Using Skype to Record Interviews

I've always wondered how people use Skype to record their podcasts and interviews.

Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani of the Conversations Network answer the question, and more!

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Delivering Killer Presentations

Just listened in on a one-hour BlogTalkRadio show that's hosted by Bryan Person, entitled "How to Deliver Killer Presentations at PodCamp."

The guest speaker, Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting, generously shared several presentation tips and insights, which I feel are valuable to any presenter, whether or not they intend to speak at a PodCamp.

You can also listen to the online archive at your leisure.

The points that resonated with me were [minutes into the online audio archive]:

• Interactions can be presentations. Even if you're not a formal speaker, anytime you walk up to someone, and shake their hand, and say hello, that in itself is a presentation. [5:42]
• Don't stress out like, I've got to be up there, I've got to be like Tony Robbins, and I need to be high energy, and I've got to be a great speaker, and I've got to learn how to speak. All you've got to do is be effective and useful for your audience. [7:38]
• Don't lose sight of the purpose. You're so anxious to get that information out, you're so anxious about what the other people are thinking of you, that you lose sight of the purpose of the presentation. [8:57]
• Stop worrying about what you're going to say. Factor that in last. First think: who am I talking to? Take yourself as in-depth as you can about who will be there, why they are there, what they are looking for, and why might they come to the session [9:14]
• Get to your room early and chat with people as they come in. Ask them what drew them to the session. Ask them what questions they have and what they're looking for [10:07]
• What result do you want to achieve? There are results in every presentation, even if it's just to get people fired up, or to introduce yourself as a thought leader on a particular point. So figure out the results for your audience [11:50]
• Thinking about your audience. It's important to prepare for a wide range of audience expectations. So when I'm brainstorming about the audience, I think of a couple of different profiles that I think might be there. [13:22]
• Communications is 2-way. It's not just you up there speaking. You need to be watching and listening massively. As you present, you pick up cues from the audience: are they with you, are they zoning out, are they talking to each other... [13:40]
• Make things interactive. You can take a room of 500 people and make it interactive by asking thought questions (where you stop and they think in their heads, and decide, and move forward), or using an 'interact with your neighbor and break into groups' kind of interaction. [16:10]
• De-personalize the experience of presenting. If someone's leaving (during your presentation) it does not mean you suck. It does not mean you're being ineffective. They might have a meeting with a bigwig. They might have to pee. They might have to eat. That's not something to get too worried about. [17:22]
• People are shy. That first question is a bit of an ice break that needs to happen. So instead of smiling awkwardly if there's silence, just say: "At this point, I generally get asked..." and then you ask yourself a question, and then you answer it. That gets the Q&A flow going. [20:29]
• Don't end with Q&A. Have some kind of presentation ending that's very focused on your result that's going to follow the QA. As you get towards the end of your presentation, just say: I'm going to stop now, and hear how this has worked for you, and hear what kinds of questions you have on the topic, and then we'll finish up. Because the kind of energy during Q&A, even if it's going very well, is kind of not what you'd want to end on and it's not result oriented at all. [20:55]
• Do not confuse the call to action with a call to buy. A call to action is a call to get people to do something physically. Think about the audience result in terms of what they physically do when you stop talking, what they do in the next hours and days, and what they do two weeks from now. That's how you plant really clear seeds. That's the difference between an engaging presentation vs. a presentation that's just a data dump. [25:16]
• Think of setting up a website around your whole presentation, so people have a place to go to continue the conversation. With blogging software, it's so easy to do. You can set up a Wordpress blog, and have people go there even while you're talking, and you can collect comments and feedback there. It's a nice back channel. [26:50]
• Don't ambush people with your 30-second pitch. It's great to have, but never launch it pro-actively. People are more receptive if you're listening first. If you address someone else's needs first, they'll have a much better impression of you, and they'll be much more open, and they'll think: that was a nice person, how can I help them? [32:20]
• The first 30 seconds. Start with the A-ha! The so what? The why do I care? That's a hook to get them interested. In the first 30 seconds with the audience, you have a massive free ride. They're focused, they're listening, they want you to succeed, they're excited about you. Use those 30 seconds. Do something exciting, a bit outrageous, but not too crazy to start out. Keep it short and don't end with "Okay, here's the summary." End with a next step, and make it small and actionable so something might actually happen. [36:05]
• Think about what you can control in the room. Is it too cold? Try to find a way to get it warmer. If you can't do anything about it, address it early on. Get through the Ah-a first before addressing it, or have someone address it as an administrative thing before you get to the stage. If they are sitting there being anxious about something, they're not listening to you. So to the extent you can address it, name it, that can help with people's preoccupations and anxieties. [41:10]
• Watching videos of your presentations. The first time, just play it back. Don't be a critic and pick apart anything that's wrong. Just pick 3 things you did really really well and congratulate yourself. People learn from positive reinforcement; they don't learn from negative reinforcement. Ignore what didn't go well. The second time, watch it again but with the volume off and spend more time looking at the body language. If there are things you're doing that really stand out, then you can give yourself corrective feedback. The third time you watch, do it in fast forward. This is how you notice every 3 minutes you touch your left ear. You probably do not know you're doing it. When you watch it in fast forward, that stuff jumps right out. [46:13]
• Body Language. Walk. Smile. Care. [48:37]
  
• The glassy-eyed room. 5 to 7 minutes is the average adult human attention span. Is it just a matter of time and they just need a change of gears to wake back up? If they do, have them do something. Have them ask themselves a question, or get up or shake each other's hands. If it's just not the amount of time, then maybe they're not getting it. You can say: This is a technical topic and I'm used to talking about it with my friends. I'm not sure how you're used to talking about it. Can someone give me a follow-up question that relates to how you do this? Never be afraid to break away from your script. [52:30]

Check out Laura's blog, Great Presentations Mean Business, for more presentation gems.

Changing the World

Just finished listening to Episode #6 of Foreword Thinking: the Business and Motivational Book Review Podcast that's hosted by Mitch Joel.

His guest in this episode is John Wood, author of the memoir Leaving Microsoft to Change the World and founder of Room to Read, a non-profit organization that establishes schools, libraries, and other educational infrastructure in developing nations.

I was moved by the idea that this man would feel compelled to dedicate the best years of his life to battling illiteracy in countries so far from his own home. It's humbling because I live in a developing country, see poverty and the effects of a deteriorating educational system on a daily basis, and yet I don't do enough to help.

Below are a few of the quotes from the podcast which really struck me [minutes into the podcast]:

• The Tyranny of Or. Sometimes there's this thing -- Steve Ballmer calls it the "Tyranny of Or" where everything's an Either-Or thing [7:26]
• On over-thinking. In a certain sense, I'm glad I didn't over-think it, because I could have talked myself out of it very easily. There's no shortage of people who would tell me exactly why this is a bad idea, or why this wouldn't work, or how difficult it would be. And I think at a certain point, you just have to ignore those voices and dive into what you're passionate about. So looking at it now, where I am today 8 years later, if I'd over-thought it I probably wouldn't have done it and I'd probably still be at a desk at Microsoft or some other technology company [8:05]
• Keeping Things Tangible. It's hard to be cynical about charity if you know exactly where the money is going to: you see a photograph of the finished school; you see a dedication plaque; it's very tangible for people. In this day and age when communication is ubiquitous, it's not difficult to raise money to do one project in the developing world. [15:42]
• Education as Key to Personal Success. All of us who have done well in life, we have education to thank for our success in life. The fact that there are almost 1 billion people in the world today who are illiterate is a damning indictment on our world. How can we ever break the cycle of poverty for these kids if they don't go to school? It is impossible. [17:37]
• Education affects Entire Countries. The United Nations has statistics where you can graph amazing things against the literacy rate. The most literate countries have the highest life expectancy; the most uneducated countries have the lowest life expectancy. Maternal death during childbirth: low literacy countries are losing 15 times as many women to death during childbirth as in an educated society like Iceland, or Norway, or Sweden. [18:05]
  
• Education is not a hand-out, it's a hand-up. You're giving people the skills they need to break the cycle of poverty themselves. [18:55]
• It is solvable; you don't need millions of dollars. We can build a school library and support it for the first three years and train a librarian and fill it with books for US$3000. We can put a girl on scholarship and keep her on scholarship and have a strong female mentor who looks after her, and pay her school fees, and give her a bicycle and pay for her school supplies and pay for her healthcare -- all of that is Cdn $275 a year. It's less than a $1 a day to put a girl in school and keep her in school [19:32]
• Literate women and girls will educate the next generation. The statistic that I think is most depressing and most damning is that two-thirds of the people who are illiterate in the world today are women and girls. And if we don't educate the girls, we don't educate the next generation. That to me is one of the most important things in the world -- to get girls in school, keep them in school, they will break the cycle of poverty for their family. An educated mother -- I know from my own background; my grandmother and my mother were both educated and they both read to me. If they had been illiterate, my life would be very different today. [20:04]
• Keep the solutions simple. Sometimes in the charity world, people make things overly complicated. I have people who say -- I want to help you plunk down a solar-powered, satellite enabled, remote learning station... and I'm like -- Oh, my God. Let's just build a library and put some books in the hands of kids and start with the basics. [20:48]

The hardcover edition of the book came out in 2006. The paperback edition was released in September 2007.

Social Media Podcasting's Rising Tide

If you listen to podcasts that focus on social media, you'll very quickly notice the way podcasters tend to mention (and even endorse) other podcasts that talk about social media and new media topics.

Examples of such podcasters include Bryan Person, C.C. Chapman, Mitch Joel, Joseph Jaffe, and Christopher Penn, just to name a few.

At first, I found this practice rather puzzling. I remember wondering -- why would any podcaster go through the trouble of mentioning these other podcasts, especially since they talk about the same topics? Surely they must realize that all these other podcasts are competing for the limited time and attention of the same group of listeners? It's practically equivalent to advertising for your competitors!

The behavior is so counter-intuitive to what I would expect any self-preserving person would do, so naturally my mind wouldn't let go of the puzzle.

After mulling it over a couple of days, the only explanation I can think of is that people who behave this way are effectively choosing to put the community ahead of themselves. They endorse their peers because they subscribe to the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, i.e., there's a tacit belief that what's good for the podcasting community in general will also be good for each individual podcaster.

I love the very idea of it because it runs counter to crab mentality.

Irene Au on User Experience

Listened to a talk delivered by Irene Au during Adaptive Path's Managing Experience (MX) Week in Feb 2007. I found the 45 minute podcast via IT Conversations.

I wanted to document the insights in a more readily accessible form, so I figured I might as well blog it.

Below are the quotes which really struck me because I think they are actually applicable even in areas outside of user experience management [minutes into the podcast]:

• On collaboration. We don't want to risk having people operate in functional silos with all these hand-offs, because that's where you might lose the opportunity to innovate. [10:35]
• On hiring. I often advocate for hiring T-shaped people; people who have deep expertise in one or more areas, but have broad interests and skills in related areas. [10.45]
• On the "brand" of your team. Do fewer things really well, because ultimately it's the brand of the User Experience team. Do we want to be known as a "shop" where we service requests, or do we want to be known as a really high-end strategic asset to the company? The only way we can really get to the latter is to choose very carefully what kind of projects we engage in. [12:12]
• On juggling projects and priorities. I do kind of see it as managing a financial portfolio, in that we want a percentage of projects that are near-term, practical, we're launching projects. Another part of the portfolio ought to be infrastructure, central efforts like style guides and design patterns. And another part that's more kinda blue-sky R&D, because it's important for the User Experience team to initiate projects and not just take orders and requests that the engineering or product management organizations are coming up with. [13:48]
• On communication. Speak the right language to the right people. At Adaptive Path, it was speaking the language of finance to the people who write the checks. At Google, it's speaking the language of engineering: "Imagine a graph with a billion nodes, and you can write algorithms against that..." [17:04, Jeffrey Veen]
• On meetings. The method or skill that we would all benefit the most from is Meeting Facilitation. If we did nothing but just learn how to better facilitate meetings, we would excel. [26:18, Peter]
• On centralized vs. decentralized. Early in a company's life, it's better for user experience teams to be centrally organized and managed. The community is smaller than engineering and product management; it's cross-functional and requires expertise and talent from different areas, so it helps to have a centralized group where people can share best practices and communicate, to hone their methods and standards over time, so teams can stop reinventing the wheel and move to higher-end activities. But at the same time, user experience is often most effective when it's integrated with the product teams. You can overcome that when you're a centralized group by matrixing into the product areas, so you can get relationship building with the product teams and have deep expertise within a domain and still have ties back to a user experience community. [27:45]
• On Google's centralization. Sergei will advocate -- we should be building features and not products. I think this is a reflection of the anti-silo thinking that is advocated there, where it's really not necessarily products that we're building, but it's experiences that are integrated that we should be building. When you have a company that thinks that way, it doesn't necessarily make sense to decentralize the user experience team. [30:58]
• On creating Yahoo's Style Guide. There are three components to that. (1) Universal look and feel. When we built the style guide, we advocated for building consistency without uniformity. How do you message Yahoo as one company but not necessarily make the products uniform with each other? (2) Design pattern library. This was more around best practices for interaction design so we can stop reinventing the wheel. How many different ways can you invent a way to do pagination or editing a table? Let's come up with the best way and get past that, and if people want to iterate and innovate off of that, we can do that and feed it back into the pattern library. (3) The UI Code Library, which has now become the YUI library, which is available on the Yahoo developer network. It's a way to consistently implement those components, widgets, and modules, so that we can design not only more efficiently, but also create a more coherent experience across the network. [33:41]
• Styling multiple products. It's important to find the elements that communicate everything as one family, but not necessarily make everything consistent for the sake of being consistent. [44:38]
  

A quick Google search also led me to Irene Au's Twitter account. Unfortunately, her updates are private.

Updated to add:
Jeffrey Veen also has a transcript of an earlier interview (Feb 2007) with Irene Au on his blog. Turns out he's been working on the new Google Analytics, which I was just checking out earlier today (talk about timing)! Jeff also has a Twitter account, in case you feel like following.

Thoughts on NCR #31

Just finished listening to Episode 31 of the New Comm Road podcast, which is hosted by Bryan Person.

The podcast "explores how new media tools are changing communication in business, in the media, and in our everyday lives" -- so naturally I find it interesting. I subscribe to it via iTunes.

In Episode 31, Bryan and guest Doug Haslam discuss a roadmap for Managing a Blogger Relations Campaign, and I agree completely with the five main points in the roadmap.

I also have a few thoughts to tack on, and rather than posting an incredibly long comment on the New Comm Road blog, I figured I might as well write a blog post.

* * *

The first of five points in the roadmap is: Identify the goal(s) of the campaign before you start it.

That statement may seem obvious, but I think it's really worth stating because not everyone begins with the end in mind. What I'd like to add is the notion that we should identify not just the goal(s) of the campaign, but also figure out how we will measure how successful we are in achieving the goal(s).

For example, if the original goal is to "raise awareness," we should take the extra time to think through just what that statement means. How many people have to become aware before we can say we've achieved our goal? How do we measure that awareness? How do we know they became aware because of the campaign?

I know from personal experience that it can be a real struggle to wrestle with a high-level objective and pin it down into something concrete and measurable, but the extra thinking effort is valuable because:

1. We may realize a need to add metrics collection to our campaign process; or
   
2. We may actually come to the realization that we have to change or re-frame our goal because there's no way to realistically measure our progress against it.
   

The idea is now old and overused, but there's still truth in that old saying that goals should be SMART.

* * *

The second comment that I'd like to make is related to the Tools of the Trade section of the podcast where Doug talked about the sites that he uses in his line of work.

I think it's worth pointing out that aside from using new media tools to look for blogs and bloggers, any blogger relations campaign should also be using new media tools to make it easier for bloggers to talk about the product, item, event, or company.

This point is illustrated perfectly in a recent book review by Tech PR Consultant, Drew Benvie. In his blog post, he says:

Now, I write about PR, so the first thing I noticed was how well the review process had been put together for a social media audience.

I was sent some YouTube footage (the book has its own channel on http://www.youtube.com/lifeisapitch), pics of the book, and shots of the authors. All as links. Very blog friendly! The website for the book's really thorough too, so I had plenty to sift through before the book even arrived.

The key point: when pitching Bloggers, by all means use the new media tools that they already know, to make it easy for them to talk about your product or event or company. There is enough evidence, after all, to suggest that convenience wins.

It also makes you seem more like "one of us" instead of "one of them" when you show yourself to be new media / social media aware, so your pitch will feel a lot less like a cold call.

Podcasting hits the mainstream

According to an IT Conversations podcast featuring Doug Kaye, podcasting has been around for three to four years in some form, even though the term didn't really come into existence in a big way until more recently.

But you know that podcasting has really hit the mainstream when Amazon.com has launched its own monthly podcast, Amazon Wire -- "an original, free podcast about books, music, movies, and those who create them."

A quick look through Odeo also shows a number of channels with several instantly-recognizable names: BBC's Documentary Archive, The Economist Magazine, and Business Week. It's great how the rise of broadband internet connectivity has sparked a revival of old-style communication methods, i.e., audio only.

One of these days (when I finally have the time!), I'm going to have to try recording a sound clip to see how easy it is to go from recording, to editing, to publishing, and finally to actual listening -- without any professional equipment.

Update:

I decided to check out Odeo Studio to see just how much of a no-brainer it would be to use their recording and publishing features with my clunky home microphone. And as it turns out, it was very much a no-brainer! Took me all of maybe four minutes to do everything from start to finish. It helps that all the buttons are large and clearly labeled. haha!

Here's the finished product, which I've entitled Hello, World. If you're a programmer who "grew up" in the 1980s, you'll get the inside joke. hehe.


powered by ODEO

The recording is pathetically simple, but it does prove that Odeo Studio works like a charm. Oh, and I would like to go on the record and say that I find the primarily-pink-themed flash player really pretty.