I was introduced to using Polyvore today and it is ridiculously fun.  I created this outfit based on the idea of spending a fabulous spring day enjoying NYC and using that baby blue camera.

They already "pay" what they think our content is worth.

I read this post by Cory Doctorow this morning on BoingBoing, called “How are you coping with collapse anxiety?” It features a photo of a sign outside of a cafe that read “Pay us what you think our food is worth.”

Immediately it occurred to me that this is what bloggers and other creators of free content are already doing.  Pay us what you think our CONTENT is worth, pay us with traffic, pay us with an increase in Whuffie. Pay us with great comments that spark further conversations.

Of course these things do not come quickly (most of the time) or without quite a bit of work and perseverence.  Chris Brogan has mentioned a few times that it took a while before his blog really caught on and turned into the comment party that it is nowadays.

Are you getting “paid” what your content is worth? What currency is important to you?

Photo credit, gruntzooki

Hi everyone.

I haven’t written in some time. 

I don’t like resolutions since I haven’t really ever stuck to one.  I am working to change the way I do things online, starting with this morning’s overhaul of my Google Reader and iGoogle Homepage.

I would like to aim for 15-20 blog posts per month.  I don’t think that daily is going to happen, but I will certainly try. 

I also am working on a plan to improve my connectivity.  Yes, I’m all set up at home and at the office, I post lots to Facebook and Twitter from my cell, but I need to have more connectivity to keep up with everything.  I went on a road trip from December 19-29, and while we had our new netbook along, I could only connect in the hotel and my husband and I can’t both use that netbook at the same time, and if he gets to the computer first, I’m ready to sleep by the time he is done.  My parents house doesn’t have wireless and their computer isn’t my computer and I got the netbook so that I wouldn’t have to use other people’s computers.

To resolve this a bit, I think I will need to upgrade my phone to something with a bit more going on.  I would love recommendations on this from anyone willing.  I have not heard good things about the Blackberry Storm and the data plan is more than I’m willing to spend.  I could go Blackberry Curve, but I really am in the dark because I wasn’t interested in my phone being so involved in the past.  However, I don’t think I can do all that I want to do without having my phone work with me as well.

I want to keep sharing photos, even though I’m pretty active on Flickr, I love sharing here as well.  I want to talk more about what I don’t know and what I’m doing to learn. 

I turn 30 this year, it’s really dawning on me although I would like to think that age doesn’t matter.  It apparently does, and I’m hoping that this helps to motivate me to do all of these things this year.

Happy 2009.  See you soon!

Presentations I saw on day 3:

• Morning keynotes (see the video of Arianna Huffington and Tim O’Reilly below, other keynote videos available on the Web 2.0 Expo website)
• Micro-Interactions: How Brands Can Influence Consumer Behavior in a 2.0 World with David Armano of Critical Mass
• What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolutionize Their Thinking with Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com, as well as John Byrne and Steve Adler of BusinessWeek
• Enhancing Engagement and User Experience Beyond the TV Screen: Some Lessons Learned from a Transition to Web 2.0 with Tony Carbone of VH1 Digital
• Agency 2.0 with Romi Mahajan of Ascentium, Pete Stein of Avenue A/Razorfish, Susan Credle of BBDO, David Thorpe of Ogilvy, and Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group

The keynotes were all enjoyable.  Not as much targeted information and also presented in the dark so note-taking wasn’t happening.  I’m glad the videos are available though to be watched again.  I really enjoyed the presentation on Micro-Interactions with David Armano (slides are available here).  It has me thinking about every instance where my websites are interacting with my users.  An example that really struck me was that each time you receive a new Netflix mailer, it’s a positive interaction between Netflix and me. He talked about audience engagement, how can we DIRECTly interact with our audience, reach out to them and have them respond back.  You don’t know who the influencers are or will be, so everyone gets “the Disney treatment.” I love that, because it’s something you totally understand, if you’ve experienced it. This is something I need to really consider in further site development, we could be communicating so much more with the users.

The next presentation I saw was “What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolutionize Their Thinking” with Jeff Jarvis, who review the BusinessWeek.com BusinessEdge program with John Byrne and Steve Adler of BusinessWeek (slides are available here).  Jeff used the word “googly” and I missed it in a previous presentation and now I am hooked.  I want everything in life to be Googly, because I associate it with wonderful things. Anyway, the idea was that BusinessWeek has launched BusinessEdge on their site, a cross of social interaction and news content, people who join create profiles and share what it is that is interesting to them.  The journalists that are contributing to BusinessWeek are also on the site and available to interact with users.  The discussion was mostly related to bringing more features to the BusinessEdge feature to make it even more user-friendly and even more Googly by letting users post about their BusinessEdge activity on their blog, LinkedIn profile, etc.

After a final trip to the exhibit hall, I came back to sessions for “Enhancing Engagement and User Experience Beyond the TV Screen: Some Lessons Learned from a Transition to Web 2.0″ with Tony Carbone of VH1 Digital.  The big thing that I took from his presentation was a lot regarding tie-ins.  VH1 is all about tie-ins, there are constant reminders while you are watching the network to go online for more content, games, etc.  VH1 also launched Scandalist, their own version of a celebrity gossip and video site, which posts up to 30 times a day.  They tweet all major headlines and content is syndicated across all MTV Networks properties.  They offer content to the visitor that they would not otherwise see on TV.  They also focus on improved reaction time, embracing things quickly so that the audience knows that they are listening.  This sounded to me like what Gary Vaynerchuk said in his keynote, that listening to your audience is great but giving a shit about what they say is so much better.  How many times do we ask them to take a survey and then sit on results for 3 months before anything happens?

My last session was “Agency 2.0″ with Romi Mahajan of Ascentium, Pete Stein of Avenue A/Razorfish, Susan Credle of BBDO, David Thorpe of Ogilvy, and Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group.  I’m not part of an agency but found the discussion between the group to be enlightening about their arena.  A lot of agencies in recent years have been all about going digital, and not paying attention to the other aspects of advertising.  Unfortunately I don’t remember who said this, but I loved this: “Agency needs to re-invent themselves so that they aren’t made useless by the tech-savvy person at the client company who knows twitter and LinkedIn.”  This is a big as I see more and more people embracing their role as the masters of their own online destiny.  In addition, a discussion was had about risk-taking, that clients might be drawn in by an ambitious plan that might fail, and if it does, will take the agency down as well.  This is likely to appeal to the client as they will understand the idea of taking a chance.

This took forever, I think I need to keep blog posts short because this has been daunting.  I have many more notes from these sessions but wanted to post about some of the major stuff that stuck with me.

Now I will continue to keep posting about everyday stuff and won’t cover any more live events until itec New Jersey in December.

On Wednesday afternoon, I participated in a team status meeting where I heard that while multiple documents requesting information had been sent to a few of our “experts,” that they were unresponsive. I immediately thought of how to make it more fun, like a game, and suggested that the questions they were asking be entered into a survey program, with a link sent to the expert instead of an attachment. On Thursday, emails went out to 3-4 of these experts with links to surveys, and after weeks of no responses, we received multiple responses in just one day.

I will be thinking a lot in the coming days about where else I can use survey software to engage not only my audience, but the experts I’m using to develop content for that audience. The idea of “the quest” has really worked here and I’m excited to take it out for another spin.

Here’s the first keynote from Friday, a discussion between Tim O’Reilly and Arianna Huffington.  I really find her so entertaining and she’s clearly very smart.  She discussed the success of The Huffington Post as well as responds to questions from the audience.

Presentations I saw on Day 2:

• Making Sense of Rich Internet Applications with Ryan Stewart of Adobe
• Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success: the Art and the Science with Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
• The Seduction of the Interface: Merchandising in Interactive Product Design with Chris Fahey of Behavior Design
• Video 2.0: Filling in Gaps in the Video Content Ecosystem with Kenyatta Cheese, Timothy Shey, Jim Louderback and Ricky Van Veen
• Using Real Time Game Concepts to Increase Engagement with Charles Forman

I’ll skip right ahead to Stephan Spencer’s presentation on SEO success, because I really enjoyed it. (The slides are available here.)  He had so many great tips for site optimization that I couldn’t keep up while taking notes.  Luckily we traded business cards and he sent me a great email with his presentation and other useful links.  During his presentation I was particularly interested in the discussion surrounding redirects.  How many different versions of each page are there, and how are they affecting the search results for that page?  He also provided a great list of different tools to use to create a strong PPC campaign, and some information on Wordpress tools for SEO, great for me as I’m still getting the hang of using WP.

Chris Fahey gave one of my favorite presentations of the week.  (The slides are available here.)  He kept it humorous and easy to follow, and I felt he was vague enough in his presentation that anyone could take those ideas and easily see in their mind how these talking points apply to their particular web properties.  My favorite bit was the 3 stages of seduction–

1. Inspire their attention, interest and desire
2. Draw them in (lead them astray)
3. Capture their ongoing devotion

This is totally it! This is what anyone who runs a website should be thinking about. Make it sexy and make them love you and feel like they can’t live without you.  While I’ve understood this for a long time, this presentation has stuck with me for the last 2 weeks and I’m still thinking about it.  I have a presentation to give two weeks from tomorrow and I fully intend to reference this presentation to the group of website stakeholders at my organization.

Next up was the Video 2.0 Presentation.  Not what I expected, so I left to check out the exhibit hall.  I did get to see this fantastic video from CollegeHumor.com though.

The exhibit hall was a good experience, my only issue with it is related to the booths that the funky & cool company names don’t necessarily tell me what they do and if I should stop to talk to them!  The best swag, for me, was the “A Website Named Desire” poster.  You can hear about it and check the PDF here.

My last presentation of the day was by Charles Forman, “Using Real Time Game Concept to Increase Engagement.”  Charles came up with iminlikewithyou.com, which definitely has an audience but I don’t think its me.  I’ve checked that site out and I just find it to be annoying.  No matter, he has a grip on what works and how to make your website like a game to get the users engaged and into it. He made mention of LinkedIn and that little bar reminding you all the time that your profile is only 70% completed.  It’s a quest!  A quest to come onto their site and finish YOUR profile.  Make your user feel like they have something to accomplish and they will stay on your site to do that.  Charles listed concepts such as providing realtime feedback, providing rewards to users, providing objectives through quests and leveling people up. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to introduce such ideas to the sites that I’m working on, and I think that most sites have SOMETHING that would work as a quest, a challenge to the user to complete. 

All in all, the conference has my mind swimming with new ideas for things to do on the websites I’m currently managing, while also trying to develop ideas for my personal stuff.

I know this post is late but today is the first day that I’ve had a chance to sit down with my notes and really think about everything.  How do you bloggers post 3 times a day and have a job and a family and a life?

So today was full of sessions (all in the media and marketing track for me) and then the keynote presentation in the afternoon.  First up, I will just say that it is so nice to attend a conference as an attendee and not an exhibitor. Second, how nice to be at a conference wehre everyone is sharing information that I’m really into. I went to conventions for years with my job to work the booth, and it’s nice to be on the other side for once.

So, here are the presentations I saw today.

• Viral Marketing 2.0 with Jonah Peretti
• Web 2.0 and the Reinvention of Marketing and PR with Brian Solis
• Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a 2.0 World with Avinash Kaushik
• Keynotes from Fred Wilson, Deborah Schultz, Jason Fried, Maria Thomas and Gary Vaynerchuk (Keynote videos are available here.)

After watching the first 2 presentations, I found it fitting that I laughed more during Jonah’s presentation than Brian’s.  Of course the guy presenting on viral marketing is going to be funnier and more shocking, AS he was telling us that viral content tends to be funnier and/or more shocking.  Brian is coming from a PR perspective where embracing social media while still being in PR is very different than looking to create a viral phenomenon.  Brian made a great statement about how PR professionals need to be both anthropologists and sociologists and use the knowledge they gain to embrace social media in their work to their best advantage. 

Brian also presented the “conversation prism” which I am sort of blown away by.  His blog is also fantastic.

One of Jonah’s tips was to create a mullet – as in, make your website business up front, party in the back.  He indicated that Huffington Post was a good example of this.  Another thing he mentioned in relation to the Huffington Post was that the team there is constantly reviewing the performance of items on the homepage, tweaking headlines and moving things around to get the most action on the site.  I can’t even imagine having the resources to have that sort of attention paid to getting the most out of your content.  Don’t get me wrong, the sites I work on do not have the same kind of content turnover as the Huffington Post.  However, if we had more time to really analyze the sites (utilizing the great information from the presentation by Avinash Kaushik), the potential of these sites could be reached. Avinash’s presentation was great (thank you to all of the presenters who made it entertaining and informative) – I am really looking forward to using Google Analytics again when I’m back in the office next week. 

After a visit to the exhibit hall, I headed over to the keynote presentations.  Good setup, everyone had about 10-15 minutes and the presentations were concise and compelling.  Great choice of speakers.  Gary Vaynerchuk from WineLibraryTV finished up the presentations, and wow, that guy is energetic.  Also not one to bullshit, he tells it like it is and is clearly so passionate about people and how awful it is that so many of us are not doing what it is we dream about doing.  Not touchy-feely at all though, I just really enjoyed his presentation, and I don’t doubt that those around me felt the same.

I have more to say on the whole day but I am tired and will be back at the Javits tomorrow morning.

Commentary here from CNN.com on how Senator Obama’s online presence dominates over Senator McCain

Things I’ve seen online related to the election:

• You can subscribe to shared items from the Obama and McCain campaigns via Google Reader
• You can subscribe to podcast feeds from the party conventions and from the campaign trail of each candidate
• You can pick up badges, icons, etc to post on your blog or other web space promoting your chosen candidate
• You can friend your candidate on Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• You can follow Barack Obama via Twitter.  (I could not locate what appeared to be a John McCain Twitter account)
• …and many more

I think that it is obvious that the reason that so many young people are becoming more active during this election period is because of the internet and the extreme availability of information.  4 years ago, we were not hearing Wolf Blitzer say “blogosphere” and now it’s a cable news buzzword.  The news media is putting real stock in bloggers and what they are talking about, as they should, bloggers are everywhere and their voices are being heard (or read, rather). 

It’s an exciting time to be paying attention to what is happening online, during the next election this will all be expected and those running the campaigns will have to embrace more new ways to reach the voting audience.

How does everyone feel about the effects of new/social media/web 2.0 on the upcoming election?  Opinions, thoughts?

Excellent post from GrokDotCom

I read this post today on GrokDotCom and while it seems like the most obvious of points, I find myself realizing that in my business, we are not focused enough on utilizing product reviews from our target audience members.  What are the best ways to deliver these reviews to an audience when the product is online content?