insights – Page 24 – Hello, I'm DK – creative producer and speaker coach

Nothing Is New | Pinterest Is A Remix / Redux / Mashup etc

The world does cartwheels for new.

The problem is it’s hardly ever that.

Most “newness” is just an element of it’s overall offering.

Just like Pinterest—the latest social media wonderkid (although it’s been going for nearly 4 years).

The idea is not original.

It’s a visual Delicious, a more ordered Tumblr / Ffffound / We Heart It / ImgFave, a girly Reddit / StumbleUpon… the UI/X is cleaner, more intuitive and due to this the user numbers has really ramped.

The fact is we’ve all been scrapbooking for years.

Now we just aggregate digitally.

Faster.

Tidier.

With more people.

Over wider topics.

New is rarely something monumental but rather a quiet shift and addition. A gentle increase to the discourse. And by adding in multiples of time and people, it appears more than it is.

This is replicated in the (misplaced) discussion about social media and how it’s constantly changing and morphing, when it should be about the fundamental skills not the platforms themselves. Seeing it as not a mountain to climb but a wave to catch totally shifts the thinking and approach.

Be careful of the smoke and loud voices because it’s what’s behind the curtain that counts.

Focus on what’s best not what’s new.

Everything is a remix.

A redux.

A mashup.

Nothing is new.

This is not a negative post about Pinterest. It’s a great site. Am playing around with it myself. Just wanted to move the conversation along.

UPDATE: although now I’m reconsidering being on there, you also should.

The Freemium Model In Action | Steens Manuka Honey

steens manuka taster strip

Tasters. Teasers. Tempters.

Steens Manuka Honey is the best tasting honey on the planet. Not only is it rich in medicinal properties (you can put this stuff on your wounds and it will aid recovery) but as a brand they also understand how to entice a customer.

Above is a little strip of card with a sealed packet of the delicious nectar on the reverse. Snap the strip in half and enjoy a sweet sample.

This for me is the correct definition and real-life use of the freemium model—leveraging the quality of the product through a sharable short-form handout.

This has parallels with social media, as every tweet, blog post, video vignette etc is a taster to the larger brand offer. A cheeky flavour to excite those to want more.

Done well, with grace and quality, it’s a simple and sure-fire way to build up a customer / consumer base who advocate you further by distributing your free little contributions.

Develop and dispense tasters.

Simple.

Big thanks to Dom who first gave me the honey strips and a jar to get my hooked. Further thanks to Sheryl for being a wonderful soul through our contact on Steens Facebook Page and for sending me more tasters—my colleagues are going to enjoy these and I’m sure will be converted into customers as well.

Why Develop An Online Speaker Training Programme | The Purpose, The Why, The What

The above is fun and real.

Am spending my spare time developing out ‘The Best Damn Speaking Course On The Internet (Even The Planet)‘.

My current focus (apart from pooling together some fab speakers to share their knowledge) is on the experience and value the customer / member receives plus the why and what truth this project essentially serves.

This is what I’ve come up with:

This is for the project manager who needs to delight and astonish their bosses / colleagues in that important meeting.

This is for the conference organiser who has realised that titles and positions of authority does not equate to being a good public speaker.

This is for lecturers who want to engage the whole room, from the front-seat-swots to the back-of-the-room-hall-dwellers.

This is for the sales rep who is hungry to explore the power of telling stories and is craves some inspiration.

This is for the tired executive whose career needs new energy and vitality to project them forward in the looming performance review.

This is for those who can’t ever imagine speaking to a room of people (no matter how big or small) and have a positive impact.

This is for you.

It will exist to aid, challenge, enable, add, energise, delight, empower, sharpen, equip all newbies and old hands to be able to speak better.

To present with clarity and purpose.

To become a kick ass communicator.

Learning@School 2012 | Tracking Twitter Infographic

Another infographic for my fab employers regarding the recent Learning@School 2012 conference.

Approximately 1,300 teachers for two days of educational musings, wonderings, provocations, challenges, solutions etc

Some takeaways:

the increase in all numbers from Ulearn11 (our last big conference back in October—wonder if the 5 Step Twitter Newbie Start Plan video I did helped?)
the expanded use of links within tweets plus conversations which followed (probably a little due to the fact I set up open Google Docs so the audience could collaboratively take notes during the four main keynotes—can be found on the Learning@School blog)
the potential reach of the conversations (calculated by the TweetReach reports)

What did you take away from the infographic? Am I asking the wrong questions? What do you think of the results? Were you at the conference and tweeting out and if so how did it add to your experience of the event?

Ideabombing | Spreading Ideas Internally

ideabombing

Ideabombing is one way I’m trying to communicate and share stuff which inspires, invigorates and melts peoples minds:

Idea | noun
a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action

Bombing | verb
the art of doing any forms of graffiti visual activity.

Twice a week new content is shared through the internal CORE Education community site to digest and react to (as I never forget to pose a question or two to contextualise thinking).

Imagine this in schools but instead of shoes the texts relating to subjects plus all the different supporting content… it’s not way in the future, it’s here, nearly…

How can you see this being applied in educational settings or in the work place?

Get the idea…?

Let me know how you’re ideabombing in your organisations / companies. Does the above distribution example help?

Creating More Media Than Media | A Research Project

utterly confused stats

How much media there is the world?

For the past couple of years I’ve been saying in my social media presentations that:

“…we [as individuals] are creating more media than Media [print / tv / film / radio etc]…”

I have no facts or figures to back this claim up.

It’s an inkling.

A feeling.

A judgement call.

As someone who does numbers like this, how do I find this out or rebuke it? Has someone already explored this? Do you know the answer?

Help please…

Image credit

Wingstand

wingstand

Some people have asked about my minimal work setup—it’s down to the superb Wingstand product I supported on KickStarter.

Ulearn11 | How Twitter Makes An Event Global

Above is a quick and dirty infographic created as a mini Ulearn conference evaluation (a superb educational annual event organised and run by CORE Education).

The big takeaways:

#Ulearn11 was trending in New Zealand the two main days of the conference
the massive reach the 300 active tweeterers accumulative follower network has (TweetReach indicated it at nearly 750,000 impressions and a reach of about 70,000 people)
how easy you can measure the ‘popular kids in the playground’ (those who tweeted and were tweeted about)

Couple this with twitter conversations not using the hashtag, the connections made through the tweeted ideas plus the retweets, then you’ve got an indication of how Twitter can enable an event to go global.

How do you measure the social media elements of your events? Do you display them graphically or in a different way than above? Drop some knowledge in the comments below.