The session I gave at Podcamp Toronto 2010 was titled Saving Newspapers Using Search & Social. It was all about how newspapers could use a blend of SEO, social media, and mobile apps to increase their audience and offer more diversified and targeted ad buys. Some of the audience seemed to thinks that I was on to something, and some of the audience thought I was dreaming.

On the last day of PCTO, I met Dave Coleman. He’s the Director of Marketing for Spreed Inc, a company that’s already working with newspapers to provide the mobile component of what I recommended in my presentation. Spreed is working with some major newspapers, such as the Globe & Mail, which served up 7.5 million page views a month last month through their iPhone App alone.

iPhone Version

So it looks like newspapers aren’t f**ked, after all. They just need to start looking at themselves as Social News Organizations rather than suppliers of physical, printed artifacts. Because, frankly, their business model hinges on providing authority, printed content, and there’s nothing in that which stipulates that that content has to be delivered via a berliner, tabloid, or broadsheet format.

Credit: Flylice

I used to work with this biz dev guy who was a negotiation genius. He also used to say how his ability to understand the other guy’s position was both his biggest strength and his biggest weakness.

On the one hand, he could anticipate where the other guy was coming from, and craft his pitch around that. On the other hand, being able to empathize made it that much harder to press his own point when he knew that the deal he was trying to strike just didn’t make sense for the other guy.

More recently, I worked with another biz dev guy. He was kind of an unlikely candidate — polite, soft spoken, and respectful.

He also had an unlikely philosophy: no matter what, always keep pushing until someone says “no.” After pitching, he’d keep following up, over and over again, letting nothing discourage him until the other guy said “no, we don’t want to work with you.”

Advertising uses both of these approaches. First, it tailors a campaign around a particular demographic. Then it repeats its message over and over and over again until it sticks.

But I think the lesson extends to a lot of other things in life — whether you’re a marketer, an activist, or just someone who’s trying to cope with office politics.

Understanding the mindset of the people you’re dealing with lets you anticipate their reaction and tailor your approach accordingly. But it’s just as important to never stop pushing. Because even if someone means well, they have their own sh*t to deal with. So if you want to get things done, you just have to keep pushing for it until you either get your point across or they tell you to f*ck off.

It’s terrible and wonderful at the same time! It’s like freedom in a cup!
– Elliot

Credit: Thomas Hawk

There’s a samurai adage to the effect of “he who ceases to fear death becomes invincible.” The idea is that if you stop giving a shit what happens, you become free. Free to speak your speak your mind and follow your heart. You stop needing them so they can no longer harm you. They might take away this or that, but they’ll never take away your dignity.

This was an idea that Jean-Jacques Rousseau caught onto during the Renaissance. Rousseau believed that the key to freedom and happiness was to reduce our needs as much as possible. This why he distinguished between amour de soi and amour propre. The former is a natural form self-love that let’s us pursue whatever really is in our self-interest. The latter is a form of pride that we learn from society and through all its bullshit and brain-washing. Amour propre only serves to increase our dependencies. It’s rooted in pride and vanity and makes us reliant on arbitrary social conventions and the opinions of others.

This is why there are two sides to the saying that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” On one hand, being free to do whatever we want often means having nothing left worth having. It implies being along and unhappy. But if you can shed any need that you can’t fill for yourself, then you can be both free and happy.

This is also why Bob Dylan said “to live outside the law you must be honest.” It’s not so much that you need to have integrity to get away with being an outlaw. Rather, it’s that you can’t escape the law if you don’t. You need to be honest with others (integrity), but more importantly, you need to be honest with yourself. You need to understand what you really need, and what the excess bullshit is so that you can let it go. Because once you let go of the bullsh*t, no one can rule over you. You’re free from social conventions, which are probably the most tyrannical set of laws we live under.

It’s easy to give into the bullshit. We all need to eat, we all need to make money, so it’s tempting to give in, tell people what they want to hear, and try to get what we want out of them. But if you stop giving a shit about all the bullshit, you’ll probably find out that you need a lot less than you thought, and that you can get by on a lot less. And the less you need, the less ass you have to kiss, and the less ass you kiss, the better you feel about yourself. It’s true, you should try it sometime.

Credit: Christopher M. Dawson

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer is out, and tech journalist Tom Foreski did some digging into the findings. As Tom points out, the news isn’t good for PR agencies, “social media experts,” citizen journalists, or media companies of any kind:

• Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.
• Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.
  [...]
• Trust in credibility of TV news declined by 20 points, from 44 to 24 percent
• Trust in news coverage on the radio dropped by 17 points, from 48 to 31 percent.
• Trust in newspapers fell by 14 points, from 46 to 32 percent.
• Only 38 percent trust media (as an institution) to do what is right, down from 46 percent in 2008.
• Media companies (as an industry) have declined in credibility by 16 points (from 48 to 32 percent).
• In the U.S., media companies are tied with the insurance industry for last place. Banks are second from the bottom.
• Top trusted industry is technology and it has widened its lead over other industries.
• Tied for the second most trusted industry is Biotech and Automotive at 63 percent, followed by Energy, Retail and Food at 61 percent.

Naturally, this got Tom speculating whether it was simply a case of market factors at work: the media marketplace is simply over-saturated (with everything from mainstream to social media), and that might have driven the market value through the floor. As far as the mainstream media goes, Tom also suggested that it probably has to do with how “traditional media is under pressure, with fewer resources [which] means more mistakes, less time to check sources, [and] a lower quality product.”

I think another part of what’s going on here, though, is a case of over-exposure/fatigue. I mean, we’re tapped into information all the time. We spend the majority of our time staring at glowing rectangles. Our telescreens are on steroids. And we’re getting stupider because so much of our mind share is being taking up by other people’s messages that there hardly anything left for our own thought processes.

So maybe what’s starting to happen is that our minds are pushing back. Maybe it’s an evolutionary mechanism to coax our own, independent sense-of-self into re-asserting itself. ‘Cause something tells me that trust in peers that we actually share space hasn’t dropped. These are peers who we can read when they share information with us. We can see their body language and respond to it.

Who knows? Maybe what’s making us stupider is that we interact less with people and more with machines. We are, after all, social creatures, and those social tendencies have evolved over 3 millions years of physical interaction. So maybe our brains are pushing back. Maybe they’re trying to drive us away from the media circus and back home into the company of a real tribe.

This is an interview with Chris Hill, the President and CEO of FundScrip, a company that helps non-profits raise money by obeying the 13th Law of Power: When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude. Basically, FundScrip helps these non-profits raise money by selling gift cards — instead of just asking for hand-outs.

Chris and I actually met a couple years ago at a job interview. He interviewed me. Our paths crossed again last year in Vegas when we were both working for other people. We had a lot of fun that night, and a lot of video was shot that night, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be doing either one of us any favors by posting it online. Besides, what happens in Vegas in supposed to stay there, not online…

iPhone Version

Credit: Mike Rollerson

The really great thing about online communities is that they let us connect with like-minded people along the lines of share common interests. But what good are those connections if you can’t ever leverage them? After all, like the old saying goes: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

But how do you go about calling in the chips when the time comes? You know all these people and you’ve had all these “conversations” with them. But your relationship with them is scarcely skin-deep: it’s based largely around a single, niche interest, and you rarely share any physical space with these people. So there’s something awkward about reaching out to them one day as asking for something.

So what do you do? Do you timidly broadcast a plea amid the deafening white-noise of the stream and hope it gets noticed? Or you do you risk crossing a line by knocking down doors one by one, via DMs, IMs, and email?

After all, what good is it being tapped into a niche, target network if you can’t ever call in the chips?

Credit: Niko Prencin

For the most part, old money looks down on new money, and when old money uses the term nouveau riche, it’s for a reason. For starters, the nouveau riche tend to lack a lot of the manners and tastes that come with generations of refinement. But more importantly, the nouveau riche lack longevity. You see, any a**hole can make money, but as the saying goes, “a fool and his money are soon parted.”

Specifically, the fortunes of the nouveau riche often don’t last more than a generation or two. Daddy makes some money, the children grow up spoiled and lazy, and the grandchildren are left back where most of us are: working for a living. So if you think about it, the manners and the tastes that come with generations of refinement are really just proof that your line has what it takes to stay rich and might actually be entitled to its fortunes.

This remind me a lot of new media. It’s easy to gawk at how the mainstream media (MSM) insists on doing business, but we forget that they’ve been around a long time. They’ve made a lot of money, and while their profits might be slipping, many of the top players probably have more than enough of a cushion to weather out tides of change (I know: a lot metaphors in sentence).

You see, as much as the nouveau media eats into the market share of the MSM, it often doesn’t know what to do with it. A lot of nouveau media often doesn’t know how to actually make money, and doesn’t last more than a generation. We see this in how Friendster was eclipsed by MySpace was eclipsed by Facebook, and in how Twitter still doesn’t really have a revenue model.

I think it would do a lot of “evangelists” and “thought leaders” well to consider this when sharing their ideas on “game changing” media or technology. ‘Cause while some new kind of media might be really neat or fun or useful, it might not commercially viable on its own. Rather, it might be something that’s more appropriate as part of a much more comprehensive media experience, and as an asset of a much more established media entity.

Credit: galessa's plastics

About a month ago, I wrote a piece on Revenews.com about diversifying your online ad budget. Well, a few weeks later, Wade Sisson invited me to discuss online ad budget diversification on Affiliate Marketing Insider on WebMaterRadio.FM.

The episode is called Savvy Advertising Budget Planning got 2010, and we chatted about social media ad networks, as well as second tier PPC networks. The discussion was mostly from the perspective of an affiliate marketer, but the approach is something that pretty any marketer can use:

• Social media ad networks let you better target campaigns through user profile data.
• Second tier PPC networks can offer either (1) better ROI on certain keywords, or (2) access to content networks that don’t deal with the top-tier PPC networks (such as Adwords).
• Know your average CPA when evaluating a networks pricing.
• Start with a test budget to see whether an ad network can improve your CPA/ROI.

In a nutshell, users are diversifying the way they are using the web, so marketers have to diversify how they target them. While social media sites are becoming a bigger and bigger source of traffic, many top-tier content networks  opt to monetize through second-tier networks because because they offer more personalized account management. So if you’re looking at ways to expand the reach of your campaigns (and possibly bolster online acquisitions), you might want to consider going beyond top-tier PPC networks such as Adwords.

Credit: Aniara Trast

Let me tell you a story: Recently, a friend of mine told me how he needed help moving a sofa. There was someone who he knew online, and their relationship had spilled over into the real world because they lived nearby one another. But he couldn’t muster the nerve to ask for a hand because their relationship was so niche-based that it just didn’t seem appropriate to push it beyond that niche set of interests.

There’s a lot to be said for online communities, the “connections” they offer us, and how they factor into our moder social lives. But if you think about, before social media, communities centered aroumd physical space. Whether they were neighbourhoods or community centres, the were anchored to a geographical location, and couldn’t exist without them.

And something that’s interesting about these “organic communities” is that they accomodated differences better than do online communities. Take the neighbourhood: with the neighbourhood, we make a community because we live near each other, do business with one another, and have generational and family ties that bond us together. Families will have been part of a neighbourhood for x-amount of generations, and that shared history is a big part of what ties them together — for good or ill.

With these “organic comminuties,” it wasn’t shared personal interests that held people together. Rather, community members had all different kinds of interests (professions, sports, hobbies, etc.), and that vast array of interests made for a more colourful, diverse community. People were sharing a space, and that shared space took precedence over their differences. Your own personal interests didn’t matter as much as your physical ties to other community members.

And I believe, for the most part, that that dynamic fostered a more tolerant and less egocentric ethos than we find in online communities — which, in turn, led to deeper, more nuanced relationships between community members.

Credit: lanuchan

You see, online communities are driven by common interests and not by shared space. We come together and connect online because we share one, common interests. And the result, I think, is that the relationships we form with other online community members are more shallow. Just as Google might be turning us into “pancake people” by getting us out of the habit of learning and remembering, social media might be turning us into “pancake people” by coaxing us into trading up deep, naunced relationships with a few people for shallow, uni-dimensional relationships with many people.

I think this is why online networks get so excited about events such as Podcamps and TweetUps: it forces them into a shared space, and lends the relationship a bit more legitimacy. But even that shared space is ephemeral. You only share it for a limited time, you’re not in each other’s face in the same way, and you’re not force to push one another’s boundaries beyond your shared interests. In fact, these events are so few and far between that, despite sharing a physical space, your interactions tend to focus only on your shared interests.

It’s in this sense that I’m hoping RoadCamp will be a kind of “social (media) experiment.” By putting a couple dozen geeks into a relatively confined space for 3 days with no real escape (i.e. personal space), we’re going to be really pushing those personal boundaries. We’ll be forced to connect with each other on a much more nuanced level, and confront how we all have interests and perspectives that are completely alien to one another.

A lot of us blogger and tweeters like to quip that we’re social media rock starts. Well, we’re hoping that RoadCamp will be precisely the kind of experience that both tears bands apart and inspires them to do some of their greatest work — to put to the test whether we’re just another melee of one-hit-wonders, or really do have any of the kind of staying-power that bands like U2, The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith have demonstrated, decade over decade.

Credit: Andreas Constantinou

Having a client really is like dating. You both enter into a relationship with all kinds of baggage. You both have histories. You both have expectations based on past experiencse, and sometimes you even have trust issues.

Sometimes, one of you has really high expectations because of past relationships, and when that happens, it helps to stop and ask yourself: if something was so great back then, why didn’t it work out?

And just like a romantic relationship, when something goes terribly wrong, often both sides share blame (maybe one a little more than the other), because it takes two to tango. Take apologies, for example: it takes a big person to admit that they’re wrong, but it takes a bigger person to accept that apology, forgive them, and move on with no hard feelings.

You see, even when it’s someone else’s f**ks up, it’s still your problem, and when something is your problem, it becomes your responsibility. And if you don’t accept that responsibility, then you’re just as much to blame as the next guy.

This is the difference between fault, responsibility, and blame. Someone else’s fault is often still your problem and your responsibility, and you’re just as much blame if you don’t live up to that responsibility.

In fact, this is a recurring theme that we see in religion all the time. A perfect being made an imperfect man, but we’re still expected to struggle with those imperfections, partly by improving on those we can, and partly by accepting the limitations of our imperfections — whether they’re our own, or those of others.

And what’s religion for other than giving us an example of how to live our lives better? So maybe it’ll help next time someone falls short of our expectations to take the shortcoming for what it is, accept responsibility for what we got ourselves into with them, and choose to react in a way that reflects and lives up to that responsibility.