Friend (n.): Acquaintance. Dimly-recognized name. Means of driving up your numbers on LinkedIn.
(one businessperson to another) It was great meeting with you. Have your people friend my people.
An iTunes playlist for the Vancouver Folk Festival – see you there!
Every summer, Social Signal gathers at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. And this year’s lineup looks especially promising… but you don’t have to take our word for it.
We’ve (and by “we’ve”, I mean “Alex has”) assembled an iTunes playlist (or “iMix”): 34 songs by the artists who will be on the twilight and evening stages for this year’s festival, running July 17-19 at Jericho Beach. From the Weakerthans to the Paperboys to Mavis Staples, you can get a taste of what to expect – or, if you can’t make it, a taste of why you should come next year!
If you’re coming, be sure to drop by our tarp (look for the Social Signal flag fluttering nearby) when we hold our annual picnic during Saturday night’s performances. Say hi, meet the team… and enjoy the music!
An iTunes playlist for the Vancouver Folk Festival – see you there!
Every summer, Social Signal gathers at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. And this year’s lineup looks especially promising… but you don’t have to take our word for it.
We’ve (and by “we’ve”, I mean “Alex has”) assembled an iTunes playlist (or “iMix”): 34 songs by the artists who will be on the twilight and evening stages for this year’s festival, running July 17-19 at Jericho Beach. From the Weakerthans to the Paperboys to Mavis Staples, you can get a taste of what to expect – or, if you can’t make it, a taste of why you should come next year!
If you’re coming, be sure to drop by our tarp (look for the Social Signal flag fluttering nearby) when we hold our annual picnic during Saturday night’s performances. Say hi, meet the team… and enjoy the music!
LexPublica aims to bring open-source principles to the practice of law
Social media are often called a disruptive innovation: one that surprises markets and, often, threatens market leaders.
A few nights ago, at Vancouver’s seventh Democamp (blogged wonderfully by Raul Pacheco here), I caught a glimpse of what may be the latest facet of that disruption.
It was nestled among a series of other fascinating demonstrations – including our friend Kris Krug‘s use of NetVibes as a personal media monitoring platform; Anahita, a Joomla-based social network platform; and BuddyPress, which turns WordPress MU into a social network. All very cool.
But the thing that really caught my attention was the upcoming service LexPublica.
If a substantial part of your business involves preparing simple standard legal documents, you may want to put down any hot beverages at this point.
LexPublica is the brainchild of lawyer Martin Ertl and open-source developer Zak Greant. Their goal is “opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone” – starting with an online community where you’ll be able to get plain-language contract templates for free.
Here’s how Zak and Martin describe it:
No one can afford lawyers. Individuals, professionals and small businesses can’t afford lawyers. Startups can’t afford lawyers. Big companies with large budgets for legal services can’t afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, in all earnestness, that they can’t afford lawyers.
LexPublica aims to solve this problem by opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone.
The first practical step we’ll take is to make common contracts available free of charge. These will include things that most of us need, such as employment agreements, website development agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s for short). The contracts will be written in plain English and have supporting guides to help you use them properly.
Along with the contracts, we’ll provide other information about contracts and the law to help you make informed decisions. With that, you can also make a better decision about when you want do prepare a contract yourself and when you want to get a lawyer.
This isn’t a philanthropic venture – this duo is completely open about their commercial intentions. It’s another example of a phenomenon that Wired editor Chris Anderson described: a growing economy premised on the way the Web makes it possible to give away valuable content at, effectively, no cost.
The people who should be nervous about this may not be lawyers – people will still need to have documents tailored to their particular needs and jurisdictions, and heaven knows there’s a lot more to the legal profession than just drawing up contracts. (Somewhere in the bowels of a large law firm, a weary articling student just looked up from her computer screen long enough to laugh mirthlessly – “HA!” – and then returned to the stack of contracts she’s drawing up.)
Instead, the folks I imagine would be the most unhappy about this – at least in the short term – are the ones who sell preprinted legal templates, kits and forms.
Then again, one of the most fascinating things about the social web is its unpredictability. Maybe the biggest group of adopters will be people who otherwise wouldn’t be using legal documents at all, but who discover contracts aren’t that intimidating after all… and the result might be a dramatic expansion in business relationship rigour across the board.
Or maybe some part of the legal profession will take this idea and run with it.
Or maybe the community that springs up around LexPublica will itself give rise to something fascinating and unforeseen.
We’ll be watching LexPublica with interest – and not just as a social media case study, but as a potential business resource. We have more than just the occasional contract to draw up ourselves, after all.
Make the most of your conference sponsorship
Hey, you’ve sponsored a conference – good for you!
Chances are good you wanted to help these folks out, and support some productive conversation, learning and networking. Chances are also pretty good you want to get some benefit out of the sponsorship yourself with goodwill and exposure.
And when they said you’d have an opportunity to speak to the participants, you jumped at it. And you have a great 15-minute pitch carefully crafted by the folks in marketing, including a PowerPoint video that hits all the key selling points.
So why do you have this nagging feeling of impending disaster?
Maybe because you’re about to turn that goodwill into impatience, even hostility.
Because those selling points are about to bounce off a wall of indifference and distraction. And because you’re about to lose a great opportunity.
But I have two pieces of good news.
The first is, everyone’s expecting you to do just that. It’s what sponsors usually do at conferences. They deliver a pitch to an audience anxious to get on with the actual business of the conference: people who are painfully aware of the bill for conference fees, hotel, food and travel, not to mention time away from work, and who don’t want to waste a minute on someone else’s self-serving agenda. And then the sponsor walks offstage to tepid applause, silently wondering if maybe it would have gone over better with more animation in the PowerPoint deck.
So at least you have plenty of company.
And second, it’s not too late to turn things around.
From someone who’s attended and spoken at a lot of conferences, and who’s written those speeches for other people, here are some ways you can do yourself and your audience a lot of good at your next sponsored event:
- Lose the sales pitch. Whatever else you do, please don’t pitch the audience. If all that means is you throw out the PowerPoint, and all you’re left with is a quick “Hi, we here at Social Signal are thrilled to support this conference. I’ll be here for the whole thing, and I hope you’ll grab me to say hi. Have a great four days!”… well, you’re now miles ahead of where you were.
- Make it fast. Thank the audience and organizers for the opportunity to support the event, say briefly why it’s important to you, add a personal note, and wrap up inside of three minutes. Rehearse it to make sure you’re under that limit; if possible, record yourself and then listen to it from the standpoint of an audience member. Does anything sound false, self-serving, trite or dull? Cut it.
- Introduce someone else. Instead of delivering the keynote, arrange with the organizers to introduce one of the conference’s featured speakers – someone people are really anxious to hear. Keep your introduction short; you can indicate why the speaker’s background or subject matter are so interesting to your company in a sentence or two, but the main thing is to get a little credit for helping to make an engaging presentation possible – and that means getting to that presentation quickly. (An added possibility: see if the organizers would be willing to name the keynote after your organization.)
- Hyperlink. Prepare a longer message about your organization and why you’re participating – on your own web site, or on a site like YouTube. Let your audience know they can see it there if they’re interested, and that they can get more information about your products and services there as well. You’ll be helping the people who are genuinely curious about you, without alienating the folks who aren’t.
- Announce something. Give your audience some genuinely exciting news… something that’s exciting to them, and not just to your organization. And it should actually be news, not something you’ve announced already.
- Razzle-dazzle ’em. If you can be genuinely entertaining, then go for it. Sometimes it works best to set something up in advance – for instance, by preparing a (genuinely) funny video.
- Deliver a public service announcement. Talking about something you and your audience care deeply about, a cause your organization is supporting, can identify vital common ground. Be sure to have a call to action: a way interested audience members can learn more and add their support.
- Pull an Oprah. Give your audience members something then and there. Chances are your budget doesn’t allow you to give away cars, but that doesn’t mean you can’t offer something of real value. Have people on hand to hand out copies of a book, announce there are keychain drives with an ebook on them, or put up a claim code onscreen to download something free and valuable.
- Deliver the keynote – really, really well. If and only if you have great content to share, then deliver a keynote. Lose every single one of your selling points; instead, deliver high-value information. Tell stories, and make them part of a compelling overarching narrative that speaks to your audience’s hopes, dreams, ambitions and passions. Make it the best, most memorable speech of the event… and if you don’t think you can clear that bar, then reconsider.
(Now, if you’re the kind of discerning person who’s reading our blog, chances are good you already know that it’s better to engage your audience than to bore them. But maybe there’s someone in your organization who hasn’t quite figured that out yet… or figured out how to act on it. I’m not saying you should slip this under their door… but I’m not saying you shouldn’t.)
Make the most of your conference sponsorship
Hey, you’ve sponsored a conference – good for you!
Chances are good you wanted to help these folks out, and support some productive conversation, learning and networking. Chances are also pretty good you want to get some benefit out of the sponsorship yourself with goodwill and exposure.
And when they said you’d have an opportunity to speak to the participants, you jumped at it. And you have a great 15-minute pitch carefully crafted by the folks in marketing, including a PowerPoint video that hits all the key selling points.
So why do you have this nagging feeling of impending disaster?
Maybe because you’re about to turn that goodwill into impatience, even hostility.
Because those selling points are about to bounce off a wall of indifference and distraction. And because you’re about to lose a great opportunity.
But I have two pieces of good news.
The first is, everyone’s expecting you to do just that. It’s what sponsors usually do at conferences. They deliver a pitch to an audience anxious to get on with the actual business of the conference: people who are painfully aware of the bill for conference fees, hotel, food and travel, not to mention time away from work, and who don’t want to waste a minute on someone else’s self-serving agenda. And then they walk offstage to tepid applause, silently wondering if maybe it would have gone over better with more animation in the PowerPoint deck.
So at least you have plenty of company.
And second, it’s not too late to turn things around.
From someone who’s attended and spoken at a lot of conferences, and who’s written those speeches for other people, here are some ways you can do yourself and your audience a lot of good at your next sponsored event:
- Lose the sales pitch. Whatever else you do, please don’t pitch the audience. If all that means is you throw out the PowerPoint, and all you’re left with is a quick “Hi, we here at Social Signal are thrilled to support this conference. I’ll be here for the whole thing, and I hope you’ll grab me to say hi. Have a great four days!”… well, you’re now miles ahead of where you were.
- Make it fast. Thank the audience and organizers for the opportunity to support the event, say briefly why it’s important to you, add a personal note, and wrap up inside of three minutes. Rehearse it to make sure you’re under that limit; if possible, record yourself and then listen to it from the standpoint of an audience member. Does anything sound false, self-serving, trite or dull? Cut it.
- Introduce someone else. Instead of delivering the keynote, arrange with the organizers to introduce one of the conference’s featured speakers – someone people are really anxious to hear. Keep your introduction short; you can indicate why the speaker’s background or subject matter are so interesting to your company in a sentence or two, but the main thing is to get a little credit for helping to make an engaging presentation possible – and that means getting to that presentation quickly. (An added possibility: see if the organizers would be willing to name the keynote after your organization.)
- Hyperlink. Prepare a longer message about your organization and why you’re participating – on your own web site, or on a site like YouTube. Let your audience know they can see it there if they’re interested, and that they can get more information about your products and services there as well. You’ll be helping the people who are genuinely curious about you, without alienating the folks who aren’t.
- Announce something. Give your audience some genuinely exciting news… something that’s exciting to them, and not just to your organization. And it should actually be news, not something you’ve announced already.
- Razzle-dazzle ’em. If you can be genuinely entertaining, then go for it. Sometimes it works best to set something up in advance – for instance, by preparing a (genuinely) funny video.
- Make an introduction. Bring someone else – someone your audience will find fascinating and compelling – onto the stage to tell their story.
- Deliver a public service announcement. Talking about something you and your audience care deeply about, a cause your organization is supporting, can identify vital common ground. Be sure to have a call to action: a way interested audience members can learn more and add their support.
- Pull an Oprah. Give your audience members something then and there. Chances are your budget doesn’t allow you to give away cars, but that doesn’t mean you can’t offer something of real value. Have people on hand to hand out copies of a book, announce there are keychain drives with an ebook on them, or put up a claim code onscreen to download something free and valuable.
- Deliver the keynote – really, really well. If and only if you have great content to share, then deliver a keynote. Lose every single one of your selling points; instead, deliver high-value information. Tell stories, and make them part of a compelling overarching narrative that speaks to your audience’s hopes, dreams, ambitions and passions. Make it the best, most memorable speech of the event… and if you don’t think you can clear that bar, then reconsider.
(Now, if you’re the kind of discerning person who’s reading our blog, chances are good you already know that it’s better to engage your audience than to bore them. But maybe there’s someone in your organization who hasn’t quite figured that out yet… or figured out how to act on it. I’m not saying you should slip this under their door… but I’m not saying you shouldn’t.)
Why, yes — I’d LOVE to speak at your event
Public speaking and speechwriting: the essential guides
Looking for advice on public speaking, speechwriting and leadership communications? Here are some of my most comprehensive posts, on topics that people ask me about most often.
