TomBritt.com Online Marketing Blog

When I was visualizing the crowd that might attend the first annual BlogIndiana Conference this weekend in downtown Indianapolis, I had to admit, the picture wasn’t pretty. I had images of GenCon rejects without the costumes wandering around with laptops and Star Wars backpacks.

I have to admit, the conference was a pleasant surprise and well done for a first-time conference. Some local speakers included Renee Wilmeth of “Feed Me/Drink Me” fame, Bil (one “l”) Browning from the Bilerco Project, Smaller Indiana’s Erik Deckers,  Bob “I look like a high school history teacher” Burchfield from AroundIndiana.com, the Pasta Queen Jennette Fulda. and of course me talking about our Geist Reservoir Community blog portal. (I just love cross-posting!)

Of course, we had out-of-towners from Hanapin Marketing and iSocket.com come up as well as a constituency from Cincy’s PhoTrade.

The term “blogging” is a pretty broad category, and the conference tended to lean towards the casual, shut-in, “wish I could be published” blogger. A lot of hype around Twitter, which I personally think is a waste of time. As if we don’t all suffer from attention deficit disorder enough, let’s keep a bunch of “followers” updated on our every move throughout the day. There is a business model there somewhere, but I just don’t have the time.

Corporate blogging wannabes trying to figure out their online strategy were probably a bit confused as well. I sat through a session by Sarah Robbins with MediaSauce who has a purple swipe of hair for a calling card. The topic was online branding, but the content was geared more towards those trying to reach the college facebook or secondlife “I look so much better as an avatar” crowd. I don’t think the problem was the presenter, Sarah did a great job and kept it interesting. The problem is blogging itself.

I realized after the 1:00 panel discussion I sat in on today that blogging is just a technology that is used and adapted by many people in many different ways. We might as well had a hammer convention and had Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Sears sponsor it.

“I use my hammer to knock down walls.”

“I paint winter scenes on hammer handles and sell them at craft fairs.”

“I’m going to the 2012 Olympics to participate in the hammer throw competition.”

“I use hammers to correct my kids.”

Everybody has a different reason for blogging, everyone has a different community to build, and everyone wants everyone else to read their blog. Reminds me a lot of the self-publishing conferences I’ve been frequenting the last three years.

At least no one mentioned Oprah’s book club at this conference.

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development, and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative to enhance and expand grassroots media.

CMLP’s interactive database of legal threats contains lawsuits, cease & desist letters, subpoenas, and other legal threats directed at those who engage in online speech. You can view, search, create, and comment on entries in the database from their database page.

Perhaps one of the most useful resources is the Legal Guide for citizen journalists. You can lookup laws unique to each state.

The latest Author Solutions service is a “Word Clay-ish” self service photo book creator on collaborative steriods: Inkubook.com. Users can upload photos from their iPhone or laptop, add some captions or poems, and crank out a paperback or hardback book for as little as $12.95 each.

Create a free account, download Microsoft’s Silverlight, and you are creating books online. Upload photos in .jpg, .tif, or .png format, add a caption, upload text or stories, and then you start laying out the book yourself online. Have some family members or friends that want to contribute to your book? No problem, “invite” them to collaborate on your project and build it together (sounds like a Lowes commercial). No software to purchase. No minimum orders. No hosting fees. No kidding.

In typical Author Solutions fashion, they also provide live online chat and toll free phone support for their users.

Remember, this is in beta so expect a few kinks and some “coming soon” images. Overall, it’s a great product for all those people who got a new digital camera for Christmas and have already filled their SD cards with photos. Create a long-lasting book and send it to your family! Visit Inkubook.com now!

There are only two shows that I watch on television: America’s Got Talent and 24. Now most guys will admit the Jack Bauer fix, but watching America’s Got Talent is a lot like riding a moped: fun to drive but you don’t want your friends catching you on one.

Hosted by my favorite afternoon show host, Jerry Springer, the two finalists last year were a ventriloquist named Terry Fator and a singer named Cas Haley. I have to admit, my wife and I fell in love with Cas’s voice on his first night and had to watch each week to see his spin on songs like “Dancing on the Moon.” He’s a combination of blues and reggae with a tropical twist. He’s the next Jimmy Buffet with more vocal talent.

He lost out to the guy with his hand stuck in a sock (no hard feelings), but I was excited to see him visit Indianapolis on his summer tour last week at the Music Mill near Keystone at the Crossing. He brought in a full band of 7: drummer, trumpet, sax, lead guitar, bass guitar, and a percussionist that added the tropical twang. The concert itself was awesome, only about 200 people but very intimate and the sound was great.

Now let me get to the reason why I’m writing this post to begin with. Cas Haley, besides being musically gifted, is also a very personable guy. After his encore, the lights came up and Cas stepped down off the stage in his “capri-length” shorts and greeted each and every person as they left the venue. I expected a quick handshake, “please buy my CD”, or “hey, you’d look good in my overpriced shirt.” Quite the contrary, Cas talked to everyone like we were at his wedding reception.

Of course, I had to tell him how talented he was, which he graciously agreed. I asked him about his wife and son. He was excited to talk about his new house they are moving into (something he spoke of on his first appearance on America’s Got Talent). He also talked to us about the record deal he passed on from Simon’s label, a deal that would have given him a $200,000 advance. Here is a guy that was basically a stay-at-home dad struggling to make some extra income and he passed on a deal that would have made him comfortable for at least the first year.

As much as I love his music and him as a person, a dad, and a musician, I do have to give some constructive feedback. Cas, you need to come out with some of your own original music. While you sing good songs better than the originals, you need your own identity and “mark” on music. I would also recommend that your website share more family and personal info with visitors, much like the Cas Haley that I met in Indy last week. Hey, I’m thinking about driving to Nashville to catch him again later this month, so I still love the guy. I wish him the best and hope he has all the success he deserves. He’s one guy I wouldn’t mind seeing with the millions of dollars, somehow, I’m not worried about it going to his head.

I’ve been pretty open and honest about the atGeist.com “experiment” in local portals. Two years ago, we attempted expansion by launching atFishers.comкомпютри which was about 20% successful (80% of what we attempted didn’t meet expectations so we pulled them). I also realized that the older I’m getting, the less patience I have for initiatives that don’t take off.

I’ve been itching to try it again, this time in southern California. Here comes atLaJolla.com! It turns out that La Jolla, California is very similar to the Geist Reservoir area:

• Affluent demographic
• Approximately 15,000 homes and businesses
• Near a major metropolitan area (San Diego and Indianapolis)
• Weak or no local newspapers

I’m flying out to La Jolla to meet with my new partner out there, a local that has already developed one local portal similar to atGeist.com and he has an office in La Jolla already. La Jolla is a hotbed for realtors, plastic surgeons, upscale car dealerships, and of course homeowners associations for those affluent oceanfront homes.

Our community hosted it’s first Geist Half Marathon & 5K race yesterday, and running it was tough. My feet and legs never got tired. I didn’t even break a sweat. Actually, I’m the president of this great not for profit organization so I was “running” or “managing” the day’s activities which went off flawlessly.

For all of you out there doing your own local neighborhood portal, creating a community showcase event like the Geist Half Marathon & 5K is a great way to rally your neighbors to volunteer, sponsor, or participate. Here is some advice from a guy that’s spent the last 15 months planning this community event:

• Hire professionals: We hired Vision Event Management as our race director and boy are we glad we did. Don’t rely on volunteers to steer the ship, every good army needs some paid mercenaries.
• Focus on kids: Our event benefits health and wellness programs in the local schools. Kids are great networking and marketing vehicles, but go through their schools.
• Focus on volunteers: We ended up with over 700 volunteers, but it was a last-minute drive that put us over the top.
• Get all sponsor agreements in writing: We had a key sponsor start acting squirrelly the day before the event. Manage expectations by putting everything a sponsor is expected to do in writing.
• Bench politics: Don’t allow politicians, lobbyists, activist groups, or other polarizing persons to exhibit or pass out flyers at your event.
• Choose a great venue: If you could take a postcard photo anywhere in your community, where would it be? Wherever that is, host your event there somehow.

Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter has filed a lawsuit against book publisher and promoter Airleaf, LLC (formerly Bookman Publishing) for taking money without providing the promised services in return. The lawsuit is seeking consumer restitution for at least 120 customers.

“More than 120 people are named in the lawsuit, including many from Indiana who lost thousands of dollars,” said Carter. “In fact, hundreds more may have lost money. They paid for services. Airleaf did not deliver, and now, those consumers deserve refunds.”

Its companies like this that give publishing a bad name. Writers Weekly had to ban Airleaf from posting on their forums they were abusing them so badly. Late in 2006, they organized a “Book Fair” at Franklin College and sold table space to a hand-full of authors that were promised a huge book conference at the college’s basketball arena. Only 5 authors and a custodian wondering why there were 5 authors in the gym showed up.

We finally got our first Internet-delivered television show up on GeistTV.com last week. Using a new Canon HDV video camera, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Jumpcut to host and produce the final show, I finally got the prototype show online last week.

The learning curve has been in figuring out whether to edit raw clips via Jumpcut or pre-edit them in Elements and upload them as finished shows and use Jumpcut just for hosting. What I figured out (after many experiments) is it is best to create short clips, under 2:00 minutes each, and then create a movie in Jumpcut from the clips. Just like YouTube, Jumpcut has a 100 MB maximum file size so posting a 12:00-15:00 minute video will suffer quite a bit in quality. Posting (10) 2:00 minute clips and putting them together in Jumpcut is the “answer.” Besides, the video quality in Jumpcut is far superior to YouTube.

Now, we’ve been posting the short clips to YouTube and a local video portal IndyTube.tv. This has been pretty effective for us to gain eyeballs and traffic to the mother ship: GeistTV.com.

What we plan to do next is start soliciting neighbors around Geist to submit their video clips to Jumpcut and join our online group. We can then take their clips and add them to our movies, a cool feature of Jumpcut that makes it really unique.

Oh, and if you’re worried about Jumpcut over YouTube, remember that Jumpcut is owned by Yahoo! who also owns flickr. I put a photo slide show to music and posted it on Jumpcut in about 5 minutes yesterday, something you can’t do on YouTube.

I was talking to a “newspaper insider” the other day about the convergence of media and the somewhat incestuous relationship between metro newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. In our market, the Indianapolis Star has tried to create as many new online properties as they have new print properties in the last few years. (See my “Why Newspapers Are Dying a Slow, Painful Death” post)

I asked a simple question, “why don’t television stations feel threatened by their newspaper ‘partners’?”

The answer I got was a bit surprising.

“Television is already there, newspapers are running from where they are…they want to be television stations.”

He pointed out that in markets where one company owns all three mediums (TV, radio, newspapers), the television stations are the cash cow, radio stations break even, and newspapers lose money. In the example he used in Columbus, Ohio, the newspaper is actually being shut down because it is losing so much money.

Given this, he revealed that the Indianapolis Star’s goal is to eliminate the print product completely by 2013. No more print?

Last month they “redesigned” the paper to use a narrower font, narrower broadsheet, and supposedly “easier to read” type. In other words, they put their presses on a diet and cut about 10% of their paper costs. The business section is now a 4-page flyer with a few business classifieds and some stock prices. Signs of a struggling newspaper business are everywhere and they are trying to mask it by waving shiny objects at us like we’re infants.

“Look over here Tommy, it’s a new website!”

“Lookie over here Tommy, it’s IndyMoms.com!”

“Heeeerrrrreeee’s a big puppy, Tommy. You like puppies? Go to IndyPaws.com like a good boy.”

You might be making money online, even faster than you thought. But in the long run, if you eliminate print, you’ll be doomed. You are selling online ads ‘better’ because you have a relationship with your print customers and they want something that works. Simple. Your newspaper ads never have and never will do what the online ads can do: generate and quantify leads.

I think Gannett is fattening up the IndyStar.com “Walton-family-sized” offering of print and Internet products to sell to a radio empire, like Emmis. Television giants won’t touch a newspaper, but radio has the need to grow and they already survived the streaming media tidal wave in the late 1990’s. Without a strong Internet video strategy and the paradigm fixed in the public mind that the newspaper will report on what we do, newspapers have too far to go spread too thin as it is.

Give up the print and newspapers will die. Jot this prediction down.