Managing the Gray - Marketing for the New Media Professional

Transcript for Managing the Gray #41
“Calculated Risks and Taking Chances”
Originally Posted on September 12, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Top of the morning everybody. It’s C.C. Chapman coming to you from the new C.C. studios here. Yeah! I’ve moved since the last show. This is episode #41 of Managing the Gray and I’m very happy to be here. There are a lot of things going on in my life right now. So, today we’re going to be talking about everything from risk to happiness to career changes to all those things that I’m going through right now. I had several people email me including John Swanson who sent me a very, very nice message encouraging me to share this. He wasn’t sure if I was going to share this sort of things and I had planned to. I get a lot of feedback from a lot of people and I’ve gotten a lot of messages over the past couple of days. Wait. I realized some of you may not know the news.

So, I have resigned from Crayon. I am leaving Crayon, a company that I helped form and launch and get going. Maybe I didn’t help form it, but I helped get it launched and all that. It’s been a great year. It’s been an up and down year, but it was the right time to do it. It’s honestly something I had thought about for quite some time and knew that was going to happen, but with moving the house, putting down a gun for hire free agent on a mortgage application doesn’t quite work. So, I stuck it out and I’m leaving. I wish them nothing, but success. I know they’re kind of changing themselves now. So, I hope Crayon goes on to do success, the guys there, the ones that are left I really like. I really appreciate it. I hope they do great things. There are still a lot of great ideas there. So, we’ll see what happens and keep watching them at crayonville.com and see what they’re up to.

Me? So, what am I doing? I’m taking a chance. I’m taking a risk and it’s something that I think applies to anybody who listens to this show is the fact that risk happens. You need to embrace it and be okay with it, but there’s a difference between a calculated risk and just throwing it out there and hoping things work. You got to think about things like this, especially when it’s involving your career. You’ve got to really think about the long-term implications. You’ve got to think about where you’re going to go, what you’re going to do. Can you do this? I mean things like financially, can you do it? I mean I just bought a house and I’m still selling my old house. It hasn’t been sold yet. So, there were lots of financial decisions in this, but at the same time don’t think just short term. You’ve got to think long term.

What I’m trying to get at is these are things you need to think about for whether it’s a project you’re about to do, whether it’s a career change, whether you’re going to college and trying to take your first job. You got to be comfortable with taking a chance and taking a risk because let’s face it. Depending on how old you are, you’ve got plenty of time to fix it. If you make a mistake, we all make mistakes because sometimes mistakes happen or chance turns out to be bad or risk doesn’t work in your favor, in which case you just have to change it around, get going and going again. The key is that you can learn from it. We’ve all heard the thing you can make mistakes, just don’t make them twice. That’s true. Learn from them.

I know pretty much any project I’ve ever worked on, things haven’t gone quite the way I thought and you learn from it and then on the next project you don’t do that and you learn from it again. We’re all learning. Anyone who says they know all the answers is wrong because everyday things are changing it. I was talking to someone the other day and I was talking about what I’m very excited about where I want to stay freelance for a while is I get to help companies, people, individuals “get it.” Her response was, “Yeah and that means first realizing that getting it changes every two weeks,” and that’s very, very true.

If you’re thinking about doing a career move, if you’re trying out a new project, just calculate the risks, really look at the things and look at it from every angle, analyze it. What I always like to do is, “What’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s the worst possible thing that could happen? What’s the next worst possible thing?” Once I get those out of the way, I can really figure out, “Okay, how can I avoid those two worst things?” Then I can focus all my energy on the positive because if you’re thinking about taking a risk, there are always a million positive outcomes that can come of it, but think of the two worst. Look at those and then do everything possible to stunt them out and move forward. That’s my advice.

Now, I get a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls from you guys. Oh, I get yelled at when I don’t give the comment line out. It’s 206-309-4729. That’s 206-309-GRAY. There. I get a lot of questions like I’m not happy in my job, what can I do to leave. If you’re not happy, get out. There are so many jobs out there. There are so many opportunities out there. You can make your own opportunities. I’ve always had this rule that if I get up in the morning — if I get up for a solid week because we all have those days you get up and you’re just like, “Oh, I don’t want to go.” We all have those days, but I’ve always had this thing that if a solid week happens and I just don’t want to be there or I’m dreading it, wherever that job is, that means it’s time to get out. It’s not worth it. Happiness is way too important and life is too short.

You’ve got things in your life that you do that do make you happy. Mine, it’s my family. My family comes before everything and they make me happy. If I’m not happy, then I know something’s wrong. I mean I knew I made the right decision to move on when two days after I resigned, we were sitting in the living room and Laura looked at me and I go, “What?” She goes, “I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time.” When your wife notices something like that, that shows you that I made the right decision. I know I did. So, really look at your happiness. Figure out what makes you happy. Know what you want and what you don’t want, especially if you’re looking to move to a new job because let’s face it, right now, I mean I’m not going to lie, I’ve gotten some offers for jobs already and I’ve turned them down because I know what I want and more importantly, I know what I don’t want. For me, I’m a driving guy so a commute is like the ultimate hell for me. I hate commuting, especially like a long commute. It’s such wasted time and wasted opportunity in your life and it’s such a life suck. I hate commuting. The other thing, the rule I’ve told everybody and I’ve done this when all things started going crazy, I won’t leave New England. It’s just not an option. That’s just my personal rule. I mean those are my two rules. I don’t want to commute and I won’t leave New England. Those are my two rules. I won’t leave New England because it’s where all my family is.

It’s funny. I remember I had a company courting me a couple years ago and they were like name my price. I’m like there is not a single dollar value on this planet that will get me out of New England and it’s true. I just won’t because there are too many things that are more important than money and no job is worth leaving the things that are important to me. Think about that for you. Maybe it’s right down the list. I mean I keep a paper journal. I write down things all the time. It’s the old pro and con sheet. Again, this can work for projects too or company strategies. Think about these things. Life lessons, baby. It all ties back together. It has to do with business. It has to do with new media. It just does it all.

One thing too is if you’re thinking about leaving a job or you’re thinking about taking a risk, be realistic. I am not one of those guys who can just throw caution to the wind and just jump out of a plane. I’m going to check the parachute. I’m going to check the airplane. I’m going to make sure I know what I’m doing. Just think about the big picture and think about the long-term implications of what you’re doing. Sometimes a little risk can snowball out of control and the next thing you know, you’re drowning, you’re just going insane. You don’t want that. I always like to think long term. I like to think, “If I make this decision now, how could that affect things 6 to 12 months out or even further?” I can’t do the five-year plan anymore because stuff is changing way too fast. I’m lucky if I have a 6- to 12-month plan because things are changing so rapidly and the technology changes every month, day, whatever you’re talking about, but really be realistic. Look at it objectively. One of the neat things that I’ve always been able to do is take the creative, take the crazy rainmaker idea, go crazy, and then look at it from the realistic side of things and say, “Can this happen? Is it the right thing to do?” I did a lot of those thinking over the past few weeks, a lot of those things.

If you’re going to take a risk, especially if you’re doing it on your personal side, you’ve got to have the buy-in of the people you love and care about. I could not have made this decision without Laura. Plain and simple it wasn’t. We talked long and hard about it. She’s funny. She had the ultimate faith in me. It’s kind of crazy to have two mortgages and suddenly quit your job with nothing lined up. We’re talking about risk and taking a chance, but I knew it was the right thing and she was okay with it because we talked about it. She knew why I was doing it. She knew the reason. She knew where I was going. It’s funny. I thanked her. I said, “Thank you for believing in me,” because it’s a leap of faith on her part to believe in me, but what she said came back to me. It blew me away. She said, “You’ve never given me a reason to not believe in you.”

That meant a lot and that’s kind of personal. Yeah, this is showing I’m kind of wearing my life on my sleeve, but that’s what I’m about. I mean C.C. Chapman is an open guy and I share you guys and I’m hoping you’re getting something out of this and I’m hoping those people out there who said, “C.C., we’d really want to hear your side…” If you’re looking for dirt, you’re not getting it here. Just get out of the way because I’ve had plenty of people ask for that. Really make sure the people around you, your support network whether it’s your friends, whether it’s your family, make sure they’re involved and they will help you. I know right now, if you’re listening, I know that there’s like one person you could think of outside of your direct family that you’re like, “I could go to them and ask.” I have those people.

When I was ready to make this decision, there were two people that I knew I was going to call and chat with and I did and I talked at length with them. It helped reaffirm my decision and that’s not a bad thing. If you’re thinking about taking a risk or a chance, reach out to somebody. See what they think. Tell them because they might go, “Are you insane?” but then when they realize it’s a really truly good idea or good risk, they’ll embrace you, they’ll help you, they’ll give you ideas because that’s what true, true friends are about. They may be Internet buddies. They might be lifelong buddies from school. It doesn’t matter. You know who your trusted people are. Talk to them. Work with them. Chat about what’s going on because sometimes just getting it out of your brain — I find it very helpful to just get the idea out of my brain and just bounce it off to somebody. Just see what people think about it. That’s important.

Now, one thing I am going to push. Things are not going to be given to you. You have to make your own opportunities. I’ve heard from so many people over the past year doing this podcast where people say, “Oh, C.C., I want…” they expect things given to them. There is no such thing as a free lunch, right? Well, I’ve had free lunch before, but let’s face it. You need to make your own opportunities. None of this stuff is given to you for free whether you’re talking about growing a podcasting audience, whether you’re talking about influencer outreach to get your product out there, it’s not going to happen overnight by magic. Yeah, once in a while, Tinker Bell swings by and dusts it with pixie dust and all kinds of cool things happen, but in most cases you’re going to have to work very hard to make your opportunities. I’ve worked my butt off these past few years, really getting myself out there, getting my brand to where I want it to be and I want to take it to the next step and you’re going to see things in the new future taken it to the next step, but that has been a lot of hard work, a lot of hours, a lot of late nights.

You guys ask how I get things done. It’s late night. It’s the Mac on the couch with a beer at midnight going, “Okay, now, what do I need to do?” You’ve got to work hard. Opportunities sometimes will present themselves and, yeah, I’m finding out now that it can be out there. Sometimes just raising your hand will get you noticed, but you’ve got to work hard. Make your own opportunities. I cannot stress this enough. You’ve got to do it. Get out there. Reach out to people. Reach out to your network. Actually, use a social network for what it’s really used for. Find people. Interact with them. Make friends. Have a dog that barks in the middle of your podcast, things like that. Just work hard. It’s amazing what a dog will do to distract you.

So, I think this is a perfect time. I want to play a comment from Paul Colligan.

Paul Colligan: Hey C.C. It’s Paul Colligan. I just listened to your show about are we selling ourselves too short, new media selling itself too short. Yes, we’re doing that. That’s the problem and the problem is if we don’t get together and prove what our value is, scream what our value is, shout what our value is, then the traditional media is going to keep thinking they can buy us off for a case of beer or something like that. So, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to realize the value of what it is that we have. Now, the [unintelligible] changed in a number of ways. It used to be we associated value with the equipment that produced the value. Movies are better than home videos because the movies were produced over a multimillion dollar budget, whereas, the home video is a $300 Handycam kind of thing. Let’s face it, podcast, like you said, they’re basically free. So, what happens is a lot of times we associate the content as being basically valueless because it’s created basically free.

That’s not the case anymore. The technology is becoming ubiquitous. That’s what we wanted, that’s what we dreamed for, but the value of what we do with the content, the value of that information, that’s where all the power is. Second Life, one of your favorite hangouts, the technology is great, yes, but it’s what the people are doing with the technology that gives Second Life all its value. It’s the exact same thing as podcasting. So, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to realize how much value we have. We’ve got to only charge for that value. We’ve only got to let people purchase what we have to say at the value that we’re worth and then these things will change. It’s scary sometimes to realize, to charge what you’re worth. It’s scary that someone will say no. It’s scary that someone will invalidate you. Whatever the term is you want to look for, the fact of the matter is new media is worth it. Let’s stop selling ourselves short. Great show as always, man. Sorry I’m a couple of weeks behind, but it’s just too good not to call it on. Talk to you later, sir. Bye.

C.C. Chapman: Thanks Paul. Thanks, Paul, for covering up Roxie barking. You’d think with the new studio that I’ve got here, I’ve got doors on this studio, I’m just not used to shutting them so they are now shut and the bus went by so hopefully she’ll be quiet. What Paul was saying, it plays into it too. It played into the whole value discussion that we’ve been having for a while, but also plays into your worth and determining your worth. I’m having to face that now. I had someone yesterday call me up and say, “Hey, C.C. I want you to do this and this and this and this. How much is it going to cost me?” I stopped and I realized, “Crap! I got to think of these things now. I need to think of rates and things like that.” How do you determine that? Sometimes in today’s world, it’s not just based on talent or experience. It’s based on a lot of things. You can ask 10 different consultants and they will all charge you totally different things. It’s kind of interesting and that’s a problem I’m dealing with right now and I’m going to figure it out, but it is definitely something that, like Paul was saying, it applies to podcast, it applies to everything. I think you’re going to see a lot of discussions about this.

The Podcast and New Media Expo, newmediaexpo.com is coming up at the end of October. I know there’s going to be a lot of chatter about that. The Association for Downloadable Media is having its first public meeting there. I will definitely be in that. Profitable Podcasting, there’s going to be a meeting by Paul. There’s going to be a lot of great sessions, a lot of great conversations. Trust me. There will be lots of things going on there both in the Expo floor, in the Marriott and just all around. Homefry Breakfast, by the way, any Managing the Gray listeners, we’re going to have breakfast at the Spire on Friday morning down the street, basically have breakfast before the conference opens and you’re all invited. I can’t believe I’m going to say this. The invitation’s on Facebook. Wow. Email me and I’ll get you details.

So, there are lots of opportunities going on. There are lots of conversations going on about how do you value your content. I just got back from PodCamp Philly a couple of days ago. What was interesting was there wasn’t as much talk about that there because most of the people there weren’t even into podcasting yet. Me, Mark Blevis, and Linda Mills did a session on highly effective new media and one of the first questions I asked was “how many people is this your first PodCamp” and easily, easily 90% of the room, 80-90% of the room raised their hands and I asked “how many people have never done a podcast” and it was a little bit less than that, probably 70-85%, but it was still a lot. So, there was a lot of new people coming in and learning about the technology and figuring out “does this work for me or does it not.” They’re going to be asking the value question before you know it, how to get sponsors, how to get…

There is so much talk about that and I think you’re going to see a lot of changes. I’m curious what gets announced at the PME. There are always big announcements happening. I know a couple that I’ve heard rumbling in the background so it will be interesting will anybody get more money, will people be joining new networks, will companies be merging, will there be new technology. Who knows what’s going to go on? I’m looking forward to it because it’s a business opportunity for me too now. Going the gun for hire route, the mercenary role now, I’m looking for work. I don’t have one. As of Friday, two days from now, I don’t have a paycheck anymore so it’s going to be kind of interesting to see where things go and I’m excited. That’s what I want you to think about is get excited about what you’re doing. If you’re not excited about what you’re doing right now and you want to do something more exciting, do what I was talking about earlier. Look at the risks. Figure out what’s important to you, what’s not important to you, what drives you nuts, what sucks your life blood away. If it sucks your life blood away, you don’t want that and whatever you moved to. You don’t want to work with that. You don’t want to play with that. Do you see a project coming down the pipeline that gets you excited at your company? If so, go after it. Raise your hand and say, “I want to be part of that.”

If you see one that you know is just going to suck every living day out of you, avoid it like the plague. Try to get away from it, but when you see something that excites you, go after it. Work hard, work very hard and make it work. Make it yours. Make your opportunities. Take the chance and just get out there, kick butt and have fun doing everything you’re doing. Be passionate about it. Passion is what drives everything or it should. Passion drives everything I do, everything I do, everything I live, breathe, and do whether it’s making dinner last night, spoiling my wife, or it’s recording this podcast, or it’s seeing a movie, or it’s painting a painting, or it’s writing my book, which I finally get to do more of. I wrote a bunch on the train the other day. It felt good. Chase your passions. Use that energy. Figure out what makes you happy and just go do it. All right? I can’t stress that enough. Seriously. Right now, write down what you hate and you love what you’re doing right now. That’s your homework. Just go do it and think about it. I tell you, if the side of the hate is longer than the love, you’ve got something you got to think about.

Call me up, 206-309-4729, or drop me an email at managingthegray@gmail.com. I would love to talk to you and hey, you want to hire me? You’re not going to hear me say this every time, I promise. Cc-chapman.com has got all the contact information. I would love to hear from you. I would love to work with you and if you think you’re too small, don’t. I’m very much excited about working with people, individual bands, movies, companies, whatever it is, other agencies. Heck, I’ll come in and do a pitch with you guys or facilitate brainstorm sessions. Whatever it is, I just am excited to work with such a variety of new people. That has me giddy with glee. Giddy with glee, C.C.? I don’t think so.

Anyways, guys, you take care. I will be back very, very soon. Until next time, swing on by managingthegray.com. All right? Go out. Be passionate.

Originally posted on Managing the Gray 

Posted in Transcript | Comments(1)

I noticed today that my good friend Scott Sigler has started a new blog called Does It Sell Stuff?

He doesn’t pull punches in life and writes some mean fiction, but he also truly understands this playground we are having so much fun in. Recently he was talking about a campaign from BigFix. Specifically their Ray Hopewood Campaign.

Instead of just hype, Scott details out the views, leads and sales generated by this campaign. Very rarely do you get to see this sort of data and it was refreshing to be able to look at them. I wish more companies were not afraid to share this sort of data. In the end it helps all of us out. Sure looks like it is helping them get the word out there based on the press they are getting.

I’m still hoping Scott gets to busy with his writing to focus on this site all that much, but for now I’ll be reading!

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In Washington, DC to give a keynote at the Era of Conversation event and last night after dinner Geoff Livingston whipped out his flip camera and asked us this question. Besides me, you’ll also hear from Valeria Maltoni and Doug Meacham.

Really looking forward to today because of a room full of new people. That always excites me. Plus, “New Media” Jim will be there and I’ve wanted to meet him for quite some time.

Posted in Video, New Media | Comments(2)

Whoever the agency is that is working with Axe Shower Gel and other products is doing a great job. They first got on my radar when they sent Yes But No But Yes to LA for an influencer junket. Then today I found a link to this new Naughty But Nice Program video which was a riot. Especially since they made pretty good fun of the PR guy in the video.

At the end of the day if you want a video to be popular make it fun and entertaining. My only problem with this video is that it is five minutes long and thus requires quite a level of commitment from the casual web surfer. It could be culled down to a tight 2 minute piece that I think would make it even better.

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Last night I had a dream that Adobe bought Linden Lab and thus the popular virtual world of Second Life. I woke up giggling a bit about this, but then in the shower (isn’t that where great thoughts happen?) I got thinking more about how that could be cool if it actually happened.

Adobe and Macromedia merged a while ago. So think of the tools that Adobe has. Flash, Illustrator, PhotoShop, ColdFusion and Flex. They’ve got the perfect mix of tools for scripters and designers. Imagine what you could do with that tool set if completely integrated into Second Life. Just thinking about it makes me smile and grin. It would be quite impressive.

Now, I don’t think that Second Life fits into the Adobe business plan, but then again I don’t know what their plan is. I could make arguments that having a virtual world would be an amazing place for creatives to unleash their brains because lets face it, that is what Second Life is for a lot of people. It is about a lot of other things too. *grin*

The code side is where the real power could be. I worked with ColdFusion for a number of years and know that it can do some pretty cool stuff. Finally having web integration in both directions would be a huge plus. Being able to query data from other sources and have that data come into Second Life would shift everything. I’m still hoping they do simple things such as tying the weather to a zip code. That way I could build a sim and tell it to pull the weather from Boston or Hawaii to add a certain new level of “real” to it.

I’m not making any predictions here, but I had to share since it gave me something to noodle on today and perhaps it will give you something to as well.

Posted in second life, New Media | Comments(1)

As most of you know by now I have resigned from my job and am jumping head first into the deep end of being a hired gun freelancer. It is certainly an exciting time right now and I was encouraged to share with my listeners how I came to the decision and what I’d share with others who might be thinking about the same thing since I’m hearing lots of grumbles out there.

So, today we talk about calculated risks, taking chances and figuring out what you love and hate. All things that were important to me and that should be important to you. I’ve also got a great comment from Paul Colligan that focuses on the assigning value discussion we have been having, but that also fits into my world right now as I try to figure out what to charge people who hire me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. The comment line is always on at 206-309-4729. If you like the idea of hiring me for some work or looking for a speaker at your next event please drop me an e-mail and we can get chatting.

Update: Transcript of this podcast here.

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As an FYI to the readers and listeners over here I wanted to share some news with you.

Last night I publicly announced my leaving of crayon. You can read all the details here.

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I’ve been keeping an eye on Zoho for a while. They are doing a lot of the same things Google is trying to do through Google Apps. A completely online working environment. The perfect thing for all the new media nomads out there.

Biggest difference though is that Zoho has an off line feature. I can sync everything to my desktop (using Google Gears of all things *grin*) and work completely off line and then sync up the next time I connect. THAT is the key thing.

Then this morning I find out about Zoho Business and my grin got even bigger!

It is going to come in two flavors - Free & Pro. Some features will include:

• Company level Admin Console
• Domain Management (for pointing your domains to Zoho Apps)
• Centralized User and Group Management
• Single Sign-on across several Zoho Apps
• Zoho Apps include Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Notebook, Email, Cal, Tasks, Planner, Viewer, Chat etc.
• Customization Options
• Multiple levels of Security including SSL
• Remote Backup
• Telephone Support and more.

I love all of this and think it is a huge step forward. I’m wondering how long until Yahoo or Microsoft try to buy them so that they can directly compete with Google. Heck, if Apple made a play at them things would get REALLY interesting, but I don’t think it’s the market they are in right now.

Posted in Cool Tools, New Media | Comments(1)

Once again the power of Twitter shows up in my life and this time it leads to me giving a morning keynote at the October 4th Era of Conversation Conference in Washington, DC.

I’m excited about this event because it looks like a packed day full of information and interesting people. Geoff Livingston and I connected via Twitter about me doing this event and I’ll be speaking along side Valeria Maltoni which is very cool.

I’ve been working on a new presentation and wasn’t sure when I might actually first show it, but this could be the event. After watching Mitch Joel speak, I’ve really begun to look at presentations as something very different. Thus I want to really focus in on the presentation as much as what I’m saying. Does that make sense? It does in my head. *grin*

So if you are anywhere near DC when this is going on consider registering and attending for the day. If you are going let me know so that we can be sure to meet each other and really have a conversation.

cross posted from CC-Chapman.com 

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Transcript for Managing the Gray #40
Assigning Value and Monetizing Your Podcast
Originally posted on August 6, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Well, good morning everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #40. Hey, it’s C.C. Chapman here in MetroWest Boston. It may not be morning for you, maybe night, evening, who knows what it is? Whenever you’re listening to this, I hope you’re having a good one. I hope it’s a sunny day, beautiful day, and things are going well for you and I hope you’re having fun playing on the new media playground like I am. It’s a Monday morning here in Boston. It’s episode #40 of Managing the Gray and I wanted to get this out before the week starts, before the week consumed — you know how that happens sometimes? You have goals and things and then your week just kind of completely consumes you or even if just a day consumes you? I’m not worried about the week necessarily even though I’m headed off to Florida this week, not for vacation. It’s all work, no pleasure. Well, probably some pleasure, but who knows, but heading down there.

I knew this is going to be a fun show because I know I was going to get some quality feedback in the last show where I was talking about selling yourselves short, talking about Jaffe’s iPhone and all that. Of course, no audio comment from Jaffe. I see the guy in person, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be on my show. Anyways, lots of people called in to the comment line, which, again, in case you don’t have it, is 206-309-4729. It’s 206-309-GRAY. We love hearing from you, anything you have to say. We would love to hear from you. I’ve got tons of comments today to play. They’re very long. They’re very insightful. They say a lot.

The topic of selling yourself short and monetizing your podcast and bartering and all that. That’s one thing I want to say upfront too because there was a lot of discussion on the blog as well. I have zero problem with bartering. I am a huge fan of bartering. I once did some — this was a long time ago now I think about it. I did some logo work for someone in the early web days and they paid me a Best Buy gift certificate. I don’t remember why. There was something with their accounting. I said, “Buy me some Best Buy gift cards,” and it covered the cost and I was cool with that. I think bartering is an amazing thing. It’s worked for centuries. I have something you want, you have something I want, let’s trade and I’m okay with that. I have no problem with someone giving an iPhone for an episode. I think that’s great. It was just a particular podcasting question I thought that was selling that one short. Actually, let me play that comment right here because it fits before. Can you tell I’m just kind of flying by the seat of my pants today?

Mike Wills: Hey, C.C. This is Mike Wills of Mike’s Hotdish at nextgenerationofradio.com. You were talking about selling — are we selling ourselves short as podcasters and, you know, I would honestly have to say I have no idea. I think the people who have it in marketing and people who know what advertising costs or whatever knows what they’re worth, know what their show is worth, know what their audience is worth, and so on. I think people like me who are just your average everyday person or a programmer or just a geek or whatever, we sit back and like I don’t know what my show is worth, I don’t know how to charge for it, you know, just in general that kind of information.

So, we just “Hey, I’ll give you 20 bucks to advertise on my show.” “Oh okay. Yeah, sure. Great!” That’s income. We really don’t care, but, yeah. They don’t believe the stigma of “Oh gosh, you guys are so cheap, we can have [unintelligible],” you know, whatever. Anyway, I guess it all comes down to we as podcasters, most of us don’t know what we’re worth so we don’t know if we’re selling ourselves short or if we’re too expensive. Maybe we need comparison to radio and television, I don’t know. Is the audience worth more than them? I guess those are some questions that I don’t know and hopefully someone could figure out an answer for. On that, keep up the great show. I enjoy listening and I’ll see you guys next time. Remember, the nextgenerationofradio.com.

C.C. Chapman: So, that’s what I was getting at. What I’m getting at is that each podcaster has determined the value for themselves and yeah, I know a lot of it, especially if you’re just starting out, you don’t have a value. Any money that gets thrown at you is more money than you had yesterday. I used to say that and I still say that that anybody who fights the idea of monetizing your podcast, what I always say back to them is, all right, take your favorite product, company or charity or cause, I don’t care what it is. Think about it in your head right now. Now, tell me. If they came to you and said, “We will pay you to talk about us. You get to talk about it how you want. We’re not gonna push an ad down your throat. We’re just going to say, ‘Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Podcaster, here’s money to talk about us and you already love us.’” There is not a person on the face of this earth who wouldn’t take that and I’m sorry if you say you did. You wouldn’t, but it’s true.

The point is you’ve got to figure out what is good for you and it is different. A guy who’s just sitting around doing this in his spare time might charge different than a soccer mom doing a podcast who might charge different than a corporation doing a podcast. Just to give you an idea, I mean when we’re talking about advertising on television or newspapers even just banner ads on major websites, you’re talking about thousands and thousands of dollars for one run or a week run.

One of the things I’m suggesting to you, I’ve heard Tim and Emile Bourquin over Podcast Brothers talk about this, is if you go to a company, a major corporation, if you actually get to the point where you’re looking for sponsorship and you go to a company and you say, “Hey, would you like to sponsor my podcast for a month? It’s four episodes and it’s going to cost you $500.” They’re going to laugh at you because they’re going to know you’re not taking yourself seriously. You’re an amateur and that’s not a bad thing. You can be that way. That’s a great thing to do. What I’m getting at is if you actually go out to look for sponsors, they’re not used to dealing in those little small numbers and they’re not going to take you seriously. It’s weird. I wish I remember the company because I know Tim Bourquin talked about an example where he was going out asking for sponsorship and it wasn’t working. Someone told him, “You’re not asking enough.” He actually went out and added some thousands to what he was asking for and the first person he asked came back, “Oh okay. Sure,” because they recognize that dollar figure and it was shocking. It’s sort of weird. You see that too sometimes when you’ve been on work and whatnot. It’s not always the cheapest one. It’s sort of strange.

I was talking about bartering and what I mean is it’s a great thing and I think it’s okay. If someone wanted to give me something to sponsor Managing the Gray or Accident Hash, One Guy’s Thoughts, I’d be cool with that. Perfect example, a very pertinent example would be One Guy’s Thoughts. If Panasonic or JVC or Sony wanted to give me a camcorder to be like the official, you know, at the end I would put “camera provided by company X.” I’d be all over that. I’d be cool with that.

Heck, week two or three of podcasting ever, way back in 2004, I reached out to a musician’s friend and said, “Hey, I know nothing about audio equipment. What if you gave me a mixer and a microphone?” That’s all I was asking for, for my computer and I would say “equipment provided by musician’s friend” on every Accident Hash out there. They said, “Sorry. We’re not interested in this podcasting thing.” They blew it, didn’t they? I mean for what cost me $200, was I selling myself short? Probably not because it was exactly the perfect barter and they blew me off. They said, “I don’t think so.” I remember they actually said, “Sorry. We’re not interested in getting involved in podcasting,” at that time. Now, they have podcasting packages. That’s what I was trying to push them to do, but it’s what I’m getting at. That I thought was a perfect barter.

I still think if a camcorder company wanted to donate a camcorder to One Guy’s Thoughts, I’d be down for that discussion to talk about it because I think it’s a great thing. Now, would I automatically do it? Maybe not. It depends. It depends if it’s a brand I knew or not. I just want people to start thinking different. The key is that you’ve got to start thinking about yourself a little bit bigger, a little bit different if you’re going to monetize. If you’re one of these people who don’t want to monetize your podcast, this whole episode is probably going to drive you a little nuts because we are talking about that concept today.

Of course, my good buddy Christopher S. Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, I’m glad he called in because I knew he’d have thoughts on this.

Christopher Penn: Hey, C.C. Chapman. This is Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, PodCamp, and Marketing Over Coffee. Regarding your comments about why new media folks are selling themselves short, I think it’s a sociologic phenomenon more than anything else or a psychological phenomenon, I’m not sure which is the correct term. As individual, $1000 is a lot of money, $10,000 is a lot of money, and $1 million is a heck of a lot of money because we’re used to dealing with smaller amounts in our personal lives. Podcasting and blogging are inherent with personal media.

We have our individual shows. So, if somebody shows up at the doorstep with $1000, it seems like a lot of money to us. Corporations are used to dealing with things that have 7, 8, 9, 10 digits in them and $1 million per ad spent is like the [unintelligible] cream cheese budget for Manhattan banks. So, for podcasters and bloggers to get out of the mindset of small sponsorship, they have to start thinking like a corporation. It may even help to sit down and legally separate out your podcaster, your product from yourself. Look at it as a company will look at it. Okay, here’s the ROI, here’s the AdSense, here is the operations budget, and things like that. Then with a more dispassionate look, understanding that you are not your show and vice versa, you can start to ask for more competitive sums of money as other forms of media.

Like I said, it’s a big part of the fact that it’s personal medium and we treat it as such, but it’s also a corporate professional medium as well. I know the Financial Aid Podcast, $20 million in loan volume last year is a heck of a lot of money and more than I’ll make this year or in the next several years combined, but for a loan industry that’s still a small amount of money. Even so, it would be worth it to a bank to acquire that $20 million worth of loan or whatever it is going to be for this calendar year. So, the money is definitely there as long as you think of yourself or at least your show as a corporation and do business to business work as opposed to business to personal work because that’s going to lead to trouble. Talk to you soon. Take care. Check out my stuff at financialaidpodcast.com, marketingovercoffee.com, and podcampboston.org. Take care, C.C.

C.C. Chapman: Thanks Chris, yeah, and quick plug for PodCamp Boston. We’re up to 324 registrations as of this morning. So, please check out podcampboston.org and register. It’s going to be a huge event, October 20… Chris is going to kill me. October 26 I believe is when it is, October 26 through 28, [unintelligible] VON Boston. It’s going to be a really good time. Chris reminded me of a trip. Ewan Spence and I were on a train in Germany talking about the fact that more people need to think about themselves as businesses. Now, I’m not talking about you have to go out and get all incorporated and all that, but what I’m talking about and Chris was kind of talking about is to treat yourself like a business. If you’re thinking about monetizing your podcast, you need to make business decisions. You need to think long term. Don’t sign a contract that locks you into five years unless it’s some really good money because the world’s going to change. I mean really think long term. Yeah, right now I might have 10 to 50 listeners. Where might that be in a year? I don’t know, but you got to think about that and just think about growth, especially if you’re going to sign a long-term sponsorship deal. Really think about it.

One of the things too that I see people do sometimes is they just take stuff for free and advertise it on their podcast, which is fine, but think about it. What are you getting out of it? Not much. Maybe you’re getting some free product. It depends on what it is really. I would give away lots of things on this show if it was something I personally believed in. I don’t want people to think about that. It’s funny. Part of me, I’ll be honest, was a little jealous of Jaffe that somebody actually came to him. I think that’s great. I was trying to think of what could people give me to sponsor an episode. I don’t know. I was trying to think of something I wanted and nothing came to mind. I don’t need the Xbox 360 or the big screen TV in the living room. I would take both of them, you know? I still think if Canon stepped up and gave me lenses or Sigma or someone will give me lenses for my camera to play with, I would even return them. I think they would be cool, but not really pertinent to Managing the Gray, but that’s another thing. It has to be pertinent to your show. Whoever the sponsor is should be pertinent to you. Think about it.

I have turned down sponsorships that I wasn’t interested in because — the ones that I’ve turned down have been personal reasons, I didn’t believe in the product or something I didn’t want to be showing. That’s something you have to think about too. So, one of the things I told you, there’s going to be heavy comments. Again, if something just clicks in your head, what was that number again? It’s 206-309-4729. It’s fun because I got a lot of different comments from a lot of different markets. This one was talking about music.

Rob C: Hey, C.C. This is Rob from the Fixion Media Advertising Network. That’s fixionmedia.com. I’m just off the hills listening to your recent podcast, “Is New Media Selling Itself Short?” I have to say it is. I liken it to the independent music scene where there’s a lot of great artists, a lot of great people who are trying to start independent companies and whatnot, but nothing really connects unless you’re connected to big business. At the end of the day, it’s an inferiority complex that we have to deal with as a smaller niche or subculture or underground movement of sorts.

In my case, it’s been an uphill battle since I deal with hard rock and heavy metal music and we’re only recently starting to look for publishers to expand within more of a demographic range, you know, the male 18 to 49 and whatnot, but at the end of the day, those corporate buzzworths said the demo, the male demo, the age group, or this and that, we’re not focusing enough on coming together and on operating together. That’s one of the reasons why I started my ad network. I started publishing an online music site called blistering.com in 1998. I find it pretty hard getting advertisers and really just surviving. Pre-dotcom boom is a lot easier to make a dollar off a banner ad and everything just kind of came crashing down at one point. So, what I did was I teamed up with another site called blabbermouth.net and we basically split everything down the middle. His site was about five times bigger than mine, but we just split all the advertising revenue down the middle. He had more traffic than I did. We aggregated our audience and a couple of years later, we ended up signing a couple more sites and now we’re representing 20 websites in the music space and interest is improving. I guess people are picking us up on Nielsen, on comScore, word of mouth, through our properties, and so on and so forth.

So, we represent an audience of millions now and from the client or brand agency perspective, we’re more of a viable source to deal with. I think podcasters and bloggers, anyone involved in social media or creating social media tools or interacting in any way whatsoever is truly the old adage of networking and know your neighbor. Team up and start a site with 10 amazing marketing bloggers or whatever the case may be. That’s the only way you’re going to get your voice heard. It’s the only way you’re going to have some sort of authority in the industry. At the end of the day, your words will speak for themselves, you know? And everyone’s words will speak for themselves, but that affiliation is that creating your own mafia or something like that. It’s a smart way to go in the business sense. That’s pretty much what I have to say about this. I love the podcast, C.C. Keep Managing the Gray going strong.

C.C. Chapman: That ends real fast. That’s another way to do it. I thought that was another great concept, the fact of affiliation and bringing yourself together. This is why things like Blubrry, PodShow, Kiptronic, Tripod, I know I’m going to forget a whole bunch of them, but these networks formed to pull — that’s exactly the model. I mean those PodShows are part of the model. I know guys, part of the model, and all these other ones from day one was pull these shows together and then when you go to an advertiser, you can say, “Look, you’re not just gonna buy on this one. Sure, you’re gonna buy across these 10 shows, 20 shows,” depending on who the advertiser is. It’s a great model and there’s nothing to say that you can’t do it on your own. Blogs have done it for a while. Why haven’t podcast? Rogic is the only one I can think of that has done a completely independent network. They’re personal friends. I’ll put that out there right now, Nico, Bob, Cat, Matt, all those guys, Mark. I’m forgetting a bunch of people, but the fact that they pulled together and they banded their shows together… I don’t think they’ve ever pulled together just for advertising. They pulled together for a lot of reasons.

The concept of tribal communities that cavemen did in the old days and we’ve been doing ever since, why can’t it work in new media as well? People cluster together. They work together. This goes beyond just monetization. You can work together. I know I have my small core group of people that I bounce ideas off when I want to cause some trouble or try something new. I have these core little groups of people that I trust and know and share similar interests with. Why not do that out in the podosphere? You can do that right now. If you do tech podcast, there’s plenty of people you can connect with. Maybe you have a super uber niche, but maybe there’s somebody else out there. People shouldn’t view things as competition. There’s room for everybody. Look at how many music podcasts are out there and here’s people pulling them together. You look at the parenting podcast, that’s a perfect one that should be pulled all together so people can come and get a parenting channel, I don’t know what it will be, about parenting something. You would go to one website and they could get a combined feed of all these select parenting podcasts. Marketing is another perfect example. I know we talked about Kapow at one point. Is there something we could put together on master feed to pull all of Kapow together so people could just describe the Kapow — I love saying that for you, thank God for the pop filter — and get all the shows. There’s a lot to do with pulling together and banding and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m talking about niches. One of the things I also talked about was the concept of the ADM, the Association for Downloadable Media. Evo Terra, God bless his soul and God bless his beautiful wife, she’s a sweetie, had some thoughts on that as well.

Evo Terra: Hey, C.C. It’s Evo Terra of podiobooks.com and funanymore.com, listening to your comments regarding the Association of Downloadable Media and some other organization you mentioned. I share your same concern. We need to make sure that not only these things happen for big, huge podcasts, but also little podcasters as you mentioned, but my take on this is if it all goes in one direction and we continue to look for what happens for the big guy, well, what happens for the folks that are big or maybe they’re small but they’re doing something different.

Podcasting can be more than two dorks in a microphone or even one dork in a microphone. Not that I’m saying it should be you, but there are some people not to mention like podiobooks.com, for example, I’ve got about 137 different titles up there right now where people are using podcasting, the medium, to get their audio books in front of a brand new audience for free. I guess what I’m trying to say is [unintelligible] and the reason that I’m thinking of joining one or both or all that come across is to make sure that we don’t pigeonhole podcasting into something. There are a lot of different things that I’ve seen that are completely unexplored out there in this magic podcasting. I think the distribution method itself is interesting enough that we need not just make it something very basic. On the other side, I think it’s very important that we do have standardized ad units. I work in online advertising as that’s what brings me most of my income and I wouldn’t be able to do my job if it wasn’t for the Internet Advertising Bureau. I would be going through and figuring out what would were the standard sizes of units that we should be using and how long they should be and the file size and a lot of things like that.

So, yes, we do need those standards, but I want to make sure that, as you mentioned, the little guy is taken care of and like I’m concerned with that people are doing something unusual and different with the podcasting method, I want to make sure our needs are met as well. So, that’s why I’ll be in there fighting my flag and making sure that all voices are heard. Ciao!

C.C. Chapman: Amen. Amen! That’s why I love Evo Terra. He’s like me. He wants to make sure everybody’s voice is heard, not just the big guy. I agree with you. If you’re not familiar with the Podiobooks model, podiobooks.com is such a killer idea. I’m talking about the network idea where Evo and I know there’s other people involved and I’m sorry to them because I don’t know their names on the top of my head, pulled together audio books. Everyone knows the Sigler and the Hutchins and the Nemcoff names when it comes to Podiobooks, but there’s a whole bunch of other authors out there that people may not know about. If you go to podiobooks.com, you heard, he said they have 137 I think titles up there where you can get these audio novels and they’re getting at it all the time. That’s just screaming for appropriate advertising to put into it. It also seems like a lot of possibilities for acquisitions and if I was a book publisher, I’d be listening there to every book that came out because you could get a feel and find some new authors, but that’s just me. Hint, hint.

I agree with you, Evo, about the Association of Downloadable Media sense. I was really hoping I would have a comment from them for the show, but I didn’t unfortunately. That’s why I kind of held off hoping certain people would comment on this and they didn’t, but that’s okay. I talked to several members because I am officially a member of it because I want to see what they’re doing and keep an eye on it and be involved with it. Not only are they going to try to standardize some metrics and whatnot — it won’t work for everything, that’s for sure. I know the way Financial Aid Podcast measures their success versus Podiobooks versus me is very different, but at least getting some metrics out there. Just the number of listeners, I would love to have a standardized way of doing it because everybody throws numbers out there. “I’ve got 10,000 a month” or “I’ve got 100,000 requests per day.” Those are very different numbers. They don’t mean the same things. If we can just even get some standard things like with web stats, it took a while to get hits, page views, unique visitors. It took a while to get that type of stuff. We need to get there from podcasting to make people talk numbers across the board easier.

The other thing too is I hope these associations take it to the global concept because podcasting and new media in general is completely global. It’s not a US-centric thing and most of these associations and networks for that matter seem to always start very US-centric, which I’m fine with. I’m sure there are legal ramifications and corporate ramifications, but you got to remember this is a global concept. There are people around the globe and podcasting is borderless. What I mean by that is I know of several major sponsors and one comes to mind that sponsored several podcasts, but turned down another because of where it was recorded. It was recorded in Europe and they said, “Oh, we only want US-based podcasters.” Completely missing the point that there are people around the world right now listening to this.

Yes, I am in Boston recording this, but who cares? I could just as easily be in Singapore like Mitch Joel just did on the beach. I could be Mark Hunter up in Scotland. I could be somebody in China, maybe not China. I don’t know if they allowed podcasting yet. I could be in Cape Town, South Africa, like the ZA Show. I mean I could be anywhere, but the fact my listeners could be global and advertisers need to wake up. One of the things too while I’m thinking of that, advertisers are more clueless than podcasters are as far as selling themselves short. Marketers don’t have a clue what they’re doing with podcast. I’ve seen very, very few sponsors do it right, realize that this isn’t just another media buy. It’s not the same thing as buying television. It’s not the same thing as buying a print ad. It’s not a 30-second middle-of-my-podcast radio spot. That doesn’t fly, people. Advertisers have got to figure out that this is a unique medium and work with the podcasters in the community to figure out a way to do it right, to do it in a way that people are going to pay attention and actually care about your product.

That’s where I think things like when I was talking about the camera idea for a video podcast — I know when Kevin Smith did his Train Wreck, which were his video diaries leading up to Clerks 2, it was sponsored by Panasonic. At the end, it said “cameras provided by,” that made sense. If there was a 30-second commercial at the beginning of every episode advertising Panasonic cameras, I would have flipped it off. I know MTV does that. It drives me nuts. MTV has these little 30-second podcasts, video podcasts, kind of like highlighting news and I love watching them, but at the beginning of every one, there’s a 20-second — I’m not going to name the product, it’s like a moisturizer thing, but there’s a commercial and I’ve now gotten to it. I know how long it is. I just fast-forward through it. I just skip it. I’m like “I don’t want to watch this.” It’s stupid. They could be much better done. So, advertisers, wake up.

One more audio comment.

John Havens: Hey, C.C. This is John Havens from Blog Talk Radio and also PodCamp NYC. I wanted to comment about your show “Is New Media Selling Itself Short?” from July 27th. My answer is yes. Period. We are all selling ourselves short as content producers if we do not look into ways of monetizing, if we want to monetize. I did a show on about.com with my podcast. It’s still up. I think it was April and I’ll look for the episode number if anyone wants to go there, episode #33, I interviewed Justin Kownacki from Something to be Desired. He’s got an amazing videocast. One of the things we talked about was whether or not content producers should charge. So, people listening, the universal answer all of you will say I know is “no, of course you shouldn’t charge.” The second you charge for your podcast even if it’s a buck, you will lose your audience. Okay? So, first of all, I want to say I understand reality. This is the nature of what the era of the Internet, where we are right now.

Right now, if you charge as a podcaster, if you were to call it the premium podcast and you say, “I’d like $1 per episode,” the majority of people will say, “Well, you’re an idiot. No one’s gonna buy it,” and they might even get offended, “How dare you charge for your content?” First of all, there is someone who I do respect. It’s the guy who runs a show called The Roadhouse Podcast. I believe that’s the right title. He charges $1 I think it is, forgive me if I have this wrong, but I really like this model so I want to give him full credit. He charges $1 for a version of his show with no ads and it’s a higher quality sound rate because it’s blues music or he lets you listen for free, but he has ads and the sound quality isn’t quite as high. Now, I think that’s brilliant because what’s that saying to a listener is — that, to me, what it’s saying is, “I’d like to get paid and if you want a version that’s really listener-friendly, pay me a buck and that helps pay for the cost of the effort it takes to make it.” I think that’s a great model. Okay? So, he is monetizing. Most people when they hear about that, podcasters that I talked to, think it’s fantastic. However, now, if he just said, “Please pay me $1 for my episode,” again, most people would say, “What are you talking about? Of course not.”

All right, now, here’s the thing. As C.C. pointed out, on your episode C.C., when you create a show, it has inherent value because of who you are and how well you produce it. Okay? I say how well you produce it because we’ve all listened to a musician who may not be the best technically, but we still love their music and we’ve all listened to musicians for instance who are great technically, but we don’t feel they have the heart. Okay? So, if you are producing content that people loves and they want to download, first of all, amen. Awesome. Keep it up whether or not you want to monetize. But if you want to monetize, talk to your audience and tell them. Be honest. “I would like to monetize. I would rather do my podcast and work at, whatever, Starbucks or at my corporate job. If this is something you’re willing to pay for, let me know.” Always talk to your audience. I would never say just start charging. Okay, C.C. If this records for some reason, I left like four long messages. [Unintelligible] We all know I talk too much or leave long messages. So, I’ll talk to you about this. Bye.

C.C. Chapman: I hadn’t listened to that one all the way through. John, that’s the only one that came. But there was good stuff in there. There was very good stuff in there. I didn’t realize, what’s his name, Tony was doing that with The Roadhouse Podcast, which by the way, if you guys like blues at all, The Roadhouse Podcast is amazingly blues. I’m not a big blues guy, but I can dig it and he does an amazing job. I’m talking about a well-produced podcast. Check that out. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Great, great show. Good guy too, very standup individual, which I like. John bring up some good points there too about different models for monetizing. It doesn’t have to be advertising and seriously, we are in the puppy days of this world. Remember when people said no one would ever buy music online, Apple is doing horrible from that. Forget the DRM question. That’s a whole other question, but people are buying music.

It’s the same if you want to buy podcast because let’s face it, you’re listening to podcast right now, but we’re still in the echo chamber where maybe we wouldn’t pay for it, but I guarantee you if I made it so that someone could do pay-per-view subscribe on their television set — I bet a lot of you people have TiVos and DVRs that pre-record stuff that’s automatically there. I would lay money on the fact that if you could stand in front of your television and say, “I want to subscribe to Tiki Bar TV,” I’m trying to think of some big, you know, or GeekBrief.TV, come on, any of these things, it will go “Okay, that will cost you 5 bucks a month” whatever if you get premium packages, people would do it and it would just show up on their television sets. That’s podcasting. People, it is. That’s where things are going to go. It’s going to get to that point.

There are certain shows I would pay money to subscribe to. Maybe I get them early, I’ve seen that model before. What I’m getting that is people outside of the podosphere, people who are not producing podcasts, those millions of people who haven’t found out about it yet, they would pay for these things. Part of me says because they don’t know any better, but part of me says because that’s the model they’re used to and it is a model that we’re going to get to at some point. There’s going to be a point where you’re going to pay — a video podcast is a perfect example where maybe I can download the iPod version for free, the little screen, but I thought if I want the Apple TV version, I’d pay something for it. It’s a higher res, it’s more bandwidth. I see that model working. I think it’s a great model and I’m waiting to see someone try it. Now, for me, it’s got to be the right content or I won’t buy it, but that goes for anybody.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — we’ll wrap this all up because it’s going really long for a Managing the Gray — the key things I want you to take away is if you don’t want to monetize, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing saying you have to monetize at all. I love the people who have no aspirations to monetize. It’s fun. You’re doing it strictly for the pure fun of it and get the information out there and podcasting and new media is a whole [unintelligible] gives you a voice. That’s okay and that’s cool. Those of you who do want to monetize, start thinking like a business. I’m not saying you have to go get lawyers and accountants, but just think and what I mean by that is always think long term. Think “what if my podcast suddenly explodes and get hugely popular? Do I want to be locked into a contract for $50 an episode?” or whatever the number is. I’m not going to focus on numbers. Assign a value to yourself. If you have questions, talk to like-minded people and they will help you. “What do you think about this?” Maybe band together. It’s funny.

Managing the Gray has been around now for over a year and it sort of saddens me that it has never had a sponsor, not kind of saddens, it does sadden me. Have I actively gone out looking for sponsors? No, I haven’t, but it sort of bothers me as having a new media and a business-focused podcast, I seem to think that my audience would be a perfect audience for the appropriate advertisers to reach out to and I’m extremely open to advertising, sponsorship of the right type. Seriously, email me, managingthegray@gmail.com or cc.chapman@gmail.com, happy to talk about it, happy to barter. I’m open on all sorts of things. People seem to miss the opportunity a lot. You know me. Come on. I work for Crayon. We live and breathe thinking of creative solutions. So, I’m more than happy to figure out something that works for my audience because I’ll tell you, somebody comes, “Hey, I wanna drop a 30-second spot on your show,” it better be a product I’m really into and it better be a really good 30-second spot, and even then, I don’t think so. I’ll stick it at the end. You know? That’s the way we roll. I just want to put that out there.

One thing too before I go. I got an email, trying something new here. I’m not endorsing this because I’m still playing with it, but there’s this new company that is testing out podcasting on-demand via cell phones. This episode would be long to listen to on a cell phone. If you’ve got a pen and paper, here’s a number I’m going to give you. If you dial +1, because in the US, 5637735510, if you call that number, you can listen to Managing the Gray on-demand. Say, “I want to listen to this episode.” Now, what I’m curious about is when this episode is going to be up there. I’m not sure if they’ve set up a way that they get notified yet. This is brand new. Someone who reached out and said, “Hey, C.C. Would you be interested in playing with us?” and I said, “Yeah.” It sounds pretty cool, especially if it was a short podcast. People could do it sitting in an airport, “Oh, C.C’s got a new Managing the Gray. I can get it off my phone.” You just dial it up and you listen to it. So, try it. The number is 563-773-5510. I just want to put that out there in case you want to try it. Please give me feedback because I want to give it to the company because I tried it out. The quality is obviously not the same quality that I’m recording because it’s going on the phone. I get that it gets compressed.

Also, I’ve had for months, I don’t know how many of you listen to it that way, phoneshow.com. On the left-hand side of managingthegray.com, there’s a place where you can put in your phone number and as soon as I upload, it’s usually a couple of hours after I upload, they will send you a message to your phone with a link to listen to the show, which is cool too. Phoneshow is doing some very cool things. I dig those guys. All of these, unpaid. I hate now.

By the way, I will put this out there right now. Any time I’m being paid to say something, I will say so. If I don’t say so, it’s not paid. I had someone the other day, I forget what I was getting giddy about, some product, and like, “Hey, C.C. Is that a paid endorsement?” No. The rule of thumb is I’m not going to tell you every time it’s not paid, but if it is paid, I will tell you. When somebody gives me a sweet hi-def big ass camera to film my video podcast or someone gives me a new toy or something, I will tell you. When I get the iPhone paid for, for a year. I don’t know, I don’t need anything, the Sony VAIO laptop, I don’t care, I will say it’s paid for. That’s my promise to you. That’s transparency. All right?

This has been a really long Managing the Gray, definitely a different one. Next time, we’ll be talking more about new media. We’ll be talking about all kinds of fun stuff, not all about the money because it’s not all about the money, but I’m going to get out of here. Again, comment line, 206-309-4729, or managingthegray@gmail.com. Everybody take care. Have a good one. Hope summer is going well for you and I’ll be back really, really soon.

Originally Posted on Manging The Gray 

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I had no idea there were over 5,000 different web applications out there right now. The more I think about it I’m not sure what I thought the number was, but thanks to the gang over at Laughing Squid I discovered this video that shows them all. Whole bunch that I don’t recognize.

Simple Spark made the video and is a site listing every company in the video. I hadn’t heard of them before today either. Guess I have some browsing and playing to do.

Anyone got a favorite out of the 5,000?

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Beach Walks With Rox #472 talked about how slight changes in words can make everything flow much easier. I’m not sure if you are already subscribed to this show or not, but I’m going to encourage everyone reading this post to do so. No matter how bad of a day you are having, you can just pop on and watch her walk down the beach, swim in the ocean or just talk to the camera and it will mellow you right out.

But, she got me thinking. Thinking about how far to many people in this word don’t listen. Sure, their ears are working and they hear the words that are coming out of other people’s mouths but they don’t actually listen to those words and figure out what is being said.

This is more important then ever when the listening has to translate to written words as well. But, how can someone “listen” to written words? I know I’m breaking every rule that we learned in elementary school, but I’m just trying to make a point.

It is critical that every time you chat with someone, read a blog post or see a tweet, that you stop and listen to what they are really saying. Don’t jump to conclusions. Not every “negative” comment or post may be what it seems. Perhaps they are pushing the conversation. Maybe they are biting their tongue a bit. Could be that they are just being negative. Who knows.

The point is that it is up to YOU to take the time and energy to listen.

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Someone asked me if I wouldn’t take an iPhone for an episode (and I did recently turn this down) what would I take in trade for an episode?

I had to think about this. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. It would have to be something that I personally wanted and desired. Something that I’d use and not just play with. Something that I already believe in rather then just trying it out.

The only thing that came to mind was either a higher end Canon camera then the one I have or one of the new 24″ iMacs. Different price points, but honestly that didn’t come to mind. I was just trying to think of what I wanted and what might be interesting. I tried a long time ago to get a guitar company to give me two guitars in return for sponsoring Accident Hash. I wanted to keep one and was going to give the other away to a listener. It never happened.

I just wanted to clarify that I think the idea of bartering and trading for exposure on a podcast, blog or other form of media is ok in my book. I don’t think it’s the only model moving forward, but it’s certainly one of them that has been around forever and will continue to be successful.

Posted in New Media | Comments(1)

Video content on the web comes in every shape, size and quality and the hardest thing is finding a particular clip or subject matter. Lots of people are playing with different ways to search through the massive amount of content, but no one has gotten it quite right.

Earlier this week I was shown a BETA of VeZoom which looks pretty cool.

I put in some searches for words that I knew there was content out there for (some of which I had made) and I was curious if it would actually find it and surprisingly it did quite well at pulling back results. I like that I can set up alerts and such to find tags of information I’m interested in. I didn’t see an RSS feed for this, but it might be there. It should be there!

Maybe I like it because they kept the vowels and didn’t do anything silly with that. I’ll be happy when that trend is over.

I’m going to play around with this some more, but wanted to let you know about it since the best way to test is to have more people check it out and play with it.

Posted in Video, Cool Tools | Comments(1)

I knew that the last episode was going to generate comments from the listeners and as you’ll hear that was certainly the case. I always want your voice to be heard so please call into the comment line at 206-309-4729 anytime a thought hits you.

This episode talks a lot about different concepts of monetizing your podcast. How to assign a value for your show. How to think like a business rather then an individual. The concept of banding together. A lot of topics indeed. Lots of information to consume and most of it is from the listeners of the show rather then just me.

I said it on the show and I’ll say it again here. I’m totally into bartering. It is a model that has worked since the beginning of time and will continue to work. I’m very open to the idea as long as both sides get what they want out of it. I’m also into the idea of sponsorship when all the pieces fit. The fact that Managing the Gray has gone over a year without a single sponsor does bother me. I haven’t actively gone out looking for one, but that is another matter.

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Are you already reading Web Strategy by Jeremiah? If the answer is no, then get over there right now and subscribe to his feed. I came late to the party on this blog and feel that it is one of the best out there for people playing on the new media playground. I don’t know him personally but really hope our paths cross soon as I’d love to pick his brain.

Anyway, today he has a post talking about some of the top viral videos. He even went so far as to embed them in the post so I got entertained as well as informed. Although it was interesting that I had only seen three of the ten posted. Makes me wonder who was watching them and where I was that I totally missed them. *grin*

But, the point that he made that I wanted to back up and second is that no one should ever set out to “make a viral video” as that is doomed for failure or more importantly shouldn’t be the outset. Creating quality content that connects with a viewer as well as causes them to share that content is what I wish more people would focus on.

Sure, we can all hope that a video will go viral. Who wouldn’t want that type of success? We’d all want it and so would our clients. But, it shouldn’t ever be the measure of success in my mind. Focus on the content, the story, the message you are trying to get out. If people connect with it then it’ll spread and remember it that is important as well.

An example for me is that I had never heard about Agent Provocateur lingerie until I saw a post months ago on Shake Well Before Use (another blog that I highly recommend although it is quite different as you’ll see). I hadn’t thought much about it till today when Jeremiah shared a video from them with Kylie Minogue in it that for obvious reasons went viral. The minute I watched the video I remembered the blog post and thought, “Hmm…I’ve got to check out this company” and proceeded to go to their website. That is SO much more powerful then someone just saying “oh cute video” and sharing it. Does, the video make a connection with the viewer? Does it have the ability to turn them into potential customers that are now aware of your brand?

Think about it and let me know your thoughts.

Posted in Ads, Video, New Media | Comments(3)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. A LOT of thinking.

In conversations with people and in watching what is going on I’m starting to wonder about the roles of podcasting networks, the roles of advertisers and if content producers are selling themselves short across the board. I’m not going to say I’ve got the answers because I don’t, but I had to record this show to get some of the ideas out of my head to start the conversation.

Earlier this week there was a Boston Tweetup and Clarence Smith Jr. really got me marinating on some pretty deep topics. Then going to the StartCooking.com hosted movie screening for No Reservations. Those two things really hit home and more in common in my mind then most people would have thought.

Then when I got a call in from Jay Moonah about the recent Jaffe iPhone news it all came together and I had to record this episode.

Are we all selling ourselves short? Are new groups such as the Association for Downloadable Media going to help solve the problems? What do you think? I want to hear from you! Leave a comment here or call me at 206-309-4729 and leave your thoughts.

Really looking forward to the conversation that follows.

Posted in New Media, Podcast | Comments(10)

Managing the Gray #38 Transcript
“Idle Well and Book Reviews”
(original post & podcast)

C.C. Chapman: Sure, I’ll try to help you. Hey, it’s C.C. Chapman here at Managing the Gray, episode #38. Getting it right out of the way, if you ever want to call in questions, comments, concerns, any of that stuff, the number is 206-309-4729. I’ll say it again later. I’ll put it in the show notes, but I just want to get that out of the way because everyone’s always saying, “C.C., you forget to say the number.” I apologize.

So, how are you guys doing? I’m really jazzed this morning. Show notes work good for Managing the Gray, but sometimes it’s just better just to have topics. I’ve got all these papers, just a couple of topics today I want to talk about. I’ve got a great call in from Whitney Hoffman, lots of things going on. So, what was really exciting, what I want to talk about today is something I’m watching happen quite a bit. There are new tools coming out everyday. I swear everyday or at least once a week, I’m getting a new invite to some new tool. Last week seem to be a really crazy week. I mean it was insanity. It seems like there was a bunch — I mean MrWong, 8apps, Pownce, Demonoid, Skitch, Stitch? No, Skitch. I’m trying to think what else. It was a crazy week and things are blowing up and people are getting very, very busy trying to stay on top of all these new tools. Now, it’s exciting to try these new tools, but I think what’s key is you’ve got to figure out what works for you and what’s important to you. I mean what are you going to do with these? It ties into the whole social media burnout thing I was talking about and it’s funny because I’ve started changing my opinion a little bit.

One of the things I always talk about is the fact that I think you need to be on every one of these, to at least have a presence so people can find you. Now, I think that’s still true with the social networks, things like the Facebook and the MySpace and whatnot where it’s setting up an account, but now things like Twitter and Pownce and all the copycats that are going to come for those, I’m not so sure that you need to be on all of those. Granted, try them out, figure out what works for you, especially if you’re a company. You need to at least check them out so you understand what you would recommend to a client. “Hey, this is why I think this one is the right one for you.”

I have a Pownce account. I don’t use it very often. I use it every so often. I go out there to look at it, but it’s not what’s being used right now. Twitter seems to be the microblogging tool of choice for me personally and the people that I want to follow and pay attention to. Pownce is out there. It’s still being used and I go in there every so often, but I find I go in there once a day, maybe twice a week. Twitter, I’m in there all the time. I tried them both and I figured out which one I like. Same thing goes with all these other sites. I trashed Facebook left and right, trashed it, just totally trashed it, but what’s interesting is after the initially wave of everybody just having to do stuff, now I’m seeing it started to take shape. I see people leaving groups or people who are joining these massive groups and now everyday I see people who have left groups or they have created groups, very fine tuning what they’re using Facebook for and I think that’s very interesting because I’m watching it and I’m seeing it become a little bit useful. I like the homepage that shows you what your friends are doing. It’s very interesting to see photos and what people are doing. Still, it tells me a little more information I need on things. I’m seeing it for event promotion working very well. We’re doing a Missing Pages movie premiere on Crayonville on Thursday. I know Mark Forman posted something there. So, it takes this Second Life event and makes it way outside of Second Life. It’s pitched as a movie premier. The Second Life location is a secondary aspect of it, which I thought was great, so people who may not even have ever seen Second Life are excited because it’s a movie premier and they get to come to it. The fact that it’s in Second Life is just — it will be a barrier for some, but it will just be a quick barrier for most hopefully and they’ll come in and they’ll take part in it. So, Facebook is working with that.

This 8apps thing, the thing that excites me about 8apps — it’s the number 8, 8apps.com. What excites me about that is I like the collaboration part of it. It’s not really there yet. Somebody called it it’s like part Facebook, part Basecamp, but doesn’t have the project management pieces in it that Basecamp does. What I do like about it is the instant collaboration idea in it. It’s got kind of a neat brainstorming tool like virtual sticky notes page I thought was pretty cool, but guys, it’s brand new. I’m already seeing people trash it, but I’m more of those let’s-wait-and-see, let’s-let-it-evolve-a-little-bit. I don’t even know if it’s officially beta or alpha, whatever it is, but that excites me, a social network where people are working together. 8apps is one of those things where I haven’t given in yet to just let anybody be my friend. I’m only kind of acting with people that I actually want to work on projects with. It’s only got — what is it? Three apps in there now and the fourth one is coming. I’m curious what the other four apps are going to be. It’s an interesting concept and I’m going to keep watch of that space because I think it’s going to be interesting and I’m excited by it.

Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about is I’ve got some giveaways for you today. Thoughtout.biz is a very cool company. They’re mainly known for the PED stands, the PED2, the FlexPEd. What these are, they’re iPod stands, but they’re not just for iPods. What’s cool about them is they are these heavy metal stands. I have one for my iPod, but it expands. I’ve seen people put their Treos in it. Does an iPhone fit in it? I bet you it does. I haven’t tried it because I don’t have an iPhone. Anybody want to give me one? No, I don’t want an iPhone because I don’t want to pay — what I hate about — I won’t rant on the iPhone right now. Thoughtout.biz does a lot of very cool things and one of the neat things they make is a MagStay Pro and when I got the MacBook Pro, Mike sent me over some of them. He said, “Dude, you’re gonna want one of these and I’ll give you a few for your Managing the Gray listeners.” I’ve heard people slam these. What it is, you know how you’ve got the magnetic thing for your MacBook Pro? If you have one of the new Macs, it’s a magnetic power cable. It just pops out. It’s a magnet. So, that way, if someone trips over the cable, it doesn’t pull the whole laptop off the desk, but what I found and it’s funny what this is. It’s just a little plastic contraption that works with your MacBook Pro and what it does is it keeps it in there and in the tagline is “Sometimes, a magnet is not enough,” and I asked myself, “Doesn’t that kind of go against the reason of why the magnet’s there?” He’s like, “Yeah,” but they’ve seen these to be very popular for people who have to leave their laptop on like when it’s rendering. If it’s rendering video or something, the last thing you wanted to do is get unplugged if you leave it overnight or leave it for a few hours. I’ve had that happen where it’s come unplugged and I didn’t know it and the battery started draining on me, so I can understand what these are and I’ve got a few of them, so if you want them.. You can go to Thoughtout.biz and check it out and see what they’re all about, but drop me an email at managingthegray@gmail.com and I’ll give away a few of these. I think I’ve got three or four of them I can give away for you and I’m more than happy to give those away because I love Thoughtout.biz. They do a lot for the community I know for the longest time. They may still be running this. When you bought a PED2 iPod stand, you get to pick a free podsafe CD that they actually bought from the artist. I think that’s great. They’re doing great stuff for the community. I’m more than happy to give these away.

So, hey, one of my favorite women in the world called in and left me an audio comment, so let’s get right over to Whitney Hoffman.

Whitney Hoffman: Hey, C.C. It’s Whitney Hoffman from the LD Podcast. I just read your recent blog post on what it’s like to start working remotely and how it can be difficult sometimes. One of the things that is really interesting, Alex Hillman from We Know HTML around here in Philadelphia has this thing called Independence Hall and he has a bunch of different people even working on different projects sit together at a coffee shop or some other place that they can kind of do this co-working thing where everybody who is doing independent projects can kind of work in one atmosphere and keep themselves on track because sometimes the distractions of home can really lead to a lot of procrastination or just it’s hard to put yourself in that same sort of see-I-am-at-work mode sometimes. So, sometimes going to a different place and sitting down and doing concentrated work for a fixed period of time really works, but maybe some of that kind of co-working environment stuff might be good, get together and try doing things remotely now that you have that new fancy laptop and see how it goes. If you want to learn more, you could look up Alex’s Cream Cheese Sessions after the Jelly Sessions, which I think are very similar in New York City where people get together and do this co-working thing together. It might help everybody out, so just an idea. Take care and I’ll talk to you soon.

C.C. Chapman: So, I think it’s a really neat idea. I’ll find the link and put it in the show notes over at managingthegray.com, but I understand what she’s talking about. Working at home is difficult. You’re by yourself. You don’t have that human interaction. I mean I’m using video tools to talk to my coworkers everyday, but it’s not the same and I think it would be kind of cool to get — I like the concept of all these people who happen to be working on independent projects just happen to get together so they’re in a work environment and they can socialize a little bit. I would love to do one of these out in the MetroWest area. I think it would be very cool, get together in a coffee shop. It would be great to meet some other people. In a cross spectrum, get out of just the podcasting and blogging community, just people working on independent projects, whatever they may be. If anybody’s interested, email me. I’d love to chat about it because I think it would be pretty cool and I would love to get out of the house. God, would I love to get out of the house because it does get to you. One of the neat things is I’m moving in a month and I cannot wait because my office right now is — it is an office, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not cut off from the rest of the house, so it’s got foot traffic and it’s my wife’s office too, so when we move, I actually have my own office with doors on it that shut so I can actually sort of separate that office-home time. Shut the door and just cut off the rest of the world and I’m looking forward to that because I think it will help separate things.

Now, one of the things I want to do here, I like doing book reviews so I do it. I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’ve been trying to unwind and one of the things I think is very important for people is to learn how to unplug and unwind or like I call it, idle well. My dad and I last summer when we went camping, we said, “We idle very well.” What I mean is we would just be lying around the campfire or lying around on the hillside for hours on end, not even reading. We’d read a little bit, we’d write in our journal, but then we’d just lay and your mind just wanders and the creative juices, which are just the nothingness juices, are great and I think one of the things that new media is doing right now is it’s making it so people don’t do that. They’re afraid to do it. “I can’t get offline. I’m gonna miss something.” Yeah. Yeah, you are going to miss something, but guess what? It’s the web. It will still be there. This past weekend, I unplugged for the whole weekend. I unplugged all technology on Friday morning and I didn’t turn it back on until Monday morning and you know what? It was okay. It was all right. There was no emergencies, no fires, nothing blew up. It was okay and you need to do that and I cannot stress how much that reinvigorates you and get you excited. Trust me. As I always talk about, it’s rebalancing. I have to get back out in nature quite often to rebalance myself because if I don’t get out there, I go insane. Trust me. I came back Monday morning yesterday. I was all excited and I said, “You know what? No one’s gonna suck this energy out of me. I refuse to let it happen,” and I didn’t let it happen. That kind of translates — book review, C.C., idling, where did you go with that?

It transitions into the book that I think a lot of people are reading right now called The 4 Hour Workweek. It’s funny when a book gets hot and gets trendy and where it teaches you life lessons and teaches you different strategies. It’s funny. You can start telling who — like there’s a philosophy in there about checking your email twice a day and setting an out of office message, an automated response, that says, “Hey, I only check my email at noon and 4:00,” blah, blah, blah. I’ve seen this from two of my friends already. I got the response, I’m like, “They reading the book.” I know they’re reading the book because it teaches you that philosophy. What I think is interesting about The 4 Hour Workweek, and this is my personal opinion on it, I think it’s a great book, but what I will tell you is like just like every other book out there — it’s the same advice I give new parents. Anytime a buddy of mine is going to be a parent for the first time and they’re freaking out about what book should they read, da-da-da, I give the same advice and I will do the same in new media, read everything you can, read it all, consume it all because everyday’s got different tactics, then figure out what works for you. Take little bits from getting things done. Take little bits from The 4 Hour Workweek, take the bits that work for you and leverage them fully, use them all the way for you. Don’t think you have to take a whole philosophy and use it totally.

That’s one of the reasons that I haven’t found the right religion for me because I take bits and pieces from all sorts of different religions and mush them together and that’s sort of my spirituality. I haven’t found one religion that contains everything for me. Everybody’s got something good in their religion and I like that and I pull it together and I make it mine. Same thing with The 4 Hour Workweek, I love the concept of it. I think he’s totally right. He talks about the new rich. I don’t necessarily know that term, but the fact that you can work from anywhere, you can get it done. You don’t have to always be connected. Things will survive with you no matter who you are. If you surround yourself with great people to do the great work, things will get done. You do not have to be there watching and hovering over every little thing. He hasn’t really said this, but it’s something I believe. You hire the very best people and then you let them run with stuff. It’s a painful lesson. It hurts to let go and delegate, but if you’ve hired the best possible team or in The 4 Hour Workweek he talked about outsourcing it, as long as you’ve got people who are capable of doing the task, step the hell back and let it happen. Let it happen. Do your thing. Let these other people do the things and then it will all work out. Trust me. I like a lot of things of it. I started reading his blog. I like his philosophy. He’s a little cocky, but that’s all right. He can be cocky. He’s earned it I guess. But The 4 Hour Workweek I definitely suggest reading. It’s a very interesting book. It’s worth consuming. It’s worth going through. Warning, it could be dangerous to some people out there. It’s one of those books I honestly think you could sit down and read and go, “Oh. Uh, honey? I need to make some changes.” Warning. I’m warning you now. If me telling you to read this book causes you to get divorced or scare your spouse, not my fault, not my fault! All right? It’s definitely worth checking out. I will link to it in the show notes, of course. You can buy it anywhere. It’s all over the place. It’s a very interesting book, a good read, and definitely a different way of life.

The other book I read recently is called “Rule the Web” by Mark — I’m not even going to try his last name, not going to do it. Fr — no, I’m not. I’ll put it in the show notes. He’s one of the founders of Boing Boing. I got sent a copy of this book because I thought it’s something pretty cool. It’s called “Rule the Web: How to do anything and everything on the internet - better, faster, easier.” It’s a really good book. It’s more basic than I was imagining to be honest with you because it’s really bare — I’m going to give this to either my dad or my mother-in-law because it explains — it’s very well organized, tips and tricks. It’s like “how do I find an address on the web?” A lot of people don’t know that. How do you find the address of someone you’re really looking for? Lots of tips like that, tips on maintaining your computer, tips on web pages, email, all the basic stuff or questions that — the way I would answer is — it’s all of the questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask because they know they’re going to be giggled at for asking it. There are some new +1 level stuff. What I like is there’s one section where he went out and asked a bunch of other people for their one best — Ask Cory Doctorow His One Best Tip, and I thought that was very cool. It’s a neat book. It’s paperback. It’s trade paperback I guess what you call it. I really enjoyed the book. I read it really fast. I’m more skimmed it more than anything because I knew a lot of the answers already, but I wanted to see what he had to say about things. Definitely one of those things for if you’re trying to get somebody involved in the web, maybe you need to buy it for your executive, I don’t know. I shouldn’t say that. I’m generalizing. That’s kind of mean. For someone who thinks they know the web and they’re getting into the web and they’re getting excited by it, this could be a great book to get them to the next step because I guarantee you — warning though, they’re going to read the book and go, “Dude, did you know?” “Yeah, I knew that.” “Oh, wow!” You’re going to get a lot of those moments and that’s okay. Just embrace it. Roll with it. It’s definitely a book to get people excited about the web. I think it’s another one of those books that could change people. They’ve read it and just get all giddy and excited and try to do more things.

So, those are the things I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to get in touch with you. I hadn’t talked to you a little while. I’ve been doing some interviews lately. I’ve got a great one coming. I’ve got some more interviews coming up. I’m doing more of them. I tell you. Thank you again to all Managing the Gray listeners and readers who helped me figure out getting a MacBook Pro. The Mac has definitely been a great investment. I haven’t gone totally Mac yet. I mean I’m recording this right now in CastBlaster on my PC. PC is still my main computer, but the laptop is rocking, really getting used to it, really excited. Audio Hijack Pro, that alone, if you’re into any sort of audio production makes the Mac almost worth it because it makes the Internet — I don’t know if it’s worth spending a couple of grand for this $30 program, but it’s very cool. A program that simple and that cheap does such an effective job of recording audio. It’s very exciting to me on that.

Hey, if you haven’t seen yet, one of the things I’m going to start doing is — I’ve been doing One Guy’s Thoughts, which is my video podcast. It’s sort of my personal podcast that kind of catches all things, but one of the things I’m going to start doing on that is making sure I record — now that I’ve got my workflow going and I’ve got the camera and I got everything going the way I want to, I’m going to start doing interviews with people at these conferences I’ve got upcoming. I’ve got the Second Life Community Conference coming up and a PodCamp Philly is coming up, PodCamp Boston, PodCruise Miami, lots of things coming up, Virtual Worlds 2007 Fall, lots of things coming up and I want to start videotaping the interviews and doing more than just me speaking head stuff. So, I’m going to be looking for that so if I stick a video camera in your face next time we meet, warning. Hey, if anybody knows where I can find a Zoom H2. I want to put this out to the listeners. I’m seeing all these reviews about it. My Edirol is pissing me off and so I’m thinking about getting one of these Zoom H2 recorders. I don’t know if they’re necessarily for sale yet because I can’t seem to find them anywhere, but hey, if anyone’s got a tip on where I can find them, let me know because I want to buy one. They seem very cool and I want to use one. I want to definitely try them. I like the fact that they’re made to record 360 degrees, so I want to try it with a table discussion or some other things.

So, that’s going to wrap up Managing the Gray. Again, you can email me at managingthegray@gmail.com or you can call in the comment line, 206-309-4729. Of course, managingthegray.com, it’s got more than just a podcast going on. I’m writing content up there, linking the stuff, transcripts go up there. Hey, thank you guys for listening. Thank you for telling your friends. I’ve been getting some really nice emails from new folks who are just discovering Managing the Gray and discovering me and I’m having a great time meeting you and getting to know you. Please, you can find me in all the networks. My About page links to almost all of them and cc-chapman.com is my regular blog if you want to swing on over there. You never know what you’re going to get there. So, take care. Have a great day and get out there and play on the new media playground. All right? I will talk to you very, very soon.

- Originally posted on ManagingTheGray.com in case you see this scrapped onto another site -

Posted in Transcript, New Media | Comments(0)

Transcript for Managing the Gray #34 “Call-In Mania”
Originally posted on May 23, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Good morning everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #34. Before we jump in to the show today, I realized I have not thanked them in a while and it is about time I do. I try to do it every few shows. I got to give thanks to the people who helped me do the opening credits of Managing the Gray. You hear it all the time, it makes you recognize the show, and you probably do not know who they are. The music is by Madsumo. You can check him out at madsumo.com. He is a very good friend of mine. The voiceover is Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV. If you are into gadgets, if you are into technology at all, I highly suggest subscribing to Geek Brief, a great show. Cali is a great friend, a great woman, great stuff. Madsumo is awesome too. I love you, buddy.

Managing the Gray #34 is going to be a little different today. I just twittered that I am going to feel like Mitch Joel with hair. Six Pixels of Separation is a great podcast, which I am sure you are listening to. If you are listening to this show and you are not listening to Six Pixels, something is wrong. So, go listen to that. Mitch is a good boy of mine, good friend. He does lots and lots of call-ins and lots of call-ins is not what I usually do around here. I got a backlog of them and I apologize for not playing them sooner. Also, Mr. Rutter, the show notes will have the phone number in it. Just so you have it now, it is 206-309-4729. That is easier, it is 206-309-GRAY. Give us a call. Send in your questions, comments, whatever you want.

We have got tons of them today and I will get to them in just a minute, but one thing I just want to get out of the way right now is a quick thing. It has been going on the past couple of days and it has been really bugging the bejesus out of me. That is the whole thing about blogola. I hate the term. I hate it with a passion. It stems from the whole payola concept, record companies paying DJs to play their songs, which really bugs me. Someone threw the term blogola in relation to the Nikon campaign or any of these other campaigns where [unintelligible] influencer outreach. Nikon gave out some of their cameras or D80s I think they are to bloggers out there and said, “Hey, here’s a camera. Go write about it. Go take pictures and have fun.” They did not tell them they could not say anything negative. They did not tell them they had to blow smoke and say all positive things. They said, “Here, go take pictures for six months and at the end of it, if you like it you can buy the camera or you can send it back. It’s up to you. Here, play with it for six months.” They did not tell them they had to blog about it, but let us face it.

You give a blogger a toy or a gadget, you can them out to a nice dinner, you show them a good time at a conference, anything the blogger does in her life, anything, whether they stub their toe walking on the street, they are going to blog about it and talk about it. So, if they have a new camera to play with for six months, they are going to probably talk about it. There is nothing wrong with that. In my mind, as long as the blogger or the podcaster says, “Hey, Nikon gave me this camera.” End of story. Done. Then I know that, yes, they have got it, and, yes, maybe they are a little more motivated to be positive about it, but I do not care. It is different and I am a firm believer there is a difference between journalists and bloggers. I am sorry. There is. Are some blogs turning into journals, more towards like that? Yeah, probably, but at the same time not. It is different. It will always be different. For companies out there who might be thinking about doing a blogger influencer outreach, email me, cc.chapman@gmail.com. I will be happy to talk to you about ways I think that you could do it right or do it wrong. I would be more than happy.

I had lunch with some executives several months back and the hot topic was, “C.C., how would you like to be approached? Would you be comfortable with this?” I told them it is really simple. Find out if I am the right person for whatever it is you want. Read my blog. Listen to my podcast. Do at least a little bit of research. Do not just do a Technorati search because that is ridiculous. Get to know me at least a little bit and then contact me. Do not send me a form letter. I know there is going to be form letter pieces to it. That is fine, but say, “Hey, C.C. What’s up?” da-da-da-da. Show that you have actually read or listened to me and then say, “Hey, here’s what we want to do.” I am going to know. It is okay. Do not try to be cute about it. Do not try to be coy. Just be straight up, “Hey, we want to send you X. Would you be interested?” da-da-da-da. It is not wrong to say, “Hey, we would love if you happen to talk about it.” Do not say you have to. Do not say you have to say positive things. Do not do any of that. Just be honest and say, “Hey, we want to give you something,” or whatever it is. The same thing with Vista laptops. I thought those were fine too. They sent them out and said, “Here, talk about them.” They did not have to say that. I am sorry. If I get a gadget in the mail tomorrow, I do not care what it is. I would probably be talking about it. It is just the nature of the beast.

Do I wish more people were objective and showed both sides of it? Sure, I do, but that is the way it rolls. Listen, influencer outreach is a good thing. It is a positive thing. It is something I think more companies need to do and be creative in doing it because just giving it away and letting people play with it only goes so far. Teach them how to use it. What if Nikon went out — they did do it actually, Nikon with their D-something other product, this picture town. They took a whole town in South Carolina and gave them all cameras and go shoot life. That I thought was even more powerful because it was saying, “Look, anybody can use our cameras. Don’t get scared by the fact that it is like a big professional camera. Anybody could use it.” So, there. I just had to get that out of the system this morning because it was funny. It was on my mind. There was a lot of Twitter traffic about it yesterday. I saw Eric Rice’s post this morning, an amazing post that I agree with totally. I will link to it in the show notes over at managingthegray.com. I just had to get that out of the way, get it out of the system. It is early morning here. I have not had enough coffee yet.

Influencer outreach is a good thing. Companies, do not be scared of it. Bloggers, podcasters, anybody in the new media space, if you are on the receiving end of one of these outreaches, do the right thing. Disclose it. Say that you are doing it. Say that you are involved with it. When in doubt, tell. What I mean is, if you are going, “Do I have to disclose this?” Yes. If you asked that question in your head, the answer is yes. Just say, “Hey,” da-da-da-da, “I’m doing some work with…” or “Hey, I got this sent to me.” It all takes just two seconds. Just do it.

Okay, call-ins, because I have got a ton of them. Here is the first one from a good buddy, Ed.

Ed Roberts: Hey, C.C. This is Ed Roberts from Looking out the Window and Kansas City Weather. Just [unintelligible] to listen to your PodCamp New York presentation [unintelligible]. I already have a ton of respect for you, brother. That presentation that you put out there, if there was any type of, I guess I can say — it is kind of hard to get it out from the doors, but if there was one source that I would direct people to be better interested in what new media is, I think that presentation just nailed it completely. I am flabbergasted. It was spectacular. Thank you so much for that. I am actually listening to it on my way out, storm chasing here in Central Kansas. Great listen and I just want to say thank you so much. You hit it. You always have. I tell you, there really is no other person that I can think of in the world of podcasting that really can, not only has the passion and understands new media, but really knows how to speak from the heart and explain that. I just want to say thank you for just you being you and you leading the charge and a lot of this stuff about new media. Take care, my friend, and I will catch you later.

C.C. Chapman: I need that little ego stroke after my little mini rant there at the beginning. I just realized I ranted. I do not usually rant on Managing the Gray, but I am passionate about it and that is what it boils down to. Ed, hey, thank you for the comment. If you guys did not catch that, in the middle he said he was out storm chasing. He was not exaggerating. Ed Roberts chases storms. He actually had some amazing photos from the tornados that hit recently. It is KC Weather Podcast and Looking out the Window. Looking out the Window is a music podcast. Great, great stuff, Ed. Thank you, thank you for the call. It felt good. You can call in too, 206-309-4727. Lots of call-ins today. So, let us keep it going. This one made me very, very happy. Someone is smitten in their homework.

Jerry Harrington: Hey, C.C. This is Jerry from jerryharrington.net or jerryharrington.net@gmail.com. I was just calling in response to your homework assignment from PodCamp NYC. While I was not at PodCamp NYC as I am from Chicago, and so I am looking forward to PodCamp Chicago Land, I did here your homework assignment via Managing the Gray, via the video of your presentation posted online. I very much appreciated getting to watch that and I wanted to let you know that in response to your homework assignment, I left an audio comment to Mitch Joel’s Twist Image Six Pixels of Separation Podcast just a little while ago. Now, here I am, leaving my second audio comment on a podcast. Hmm…maybe this is a dangerous slippery slope. Anyway, thanks C.C. for the encouragement and for all of your insight. I really appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: See? That is what it is about. Jerry, you get an A. Everybody gets an A when they do homework in my world. I have no other grades, but an A. Listen. If you are new to Managing the Gray and you did not hear my PodCamp presentation, what I said at the end of it was, the homework was to go try something new in new media. I said it could be something crazy, signing up for a Second Life account or it could be building a website or recording a YouTube video. What Jerry did was he called in to a podcast. It is just like leaving a voicemail. It is so easy. You just call up and that is how you become part of the conversation. Jerry, I am very proud of you that you took that step because I know that it is a weird thing. People are like, “Well, I got nothing to say.” Sure, you do. If you can talk, you have something to say. Will people listen? That is a whole other game, but everybody has a voice and that is what is fun.

Jerry, I have psyched. I am more psyched that you called another podcast and then called my podcast to tell me about it. That makes me happy. I did not care for the first person who did homework based on listening to the presentation after the fact. I have had one or two people do the homework from PodCamp who were there, which is great. Actually, it is someone that afternoon. See, there is the power, the power of this new media playground that I keep talking about, the fact that you can just try something out. It is a little scary at first. Remember the first time you get on that slide or that tire swing thing on the chains? It scares you. It is kind of freaky, but you get out there. You try it and suddenly you realize, “Wait a minute. That wasn’t so bad.” What is really magical is when you do something and you go, “Oh, that was fun. I wanna do that again.” That, boys and girls, is where the fun really gets going.

Chris: Hey, C.C. This is Chris in Indiana, a new listener. I just listened to a couple of your podcasts. I really truly enjoyed them. We run a small consulting business based out of Indiana. Most of our clients [unintelligible] are more corporate public relation types. We would really love to hear you kind of expand a little bit more about — I mean you could go on really for hours about all things that specifically political campaigns do wrong in the digital world, but if you think there is somebody who is doing it right or at least kind of sort of got it, would love to hear your insight on that, Republican, Democrat, Green Party, Libertarian, whatever. It does not matter. I would just be interested in hearing your thoughts on who is kind of doing it right and some of the opportunities that are out there for people that are running for office that they really should be connecting other folks. Anyway, I would love to hear about it. Thanks.

C.C. Chapman: See, those are the types of listeners that I love, the ones that, they are not podcasters, they are not Twitterers or Second Lifers. They are just doing the work and they are interested in this topic. So, thank you for calling in. Politicians who are doing it right, I could take that a lot of ways, but no. I think it is too early, to be honest. I think it is still too early. What we are seeing this year in particular, especially on the Democratic side, I guess Republican too but they got a little late start, is that they are testing the waters. They are trying things. I know I have seen Obama and I have seen Edwards on Twitter. Obama did something in Second Life that was horrendous, not horrendous, just it was like somebody said, “Oh, let’s do this,” and did not really investigate the medium before doing it. Everyone is doing YouTube videos, which I applaud them on. I think it is great. I know Hilary there for a while. You could not embed her videos, which was just stupid, put the video out there, but do not let people share it and show it to more people for you. Hello? I think it was a little early and I do not think anybody is doing it right. Everybody fails. Everybody politician failed because I posted it. I posted a — and this offer still stands. I want to get any political candidate. I do not care what party you are. I do not want to talk about politics. I want to talk about how they are leveraging new media. I did a blog post about this and I put everybody’s name in it I could think of and tagged it so that whoever is doing their web monitoring for them, which they should — every political candidate, if every political candidate does not have somebody on their staff who everyday does nothing but ego surf for that person, they are failing.

They should be knowing what is being posted on Technorati, Twitter, Podzinger. They should be using all those searches that we use to do our ego surfs to get that information and then following up on things. It just makes no sense. I want to interview some politicians. I talk about leveraging new media. I think we are going to see people do more of it. I really do. I have heard lots of discussions on the Second Life angle, ramblings of different politicians in different parties coming in, which I think is interesting. I have only heard one that I thought was really, really cool, but I have a feeling their campaign backed down out of it, unfortunately. I think you are going to see a lot more people. I would like to see people leveraging Twitter more or that concept of microblogging or more blogging, more Meetup functionality, those types of things. I think meshing them all together, I think — who is going to be the first politician who has a true portal, meaning you love this candidate, here is everything you need, everything, one click links to here are all of the spaces you can connect to us and share us. Here are the banners. Here are the graphics. Here are the stake in the ground science to put on your Second Life lot or your there.com or Kaneva or anything else lots. Here are some audio promos you can play in your podcast for your candidate. They do them on the radio, why not do them on podcast? Here are the banners. Here are the graphics. Here are the videos you can embed. Here are the commercials that you can embed. Give all that content out to the people and then let them do with it what they want. Yes, some people will take it and trash it, but they are going to do that anyways. There will always be trolls who are in the bad mood and politics bring out the best in everybody, right?

I do not think I have seen anybody doing it quite right yet, but that is where I think it needs to go. Just try all these things. The cost of investment — I talk about this a lot, the cost of investment is your time. It is not that huge to put it into a social network or something else. When I see what politicians are spending on, all these television commercials that after the first couple of times we all zone out and actually grow to hate. I am already hating a certain politician who is already running campaign ads here in Massachusetts. That drives me nuts. I already was not going to vote for him, but it does not matter. The point is I am already sick of these commercials and how much they are spending on those commercials. Take that budget. Take one day’s television budget. Whatever your national budget is for one day of television campaigns, take that and I guarantee you I could show you how to use new media to leverage it, whether it is me, whether it is Crayon, whatever. This is not a business pitch. What I am saying is take that money, it is not free, and leverage it. Get somebody on your staff. This new media playground is full of people who would love to — I remember back when I heard that Rob Walch from podCast411 and the iPhone Podcast now, I love it he is doing that, when I found out he was being the producer for Senator Edwards’ podcast way back in the day, I thought that was amazing. Why not reach out to this world, find out who is into politics and hire them. Let us go. I hope that sort of thing answered your question, but it is true. Nobody is standing out in my mind right now as really leveraging it. There is so much potential. I do think it is early. I think come post Labor Day, when we hit the fall, I think you are going to see things start up a lot more and certainly come January. Everything is going to go into full gear and we will see it everywhere and we will not be able to escape it.

Now, we have had guys call in all day. You can call in too, 206-309-4729. See, I am making it so people cannot miss it because I have been told I hide the number. I actually put it on my website. So, here is someone I love to death and her voice [unintelligible], Heidi Miller.

Heidi Miller: Hey, C.C. It’s Heidi Miller from the Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter Podcast. I was looking to your May 1st episode. You said something at the very end that just had me — I am in the car right now and I was going, “Yes, yes, yes.” It was a revelation that I just realized myself and it was something about, you know that feeling at the playground when you are on the swings and the person next to you, there is no reason that you think this person cannot be your best friend in the world just because they happen to be on the swing next to you. This is a combination of two things that I can relate recently and that is — first of all, I am really feeling the power of social media. Long story, but this weekend somebody who was originally a listener of a podcast of mine, she came to my house and fixed all the stuff around my house just because I have put up a posting on my personal blog saying, “Hey, I need to have my studio soundproofed and I need some doors fixed. I’ve got these couple small things. Who should I call to do this?”

It is a listener to the show who came in and we spent a whole afternoon hanging out, fixing things, so it was awesome. Another friend of mine was telling me that when she wants to kind of get her spirits lifted and she is feeling a little down on herself or life or work or whatever that she goes on the playground and swings on the swing. It is free and she swings as high as she can. I thought, “Well, I need to do that.” There are two things together made me realize that a lot of times, people who know me from the podcast or whatever, I tend to put them in a category of “that’s a business contact,” or “that’s a person I need to have X type of relationship with.” When you said why is it that not everyone you just happen to swing next to on the playground cannot be your best friend in the world. Well, [unintelligible] best friends in the world right now and we have met exactly twice in person. What you are saying that really made me realize I do need to just — everybody [unintelligible] is so cold. There is no reason to be standoffish. There is no reason to just not be 100% myself and be silly. I do not have to be well focused. I could just see myself and you know what? Why not just treat everyone you meet like they are next to you on the swings and they are going to be your best friend forever in your whole life. So, thank you for bringing that out, C.C. It totally made my day.

C.C. Chapman: Well, that totally made my day. I had not listened to the end of the call-in. I listened to the beginning of it and I am glad. That is why I do this podcast. People ask me all the time, plain and simple, I do this because it seems that people like what I say and I like to share what is in my head. It comes from the heart and the head. I agree with you fully. You do not know who you are going to meet that is going to turn into the most important contact in the world or who is going to put you in touch with somebody. I have bumped into people in airports, on the train, at conferences that at the beginning I am just like — it is one of those, “Hey, cool. Nice to meet you,” da-da-da-da, exchange business cards and nothing more than that, but then you get home and you start exchanging emails, you find out more about the person, you find out that you have got a connection that you had no idea about. That is what we are talking about here. It is what I am blogging about. It is what I am podcasting about. It is what I am trying to write my book about. All the call-ins today and everything, what really makes me happy is I am really glad that I did the title of the PodCamp New York presentation as New Media Playground because people are connecting with that. I was not sure if people were going to get the concept or I knew they would get it, but I do not know if they would really get it. It seems that people are getting it. I was not positive that was going to be the title of the book, but it sure as heck is I hope now going to be, but we will see what happens. I really like that the analogy seems to work for you. It boils it down because we were all kids once, right? So, we all get it. It is about connections. It is important. Be a connector. I got a call-in about that from someone who is connecting via LinkedIn and it worked for them.

Michael [Spielsinger]: Hey, C.C. It is Michael [Spielsinger]. I just finished listening to the spring cleaning episode. First of all, I wanted to say [unintelligible]. Second of all, I do not know if you remember we had a whole email exchange back and forth about my father and multiple sclerosis. I just want to let you know actually he is doing much better, but I also wanted to wish you condolences on the loss of your grandfather. Finally, I just wanted to let you know, as far as the power of LinkedIn, which you mentioned in this episode, I actually finally took advantage of one of their newer features, namely the Answers. Or is it Questions? I do not remember which. Either way, you post a question and people in your network or even out of your network go ahead and answer the question. Actually, I posted a question about something that I was looking for and I got an answer back from somebody in your network and actually made a connection out of it. That just goes to show the power of the new media space, the instantaneousness I guess. Is that a word? I do not know. I just wanted to thank you on that. The connection by the way was Colin Brumelle. I remember the last name strangely enough, but I was a little sketchy on the first one. Actually, I did something, which I have never done before so it is a milestone for me. I actually picked up the phone and called the number on his blog and had a little chat with him about the service. It turns out he does not even work for the company anymore that provides the service, but he was really, really nice enough to take time out of his schedule and talk to me about it. I just wanted to thank you for that. All right. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: Have you guys used the questions and answers on LinkedIn yet? It is a very, very powerful way to connect. What it is, is you get to ask a question about anything. You name it. I have seen everything from gathering people’s information, “What do you think about X” to “Hey, can somebody recommend a Y?” People just answer. It is amazing. It is a great way to pull and poll your network. It is a great way to get a whole bunch of different people’s opinions. The fact that you connected with someone through my network I think is great. I think it is great and you picked up the phone and you called him. Kudos. I am still not a phone guy. I got to get better using the phone. I just do not. I do not know what it is. I just do not. If you are ever trying to get a hold of me, email me and do not MySpace me. I do not read those messages often enough. Gmail, cc.chapman@gmail.com, will get a hold of me, trust me.

I think LinkedIn is a very powerful medium. I like leveraging it just for the connections I get and I love it just to keep track where people are. When you get a new job, you do not always [unintelligible] everybody, but I find out about people through LinkedIn getting promotions and getting new jobs and where they are. What I love doing is going, “You’re working for who?” and I go click and I read about the company and I am like, “Oh, cool. That’s great!” It is a neat, neat tool and I am glad you got the connection through it. Again, it is about being connectors. My buddy Mark Forman, I hope I get this URL right, he is starting a podcast about connecting and I am very excited about it. I believe the URL is aconnector.com. I will check that while I play the next audio comment, but I am pretty sure that is what the URL is. It will definitely be in the show notes. I cannot wait to hear it. He has not done one yet, but just the concept of it, Mark is really into connections, doing communities, all the way over in Taiwan, which is great. It adds international flavor to it. He is from Brooklyn in Taiwan, so it makes it all international. I think it is very cool that these networks — and I love hearing success stories. Any success story you have ever have, please email me or call it in. Either way, share your success stories about how new media is helping you. I would love to share them with my listeners because that is further connection. Maybe your success story can help somebody else or it will motivate somebody else to try this stuff. That is what it is all about. Take this next guy, Scott Monty who I think is going to go on at some pretty cool things.

Scott Monty: Hey, C.C. Scott Monty here. I hope you are doing well. Hey, I had a great lunch with you and was glad to just kind of share the mind space with your or share the playground as it were. I wanted to comment on a couple of things on your spring cleaning show. I thought the analogy that you used with the new media playground is certainly a strong one. I wanted to acknowledge that you have been going through kind of a difficult time with just life in general. In the midst of playing in the new media playground, life does happen. There are some things that are snags whether we make some mistakes in the new media space or quite frankly personal lives just tend to get in the way. I liken this to being in the sandbox and just getting sand in your pants. Sometimes life happens and the [unintelligible] in your pants. Well, what do you do? You pick yourself up, you wipe yourself off, clean out your pants, and you get back into the sandbox for another day. Maybe try some new toys, learn how to not get sand in your pants the next time, but it is just part of a learning process and part of the fun that goes into it. The other thing I wanted to also acknowledge was being a huge Gmail user. I have actually become a big fan of GTD Gmail. That is Getting Things Done. It is a Firefox add-on that if you go to the Firefox Add-on page and you search for GTD, you would be able to find this really cool add-on to your Gmail account that allows you to really segment things with labels in a much more efficient way than you can simply with using stars or just using the labeling system that Gmail gives you. Check it out. You might want to provide a link. I do not have it at hand, but you can certainly provide a link in the notes if you can find it. All right. Keep up the great work. I enjoyed seeing you and certainly, as always, enjoy listening to your show. Take care. You can see me at scottmonty.com. Bye-bye.

C.C. Chapman: Scott is fun. He is a listener of Managing the Gray and we met face to — I think that was the first time we met face to face, it was the Boston Ad Club earlier this year. We got together for lunch a couple of weeks back. Just grab chilis, had some lunch, great conversation. Scott is a neat guy. I am getting to know Scott better. It is great because he is totally leveraging the new media space. I love your analogy. I already blogged about this, the whole sand-in-your-pants. It is great. Scott, I am going to put that in the book and I am going to credit you with it. I promise. I know you are going to give me permission to use it, but I am definitely going to give you credit for it. It is a great stuff.

I think it is going to wrap up Managing the Gray. We are at 29 minutes right now. Wow! This is definitely a different vibe. I hope you are okay with it. I had this pool of listener comments that I have been neglecting and I really want to get them out to you because if I do not pass them along then I am doing something wrong because that is part of the whole connection and sharing and getting it all out there. This was definitely a little different. Managing the Gray usually focuses on the topic of the day, but today the topic of the day was you guys, the listeners, the people out there who are learning in the space, getting excited about the space, trying new things, falling down, making mistakes, getting up, learning from those mistakes, and then doing it better the next time. I had this CEO that — I still to this day respect the hell out of him. His name is Ben Levitan. When I worked for James Martin + Co., he was the CEO. He was like, “Failing is fine, just learn from it.” The other thing he always told me too that I will always remember about Ben was he used to say, “Listen. I don’t care who you are in the company. You can come up to me and tell me I’m doing stuff wrong. Tell me I made a mistake. Tell me I just made the dumbest decision in my life, but you have to tell me how I can do it better. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear you complain.” Exactly. If you are not doing it, you cannot complain about it. What is up? Does anybody work for…? I just thought of that. I do not know where Ben Levitan is. His name is Ben Levitan, works for James Martin + Co. down in Virginia, and I know last time he was up in the Boston area. I should find him. I bet you I can find him on LinkedIn. I am going to find out where Ben is. Maybe a listener works with him. If you are, you are a lucky individual because Ben was a cool guy, definitely shaped a lot of things in my mind.

Anyways, this is going to wrap up Managing the Gray. Of course, 206-309-4729 if you want to call in, or managingthegray@gmail.com works just as well. If you really want to get a hold of me — I keep these separate inboxes because sometimes it is a lot easier, but if you really want to get a hold of me, cc.chapman@gmail.com is the quickest way to get a hold of me. It is the account that is always open in the tab in Firefox, always. It is the first one I see, so send it there if you need something immediately. Until next time. I will talk to you very soon, managingthegray.com, blog content going up all the time, Twitter, all kinds of stuff. I am going, guys. I will talk to you soon.

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