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

Con­tinue reading »

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.).

Con­tinue reading »

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.

Con­tinue reading »

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.

Con­tinue reading »

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)

Con­tinue reading »

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

Con­tinue reading »

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

Con­tinue reading »

A chat with the co-founder of Foursquare from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Have you heard of Foursquare? If not, you likely will in short order. As some peo­ple here in the Val­ley are say­ing, it’s the Twit­ter of 2010.

Yes­ter­day, at the Where 2.0 con­fer­ence in San Jose, I caught up with Foursquare CEO and co-founder Den­nis Crow­ley just after his eye-popping keynote talk.

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

For those who don’t know, Foursquare is a web and mobile app that lets its users to con­nect with friends and update their loca­tion. Peo­ple in their 20s and 30s obsess over check­ing in at var­i­ous loca­tions to win dig­i­tal badges. It runs on the iPhone, Android phones, Black­berry, Palm and other devices.

Crow­ley says the year-old com­pany is on track to hit a mil­lion reg­is­tered users around May 1, which would be quicker than Twit­ter made it to a million.

In our chat, Crow­ley says Foursquare is about “try­ing to make the real world more play­ful (and) try­ing to reward peo­ple for doing inter­est­ing things.”

Mer­chants are start­ing to climb aboard the band­wagon, offer­ing coupons and dis­counts for peo­ple to check in or cre­ate a swarm, where 50 peo­ple need to check in at a venue or event. Some are pretty funny, like the Seat­tle busi­ness Babe­land, which wanted to give a free vibra­tor to its Foursquare mayor, or the med­ical mar­i­juana dis­pen­sary in Bev­erly Hills that wanted to give a 15 dis­count to its mayor.

This kind of swarm behav­ior, which Howard Rhein­gold chron­i­cled early on in “Smart Mobs,” was much in evi­dence at this year’s South by South­west Inter­ac­tive Fes­ti­val, where groups roamed from one party to the next fol­low­ing their friends’ leads on Foursquare.

Con­tinue reading »