Power and Presence for Women from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Speakers get guidance on how to enhance their public appearances

I've been astonished by how many of my friends and colleagues have thrust themselves into the public eye by writing books, appearing on panels or going full tilt into public speaking. I've even detected a small uptick (finally!) in the number of women appearing on stage at tech conferences.

I've spoken at my fair share of public events, and what public speakers often have in common is an uncertainty of how to engage the audience with command and assurance. That's especially true of many women, who've been taught by the culture to prize "false power archetypes" rather than being true to their own voices, says Bronwyn Saglimbeni, a public presence coach in Silicon Valley.

"As women, we need to come up with our new power archtetypes," she said at a recent Girls in Tech retreat in Santa Cruz, Calif. "Unfortunately we've been fed a steady diet of false power archtetypes -- aggression, intimation, or leaning too heavily on our sexuality, or hiding behind our sexuality."

Saglimbeni offers coaching on speaking, presenting and how to attain "true power." "It happens when personality aligns with purpose to serve the greater good," she says. "Where does the purpose of our work life and personal life intersect? During public speaking, what are the elements of our personality that need to be brought forward? Every time we have an opportunity to get up and speak, we have to really cherish that time and nail it."

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo
Watch the video on YouTube

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The future of journalism will be more social & entrepreneurial

With the business models of traditional news media in free fall, it's a precarious time for journalism. Earlier this month I did an hourlong video chat with a class of journalism students at the USC Annenberg School and told them how much I admired their willingness to tackle journalism as a career even as everything we know about journalism and news is changing.

On Friday I gave a talk at NewComm Forum (NewComm as in New Communications), the annual gathering of communications, marketing, PR and new media thinkers in San Mateo, Calif. You'll find it on Slideshare.net (embedded above) under the title, "Social and Entrepreneurial: The paths to the new journalism."

Everything about news and journalism is changing: the way it’s produced, the way it’s distributed, the way we consume it, the idea of who’s a trusted news provider, the conventions of journalism and what “news” itself means.

As someone who still practices journalism (see: this blog) but left newspaper journalism in the late '90s, my work as a social media strategist and years in Silicon Valley startups leave me saddened about the fate of newspapers -- I estimate that 500 daily newspapers, most of them mid-size metros, will go out of business in the next five years. At the same time, journalism is being reinvigorated by a new generation of journalists and publications, many of them small but deeply passionate about the topics they cover.

They'll be the ones who give shape to the new new news.

You'll notice that the title of this post refers to "paths," because the future will involve thousands of experiments and brave new ways of doing journalism, far from the one-size-fits-all era that is now ending (go to J-school, start out at a local daily, join a bigger metro newspaper, etc.).

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Tim Westergren, founder and CEO of Pandora (photo taken with my video camera).

And other highlights of NewComm Forum 2010

I've been spending the week at NewComm Forum, the annual gathering of communications, marketing, PR and new media thinkers and doers in San Mateo, Calif. I now have years of distance from the newspaper industry and so am offering my take on where the journalism landscape is heading in an hourlong talk on Friday morning -- I'll post it here next week.

Here's a recap of some random bits of NewComm that I've caught:

Great keynote presentations! Dave Carroll gave a lunchtime talk about United Airlines' blunders after its baggage handlers damaged his guitar, resulting, of course, in United Breaks Guitars and tons of opportunities for Dave to educate corporations about how to treat customers with respect. After his talk, I pulled Dave aside and got a great video interview, which I'll post soon.

The highlight for me, so far, was the keynote by Tim Westergren, founder and CEO of Pandora, the streaming media service he founded more than 10 years ago (!) in January 2000 in Oakland. Pandora by the numbers:

• 50 million listeners, with 85,000 new users per day -- entirely by word of mouth
• nearly 6 billion thumbs up or thumbs downs ("People love to thumb [up or down] on Pandora!")
• 85,000 artists -- 70 percent of them independent artists ("so the bulk of our catalog is the working musician")
• It's on 92 devices.

Pandora is at the forefront of the transition in the radio universe from mass broadcast radio, with one playlist that reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners, to unicast, where you can stream individual stations to each listener over the Internet. "The problem is you can't have millions of DJs," which is where the Music Genome Project comes in (the site says: "Moving entertainment from a mass-market service to a one-on-one interactive experience").

And while "dominance" is probably too strong a word for a company that nearly went out of business three summers ago, Pandora is certainly well positioned now to ride the wave of personalized Internet radio.

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Social media increases accessibility to public meetings from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I'm at NewComm Forum this week, probably the best gathering of minds around social media, marketing and new media anywhere. (I'll be speaking Friday about the future of journalism.) It's also a superlative venue for networking.

Last year I met Kathleen Clark of San Francisco-based CirclePoint. As part of our continuing series of vignettes with experts about different aspects of social media, Kathleen talks about the use of social media by government agencies in this quick 4-minute interview. She makes the often-overlooked point that members of the public who can't attend government agency meetings in person can often contribute their ideas and feedback through sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

CirclePoint specializes in strategic communications development and environmental planning. Many of their clients are public agencies working on infrastructure projects and seeking to implement communications for public outreach and public education. One key client is the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, which wanted to reach a broader audience through a public presence for them on Twitter (5,215 followers) and on Facebook (I just "liked" them).

Why should companies and government agencies take up social media? "It lets you tell a story in a personal way, and to have a higher level of engagement with people," Kathleen says. "Traditionally, the mode at a lot of government agencies has been to talk at people. Social media lets you talk with people."

Accessibility comes into play, too. Not everyone can come to a public meeting. But if you're a government agency, you can put out the call for feedback on Twitter, Facebook or other social networks, and you can reach a broader segment of the public and hear their concerns, she says.

Absolutely right.

A chat with the founder of GroundReport from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Five years ago we launched Ourmedia.org as the first free hosting and sharing site for video and digital media (yes, before YouTube). Secretly, I wished that more of the videos, photos and text dispatches coming through the door were high-quality citizen journalism reports.

It took a few years, but citizen journalism has grown up. Exhibit A: GroundReport, a citizen journalism site with an international perspective.

Recently I caught up with founder and CEO Rachel Sterne. GroundReport is a New York-based news platform that allows anyone to submit his or her own news articles, videos and photos. The best submissions are then published. "The idea is to give anyone a chance to participate in the media," Rachel says. "People who experience world events first-hand can give us authentic context, create more engagement around it and share their story for the world."

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo.

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PicApp: Quality images for your blog from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Have you noticed that blogging has been getting more professional lately? Part of it is the wealth of classy-looking templates and widgets available for users of WordPress, TypePad and other blog platforms. But it's also due to plug-ins like Zemanta (which I now use for many of my posts) and PicApp.

I first heard of PicApp last year at WordCamp when I ran into Niran Amir, PicApp's director of business development. What surprised me is that this service, which offers high-quality, world-class photography to anyone with a blog, is available not for a subscription but for free.

[picappgallerysingle id="8457816"]

For bloggers who write about topical subjects, like sports, celebrities, music, theater or the like, PicApp is a must-have. The above image of Katie Holmes, for instance, appears simply by inserting picappgallerysingle id="8457816" in brackets, pulled from the PicApp image gallery.

Partnerships with Getty Images, Jupiter and Corbis

PicApp enables bloggers and online publishers to easily embed images into their posts by partnering with top-flight image catalogues like Getty Images, Jupiter Images and Corbis. The service offers access to more than 20 million images, with new images added nearly every minute.

Newbie bloggers are sometimes surprised to learn that you're not allowed to just grab an image off the Web -- or even from Google Image Search -- and republish it on your blog. That's usually a copyright violation, unless the image is in the public domain or comes with a Creative Commons license. But few high-quality CC images are taken at timely events like the Oscars, the NBA playoffs, the Olympics, the front row of a rock concert or a Broadway play.

"As a technology company, we want to provide you, the blogger, with tools that make the usage of images as easy as possible," Niran. That means bloggers don't have to deal with licensing or copyrights or any of that legal stuff. PicApp handles it for them as the go-between with the major photo agencies. They make money by driving users to their image galleries and running ads there.

Watch, embed or download the interview on Vimeo (9 minutes, high definition)

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PeopleBrowsr: Follow conversations about you or a topic from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Service offers free monitoring, paid campaigns & analytics

An increasing number of businesses and nonprofits understand that there are valuable conversations taking place about their brands and organizations that they need to tap into -- it's hard to hold a conversation if you don't know who's talking, what they're saying or where they're saying it.

Where, then, do you turn without spending thousands of dollars a month on a monitoring service?

One impressive solution I've been working with recently is PeopleBrowsr, based in Sydney and San Francisco. They bill themselves as a data mining, analytics and brand engagement company that offers deep stats on your products or causes, campaigns to identify your key influencers and customized reports that assess consumer sentiment.

I recently met Priscilla Scala, product manager for PeopleBrowsr, who explains the main features of the free service in this short video interview. The premium service includes campaigns and analytics and should be of interest to a lot of companies and nonprofits that can't afford a Radian6, Nielsen Buzzmetrics or Visible Technologies. Whether you're a business, a nonprofit, an individual or an organization, you can use PeopleBrowsr to track conversations about any topic -- for free.

Watch, embed or download my 9-minute video interview with Priscilla on Vimeo

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I'm still a big fan of cleverly done mashups. The latest to come across my desk is one from MoveOn.org.

Fox host Glenn Beck has gone to absurd lengths to attack President Obama, progressive leaders—even the idea of progressivism itself. But now he's taken it one step further: Beck has gone after YOU. (Or at least, that's what this fun new video makes it look like.)

Above is the resulting video after I plunked in my Facebook credentials. You can do the same by visiting this url (I'm fairly sure anyone with a Facebook account can get a customized video). Check out the video to see yourself as the center of an out-there Glenn Beck conspiracy theory, then pass it on to your friends.

Watch my version on Blip.tv (embedded above)

In 18 days I'll be at NewComm Forum in San Mateo, Calif., to give a talk on the paths to tomorrow's journalism. I'm also looking forward to participating in workshops, interactive sessions and discussions around social marketing and social media.

NewComm Forum, sponsored by the Society for New Communications Research (I'm a senior fellow), is one of the best social media gatherings anywhere. It runs April 21-23, with workshops on April 20 (use discount code NCFW100 to save $100).

If you work in communication, marketing or new media, you should come! And now Socialmedia.biz readers can get a special discount:

• Attend the entire four-day event for $995 with this $500 discount code: NCF500

• You can come for one day, April 21, for $395 with this discount code: NCF1D (details below)

"The Social Web – Redefining Business" will be this year's theme. NewComm will feature a who’s who of social media experts and practitioners from leading companies presenting 40 sessions in five comprehensive tracks:

• Online Communications & Communities
• Social CRM
• Markets are Conversations: From Theory to Practice
• Understanding the New Media Landscape
• NewComm Essentials

Keynoters include:

• Jackie Huba, online marketing expert and author
• Dave Carroll, singer/songwriter, “United Breaks Guitars”
• Scott Monty, Ford
• Jack Holt, US Department of Defense
• Tim Westergren, Pandora
• Neville Hobson, WCG

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