Category: Productivity Booster

With the holidays over I am finally getting around to cleaning things up in my virtual space. A lot of cleanup redirecting links to the “About Me” and “Press Kit” page over here.

I’ve also installed an audio player so when I link to podcasts you’ll be able to listen to them right from the page that the link is on.

And of course backing up everything to a hard drive here and one offsite. Remember there are only two types of people – those who have had a catastrophic data loss and those who will. If you haven’t backed up in more than 3 months please take the time to do it to save yourself a future headache.

Go Pats!

If you’ve ever done any training you know that there’s a point you get to where you are on total autopilot. You’ve given the presentation more than 10 times and you have the material down cold. You know where the questions come up and where the jokes go.

A great way to leverage technology to add time back into your schedule is to video any training that you can. Why give 5 one-hour sessions when you could run 5 fifty minute videos and then do 50 minutes of live Q&A – adding 4 hours back to your day? And giving the attendees the ability to go back and rewind what they don’t understand without holding up the rest of the class.

When I originally started we used Viewlet Builder from Qarbon, which is great for capturing screenshots. Now we use Camtasia, which captures all activity on your screen. (Although I need to go in and see if Viewlet Cam is any good).
On the audio side we are using Mobile Pre USB boxes which can float from laptop to laptop, along with Shure SM58 mics which sound ok and are nearly indestructable.

For the content, try to keep clips under 5 minutes. Break your presentation into manageable sections so users can watch them a la carte.

When you do the final edit you can use some of my trade secrets to creating great sound. Scrap the source audio, export it to WAV format and use SoundSoap and The Levelator to clean it up.

Don’t worry about them being perfect, odds are you are going to have to record them over in less than a year anyway. It’s much better to have 10 videos that have some ummms, ahhhs and flubs in them than 3 perfect videos. Video content really pulls, the more you have out there the better.

I’m doing the year end housecleaning today. If you are one of those freaky observant people you may have noticed the new subscription icons in the column on the left.

If you are not already a blog subscriber you must go to Google Reader now and start using it. It’s like an Outlook inbox for web pages, as pages are updated you get a notice in your inbox. No aimless surfing. I’m able to watch 153 websites daily without spending any time on the ones that haven’t added any new content.

The same technology powers podcasts, if you haven’t been subscribing to podcasts via iTunes, what the hell are you waiting for? These two productivity boosters will save you days in 2008 – days you can use at the beach.

Please subscribe… I’m getting back to the cleaning.

Thanks!

ps – If you have content you want people to subscribe to, Ron was kind enough to put together this list of the pages you can hit to get your own custom subscription buttons:

Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html

Yahoo: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php#addtomy

Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/about/subscribe

Newsgator: http://www.newsgator.com/thebutton.aspx

One podcast that has been on my subscription list forever is Manager Tools. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience managing some great teams and have had over 100 people under me in the org. chart, but I still get something worthwhile out of every episode.

They had a recent cast about schedule management and I realized that email has been taking up an increasing amount of my time. I’m going to see if I can corral my email management down to 4x per day. Let’s see if I can kick the habit… If only there was some kind of patch.

ps – I’m trowing twitter overboard too.

A friend asked me this question in this vein and I thought the answer was worth sharing, so I took out the specifics to outline some general principles:

First, remember that most CMO’s are insane. In general you’re best bet would be to do a custom presentation based on what you know about them. A generic approach would be the type of pitch an agency would make to a senior marketing person. Something like this:

1. Define the Market
2. Strategy and tactics
2. Concepts

A CMO has a lofty plan they set up by demographics – “We are looking for married women, 35-50, household income over 100k”. By defining the Market you are selling them on how your specific skills can hit the target – “The fastest growing segment of X market is the one that I have the keys to”.

In strategy and tactics outline what will be done and how it will be measured – “There will be these programs, we are looking for X impressions, and Y conversions…”

Concepts are the best place to shine, and also the most work. The easy way out is to show stuff that you have already done for other people, the hard way would be to mock-up what you would be doing for them. It’s a good idea to present concepts in sets of 3, two good ideas and (what you consider to be) a crummy one, that way if your client always picks the crummy one you’ll know that you have some style or communication problems and perhaps you shouldn’t be working together.

It also depends on the purpose of the meeting, better firms know that interviewing agencies is a low cost method of brainstorming so they do no original work until there’s really a deal…

Just a random marketing stat for Saturday. When buying shirts for software executives I found this distribution:

M 15% L 37% XL 35% 2XL 13%

If you have to buy shirts I’d suggest a similar purchasing pattern (unless you have other data?).

Another point – I’ve always made it a point to get women’s shirts for them if they are working on behalf of the company. Nothing looks lamer to me than a woman who’s been given a company shirt that fits like a feed bag.

For the past month I have been reviewing my schedule and I’ve noticed that a very large part of 2007 was devoted to networking in the new media space. Unfortunately it’s starting to look like I’m hitting a point of diminishing returns. As much as I enjoy going to events I’m starting to think that my time would be better spent working on projects rather than talking about them.

I’m going to finish out the events I have for this year and then I’ll be setting up the work plan for 2008 without adding a lot of events. Right now I’m looking at 4 events – Podcamp NYC, Gnomedex, NME in Vegas and Podcamp Boston, and may only pick two of those.

Is there a progression of events? You attend for a few years, hit the point of diminishing returns and then go every other, or even 3rd year just to keep up to date.

Another thing I have been thinking a lot about is an idea Eric Rice infected me with – some kind of event where work is done, as opposed to education. I’d much rather get together with 5 rockstars and try to do something rather than talk about how to do things.

Of course none of this is carved in stone, it’s year end and time to evaluate all the strategies and adjust for 2008, but it’s starting to look like more time in the Fortress.