No time to go into this in detail right now, but check out the Perfect Path Plodder meets Ms Useful Sounds over on cruel to be kind.
In a rare instance of me podcasting while sitting down, we chat about the upcoming PodcastconUK.
All posts by Lloyd
Yes, I was young once too y’know!
“Ha ha ha ha, oh god, put them away you’re so sad”. That’s the reaction these get from my kids, so I thought I’d share them with a wider, more mature audience.
Yes, folks this is Mr Perfect Path twenty-one years ago, just having left home and disappeared off to the Guildford School of Acting. That haircut was the one after the Phil Oakey comb-over effort and before the standard actor’s short back and sides. Yes that’s a collarless grandad shirt, and yes that’s a grubby gabardine mac with shoplifters pockets, ideal for threatening all and sundry with impromptu acts of indecent exposure. Ahh the cheap nights at Cinderella Rockerfellas that that NUS card got me into.
A note to younger readers: If you’re under 21 (ie you weren’t born when these were taken) I really don’t want to know, OK? Just leave me in blissful ignorance that I’m old enough to be your father.
A note to older readers: Point me (and the rest of the Perfect Path gang) to pictures of you at that time, the more gorgeous the mullets or bubble perms, the better – bonus points for Buggles-style specs.
Bring me sunshine, in your smile
Over on the podcasters mailing list Mark Czajka asks about selling podcasts. I’ve been talking to people about this sort of thing recently too.
It came to me in mid-bite of my apple this morning, as I contemplated another day in London in the 80s*, that selling content is like selling sunshine.
Nobody tries to actually sell sunshine directly – that would be stupid and, under some jurisdictions, doubtless illegal. Here in the UK, we’d have to give the deckchair-hire surfer-dudes each a combined visible light, heat and UV-meter, get them to take readings regularly, and then go round busting people for more cash when the clouds disappeared (but we could also probably get away with paying them even less as they get free sunshine as a perk of the job!).
But do you doubt that there is money to be made if you have access to sunshine? Those deckchair-hire dudes are just a tiny part of the sunshine economy, and the benefits are open to anyone who lives in a seaside town in the summer. You make money by doing anything that enhances the sunshine experience, helps people get to the sunshine in the first place or helps them yakk about it for the next six months till they get their next dose.
Sunshine is free, it wants to be free but it can also bring you customers and put them in the mood to spend their money. And that’s what damned fine writing, sounds & pictures should aspire to do too.
tags selling & podcasting & money
* I mean 80-something fahrenheit, of course, the time machine to take me back to my youth still has some kinks that need ironing out before I can spend a whole day there. btw dexys send hugs (except kevin, he’s in a mood ‘cos I told him what happened to princess di).
Act Naturally
OK, so it’s back to first post and suck time. Almost one year into this blog and you get your first opportunity to see me in moving pictures. Having been interviewed by the beeb already this week, I guess I’ve just got the bug, I’ve got to be in front of a camera daahlink.
In this opening episode, Lloyd gets to find out that he looks like sh*t, that his eyebrows look like hairy caterpillars and he has Austin Powers teeth. He also finds the one face that he should never, ever, pull in public, unless he wants to be shot.
Maybe this will be a one off, maybe it will continue – you’ll have to keep tuning in to see.
Also, I don’t know if all of this will work at all in a blogpost, so be patient with me, luvs. [update: ok, it works for me in IE, but Firefox insists on treating it as a text file. Tell me gently what I’m doing wrong, please. Ta.]
Perfect Path Pontification Probed
So you all read what I said about the Queen’s Telly Club a few weeks ago (it’s not really the Queen’s and it’s not really a telly club, it’s the Royal Television Society Convention, but I just can’t help myself sometimes).
Well by a secuitous route from there and through the process of me repeatedly opening my big gob about it, I ended up in the meeting room at the Perfect Path Penthouse being interviewed by Kuldip Dhadda from the BBC, filmed by the lovely Jackie who in turn was assisted by Tom.
We covered the *gasp* threat to traditional broadcasting coming from participative media like blogging, podcasting and vlogging. Apparently they’re scared that we’re going to eat their lunch. After we were done it came to me that there was an opportunity here for the parable of the loaves and the fishes, but woe, it was too late. We hung around the corpse of advertising, picking over what we might scrape off the bones. We talked about why I do it (blog & podcast that is) and why it’s popular and makes for more accessible and worthwhile content. And we also took a look at Public Service Broadcasting and I tried to avoid puffing up their egos too much by going on about the BBC being the only player who’s actually doing anything useful in this area and ITV just being crap.
These bits will all be chopped up and mixed in with other contributions from other esteemed commentators (*ahem*) to form four short pieces of video that will be the introduction to debate sessions at the conference.
Sadly I shan’t be able to be at the conference itself as they’re too tight it’s very exclusive and apparently the only guests are kind of those stratospheric guys you and I only dream of meeting…. y’know like Michael Grade. Of course I could *buy* a ticket, but given the current state of the Perfect Path coffers £1700 (plus VAT I shouldn’t be surprised) is a bit on the steep side – though naturally I’m open to sponsorship offers, so if you’ve a couple of grand to spare, plus a little extra for danger money for going in with a podcast wire, you know how to get hold of me hehehe.
tags: television & RTS & RTS2005 & cambridge & new media
Girls go Geek in London
The first London Girl Geek Dinner happened and was partially recorded last Tuesday (16th), but in the slow backwaters of mid-August, it takes a week for these things to percolate through on Perfect Path.
The last couple of bashes at the Texas Embassy (special guests Robert Scoble in June and Seth Godin in July) have been throbbing testosterone fuelled affairs, with a smattering of women, but overwhelmingly male.
So Sarah Blow made use of Hugh’s excellent wiki to organise one just for the grrrls. Fortunately for me, guys were allowed as long as they went on the arm of a girl who was already going – and of the several thousand that asked me, Helen Keegan was the first.
Naturally, there was just as much noisy conversation from 50 women as there had been from a mixed crowd of 200 – it was different, but in a weird way that didn’t make sense to my male psyche but the big diff was that I talked so much I didn’t take any pictures and I haven’t seen any either. Certainly something in the room distracted me so much that I didn’t notice until too late that I only had about 25 minutes of space on my minidisc and my brain turned to goo trying to work out why it had stopped working in mid podcast. Sorry Table 69.
I met some new people and some of the usual suspects but overall it was great – I would strongly encourage gorgeous techie women to go to the next one, but guys, don’t bother, you wouldn’t like it. No really, believe me, it was hell, just forget I mentioned it, you really really really wouldn’t like it.
M-i-c k-e-y…
OK, is it just me, or does the right hand bit of this header graphic from an esteemed public service organisation remind you of a famous creation of Walt Disney? Y’know, if you screw your eyes up a bit…
So how do we make money?
I’ve had this conversation a few times recently and just realised I hadn’t written about it here.
It comes from putting all of these things together:
Democratisation of media – “anyone” (ok, not anyone, but a lot more people than before) have access to technology that allows them to produce written, audio and video content of a very high quality and distribute their offerings to a global audience. One of the key effects of this is that the distinction between producer and consumer gets blurred – more and more people are both.
Content is worth more if you can get it free than if you have to pay for it – people increasingly expect to get stuff on the net for free and in fact they value the product more if they’ve been able to get a free sample (or even the whole thing) online. Music and movie producers shouldn’t worry about file-sharing and copying for this reason. However, it does raise the question “What can you sell people through the web?”
Advertising is dying. It may be a slow death or a quick one, but the trend is downwards and terminal. People don’t want to be interrupted by commercial messages anymore. Yes we need commercial information, but we want it available when we go looking, not jumping out at us wherever we go. Please don’t try to grab me by the eyeballs. Trouble is, advertising is *the* business model in media – who knows how else to make money out of it?
When you put all of those things together, the future starts to look gloomy for media execs especially in TV. How on earth are we going to continue to make programmes and make money? I don’t know the answer, but I’m enjoying talking about it to help get to an answer. Whatever, I’m sure that it involves people in TV talking to people (currently) outside TV to see what things haven’t worked in the past and it also involves talking to your audiences as if they have something you want, rather than the other way round.
tags: television & democratic media & money & advertising
The Normal Business Person’s Guide to Blogs, Wikis & RSS
- “I have too much to read – I can’t keep up”
- “E-mail has stopped being productive for me, but I don’t know what else to do”
- “Communication’s really bad around here, nobody knows what’s going on.”
- “Oh God, I didn’t know we had a project team working on that.”
- “Advertising just seems to have stopped working for us”
You’re not alone. These are some of the things that made me tear my hair out as a manager (in the end I just had to shave it all off to stop myself doing it) – and these problems seem insoluble – worse than that, everything you do just seems to make it worse.
Geeks to the rescue!
Luckily, some very clever people with rather variable social skills have created a bunch of tools that seem to deal with these problems very well (Hey, you’re reading one now!). What’s more they’ve made them pretty much freely available – all you have to do is know what you want to do and work out how best to do it.
If you’ve been reading the right papers, you’ll have heard of blogging some time ago – what you may not realise is that blogs can be more than a teen-angst diary or a place to add more hilarious pictures of your cat – they are also a business tool that can be applied to marketing and communications, project management and improving the productivity of individuals and teams.
You might even have heard of a mysterious relation of blogs – RSS. Really Simple Syndication is increasingly being used to help people both focus their own reading, but also reach their audience much more effectively. RSS is also spawning a new generation of search engines that can help you find the very latest web-based information while also letting new readers find your stuff much more easily.
Those who really should get out more will have heard the word Wiki. A wiki is a very simple website that anyone (yes anyone) can edit – they are very useful for collaboration, helping people who may be geographically separate to work up ideas, create and edit documents and to organise events. Take a look at my wiki if you like
These tools together can boost your productivity enormously whether you choose to use them over the internet or within your corporate network, but if you’re not a geek and you don’t know any geeks (or perhaps you’d just like to keep your geek-related activity quiet)how can you relieve some of the frustrations of coprorate life? What could your organisation do with them? What are others in your industry doing with them? Just how do you get started?
“The Normal Business Person’s Guide to Blogging, Wikis and RSS” is a one-day workshop that I’m offering now to help people look at these issues and work out how they can benefit.
Who should attend?
There are three key criteria:
Are you a person? Good, ‘cos there’s no cats allowed.
Do you do business? OK so the definition of business is pretty wide here – I work with lots of public-sector people who do lots of “business”.
Now here’s the clincher… are you normal? I think this pretty much comes down to “Do you need to communicate better with people inside and outside of your organisation? Do you want to serve your customers better? Must you have value for money?” If you’re shouting Yes! Yes! Yes! then you’re normal enough to attend the workshop.
What’s in it for you?
If you attend, you will come away with a better understanding of:
- What these tools are and what they can do.
- How the tools are being used already by your customers, suppliers or competitors.
- The risks of not adopting these tools.
You will also see:
- How ridiculously easy it is to start and maintain a blog.
- How blogs encourage conversations that can turn prospects into customers.
- How a wiki can be used to jointly create something useful.
- How RSS can speed up information flows while improving how well that information is targeted.
Finally you will have the opportunity to talk about how best you could use these technologies to improve customer relations, internal communications and (if that’s the bag you’re into) sell more stuff!
The workshop is best suited to a small group of people (6-8), in a single organisation, or who otherwise have to work together. Contact me in the usual way (lloyd AT perfectpath DOT co DOT uk) to set up a day’s session for your team.
tags: blogging workshop & blogging & corporate blogs & wiki & RSS
Ugliest Dog ever
I wouldn’t normally be interested in dog sites, especialy ugly dogs. Personally, I aspire to having a cat blog, perhaps one like Gia’s.
But there’s a special reason for linking to The Ugliest Dog in the world (WARNING: link is nsfgosm – not safe for granny or small children), and it involves an upcoming talk called Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts & RSS – what do they have to do with your future?
Darn. I was going to use that title (the talk one, not “World’s Ugliest Dog”)
Shut up.
tags: ugliestdog & ugliest & dog
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