be written? Or that you write about it? If there’s something that should be written about and you just don’t see realistically how you are going to have the time to write about it… share that idea. Tweet about it… post it on Facebook… send an email out… pass it along to others who you know write on the topic. Get it out there. And then… remove the idea from your mental queue. Let it go.
PURGE YOUR QUEUE – Sometimes there are stories that just lose their value with time. Writing about how excited you are about the latest iPod Nano may no longer be relevant in 6 months because Apple will already have come out with a new one. So carve out some time to just go through your queue (in whatever form you keep track) and discard ideas you just won’t have time to deal with.

The important thing is that you take the action of starting to do something about all those queued ideas. Otherwise, as admittedly happens to me sometimes, you can start to get overwhelmed with all the stories you want to write – and the lack of time you have to write them.

What do you do? What strategies have you found that work for you in dealing with all the ideas you have?

Image courtesy of pedrosimoes7 on Flickr.

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Novelty trumps production values – for a while (the maturation of new media and video)

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A few weeks back, Mitch Joel wrote a great post on his blog called “Online Video Can Kill Your Credibility” that really asked those of us involved with video online to step up our game a bit and really look at how to make better videos. Mitch, who admittedly does not create video himself, pointed out that with the sheer volume of videos being uploaded daily we need to look at how to improve the production so that our videos stand out. He offered several suggestions, of which I’ll point out:

AUDIO – It has always amazed me how incredibly important audio is to video. Mitch has a number of good pointers here.
LIGHTING – This may be obvious, but it’s a point that people so often don’t pay enough attention to – make sure you have good lighting!
BACKGROUNDS – It does matter what is behind you. Does it support your story? Or does it at least not detract from your story? (i.e. do people watching your video spend their time trying to figure out what the big orange thing on your shelf is?)

I agree with Mitch on the value in Steve Garfield’s great book, Getting Seen – and I in fact recorded a video review about the book.

However, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Mitch’s overall view that without improving production values your videos are doomed to die.

It all depends upon your audience.

It may be that the format for your videos may be perfectly fine as the “man-in-the-street” form with quick interviews taken with a Flip camera and rapidly posted. It may be that your video shot in your messy office fits in with the theme of the show.

Or not.

Mitch’s post is a great reminder of the natural evolution that occurs in every “new media” as it matures into just “media”. Go back to the mid-80s when the Macintosh first came out and brought everyone into the world of “desktop publishing”. Do you remember the “ransom note publishing” that ensued when everyone started throwing a zillion fonts on a page just because they could? Do you remember how many horrid looking documents were created? Over time, though, people learned to use the tools better and expectations were raised for a higher level of document.

Similarly, back in the early ’90s when the Web was brand new, pretty much everyone had to connect in to a server and edit HTML files by hand. The fact that you HAD a web site was the huge deal – so people didn’t care as much about what it looked like. Over time, expectations have been raised and (thankfully!) many of the atrocious sites have been left back in the 90’s.

Ditto podcasting… back in the early 2000’s when podcasting first appeared it was perfectly fine if someone just turned on the microphone and pressed record. It was a new, joint experiment and any podcast was cool… ditto video podcasts…

Novelty trumps production values.

To Mitch’s point, though, there comes a point in time when the “new media” is so commoditized that higher quality content does rise and get greater visibility. It is up to all of us who create video to take a look and ask ourselves – what will we do to stand out from the competition? How will you improve the quality of what you are doing?

I know what I want to do with my show – what are you going to do with yours?

P.S. And yes, we’re in this funny state where you don’t want to improve your quality too much or people see it as “too commercial” and “not authentic” – there’s a balance in there somewhere… that will undoubtedly change over time as well.

Note: Photo courtesy of pursuethepassion on Flickr.

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Vox FAIL – Blogging Platform Shutting as of September 30th – But what about the SEO?

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There’s a fundamental challenge in using a hosted platform for any kind of service:

CAN YOU TRUST THE “CLOUD” TO BE THERE?

Not just in terms of availability (i.e. uptime versus downtime), but also that the hosting platform will be around for a long time – or that you will be able to easily move to another platform.

We’ve reached that state of trust with hosted email servers and hosted web servers – those are now “commodities” and we can choose from zillions of providers. We embrace “the Internet Way” of “distributed and decentralized” systems… the data is very portable (web pages, email messages). Yes, it’s a major pain, but it can be done.

Blog platform providers are a bit different, though. Sure, fundamentally they are just a hosted web server running a content management system (CMS)… but there are specific tools and ways that they work that you get used to and come to rely on. You build up a community of readers and other blogs you read… sure, you can move to another provider, but will they carry over all your links with all the SEO value they have? (not likely)

VOX.COM FAIL

The many users of the Vox.com blogging platform woke up yesterday to discover that their home is shutting down and going away effective September 30th:

On Thursday September 30th, your blog will no longer be available at Vox.com, and you will no longer be able to sign in to Vox.

Poof!

All the content you wrote… gone. Offline. Removed from the online world.

To the credit of SixApart, they have provided a site, closing.vox.com, that has instructions about how to move your blog to TypePad, to WordPress or to Posterous – and how to move your pictures and videos over to Flickr. However, if you read the comments on this post it would seem that all is not happy in Vox land and that the migration is not smooth and painless.

Largely because I am a paying TypePad customer and already had a blogging platform, I never used Vox beyond setting up an experimental page back in 2006 when the service came out. So the impact of the Vox closing to me personally is minimal.

SEO FAIL!

Here’s where I would be worried, though, if I did use Vox more… what is going to happen to the “search value” of all those blog posts that have been written over the years?

All of the links in search engine results to those posts will FAIL.

There was this comment left by SixApart executive Michael Sippey:

If you do move your blog to TypePad, we’ll redirect any requests for URLs on your Vox account to the home page of your new blog on TypePad.

But note the emphasis I added… your old blog posts will NOT redirect to your new blog posts! The links will instead go to the home page of your new blog, leaving visitors to somehow attempt to find the content that was previously linked to.

Way to kill search value. 🙁

Another user asked this specific question and the response was to put a link on your new home page to the specific post that gets a lot of traffic.

Not scalable – or desirable.

But it is what is is… you are not in control of your own platform. You were locked-in to the tools and systems of the vendor.

The WordPress Option?

If I were to counsel Vox.com bloggers on what to do next, my personal suggestion would be not to migrate to TypePad, or even to Posterous, but rather over to WordPress.com. Why?

BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT LOCKED IN!

With TypePad, you are back using SixApart’s hosted proprietary blogging platform. Sure, it’s essentialy hosted Movable Type, but it has evolved, and you then need to think about where you can host your site on MT. Posterous is a startup and is using whatever they are using… I’m not sure what they’re using, but it’s not clear to me that if THEY went away I’d be able to move my content. (In fairness, I don’t know.)

I do know, though, that WordPress.com uses the free and open source WordPress software – and if you don’t like hosting it at WordPress.com, you can migrate your site to any of a zillion other WordPress hosting providers – or run it on your own server. Odds are that if you use your own domain name on WordPress.com, you should be able to migrate your content from WordPress.com to another WP site with all the URLs intact!