My Learfield buddy Steve Mays took this video inside the studios of Kidscast. Kidscast is a podcast/radio show we produce at Learfield for the Missouri Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse. It’s not all about alcohol and drug abuse, though. It has a joke of the week, and information about famous kids in history. and lots of other cool things kids are interested in. In fact, it’s the perfect example of how you can communicate more effectively with people when you offer them something they want, instead of offering what you want to give them.
Incidentally, Steve uses his little Casio digital camera to capture video like this. I have something similar from Nikon. Less than $200. If you don’t have something like it for your organization or small business, run to Costco or Sam’s Club and buy one. It will exponentially increase your ability to tell interesting stories to the people you want to engage. It’ll be the best $150 you ever spend.
Your “new” is not “news.” You should not communicate what is new in your universe. You should communicate what matters to your constituents.
The whole idea behind this blog was that I wanted to show people it’s possible to combine aspects of journalism with their marketing and communications. And good journalists don’t just write stories they want to read. They write stories their audience wants to read. The same applies to every single bit of communication you’re doing for your nonprofit or small business. If you’re talking about yourself without anything valuable to your readers, you’re spamming them, plain and simple. Give people something of value and they’ll love you for it. Once they love you (because you’ve helped them) they’ll actually want to hear about what’s new in your universe.
Everyone’s debating the effectiveness of social networking tools for fundraising campaigns. A new social networking site, Razoo, seems to want to cut to chase: they’re going to give $10,000 to a nonprofit organization that signs up at least 100 new members by September 15th. And it’s not just a numbers game, as the winning nonprofit organization will actually be selected from the community based on their social change projects.
What a great promotional idea, and a wonderful opportunity for your nonprofit organization! Here’s the contest info from Razoo.
Mashable has put together a Photoshop Toolbox, with 80+ Photoshop tools and resources. If you use Photoshop to edit images for your website, you’ll want to take a look.
Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.
It resonates personally because I’m the kind of person who can see 100 possible outcomes, each worse than the one before — and within 5 minutes convince myself I will be homeless and alone by next Tuesday. But I think this 1-liner also explains why so many people are failing to take advantage of the online space for their business or organization.
When something new comes along, most of us tend to believe the worst. That’s true whether we’re talking about airplanes or computers or online media. We’re unable to visualize the rewards of success because we don’t have the experience to do that. We don’t have any grasp on how jumping into an online conversation with people will improve the work we do. Only after doing it can we really understand just how work- and life-changing it is.
But it’s pretty easy to visualize the penalties of failure. We’ll get overwhelmed by extra work. We’ll say something silly on a blog and embarrass ourselves. People will leave mean comments or otherwise undermine the goals we’re working for.
Here’s the secret to this — the negatives almost never happen. And when they do, they’re not a catastrophe — they’re no different than the bad things that happen to you in your everyday work life already. But the positives — those things you can’t even imagine yet — they happen all the time for people who simply make a commitment to participate in this online space. And with patience, those positives start spinning at them faster and faster, so that they can’t imagine having done their work without that resource.
And one more thing. Those people and organizations who are successful in the online space — who have thriving blogs or podcasts, or who use social networks to help their work – they are not any different from you in talent or time or personality. The difference is that they’ve jumped in when the negatives seemed daunting, trusting that the positives would follow.
