One of our attendees sent me an email this past week about setting up a pre-networking group on LinkedIn.com. So we did! If you’re a member of LinkedIn.com, we’ve set up a group for New Media Expo attendees and anyone else interested in networking with fellow content creators.

But it brings up an interesting point. There are hundreds of sites and services where I can setup groups, micro-sites and social networking pages. I could literally spend my entire day signing up for new sites, entering my information, and then maintaining that information as we get closer to the Expo. When is enough, enough?

For a conference or business, the answer is probably - it’s never enough - sign up for as many as possible so that every person out there can find you somewhere. But the answer for an individual is probably different. You may sign up for a bunch of new services during their private beta and launch but only use a few on a regular basis.

I hear a lot about how social media overload is coming - folks for me I’m already there. As an individual I use a handful of services - it’s all I can do to keep up with those. As a business owner, I use as many as possible, which means I’m probably not using any of them as well as I should.

Ultimately, you need to decide if the services you are using are just creating “busy work” and those that are truly helping you enrich your experiences online - and off!

How do YOU decide what’s working for you and what’s just “busy work?”

NOTE: Badges for registered New Media Expo attendees will start mailing next week. Be on the lookout for yours!

I had a feeling that the heavy emphasis on live broadcasting, twittering and blogging during conferences would have a downside.

One attendee has had it and I can understand why.

Even the best social networking tools have their limits. And that limit seems to be reached when, instead of networking and speaking to the people in front of you, you’re “networking” and “speaking” to the people who are not.

After reading this post, an absurd thought came to me. How long until a conference reception with 400 attendees is completely silent because all the attendees are live blogging and twittering instead of talking to the person next to them? Heaven help us.

I’ve always thought of “social networking” as a bit of a misnomer. Sitting in front of a computer screen writing 140 character messages on Twitter or commenting on a blog or tagging photos on Facebook doesn’t feel like networking to me - and honestly, it doesn’t feel very social either. Having a beer with friends and colleagues = social. Talking shop with someone I just met at a reception = networking.

Now granted, I’m a conference organizer, so “old-fashioned” meetups with people is how I believe “real” social networking takes place. So I had to laugh today when I read a blog post that had the following line:

“Twitter has been down for about an hour - how are you spending the time?”

As if Twitter was the only way to spend time and finding other things to do was a challenge! Has it really gotten that bad for some people?

If every website and email server worldwide went down for several hours during a weekday, I might actually be wondering myself how to spend that time. Picking up the phone and making a few calls would probably be the answer. But a single site?

Twitter is either brilliant or the enemy of true human interaction (and productivity, for that matter). In the meantime, for some of you it seems that Twitter is the Blue Pill.

“Content wants to be free” and other scary phrases seem to rear their ugly head every so often. This week, the discussion focused around whether content is becoming so easy to get and make that it is becoming worthless.

The bottled water analogy fits perfect here. Tap or drinking fountain water is free and available everywhere. Yet bottled water sales continue to soar because of:

a) Convenience - bringing a bottle of water with me means I don’t have to search around or stop to find tap water
b) Higher Quality - ok this is probably more perception than reality, but people pay for bottled water because it tastes better and is perceived to be more pure because it is from a “trusted” source. (For me, I buy it because I wonder what’s been rinsed out or cleaned out at the drinking fountain that I’m about to put my face in.)

Both of these apply directly to content. If someone has created content that saves me time because I don’t have to research and aggregate the information myself, that’s convenience and I’ll definitely buy it. If someone has created a high-quality piece of content that took a great deal of work to put together, it’s going to be higher in quality than something someone put together for free - and I’m likely to buy it.

Yes, more and more content will be available for free, but it means a lot of garbage will be available as well. The more researched and more work put into a piece of content, the more value it has to the customer and the more likely they are to open their wallets for it - that will never change.

All this is to say, don’t shy away from creating content you can charge for just because you hear “digital content has no value.” Anyone who says so likely wouldn’t pay for anything anyway. Concentrate on the audience that wants convenience or wants higher quality and you can always make money with content.

Videos of kids breaking their arms on skateboards on YouTube = free

Video series on step-by-step methods to raise capital for a business from a 25-year VC exec: $

For alternative (read: wrong) views: see here and here.

You know who you are. Always talking about how content should “free”, “open” and “transparent.” Conversations should be available anywhere, with everyone having equal ability to comment, discuss and feel valued. Anything behind a “walled garden” that can’t be re-mixed, mashed-up and re-purposed should be frowned upon - even ignored. Copyright? Schmopyright- I use the most liberal version of Creative Commons because I want people to join my campfire discussion and anything that limits that can’t be good….right?

Wait a minute - a site called Shyfter is grabbing my feed and allowing people to comment on my post outside my blog? You mean, a discussion I started could actually fizzle on my blog, but take off somewhere else? They can’t do that! My Creative Commons license says they….wait a minute. They give attribution and there aren’t ads around the content so they aren’t using it for commercial purposes. Hey, that’s not fair!

So I guess all the talk about open, free and transparent is great - until someone takes content of yours and uses it to build their site.

You can’t have it both ways, folks. If you really believe in all that open, free and transparent baloney, don’t whine when your content is taken and a discussion about it is had elsewhere.

This post, like everything else on this blog: Copyright © 2008 TNC New Media. All rights reserved. And proud of it.

I’ve been thinking about this subject all week and it’s starting to bother me.

In the “old days” anyone who was famous in the media had the big bucks that naturally accompanied that fame. But these days, there seems to be a whole lot of folks that are “Internet famous” because of blogging, podcasting, Twitter, flickr, etc. and yet need to ask their audience for donations in order to buy a better microphone. It’s a bizarre and ironic result of the ability for anyone and everyone to start producing content and gather an audience.

Sure, there’s a great deal of talk about how one can leverage fame into fortune with speaking gigs, book deals, TV appearances and jobs with Fortune 500 companies. But how many people have actually turned their fame into real dollars? Not many, simply because great content creators often aren’t always great marketers. You can say that great content will open doors all by itself, but in reality it just doesn’t work that way.

Twitter, blogs, podcasts and new media in general have created a wave of “famous” people - people with a “wealth” of attention and inbound links, but can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfuly, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience. That’s a shame and it needs to change.

The “link” and “attention” may be the currency of the Internet, but until someone can show me how to pay my mortgage by linking to my bank once a month, that just doesn’t fly with me.

I hope it’s one of the many conversations we can all have at the New Media Expo this August. Feel free to comment here to get the conversation started.

I’ve had several conversations with prospective advertisers this week for TraderInterviews.com. TI is our site for online investors that has a podcast, marketplace directory of resources and Digg-like message board. This site happens to attract a pretty tech-savvy group of visitors because many are trading their own stock accounts online and are “veterans” of using the Internet for everything in their life. As such, it we have thousands of listeners to the podcast who subscribe to the RSS feed and rarely visit the site because they get the content via iTunes or another aggregator.

We insert our sponsor’s banners in the RSS feed, so impressions isn’t the problem. Issues arise when I tell a potential advertiser a numbers of visitors and RSS subscribers because they then go over to Alexa and see that our ranking doesn’t really reflect that same number. I know, I know - we can go on forever about how Alexa isn’t really that accurate, yet lots of folks use it.

It’s almost enough for me to turn off the RSS feed and force people to come to the site to get the content. Almost. But then we’d lose the iTunes folks and I can’t afford to alienate that group. Not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t technically be a podcast anymore.

So we’re stuck in a tough place here. I want our RSS feed to be popular - but not too popular…

Any and all suggestions are welcome.

NewTeeVee posted an article about a Bear Sterns report indicating they think this is just the beginning of the explosion in online video.

“We believe that video will be at the very heart of the next five years of web evolution.”

Sounds good to me and is good news for New Media Expo.

Yesterday was the day we sent out all of the acceptance and rejection letters to speakers for the New Media Expo in August. I have a love / hate relationship with this day because I know I’m going to make a few people very happy and a lot of people very disappointed. We’re fortunate enough to get hundreds of proposals which means we can pick and choose from many topics to fit the “feel” and content we’re looking for in that particular year. We received over 700 proposals for just 52 spots.

Because the New Media Expo focuses on a “newer” industry, the speakers are chosen not because of how well they are known, but about how well we feel they can educate the attendees. The question I ask myself when making the final approval is, will this speaker/session have the attendee saying to themselves, “Wow, that session made the entire trip worthwhile. If that was the only session I attend here, it was worth coming!” Get 50-55 of those types of sessions and you’re conference will always be a winner.

I personally send every invitation and turn down email to every single speaker that sent in a proposal. It takes two days to send them all (doing nothing but that all day). Is it the best use of my time? I don’t know that I’ll always be able to do that, but it just feels right when someone has taken the time to put together a proposal and send it in. The downside is that I have to tell a lot of people I consider friends, that we don’t have a spot for them at the show. Sometimes it’s overlap in content, and sometimes it’s giving a shot to someone we’ve turned down the last three years and has refined their proposal over those years to be something really terrific. We had to turn down some pretty darn good proposals and it’s difficult to do, but tough choices have to be made.

Most people who are turned down are appreciative of the fact that we let them know and valued the time they put into the proposal. From my experience, most events simply don’t get back to the speakers - you know you haven’t been chosen because you never hear back from them. That’s not how I want to run my company and so whether I do it or our conference coordinators do it, we will always let the speaker know either way.

But as you can imagine, some speakers don’t take it well….at all. Each year we have at least one reply to the turn-down email that I post on our bulletin board in the office hallway - for a quick laugh and also to remind everyone that burning bridges is never appropriate.

Here’s this year’s:

Oh darn…Gee, I wonder how many of those 52 speakers are professional speakers? Like me. Gee, I wonder how many of those 52 are women? Women over 60? A women Professional Speaker over 60 into New Media. Very unusual, Very sought after…tell your committee to cram it….I’ll go elsewhere in August. Sour grapes, you betcha!

Probably a boys/geek fest with no class anyway…..well, that felt good to let it all out……..

Now bring on the real jobs…….

Patti Serrano
www.eClubNetworking.com

Aside from the fact that we have more women speaking this year than ever, all I can say is, thanks for confirming we made the right choice, Patti.

But we’ve got our conference lined up now and it’s one to be proud of. I’m looking forward to August!

PaidContent.org points to a study showing that for the Wall Street Journal to make up the revenues from it’s current paid subscriber base, it would need 12X the traffic.

Although not a great example of being “niche” I think this does argue that for some niche publishers, advertising simply isn’t going to provide the revenue necessary to sustain the business - simply because they won’t be able to get the traffic necessary to make banners, text links and other forms of advertising worthwhile.

Paid subscription for niche content that serves an audience well is also a very valid model. The more difficult it is to get that information elsewhere on the web increases the likelihood that the paid subscription model or pay-per-download model will work.