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How To Network

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Networking is important. We all know that. In my experience, being able to pick up a phone and call a contact for relevant information has been priceless. But making contacts is not something I would call "easy". Networking can be awkward and uncomfortable. Unfortunately, if you are really going to be a rock star in your field you’re going to have to learn to live with networking.

Last year I attended the GDC Focus On In Game Advertising Summit in San Fran, Can. The company I worked for at the time sent me out, all by my lonesome, to learn more about an in game ad project we were working on. I decided to live blog the whole event so my seniors and co-workers could keep up to date on what was going on. I blogged about each speaker as they spoke. I went into painstaking detail about what I was learning. I was becoming an expert at something I knew almost nothing about only days earlier. I figured I would return a hero.

Then my boss left this comment on my blog:

Hope we got more out of this event than what is written about here. Did we get any designer leads or cards from any other in game agencies?

I suddenly figured out why I was really sent to San Fran: Networking.

If you are being sent by your company to an industry event there is a VERY slim chance they want you to sit attentively at every track and simply debrief them upon your return. If you want to come back a hero you’ll need to have a virtual Rolodex of new contacts in hand. That’s the bottom line.

I’m not shy. I’m not scared of the public. I’m not scared of social settings. But something changes in me when I have to use social skills to actually produce a result that my boss is counting on. I’m not alone though, seems many professionals have this very same problem.

Some common misconceptions that hinder the networking experience are…

  • Everyone here knows already knows each other, except me
  • I will annoy people
  • No one wants to talk to me
  • I’ll be outed as a rookie immediately
  • I have nothing valuable to add
  • I’ll look like I feel: nervous

Here are some great links to help you network better and get over my all-too-accurate bullet points.

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Social Media Newsroom Template

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SHIFT Communications certainly has a major interest in pushing social media in public relations. Not only did they release a Social Media News Release Template (first to do so?) but now they have released their template for a Social Media Newsroom too. Both links are PDF

So which one of you 2.0 hackers is gonna streamline this for everyone and make a handy web app that builds and hosts these newsrooms? I think it seems pretty easy. Some simple cut and paste of feed urls and maybe a simple CMS for releases, execs, boilerplates, etc.

BOTTOM LINE: We need a white label, simple, hosted web based newsroom solution based on the SHIFT template. Who’s gonna do it?

Webmaster 2.0

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via AwakenedVoice

Rob Safuto has a great post that asks if your webmaster is "in the know 2.0". Personally, I’m sick of the old school acronym spitting webmaster who brushes off the new web. We are living in the web version of the wild west and you better get some bigger guns. At this point even rookie webmasters should be able to at least install WordPress, Drupal, Mediawiki, and have some basic understanding of RSS, podcasting, and basic new web concepts like tagging and social bookmarking.

BOTTOM LINE: Get a Bluehost.com (not aff) account with Fantastico one click install of some of these technologies, play with them, hack them, have fun, change the world. And for G*d sakes start a damn blog already!

Podcasting and Internet Radio-Why is there a difference?

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I’ve been hooked on using Alexaholic and the brand new Google Trands lately. Today is my first post where I will use data from these two sources to illustrate a point about podcasting. Will it work? Who cares. Graphs are cool.

In one of my post about RSS adoption and why it’s so slow I talked about how tech acronyms will slow adopyion rates among the main stream. The more we can flatten the learning curve the faster new technology will take off. Of course, this is common knowledge, but usually appilied to UI’s. No one ever thinks it could work with something as simple as a name.

I propose that podcasting would have a higher adoption rate if all audio publishing was referred to as “internet radio” and podcasting was simple a feature. Perhaps all podcasters should stop using the word “podcast” and just call themselves EJs (Electronic disc Jockey) with internet radio stations. Most blog post from podcasters already have a built in player so it is really internet radio on demand. As a matter of fact, an entire campaign should be waged on that note alone. It’s not “podcasting”, it’s “Internet Radio On Demand”. Now THAT is something the mainstream can grasp.

Interest in podcasts is up, WAY UP. But America seems more hooked on internet radio while Singapore is falling in love with podcasting.
Podcast_trendOne could make the argument that podcasting will soon overtake internet radio. Someone else could make the argument that podcasting and live streaming are radically different. I see it making more sense when podcasting is put under the umbrella of internet radio.