That’s right, 14″x10″, 100-page, full-color glossy coffee table books.

Imagine the wasted tens of thousands of dollars for:

• the designer
• the writer
• the photography
• all the reviewers
• the printing
• the mailing list
• the postage

Couldn’t all that wasted money and time have been used more wisely to actually help make someone’s life better?

It’s a frivolous waste of money at a time when companies should demonstrate fiscal responsibility.

Am I right? Please share your opinion. Thanks.

No related posts.

This parody video just made me sick to my stomach…. because it’s spot on. I’ve heard every one of these excuses so many times during my career. It’s incredibly frustrating and demoralizing how some people undervalue the expertise of others.

• “I want the highlights. But can only pay for the trim.”
• “I don’t want you to work for free. It’s just a test. You can roll the cost over next time.”
• “I’m not making any money either. You gotta work with me.”
• “We’ll make it up on the next one.”
• “I can cover your hard costs. But that’s as far as I can go.”
• “We need you to show us how you make it so we can do it in-house next time.”

My advice is to stick firmly to your position and don’t give it all away. Sure there are times you may want to barter or there could be some tangible benefit. But there’s no reason to be bullied into giving your skills away especially to someone who obviously has no respect for you.

What are your thoughts? How do you combat this behavior in your day-to-day business relationships?

No related posts.

This 12 minute presentation covers immediate steps you can follow to start your business and personal branding online.

It covers how to define what you want want to be known for, evaluating the competition, planning, where to create your online profiles, building your professional networks, participating in online conversations.

This was originally presented to a small business networking group on 04/24/2009.

Did you like this presentation? Was it helpful to you? Have additional tips to share? Then please leave a brief comment on this blog post. Thanks in advance!
-Roland

No related posts.

• Man’s ‘pants’ password is changed — Interesting issue. If your customer refers to your brand in a disparaging way, do you have the ‘right’ to make unauthorized changes to the customer’s account? I’d say no.
• AMC Asks Twitter to Remove ‘Mad Men’ Accounts — Over the past month I started getting followed on Twitter by Don Draper, Joan Holloway, Peggy Olson and other characters from the great AMC show Mad Men. I explored their profiles, they were having fun banter between them. Seems that AMC didn’t take kindly to fans of the show posing as characters. Sure lawyers must always advise that you protect your copyrights. But putting your foot down on fans leads to damaging your valuable relationship with them.

Brands must proactively recognize the long term harm of their actions. A disagreement with a single person can easily become a PR headache.

There’s a definite message in these examples.

• Do you have a specific policy in place to handle interactions with customers and fans? If so, does your staff/vendors know the course of action to take?
• Decide clearly on what is acceptable use versus infringement.
• Embrace fans who want to promote your message.
• Open dialogue with customers who have are expressing negative opinions.

I hope you find this useful. Please feel free to send me links to relevant articles.

Have a great week!
-Roland

No related posts.

How Large Is Too Large?

As a content consumer, I subscribe to dozens of podcasts (i.e. marketing, technology, Mac-centric, parenting, TV/movie fans). Audio files for a 15-45 minute show are generally in the 12-50MB range, depending on compression and format.

It’s great that content producers are discovering the ease of publishing video. But I’m noticing an increasing trend by producers to push out files over 150MB on their feeds. Over the past week I got several ‘ginormous’ screencasts and a 628MB presentation. These files are passively downloading in the background while I’m working. But that kind of bandwidth consumption can clobber users like myself who regularly find themselves moving to various access points and connection speeds throughout the week.

Rather than publishing a heavy video file on the feed, how about posting a smaller audio file version? Better yet, edit that video down to a three minute highlights video. Then notify listeners that they can watch a streaming optimized version of the full length video at the publisher’s website.

Respect Your Audience

While content quality is important, it’s about time for content producers to seriously evaluate what they’re publishing.

• Edit for length — Invest a bit of time to the key points across.
• Choose the right format — Is video of a one-hour presentation really necessary? Or, simply a nice-to-have when audio will suffice?
• Is it really important? — I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by short videos that are just not really useful. (i.e. “I’m messing around with new screencasting software.” or “I’m trying out my new Flip video camera and thought you’d like to see my dog.”)

I enjoy being a podcaster (mainly audio) and I tend to be very sensitive to the file sizes I publish. I’ll noodle with compression options to balance audio quality against reasonable file size. I don’t always succeed, but nevertheless I do try before I hit ‘publish.’

So don’t let your enthusiasm get the best of you. Try to always put your best foot forward. It’s more respectful to the audience that’s investing their time with you.

What are your thoughts on that? Please comment and answer the poll below. Thanks in advance.
-Roland

No related posts.

I’ve created a score of accounts on various sites, under various personalities depending on what I was experimenting with. Here’s just a small portion of my tale:

First Jaiku was great. It aggregated all my feeds into a single stream, but I couldn’t find my “friends” there.

Then I was enthralled by the speed of Twitter, only to be lured away by the fancy features of Pownce.

I became bored and bounced back and forth making “friends” and interacting on Pownce and Twitter until I learned to setup Twitterfeed — then I only had to post on Pownce and my posts would automatically make their way onto Twitter as well.

To combat distraction from refreshing the browsers constantly, I trialed a variety of desktop client apps to alert me with chirps and notifications as the timeline became updated throughout the day.

But I got lazy. Twitter had a mobile client so I went back there so I could read the timeline in the bathroom or in the parking lot. Eventually Pownce became mobile friendly too, but it was too late for me.

I don’t bother with updating my status in AIM, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, etc. Then came a slew of sites I can barely remember. I skipped over FriendFindr, FindFriendr, FriendMeUpOrIllKickUrButt, blah, blah, blah and moved with the herd over to Plurk. Not satisfied, I found the beta code (pingofpings or pingyoulater) for Ping.fm so now I can post from a single interface to a dozen other sites. I can even email from my mobile phone to my unique Plurk address and get posted all over. Very cool.

The hole I’ve dug myself into is two-fold:

1. I no longer want to add to the noise and clutter. I’m trying to post mainly useful commentary and links to resources.
2. Now how do I interact with all my social network “friends” scattered all across those sites?

Last night, the gang at the New Media in New Jersey meetup were playing with identi.ca. (*sigh*)

So, what’s your story? Are you a microblogging or social junkie? Or do you think it’s all time-wasting rubbish. Please share your thoughts with us.

Oh, and wont you add me as a friend?

No related posts.

Listen to this podcast:

Presented by Todd Cochrane and Jeff Hinz of RawVoice
http://www.rawvoice.com

No related posts.

Listen to this podcast:

Presented by Cliff Ravenscraft from http://www.GSPN.tv

No related posts.

Listen to this podcast:

Presented by Rob Blatt of the New York Sun
http://twitter.com/robblatt

There’s a write-up about the session over at Mequoda Daily.

No related posts.

Listen to this podcast:

I really enjoyed the day in Brooklyn attending Podcamp NYC 2.0. Ran into old friends and made new connections: Cliff Ravenscraft, Todd Cochrane, Jeff Hinz, Brad Pendergraph, Chris Cavs, Chef Mark, Rob Blatt, Tom Guarriello, Chris Kieff, Robert Rukstalis, Kim Rossi and Ari Greenberg.

[01:30] What is Podcamp?

[12:00] Learnings from a conversation I had with Todd Cochrane and Jeff Hinz from RawVoice / Blubrry

[18:30] Learnings from Rob Blatt’s presentation about finding the balance between creative and technical.

[20:30] Struggles of keeping organized. An explanation of how complex a podcast recording can be.

[25:30] Excellent tips on how to record podcasts more efficiently.

[30:30] Virtual trade shows.

Thanks for listening.
-Roland

Feedback always appreciated:
http://www.Blubrry.com

No related posts.