Reinventing The Wheel

A lot of topics I write about as a freelancer concerns the banking industry. Recently I did a spate of articles on Social Banking, how banks are embracing social media to reinvent their business. And it’s not just social media websites but many of the Web 2.0 tools that banks are using to open up communication channels with customers.

One thing I’ve learned during this economic crisis is that American business has drifted away from creating innovative products people want to buy to creating ways to make more money for the company with less effort. In an article in Business Week a former Harvard Business school professor tackles the problems on Wall Street by having them redirect attention to serving the needs of the customer and instead of serving the needs of the shareholder. Trust is at an all time low for American businesses and the consumer has become empowered int he digital age. This makes for a dire situation for businesses who look to keep the status quo rather than go with the flow. In the article the Harvard Professor, Shoshana Zuboff, proposes that company managers unlearn what they learned in her classroom over the years and embrace the space where individuals actually live, what she calls the I-space.

It’s a good read and a wake-up call for the way we build and run businesses in America as we approach the second decade of the 21st Century. Click to read the article, “The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems.”

Publishers: Don’t Punish the Readers

A long time ago even Pennysavers raked in the money just on classifieds alone. I should know, because I used to design ads (both display and classified) and manage the computer network for a Pennysaver. I didn’t typeset those little text ads. They were done by minimum wage making working mothers and elderly ladies. At first it was done on phototype machines but then we got smart and had them typeset on Macs. When we purchased those Macintoshes and some of those ladies in the classified section lost their jobs, boy was there a lot of screaming and yelling. This was back in the early 1990s, so in the entire history of the newspaper business, it really wasn’t that long ago. When we implemented a pagination system so that we didn’t need the paste-up artists anymore few years later, again people bitched and complained.

Back then Apple Macintosh networks were rather small affairs and in small shops the head Graphic Designer was most often also the Macintosh network administrator. Crazy, I know. If this was your lot in life at the time, then you must remember what it was like being caught between a rock and a hard place suggesting to your Art Director and Publisher and Editor the immense savings they would see from pagination and typesetting on the Macintosh. See you were essentially selling our your fellow artists because some of them were going to go extinct in the transition to all digital design and lose their jobs from this change. On the other hand, if you didn’t suggest these small investments in equipment and software to show a cost savings, someone else was going to come in the door very soon and do it. Then you lost your job (or risked demotion.)

When the cost savings was going toward the publisher, all was well and good in the industry. We happily traded human power for machine power in the production department because we could slash costs while still cornering the market on display ads, a market monopoly the print business had since Ben Franklin’s day.

Then one day a guy named Craig came along with his confounded list and ruined the party. We all know the story of how the newspaper business made a ghetto out of the web until they just couldn’t ignore it anymore. Call it blindness. Call it ignorance or arrogance. Call it what you will, but publishers let it all go by as they watched first Google, then eBay then Craigslist steal their revenue right out from under their noses when what they should have been doing was hiring these guys and buying them out for pennies on the dollar before they were billionaires. The web was just the ultimate printing press but no one (except young innovators who may or may not have been bought for a song back in the late 1990s) saw it for what it was.

Newspaper men will be newspaper men and now that the truth is staring them right in the face, what do they do? Go after the little guys once again. Just like when technology made it easier to beef up the bottom line by eliminating costly staff and their benefits packages publishers like Rupert Murdock think a paywall is the life preserver for their sinking industry.

“Google is ruining our business!” they cry, among other things.

What they don’t realize is that what traffic they are getting is because of the sites that scrape their stuff and provide backlinks. Or the search engines that crawl their news sites and provide an easy way to find news then go read it, even if it is one story at a time.

The rallying cry of the industry: Blame Google. But that’s the lazy way out. What they aren’t looking at are the advertisers. Google manages to monetize their product very nicely with ads sitting astride news results being only a small fraction of their income, according to an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Newspapers and magazine publishers rushed to get online put the cart before the horse, so to speak. At first it was a ghetto. Then it was the place to be. But what they didn’t do is think about a business model before throwing all their content up for the world to see for free.

I don’t have numbers to support this but I suspect that if you take out distribution and printing costs what’s left can be supported strictly by advertising in the news industry if you do it right. I think a website like newjerseynewsroom.com poses as a model. Ex Star-Ledger newspaper staffers started this news site. It seems to be going string but I can’t find any stories on its financial stability.

The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal with the sheer number of visitors they get and the long history of each of these publications can easily dictate to advertisers a fair price for all those readers. They are not eyeballs or clicks, they are exactly what they used to be: readers of papers of record.

By the number of times I see these news organizations’ stories cited by bloggers and on twitter I have to suspect that they also have just as high a brand loyalty and trust than they ever did when they were printed on paper only. Papers like that have to set the bar a little higher. They must charge what a reader in that paper seeing and ad is worth, just like they did when they were in print. No one in the world can compare one little blog banner or an ad network buy to a display ad on the New York Times website.

In another version of this blog post I wrote a couple of paragraphs about a central clearinghouse standard whereby all newspapers and magazine publishers can filter content to eReader devices to be distributed and charged a fair subscription rate. Alas real life beat me to the punch and I saw this story on Mashable about a Hulu type of website for magazines. I think it’s a step in the right direction. Of course it’s in the early stages and I know very little about it yet but it’s a start.

5 Ideas to Build, Sustain and Utilize Your Social Networking Communities for Nonprofits

By Lon S. Cohen Technorati Profile

I work for a nonprofit full time as the Director of Communications. I’ve spent almost a year now building the Social Media presence at The ALS Association Greater New York Chapter and I even won an award from our national organization for my efforts. I believe that nonprofits are a shoe in for Social Media because of the opportunity to build a community around a cause. Here I offer five ideas for nonprofits to consider when managing their plan to embrace Social Networking. I hope to build out a special section with advice just for non profits but this is a good place to start.

Invite your community to contribute.

Give your community a way to express themselves by opening up your Social Media for them. Web 2.0 is about conversation, sharing and user created content so use your established Social Media outlets to give people a voice especially if your mission is to help others. Sometimes it’s important to give the people you are helping a voice because that may be the only lifeline they have. Let recipients of your charity talk about the impact your organization has made on their lives. Do you donate technology to schools in third world countries? Then let them use that technology to update people on their progress. Remember those photos and letters that the charities on television used to promise you’d get if you donated to help feed the hungry children? That was a perfect interactive model. You can do that with a blog and a Flickr account. It connects your followers and fans directly to a human face. Or let donors speak about why they donate. Many times a donor has a specific reason or connection to your charity. Let them share that with the would through their own words. No matter if you’re in healthcare, technology, or conservation the specialists in the field you are working in can usually tell great stories about the good things they do. Remind people to send, add and tag photos to you and on your Facebook fan page or Flickr account. You’ll also find plenty of people already advancing your mission online in their own way. Ask them to blog or tweet about your cause. What nonprofits do best is create goodwill and inspire others. Social Media offers people a way to share that inspiration. The best thing that can happen is to get goodwill to go viral.

Don’t make Social Media an island unto its own.

Make a direct connection between online networking to offline events and gatherings. Offer substantial volunteer opportunities at your events, attendance to support groups, and invitations to informational presentations to your community. Your Social Media presence should always support the work you do in real life. Volunteering is the crux of the success of many nonprofits. Use those connections you’ve spent so much time fostering to bring people together. And not just to attend another fundraiser. Ask for people to help you do the real things that need to get done for your organization, you may be surprised at the results. On the flip side, at your events and meetings, let people know about your Social Networking. This will help keep people connected to you in between events. Tell them about all the ways they can see or hear about everything going on with your organization through any number of Social Networking websites. If your constituents aren’t very web savvy, offer a real life how-to-connect session and invite people to learn about all the ways your organization reaches out on the internet to have conversations and alert them to important happenings.

Highlight contributions by people on your website/social media spaces.

If you do your building correctly, use best practices and have patience, soon you’ll have a sizable community gathered around many different channels. You might ask yourself, what you can do with this community of people. One thing is to highlight the accomplishments of members. Your supporters go out of their way to help, whether it’s a hard day of work volunteering, throwing a community fundraiser on their own or advancing your mission in one a number of other ways. For the most part they don’t expect to be lavished with attention for their efforts because they do it for a higher purpose. But everyone likes to see their name in lights. When you find those special people use your network to highlight what they are doing. Not only that, use it as an opportunity to teach others how to do the same thing and learn from the trials and tribulations as well as success.

Take a lesson from Zappos.com.

Use your Social Media program for “customer service.” That means listen to your community, which in turn means you have to be attentive to their needs. Your community is filled with complex individuals with unique motivations for being there, opinions they want to share and suggestions to give. You do not have to take every one and use them especially is you have limited fund and resources but explain that and then let them know how they could make things happen on their own if they feel passionately. Your nonprofit will make mistakes or need to attend to bumps in the road. Watch the comments on your blog, the wall posts on your Facebook page and the @ replies on your Twitter account. Once in a while, ask for feedback directly from the community. Sometimes people have an idea brewing in the back of their mind but are afraid to offer it up unless the opportunity is opened to them. One good way to get feedback is to put up an anonymous survey. Encourage people to take the survey and then really listen to the feedback. It will help you tweak your message and the delivery system for your information. And it does feel good when someone tells you you’re doing a good job. But just as you can learn from constructive criticism, you can also learn from kudos. If people tell you a certain aspect of your programs are fantastic and unique then maybe you can capitalize on it even more.

Forget the so-called “Obama effect” of micro payments.

Heresy! I know but this doesn’t work for anything less than a broadly appealing campaign within a finite time period and a sense of urgency. Unless you can fit into that criteria then forgo the idea of micro payments adding up to millions of dollars and try the “soft sell” instead. Take a lesson from the street corner performers. People in your community are inundated with requests from your organization already with direct mail appeals, fund raising events, etc. Learn from the street performers you might see downtown in any city. They don’t make a big sign asking for donations. They “ask” without asking. Putting a hat on the floor next to them speaks for itself. Do the same thing with a donate button or a link to your “how to help” page when you tweet or put up a Facebook status update. Use your Social Media to empower and inform. Tell a story. Make an emotional connection. Make them care so much they can’t help but give. Then have your donate button or a link in discreet yet obvious places. But be sure it’s everywhere so when they’re ready to give they can easily find out how. Make the message and imagery of your donate button as consistent throughout your websites as much as you can. Social Media is not an optimal place to raise money as a long-term plan but it’s phenomenal at raising awareness, which facilittes giving. Once you’ve capture the attention, the generating donations should come next, not because it’s hip or trendy to make a micro payment to your cause but because you have engaged them, tugged on their heart strings and made your cause personally important to them.

Podcasting 101

By Lon S. Cohen

A friend of mine recently asked how she could incorporate podcasting into her communications strategy. She needed a Podcast 101 lesson so I wrote up this primer for her. I decided to share it here for my readers. This is geared for her corporate communications plan but you can use the tips and advice here for any type of podcast you’d like to create. Of course cohcom does help companies get set up with podcasting for any purpose. Just contact us. Enjoy!

A podcast is an episodic audio or visual performance delivered to your computer on a subscription basis as a compressed file and playable in a portable device.

Podcasting relies on a set of very simple concepts strung together in a logical way so almost anyone can do it for very cheap and quite literally, in a matter of hours. If you have listened to my own podcasts (and shame on you if you have not) then you will have two very different samples to draw upon. I will highlight the differences later but for now let’s get you started. (Disclaimer. I had a podcast that I no longer do and let the domain name run out so it is not available anymore. The name was SciFi Guys. My friend and I had a great time doing it and we thought it was good but podfade got the best of us. If anyone wants to hear any episodes of it email me and I’ll link to the mp3s.)

Your first question may be: What’s the best recording method for a quick broadcast, for example, management telling employees about a new goal? This is a typical use for a podcast in a corporate environment when speaking directly to employees as a audience.

With podcasting, the answer is much the same for a quick or not quick recording and the software used does require a little bit of a learning curve.

First, if you have access to an Apple Macintosh. A really good amateur recording and mixing program is Garage Band. It does require a little time to learn but the outcome is a professionally sounding and mixed podcast recording. It’s a basic audio track-mixing program, with its own quirks but “close enough for Jazz” as they say.

Don’t have time to learn Garage Band or the thought of multi-track recording making you go “huh?” Then try a free download available for both Mac and PC and a standard in voice recording and tracking called Audacity. Did I mention, it’s free? Well, it’s free. Again, there is a little bit of a learning curve here too but it’s not a steep as with Garage Band, almost as good, is Quick & Dirty and did I mention free?

So now you have two options on software, but, well, now you’re asking me, how the heck am I going to get my voice into said program? Stop your whining girlfriend! OMG! I’m getting to it.

You have a few options here. If you own any type of newish laptop computer then you have a microphone built in. So just open up the software, choose “built-in” mic and let ‘er rip. Hit record and start talking little lady. Let me warn you, it sucks. The sound is tinny and all the background noise gets sucked right into your recording, making it hard to hear the speaker and worst of all very unprofessional.

So go get yourself a decent microphone. A very good microphone can cost up to $1,000. Not kidding. But you shouldn’t spend more than say, $75 – $100. Most of the good ones are USB. (Mine is – cost $75).

Click here for a good resource for picking a microphone.

This is my microphone and I LOVE it.

Also, you’ll want headphones to hear yourself in. You want to listen to your voice when you record and you don’t want it just coming out of your laptop speakers to cause severe feedback in the recording. Headphones also provide a layer of protection from the outside world when you record. Lastly, you just look cool.

So now you have your Mic, your headphones and your recording software. Obviously, the next step is something to talk about. Seriously, this is harder than it sounds. It’s great to write up a speech, another thing to give it to a group of people and a whole different thing to record something. You will probably want to test it a few times before committing.

One of the good things about both Garage Band and Audacity is the ability to go back and edit a recording so, to put it bluntly, you don’t sound like an idiot. You can take out the pauses, the ums and ahhs and the mess-ups. But be careful. If you take out every breath and pause, it will sound unnatural and robot like. Unless that’s the effect you are looking for, then go nuts. Editing is a fine art.

What’s the best file format for posting online (and where did you post them?)

Good question, glad you asked. The standard file format is MP3. Let me tell you. Both programs (Audacity and Garage Band) can output to MP3 format. Both have their own file formats that need to be converted. They can both be converted very easily to MP3. Here is what I usually do. I usually record voice in Audacity (if it’s a monologue) and then put that track into Garage Band and add my other tracks (music, sound effects, etc.) and the whole thing is exported to MP3 in the end.

So the short answer is MP3 file format any day of the week.

This can then be imported into iTunes. I use iTunes. It’s simple. That way you can add the tags and other data, like file name, author, date, images, etc. associated with the MP3.

Lastly, any other tips?

My friend then asked me this in our email exchange: “We’re going to put a podcast on an iPod and give it away at a team-building event in a few weeks and post the link on the website with supporting communications.”

OK. Now you’re pushing it. Free marketing advice? You do know that I have kids at home and a mortgage to pay, don’t you? Just kidding. For an internal podcast, marketing can all be handled by internal communications. What I do suggest is that initially, you can post it on your corporate website for people to grab and listen to on their MP3 players or computers. You can easily put the MP3 file onto an iPod the same way you would put any song file (also MP3) on an iPod.

Now if you want to build up a Podcast RSS feed, which is the real magic of podcasting then that’s for another day (but I will cover it very briefly below).

There are so many to websites and books that will get you more information. I got most of my advice by looking everything up on the Internet. I do have a couple of books. The best basic book is “Podcasting for Dummies,” no kidding. I know the guys who put it together. Well, I have communicated with them online and one of them worked on the website that hosts my podiobook. For a basic primer on podcasting, get up, go and get yourself some petty cash and head over to Borders bookstore and buy it.

Here are some other helpful websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teachersites/oald7/wotm/wotm_archive/podcast?cc=global

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/07/20/WhatIsPodcasting.html

Some places that you can look up to submit your podcast:

AmigoFish
Digg!
iTunes
Pluggd
Podcast Alley
Podcast Pickle

Let’s get back to the differences in recording quality for a moment. My podiobook, “Erosion” was done by me at home. I bought a microphone (Samson C01U) and used Audacity to record my voice. I then bought a CD of royalty free music and used that for the background. The sound effects came from the suite of free ones that come with Garage Band. I used Garage Band to mix it all together. The guys at podiobooks.com hosted it and provided the RSS feed so I did not have to do anything for that. Magic. I have a podcast. The quality is OK. The editing needs work. But there you have it.

On the flip side, my podcast SciFryGuys was recorded in a room in my cousin’s house, which we converted into a recoding studio. He used a mixing board and we used his microphone equipment and such. Basically, he was the board guy doing all the engineering. I helped mix the episodes on Garage Band. (We still used Garage Band though in the end we considered using a more expensive and sophisticated mixing program.) The sound quality and mixing are much better.

Here are some useful tips:

- Record in a room filled with stuff. Really, no background noise but lots of stuff. Stuff (especially soft stuff like carpet and curtains) dampens the echo. It provides a softer, mellower, more natural sound. Empty rooms have too much echo.

- Rehearse. Rehearse. Rehearse. Don’t get frustrated by screw-ups. It’s all comes out in the editing!

- RSS Feeds explained! – An RSS Feed is like a syndicated channel. It is really the backbone of podcasting. What it means is debated but I like Real Simple Syndication—No joke. What happens on a basic level is your information is pushed out to subscribers to the Feed whenever you choose to update that information. So for instance a blog, when you update the post gets pushed out to the RSS text reader. A podcast when posted, gets pushed out the podcatching software, the most popular being iTunes. If you subscribe to my podcasts (scifryguys or erosion) through iTunes’ podcast area on their site, you will get the information whenever I update that particular feed.

- On the other hand if you go to any of my blogs (plug!) cohenside.blgospot.com and subscribe to the feed, you can get it send by email or to a feed reader (there are many of which Google has a popular one).

- The reason I bring up blogs is that podcasts and blogs are intimately linked. You can use any blogging software (Wordpress comes to mind) to encapsulate your podcast MP3 into an RSS feed. Once you have the feed link (it’s a static link created by the blog software) then you can republish that RSS Feed link to Apple iTunes, which is FREE! (Free comes up a lot in Podcasting and bloging.) Speaking of marketing, one of the best marketing distribution tools is iTunes. It’s very, very popular and easy to use. While not the only one, Apple has cornered the market on podcast distribution. And… it’s free!

Hope this helps you get yourself on the way to the joys of Podcasting.

My 7 Ways to Approach Twitter On Mashable.com

My latest article on The 7 Ways to Approach Twitter is on Mashable.com. In this article I offer an overview of the different strategies people use to communicate on Twitter, even if it having no strategy at all.

There are plenty of strategies for approaching Twitter. It’s getting more complex each day, but in the end it can be boiled down to a few simple approaches.

From Twittering on behalf of yourself to Twittering for a company, playing the part of a classic character to being a robot, here are seven ways users approach Twitter.

Click here to read the rest of the article.