On Saturday, when the whole world was seemingly frolicking in the sun, I was in a windowless auditorium at the Brooklyn Public Library. And I was thrilled to be there.

You see, I was there to check out PowerUP! which is a yearly competition put on by the Brooklyn Public Library to give small Brooklyn businesses a little startup capital, fifteen grand to be exact.

The room was filled to capacity with would-be salon owners, makers of artisanal beef jerky, and other budding entrepreneurs. We listened carefully as library staff outlined the key requirements for the competition: 

• Your business must be based in Brooklyn
• You must not have made more than $10K or be in existence more than a year
• You are required to submit a business plan and attend certain key events

The PowerUP! materials alluded to “everyone being a winner,” which sounds kind of corny but in this case it was very much true: everyone admitted into the competition will participate in free classes at the Brooklyn Public Library, and each contestant will end the process with a completed business plan. Truly that is an important step that unfortunately many would-be business owners skip.

It warmed my heart to see so many people raring to get their enterprises off the ground.

There are only two more intro sessions happening in the next couple of weeks (and they are required), so if this sounds right for you I urge you to check it out!

I was first inspired to write “Sane Social Media” because of something I kept hearing from friends and readers.

These were creative, self-starting people, but they were overwhelmed with the choices available to them in the digital space.

They knew that outlets like blogging, Twitter and Facebook had catapulted interesting, creative people to new careers and fulfilling livelihoods but weren’t sure how those people leveraged those tools and in what combination.

They wanted a roadmap, or a cheat sheet.

Sane Social Media is that cheat sheet. It’s a quick read, with just the essentials of what you need to know to “get sane” about the way you present yourself on outlets like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  

It goes beyond the basics and the conventional wisdom and give you the straight dope on controversial topics like:

• Why you shouldn’t “disclaim” your opinions in social media
• Why the rise of social media demands an “openness” about your life and your work that you need to be very strategic about
• Which networks matter, and which are just a “nice to do.”

As a bonus, I include a guide on how to establish your own “home” on the web — an absolute must for today’s creative professionals and entrepreneurs.

Best of all, this ebook is totally free! I hope you’ll sign up to be one of the very first recipients of it on April 15th.

If you’re an indie type, where do you find music to put into your videos that won’t cripple your budget? Where can you find stock photography that won’t break the bank?

A dog that certainly deserves fame and fortune

These are things I’ve asked myself over the years working on a variety of multimedia projects. It’s true that while working on projects that have 0% of turning a profit (like a music video I made starring my dog), I have been a little, shall we say, flexible about sourcing, when working on business-related projects, I’m absolutely scrupulous about being on the up-and-up.

Why? What if your video or book becomes massively popular? You don’t want someone to come and hunt you down for the rights to their song or photograph.

So please, look into permissions, and credit where credit is due. That said, for those of you out there working on an absolute shoestring budget, here are some awesome resources that might help you:

Photography

Buying stock photographs is insanely expensive. Instead, I try to use material that I’ve shot, or head over to the Creative Commons search tool to go through relevant imagery on Flickr.

What is “Creative Commons” you might be wondering? Well, according to the site, “Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.” Which means it sometime affords creators access to work that they can remix, so long as they credit the original author.

Creative Commons offers a number of different liscences, some of which will and will not work with commercial endeavors, so read carefully.

Stock footage

The Prelinger Archive is a pretty incredible online archive of ephemeral films that are largely in the public domain. These are training films, PSAs and other utterly addictive stuff from days of yore. You’ll while away hours checking out this stuff — and best of all it’s FREE. So get inspired!

Music

Ever since I started using editing software (I was sixteen) I discover that music transformed everything. At that time, my work was broadcast over closed caption televisions at my high school, so I was young and naive and didn’t think a lot about “rights.”

As soon as I started producing TV spots for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, that all changed. We had a micro-budget but still needed a way to draw together a spot with music. I had to get creative. Here are some of my favorite resources:

• Jamendo: there are loads of great tracks on this site, and because lots of it is licensed under Creative Commons, you can use it for free or cheap (if your production meets certain conditions).
• Royaltyfreemusic.com – Note that “royalty free” doesn’t mean FREE, but it can mean less expensive that lining up a rights negotiation with a label, for instance.
• Royalty Free Breakbeats (iTunes link) - I love this set for absolutely minimalistic budgets. It’s a hundred tracks of breakbeats and other contemporary background music for ten bucks! You need this is your library!
• Apple library – the library of music that comes with iMovie and Final Cut is pretty cool. My one caveat is that you’ll hear it on a lot of stuff, so if you want your piece to feel more original, do a little more searching.

Hope you’ve found something new in this list — what’s your favorite source for free multimedia resources?

Twitter has a new self-serve advertising solution for small business, which is reason enough to rejoice. For a long time, Facebook and Google Ad Words were the only game in town for scalable advertising that could fit a low budget and produce actual results. 

I’m very excited to try this new platform, and in even better news, it seems that free advertising money is on offer from Amex. All you need to do is to be an American Express cardholder, and fill out this form. Make sure you are using your Twitter account to not just broadcast links, but also to engage with your audience.

Good luck!

As many of you now know, Facebook is rolling out Timeline for brands by the end of the month.

I recently switch over for my Jellybean Boom fan page, and have to say I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I like the highly visual top banner. I think it helps brands infuse a lot more personality into their Facebook presences. On the other hand, Facebook makes a lot of stipulations about how you can and can’t use the space. Promotions? A no-go. Text? Dicey.

Another big change is the death of the custom landing tab. Brands used to spend big coin having these painstakingly designed, usually with some sort of creative arrow pointing to “like.” You could use this space to make your fans watch a video or sign up for something. That sort of funneling is a thing of the past.

Why? Many think it’s so that Facebook can sell more advertising. Maybe that’s true. What I do know is that Facebook fan pages have radically changed, and in a way that might not be so hot for marketers.

Of course, rules were made to be broken, and my feeling is that is that where you’ll see the really interesting potential is where marketers bend the rules of “cover photos,” “timeline apps,” and “milestones.” This Hubspot article has a great roundup.

I did a little research on what was possible with the new Timeline. Here’s a brief overview:

Apps are the new Tabs: “Apps” are the little boxes that appear to the right of your business name. Beyond photos, this area can include email signups, video and custom content.

Cover photos should be more evocative than promotional: Per Facebook guidelines, cover photos are not meant to be ads.

Use a unique image that represents your Page. This might be a photo of a popular menu item, album artwork or a picture of people using your product. Be creative and experiment with images your audience responds well to.

Cover images must be at least 399 pixels wide and may not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

I kind of like the creativity that’s brought on by restriction, but you knew that, right?

Pinning, highlighting and milestones will become increasingly important: More evidence that 2012 is the year of the picture? The ability to “pin,” content to the top of your fan page for seven days, highlight items to make them fill a full-page width, and to introduce items that are “milestones” in your company’s history are all well worth careful exploration by those using Facebook to raise awareness for their business.

What do you think of Facebook’s changes?

Last night I went to my first “Transmedia” Meetup at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Not familiar with “transmedia”? It’s the somewhat unfortunate catch-all moniker for storytellers who are working across media — so a novel that moves into video, or a movie that involves a real-life or app-driven game. Historically, it’s a movement “owned” by the filmmaking community, though regular writers are in there, as well as media specialists, people who have knowledge of programming. Obvs with all my keen interest in the future of books, I very much wanted to mix it up with this scene. Sitting there, amid the glowing screens, I felt that I was a part of something that is not exactly well-defined, but exciting nonetheless.

Last night’s presentation was a break-out workshop from StoryCode, which was meant to help empower members with knowledge about the tech side of digital media creation.

Mike Knowlton of Storycode broke down a bunch of terms that are important for people wanting to create on the web:

• What is a website?
• How are websites put together?
• How do you add in interactive elements and video?
• What are some of the protocols used on the web?
• Who do you want to work with to realize your vision?
• How do you talk to them?

As Mike ran through definitions of a bunch of terms–dedicated hosting, FTP, API, CMS, creative technologist, wireframes–the eyes behind the glowing screens in the room started to get wide. The pace of the typing quickened. The hands started going up.

Me? I was slightly startled to realize how far I’d come in my understanding and command of technical concepts over the past few years. I say this not to brag about my amazing command of CSS or JQuery (which isn’t so hot, honestly) but just to point out that there’s nothing special about me — I am a writer and creative person first and foremost. I just had a restless curiosity about tech, and set out to learn as much as I could.

Four years ago, all those terms were pretty much Greek to me. I was just starting out as a writer/editor at the Film Society, and just starting to look at the challenges facing us. I was also just heading to my very first South by Southwest conference, ready for a crash course. I remember coming back that year, my head spinning with ideas.

From the other side of the learning curve, all of these things seem forbidding, something you pawn off to your “IT person” or “developer.” They all sound very expensive and complicated.

But getting truly “empowered” about technology is something that needs to be a high priority for anyone who wants to connect with audiences who are increasingly demanding a richer, more immersive experience.

The fact is, as Mike rightly pointed out, you need to become fluent in these terms and concepts in order to know how to ask for what you want–and get it. Nowadays, all of the things he mentioned, the languages and protocols and methods of working are a completely unremarkable part of my daily working life, as ordinary as toast. Three years ago, though — I was like many of the people in the room. What the hell’s “on the cloud”? Will there be a test?

I heard some good questions being asked: Should I go to Code Academy? Is a CMS like when I used to make sites on geocities? What is the path to knowledge?

The answer, at least to that last question, is that any path that gets you started is a good one.

You have to carve it on your own. A good place to start, though, is a project you feel very passionately about.

Our site for New Directors/New Films was like that for me. I laugh when I think about all the mistakes I made there. Despite the mistakes, however, the project was successful and represented a huge learning curve. On the other side of it, I was empowered to create using the web and add more flexible features every time I did a new project.

So the answer is there is no shortcut. But it’s incumbent upon creative people, no matter where they are in their personal journey, to begin empowering themselves about technology, what it can do, and how to talk to core collaborators.

Check out StoryCode.

If you want a crash course in understanding how WordPress can be used to make all kinds of crazy projects, check out the One Hour Website.

And if you’re going to be in Austin next week, hit me up on the Twitters, would love to chat.

My friend Cheryl is a maven of audience-building. When she teaches her documentary students, she tells them, “build the audience first.”

Wait…what?

Once we said “build it and they will come,” but in the new age of personal branding and micro celebrity, it actually makes a lot of sense. You need to build a little tribe, as it were, and then launch your baby into the world. Then you’ve already got a grass-roots community built in for your efforts.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a woman about an idea for a startup that she had. She had a unique perspective and network already established. I asked her if she had considered extending that and building a little more of a digital profile for herself before she dug into the startup itself, with all of its attendant staffing and logistical difficulties. What about a blog, a place where you can define and carve out her expertise?

Launching a project that doesn’t have an audience yet is challenging, but not impossible. Consider the case of Kickstarter entry The Mystery of Marie Jocelyne. Writing in the Kickstarter blog, one of the filmmakers, Martha Shane says that: “Without a niche audience that the film can specifically appeal to, where, and how, do we find our supporters?”

But the process of developing a crowdfunding campaign has had a lot of positive impact on the film:

The wonderful thing is that doing this work for our campaign has helped us to tighten our vision for the movie and understand what we need to make the final film work. And that, I think, is the gift that Kickstarter has given us. Beyond providing a platform for us to raise money, it has forced us to learn how to talk about and promote the film in the most effective way possible.

I’m of two minds about Kickstarter. I listened to employee Cindy Au give a talk about the crowd-funding platform at the ArtsTech Meetup and have had this stat tattooed to my brain ever since: if you can make it to 30% of your goal, you have a 90% chance of sucess.

Ms. Au said it in the context of: you need to get your thing “kick-started” by your own network. And the stronger network you build, the better chance you have of doing that.

I’m not really sure that Kickstarter is the meritocratic utopia that it is portrayed to be. I think that the most successful projects belong to people who already boast a profile.

At the same time, good ideas can be surface on Kickstarter, within reason. Martha Shane’s blog post is an excellent illustration of that in action. I became one of the film’s backers, without even knowing the filmmakers, and I’m glad to say it recently met its goal.

I was watching an online video with a guru of self-publishing. “Your marketing begins when you first have the idea,” he said, explaining that he gets a book jacket made, a landing page put up, even before he’s written a word.

That’s incredible…and really smart.

Are you building your audience right now, in every way you can?

If not, here are some simple ideas you can try:

• Produce something of value and give it away for free.
• Build the email sign-ups
• Participate in Twitter chats
• Comment on other people’s blogs
• Become a expert on something on Quora

Related: 7 Digital Ways to Raise Funds for Your Nonprofit, Cause or Project

Yesterday at work, we were talking about how people engage with customer support. Some people use the phone, some people use Google and some people (though I don’t know any) use the manual. We were trying to better structure our support site, but we had to confront the simple truth that people access information differently. So our next question was naturally: how do we equip users with tools that help them filter better — match the need with the correct information more seamlessly? “It’s like being the Netflix of support,” I said. 

On the way home on the train I was reading the Sunday Times and there was a front page story a kidney donation “chain.” What initially drew me into the article was the dateline: Riverside, California, it said, which is the rather unremarkable Southern California region where I grew up. In the story, a man from Riverside decides to give up his kidney to a needy stranger, and unknowingly sets off a chain of events that potentially saved 30 lives.

What interested me most about the story was the role of an entrepreneur, Garet Hill, who’s daughter had once suffered from kidney disease. In the transplant cycle, there is a lot of inefficiency — say you get sick, and a relative wants to donate, but you are not a match. With sophisticated “matching” techniques and algorithms, one could create a “chain” in which people who need kidneys can be matched with living donors. In this case, the chain encompassed 17 hospitals in 11 states over four months and made good matches between 60 people.

It’s a great story of a businessman finding a pain point and applying technology to make a process more efficient. But it’s also an interesting reminder that “matching” technology — what we normally think about in the context of eHarmony and Netflix — can do more than root out affinities. It can actually save lives. Check out the article, it’s great! 

A few days ago I was reading a blog post by a new mom and native New Yorker who was planning to move to the suburbs. In it were a lot of the familiar complaints about what a hassle it is to live in New York, how many compromises it entails, and how it’s just “not worth it” if you’re not making the most of everything you can do.

While reading this post on my iPhone I was partaking in the happy hour special at the bar at James, which is basically one of the best grass-fed burgers in NYC (please don’t tell) at half price from 5:30 to 6:30. Sipping on a James’ Revenge, I was smack dab in the middle of a moment that makes me feel like the luckiest girl on the planet.

You see, I’m precisely where I should be. I’ve lived here for years, came here for college, and even as I change as a person, my feelings and romance for the city remain a bedrock. That, for me, is the definition of true love.

I was thinking about this while coming home late from work one night in a cab in the rain sometime in the fall. Whooshing down Seventh Avenue South, I was reminded of walking those same streets as an undergraduate, how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

So in honor of Valentine’s Day, I want to take you on a tour of my first true love, New York. It’s a tour that exists mostly in my head but represents actual physical places.

The hassle thing is totally true, but hassles come with the territory of loving a complex character wholeheartedly, tenaciously. Don’t you think? 

Verticality

When I came here, I was always looking up. All those lives pressed into tiny apartments, stacked on top of each other. The history, the verticality, that was what I thought I was in love with, and therefore I thought I’d always be a Manhattanite. But a film job took me to the church on the corner of Sterling and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope and I realized how beautiful Brooklyn was and a couple of years later I had the chance to live in a Brownstone right on that block. Less vertical but poetic just the same.

Biking Everywhere

I didn’t understand biking in the city until I was working on a film job in college and the Director of Photography handed me a key and said, use my bike and run over to Rafik and buy some gels. Of course I complied, only to find myself flying, floating down Broadway from a gasp-worthy vantage point.

Driving in the city gives me an anxiety attack, but not biking. I’m uber-confident, weaving in and out of lanes and holding my own even in crazy NYC traffic. When I found myself riding uphill the other day at night on the Manhattan Bridge, standing on the pedals, I laughed a little and thought, is this like when Juniper stands up on her hind legs to make herself look big?

Institutions

The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of the Moving Image. The Guggenheim. The New Museum. NYC’s many cultural institutions take my breath away. Part of it was growing up on From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, which is the story of two kids who run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and solve mysteries. I mean, if you want to know the stirrings of my love for the city, start there. A classic. More about institutions. 

Prospect Park

Once we were turned down on a prospective dog adoption because our apartment was too small for two dogs. I’m pretty sure these people didn’t understand that 585 acres of Prospect Park is truly our backyard. More about Prospect Park.

Everything and nothing

Once I worked with a German film crew who wanted to shoot various neighborhoods of NYC as doubles for foreign locales. We shot Chinatown for Shanghai and the West Village for London and the were driving over the Manhattan Bridge when “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” came on the radio, and we all started singing along.

Juxtapositions

I was working on a job just outside the old Domino Sugar Factory and I was sitting there changing a roll of film and I noticed a woman in a polka dotted dress step out of a vintage Cadillac against the perfect blue sky. The skeletal remains of the old factory made the beauty of the unexpected tableau all the more stark. I realized that day that you could shoot and shoot and shoot and never be in the same place twice, because idiosyncratic things are always colliding here.

Sesame Street

New York loomed large over my childhood in Southern California. It had so many things that seemed completely foreign — wire mesh trashcans and stoops, things I’d never seen and would never have imagined if not for Sesame Street.

A few years ago, I lived in a crumbling brownstone with a bunch of other people, and I finally had my stoop:

Catcher in the Rye

Of course I loved it as a teenager, but I was thrilled to get a whole new perspective on the book when studying with Richard Locke at Columbia. Well worth a second read.

Commerce Street

My first time in NYC, I was in college, and wandering around the West Village trying to find a schoolmate’s parents’ place. I got completely turned around, walked past the intersection of West 12th and West 4th (how’d that happen, hey?), and found myself on Commerce Street. Oh my heart, my soul. I just looked around me and thought “this must be the place you were meant to be.”

The light

These are just a few of the illogical things that I think of when I think of how grateful I am to live here.

New York is always bigger than life, bigger than my imagination. And compared to that the actual square footage of my apartment doesn’t seem so important.

And growing up? Who needs that?

Social Media Week is nigh upon us and Susan Halligan and I have been busily preparing a knock-out panel on the future of books and “social reading.” In a prep session a couple weeks ago, we gathered together Jason Carey of Brooklyn Public Library, Stephen Duncombe of NYU, Richard Nash of Small Demons, Aziz Isham of Arcade Sunshine and Corey Menscher of Findings.com to come and chat about some of the topics we would hash out during the conversation.

I was slightly in awe to listen to this diverse group of individuals who are working in so many different parts of a very exciting frontier — we’ve got tech founders, developers, academics, thinkers and people who, of course who wear many hats. Susan and I kept shooting each other looks as our panelists chatted over everything from Apple’s new Author software, to the attention spans and digital reading habits of children. If this is anything like the panel is going to be, I think both of us were thinking, this will be amazing. 

I don’t think this conversation could come at a moment more ripe with possibilities–and pitfalls–for writers and readers. Just a scan of the past week or so’s headlines shows why:

Mashable published a story headlined: “Apple Will Own Your Work with iBooks Author” and ripples of dismay filtered through the blogosphere. Hope to get beyond the hysteria in a subsequent post but for now, let’s just say, no, Apple will not own your content and copyright so take a deep breath and read some better research and reasoned analysis such as this piece in Ars Technica.

Jonathan Franzen weighed in on the downsides of ebooks, remarking: “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

On the plus side, TechCrunch published a pretty good overview of key considerations for those who want to embrace the world of book creation and self-distribution, entitled “Why every entrepreneur should self-publish a book.”

All of the above are likely to be among the many subjects we cover during the panel on the morning of Tuesday, February 14th.

Hope you’ll join us!