Betsy Aoki's WebLog

Standing desk to Treadmill desk - an experiment for the new year

Betsy — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:43:00 GMT

If you've heard the media stories or are just on a nerd health kick for 2012 and want to know more about both standing and treadmill desks, read on for what I've learned so far. Nothing here constitutes medical advice - talk to your doctor before making these changes.

Standing desk

Folks at Microsoft know that in late 2011 I requested a standing desk at work. My constant travel has meant difficulties in keeping to a workout or diet regimen, and since I didn't grow up at the weight I'm at now, my back has been protesting more and more about being at a computer job. Other people I knew at Microsoft swore by their standing desk eliminating back pain, and I had been duly alarmed by "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity" article in the New York Times.

But I knew from working CES booths that all-day standing can be painful, so I read Gina Trapani's switch to a standing desk to get a feel for what it would be like to take this on.I consulted Jeremiah Andrick, who works from home when not traveling and swears by his (my inquiries and others' led to this blog post of his on his setup).

I met with my doctor, got the note, went through the ergonomics team, and here's something similar to what I work on in the office. What's not evident in the photo is how ginormously wide it is even as a corner setup - the photo looks like one person barely squeezes in, but I think 3 people could stand at my desk and work on their laptops without issue (though of course they'd have to sit and stand in unison :) ).

Obervations after a few weeks: The nice thing about my office setup is that it is sit-to-stand, an important concept for folks used to sitting on their butts all day. I'm finding my current ritual (as I work my way up to more and more standing) is to come in in the morning, hang coat. Drink coffee standing up and work til noon. Go somewhere to eat or eat at my desk while sitting. Come back to office and stand for another couple of hours. Finish the day sitting.

When I talked to Jeremiah, he was saying he took phone calls sitting down, that that felt more natural, as well as eating. I can actually take phone calls on speaker phone while standing, walking around etc - so that part wasn't a big deal. Eating standing up though felt like that "eating over the sink" manuever and wasn't relaxing.

One thing I did do after a day in nice designer boots (usually I wear sneakers to work) was personally invest in a anti-fatigue mat. (Microsoft might provide one but I didn't bother to check.)

I do have to watch for plantar fasciitis flareups and after realizing the boots were girly with no arch support and I'd skirted a flareup, I decided better safe than sorry. The mat is bright cold blue and matches nothing I own, but whatever, price of comfort. The mat has to "air out" (outgas?) so recommend if you buy one - air it out at home and bring into office when its done fuming. Usually the sneakers/orthotics suffice, but sometimes you gotta dress up, and I still wanted to be able to continue the standing regimen regardless of dress.

Jeremiah makes some interesting observations about motorized adjustable desks versus fixed. Since the motors jack up the price quite a bit, I'm grateful that Microsoft is able to do this for me at work...'cause I'm definitely not at the "stand-all-day" level of athletic training yet.

But for home use, I had to go a different route.

The Skinny on My Treadmill desk

After a few weeks of standing at work, I felt ready to tackle the higher level aim of all this: a treadmill desk for home. I did a bunch of research, neither having a standing desk nor a treadmill at home as a starting point. Here are some resources in case you are fortunate enough (or want to do some Craiglist action) of your own.

If you have money to blow, and/or need wider desk, there's the original Steelcase Walkstation variations of treadmill desk.

Instructables: gym treadmill in place, now you need to build a desk setup

Folding option - if you have a folding treadmill and need to fold the desk away too

If you have an old Ikea Jerker desk

If you can't find a Jerker, a friend suggested experimenting with Ikea's Frederik (his coworkers are standing desk users, what we aren't sure is how it may fit your treadmill) . I had an original Ikea Jerker desk, but not the kind that would go high enough for treadmilling at my height.

If you aren't going to buy the treadmill and desk as a specific packaged set, some tips:

Are you going to need sitting capability too or is this for treadmilling only? Fixed height is cheaper cause you aren't paying for a motorized desk.

Figure out the treadmill first. If you buy a treadmill in the style of The Tread (no upper console arms to get in the way),figure out how you will lift it from driveway to where you are going to park it inside (it's a two-person carrying item for sure). There was no way to get a gym treadmill up to the attic office where I wanted this treadmill desk to be, so gym treadmill was not an option.

Then, measure around it. Stand on the tread and measure the height you want your hands to be while typing. If you go motorized adjustable this isn't as big a deal, you can have a range and fiddle with it, but for me going fixed (and cheaper) I needed to know exactly how hight the desk surface had to be ergonomically, so I could buy the right fixed desk. Another option for those with gym treadmills and a wider floor space is the Trekdesk . Make sure the measurements really work for you, with some buffer built in.

What I ended up going with was buying a treadmill "Tread" from http://Treaddesk.com and a Safco standing desk from amazon. This Safco desk was almost a mistake, in that you have to assemble the desk around the Tread, the fit is that tight. On the other hand, I'm less worried that the desk will wobble or lean sideways away from the treadmill - they are practically one body now and I discarded the casters. I have not been to Ikea to measure, but the specs seem to indicate the space between the desk legs is much wider than the Safco is. I had to get help (see above) to properly adjust the desk around the Tread but if you an old hand at Ikea hacking, this won't faze you.

The reason I picked Safco over others is that it had a listed height of the desk at 48 inches, and to fit in the right spot, I needed a desk not much wider than the Tread width (I shaved it too close). I measured myself standing on the tread in order to get the height. I'm tall (between 5' 9'' and 5' 10'') and I can see a taller person really wanting to experiment with Frederik or the Treaddesk.com fixed height desks that go higher than 48". Remember that the treadmill thickness and that of the mat under the treadmill will add to the calculation.

Observations on the home treadmill desk

There is no cushioning/padding on the Tread's surface. Wear running shoes vs. going barefoot if you aren't trained to barefoot running. The time on tread goes by quickly and you don't want to injure your feet - you want to ease up to barefoot walking in any case. When I was trying to figure out the cost analysis of the whole setup I looked at this Signature desk and noted the "cushioned treadmill upgrade." Since I wasn't sure how the treadmill desk would pan out, I didn't go whole hog and invest in one of these, but I could see if the Tread or desk conks out later down the line, replacing with a more cushioned model.

A killer combination for me over winter break has been the PC version of Plants vs. Zombies (Popcap games, they have a Win 7 phone version too) and the treadmill desk. I would look up and I'd been walking for two hours straight at 2 mph after much zombie carnage. My legs would be wobbly as I staggered off to seek coffee, bio break, etc The total absorption of gaming completely masked the effort. Next up: Skyrim. I'm hoping to be able to say I've lost wait playing that game in 2012. :)

At this point it's too early to comment on the durability of the Tread or the desk, but it has a decent warranty and the fellow who brought his Tread in to work at Microsoft Research I chatted with, had had his for a year and was still going strong. So I have high hopes for 2012 - will no doubt do an update later in the year to let you know how this is working out.

Blog infidelity - sign of the times

Betsy — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:44:00 GMT

I've spent a year being massively unfaithful to this blog. :(

Last year (and to be fair the year before), it was more about twitter growing in influence and eating away my will to write long pieces.

This year, it's been more about posting other places - on the Bing blog about our social hackathon or for Blogworld about cause marketing. I've written most recently a slew of posts around Bing's work with startups at Bing Booster - the Seattle Casting call, or Geeks on a Plane: Asia . Oh yeah, and I'm doing a chickenblogging experiment unrelated to work (though tangentially related to Chris Pirillo) at http://www.businesschicken.com . But that's because I get so many questions in social media channels about the chickens!)

And part of it, the bar for this blog is getting higher. In the early days of blogging, typos were a sort of badge of authenticity and real-time meaning. With twitter and SMS and fat-fingered phone statuses, not only do typos in blog posts seem quaint, they seem inadequate. :P I can't compete with the autocorrect sites either cause of the nature of this blog demands it be safe for work! :)

I don't believe blogs as a medium are dead. I personally am not dead, and I'm (possibly due to my lack of self-actualization and enlightenment) not yet willing to call this blog dead either. But more and more I feel like it's the place where you have to get Betsy brainmatter unrelated to what's going on in the Bing evangelism world, the twitter world, the FB world, and the "guest blogger around startups" world. Because all those worlds have their outlets and you see enough of me there. They key thing about this blog is that you can email me through the contact list. Straight into my work inbox (though you might want to tweet at me to remind me, if you think it might have been too long and/or caught by Microsoft corporate junk filters).

That means the cadence of the writing here will of necessity slow down and the posts will all end up being longer. And topicwise, more about cyberculture and social media and women in tech. So for 2012, that's what you will see here. I've got a decent lifehackerish post in the works up next that will be my first of 2012. It will probably take me these two weeks (on vacation) to finish it (my how things change right - blogs used to be our twitter).

So more in a bit, and thanks for your patience! 2012 will be an amazing year!

BlogHer| bet - why Bing reaches out to startups, and why a conference like this is fun in general

Betsy — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:42:00 GMT

Last Friday I had the privilege of both speaking and mentoring at the inaugural BlogHer | bet conference, both as a Bing PR/marketing person and as social media/community application/games program manager. It's an unusual conference and so I'll lay out a bit of the format and then give some flavor of the event, which was held at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley.

The number of attendees was gated on the number of mentors - each person got a one hour slot to pitch their business, ask technical/marketing/funding advice, and the rest of the time was filled with panels to help you get the leg up technically or investor-wise. During the time I mentored my two people (one per hour) , there was a startup "speed-dating" sort of circle where folks got practice pitching and introducing themselves - something I've seen before at BlogHer conferences but especially important here, where practicing that pitch for your business was important. Because I have been to a ton of technical tracks at conferences, I decided to focus on the entrepreneurial/funding tracks for my own development and of course, I was in the metrics panel close to the end of day.

What I love about the BlogHer founders' mindset - Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Paige - is that each project they do has as its subtext giving women a voice and empowering them to sit at the table. Bet was designed to answer the question "where are the women with big tech ideas" "where are the women who want to found tech companies" - and create a conference that gives those women a leg up.

Here's what I learned...

About mentoring... the mentees were nervous to meet us, but being a useful mentor was actually nervewracking in its own way. I was fortunate in that I had different experiences because my mentees asked questions not only abou social media marketing but forums hosting, SEO/SEM, Web site and book cover design, holding events and managing email membership lists, and in general the refinement of their pitch. I texted my boss Stefan at a break that while I mock PR/marketing as an engineer, (and Stefan's hair to boot) the stuff I've learned directly and osmosis by sitting for two years on a PR team served me in good stead. You need to be able to explain your business and why you care about it in a paragraph or less. I told my mentees "the guys I meet at tech conferences can all do this. You gotta do this too."

About pitching to VCs...

You need a strong team. VC, unless they are already friends, don't really go for one-woman shows the way they go for an exec team with a business plan and a rock star pedigree. There is no such thing as a wallflower CEO - the CEO has to be the one making the pitch (though it would help to have the CTO or other folks who are subject matter experts in the financials or the product there for demo).

Know your market/competitors - even if you are so new you think you don't have any. There are different ways to make your case, but there's no such thing as a pitch deck without a look at competitors. Think of it this way - the world is getting along fine right now sans your business (or they think they are) - you need to include your thinking around competition or potential competitors early, even if it's in the appendix.

People, Terms, Valuation: Lisa Stone, CEO of Blogher, relayed this great advice she got from Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch, Chairman of Board for etsy.com) when BlogHer itself was getting venture funding - prioritize yourself by People, Terms, and Valuation. If you assemble the right all-star team who is 100% behind your business idea, and get your business idea to a provable state faster, you will attract the right terms from VCs and a better valuation follows from it. If you are only interested in your valuation and the money you take from the company before the people, you are more likely to run into trouble and an outcome you don't want.

If you are lucky enough to get past the courting stage and are talking terms, you can never invest too much money in financial and legal advice. Have these professionals run models for you so that you know with each round of venture funding, how much you and your employees/prior investors' shares are diluted. VC investments - rule of thumb is they want a return of 10x their investment (if not more). So if you are asking for $1 million in funding, they want you to have a company valuation of at least $10 million - ie, they now own a stake ina $10 million business. I won't go into the lengthy legal terms covered in the term sheet panel but for folks close to this stage, it's likely worth the virtual access fees to see it. http://blogherbet.wmbly.com/buy/ .

Where the pitch meets the money and ownership percentages is risk. If you already have a profitable business, with customers, and your goal now is scale, that's a way different risk than the company with a new idea that has no customers yet and wants funding to acquire some. Every time you pass a major milestone for the company, the valuation goes up. You may get told to come back to ask for funding once you have done X (gotten customers, built a prototype, etc). Ironically bigger/well-known firms tend to be "softer" about terms than smaller ones - they know that if the founder makes a great business that's the only way they win - having controlling stakes in a tanking company serves no one.

The best VCS help your business with more than money - the best VCs help you shape your company into a better one and its not supposed to be adversarial. While founders/owners may be skittish about giving up control at all, the better relationships are more like partnerships.

Metrics and measurement panel:

This was fun. I sat next to Amy Chang of Google Analytics and Laura Fitton (@pistachio), CEO of www.oneforty.com - Laura took notes and tracked all the tools we mentioned and put them here . I mentioned The Goodness Engine ebook, which was a cross-industry project to help Donorschoose.org, but which had lessons that apply to startups and new businesses (because like non-profits, they start with no money and stil have to drive traffic,engage customers, get donations, decide if they need an API or other feeds coming from their site, etc). The main reason I mentioned it in this context though is that the ebook shows how much metrics homework Donorschoose.org did, before baring their problems to our team of 30+ industry experts. Some of the metrics Donorschoose.org offered could be found in Google Analytics or on the twitter tools Laura mentioned - but some of them were innate to their unique business premise and value proposition. You really need to focus around your customers and where your cash flow for your business is coming from - if it's online advertising, then tools that measure user behavior on Web sites and actions they take, will be key. But only you and your database will know how many actual sales you got or consulting appoints you made - it's not just going to be handed to you by an off-the-shelf tool.

Why do I love this kind of thing? Well, aside from the fact helping women in technology rocks, folks from Bing benefit in talking with startups and new business folks as much as they benefit from rapping with us. Yes, I reminded folks that Bing webmaster tools (http://www.bing.com/toolbox ) is where you can learn how to ensure your site is noticed by Bing, and that helps get the word out beyond the SEO conferences, but it wasn't about shilling Bing so much as absorbing the energy and feeling part of that upstart uppityness that has to accompany any new venture. Bing still has a way to go, but like any startup hopefull we've got to justify spending and deliver on promise. It always feels good to tap into the energy of the upstart tribe :)

Live it vivid!

Twitter and Facebook ate my blog (or possibly my brain)

Betsy — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:12:00 GMT

I'm writing this from a skyscraper with a big window where I see exactly no snow falling, despite dire prediction. As we all know, the Seattle area can't handle snow - so much so that the *idea* of snow, keeps drivers at home.

This is a somewhat decent metaphor for the idea that the micro-blogging or status-update applications will take over blogging functions in society, much like TV was supposed to destroy radio.

But I have to admit that my purposeful blogging has gotten lighter, even as my thinking gets heavier. True, I did write these pieces for Blogworld - one about how effective community outreach for a cause can be in turning up engaged users and the other that represent my top 10 learnings while building social or community-based applications, and doing social media marketing. But there's a bunch of thinking about social and social gaming, and social good that I still need to get my head around, and I'm not sure what format that output will take. Sometimes a personal/individual blog seems a necessity. Sometimes it just seems like ego - I've always been more interested in talking about what I'm working on at Microsoft that explaining how grand I am. For me it's about who I'm excited to talk to, and the blog discussions of my travels are just so folks can share these things with me. But I can talk about Bing and the future of search on the Bing blog too, and it makes more sense in most cases to post it there.

I'm wondering how other folks are doing - those that are not consultants or where their blog is a money-maker/ad proposition - where blogging is still because you love it, or have something to say, and whether it's harder to find time for it as I am finding it. Perhaps I'm just lazy. But I also know the landscape has changed from 5 years ago.

We all know social media channels can be a distraction and all of them have gotten more popular and noiser. Internet usage is up worldwide and according to Pew, 3/4th of US online teens and young adults use social networks. it's a faster, real-time, cacaphonous online world out there and a certain percentage of thinking time for me has had to be diverted just to listening. I have enjoyed working at Microsoft because of all the brains I get to meet in my job, and I enjoy social media for all the brains I get to meet online. I forgive a ton of shyness, awkwardness or abruptness for exposure to great brain processes and the chance to swap thinking with someone who has pondered stuff as deeply as I have in some favorite obsessive areas.

What you've seen though is a pulling away and silent thinking for other reasons. There is the dismay of the early adopter - once everyone in America likes your band, can it really be as cool as when only you and your small group of friends like it? And thinking about the trends and the next big thing. The marketers have gotten into social now with a vengeance, and while you've seen a bunch of creativity there (all hail Old Spice dude! still one of my faves) you are also seeing trends of failure. That's natural in a new medium - fail, I say, as fast as you can. And also, some things only work once while the medium is new - and then first mover advantage is used up and you are now just an online marketer like everyone else.

The other thing that has informed my silent thinking/non-blogging brain lately has been the issues raised by Linda Stone and others about continuous partial attention and what it means to have software that shuts off inputs so we can get things done. I don't have a quiet life, I leave the computer on all the time, I take the computer and phone into restaurants and on vacations,and I think the last time I had 3 days without the Internet was in another country over a year ago. My novelty-seeking noggin wants candy, and well, maybe I should start feeding it vegetables and slowtime, do handcrafts so that I get the actual brainspace to think instead of receive, receive, receive.

Some of my best blog posts of yesteryear came out of lucidly felt emotions and discoveries and the chance to think about how to explain them. My life at Microsoft was just as slammed at those times as now but I feel like my brain was different. I guess what I'd hope for all of us in 2011 as we navigate the social and the new technologies that change day to day, is the ability to rise above tit for tat, ping for ping thinking and get that deep breathing, deep thinking, deep blogging in. Or tweeting if you like ( quite expletive filled, so maybe read at home - it was pointed out to me recently that the fake @mayoremanuel 's twitter feed was essentially a short story or novella written in 140 character bites).

No, the blog as a medium is not dead - and this blog is not dead. But to do it right I will have to change my life (or at least the part inside my head) to suit. I'll let you know more how that goes.

Live it vivid!

Every kid deserves a great education

Betsy — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:05:00 GMT

Now that some of the launch madness of www.bing.com/redu (aka www.letsredu.com) is over, I'd like to blog about what REDU campaign means to me.

I'm a completely public-educated person. With the exception of nursery school (ie pre-kindergarten) I went to public schools in Massachusetts and California, and got university degrees in California and Washington from public universities.

When I was somewhere between 4 years old and 8 years old (this era for me blurs a bit), the issue of Japanese Americans being put in internment camps during World War II was explained to me. Specifically, Japanese-Americans I know. My dad was about 5 years old when he got out, his parents were immigrants, and like many folks of my age, I had relatives who went there and some lost all they had. Talk about recession and losing money trying to sell your home - when people know that the government is forcing you out of your house and you are desperate, they know you will take any price. People could only take what you could carry. In those days there were no Xboxes or Nintendos, no big screen TVs, but try if you will to think about what you'd put in your laptop bag and suitcase and wheel down the street to your new home.

So as a kid with a vivid imagination, I imagined all this. The feeling of being singled out, a freak, unwanted and forced to leave my school. Being scared to go somewhere strange and yucky with my family as a kid. Would this kind of thing ever happen to people I knew again? And in these discussions, my mom noted: "Your dad's family has always valued education because when you are packed off to internment camp, it's the one thing that can't be taken from you."

Education is this amazing, invisible tool. It helps solve problems, create new possibilities, and fits into a laptop sleeve - it fits into any pocket and up any sleeve. When my relatives got out of internment camp, it was education (and freaking hard work) to get back all the physical, economic and social ground they had lost. The video on the REDU site "The Education Crisis in Two Minutes" has a great moving graphic that shows what happens when folks get a good education and can empower themselves in society. That's why education matters so much. It's a lever that rights things, helps the downtrodden, brings out solutions to problems.

So REDU is personal to me and I'm personally glad we were able to launch it. Because I got so much of my life and superpowers from public education and it deserves some karmic payback, but also because I know that secret about what education really is. World War II is over but we still have social inequities and societal problems in this country. Education remains as a tool that can't be taken from the people who have it and they can still use it to change their world.

Live it vivid!

In the summer that struggles to arrive, I struggle to blog

Betsy — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:38:00 GMT

A lot of people I ran into this past 12 months talked about it - the great blogging struggle. Some of them, who have a more entrepreneurial or consultant bent, have managed to keep blogging steadily even while picking up responsibilities to their audience in Twitter and Facebook. I, as you can see by my last blog post timing, fell far short of that.

Some of it I have to admit is the "twitter ate my blog" syndrome. I find myself with less time to think involved thoughts, and the temptation of the twitter candy is that you have your 140 characters of fun, and then the urge to publish has been banished - along with whatever complicated thought I might have come up with after that. Some of it is twitter honing my insights to what they really should be - only worth a fortune cookie's worth of expression.

Some of it has been noisy-ness and the act of keeping up with what folks are saying. I just finished re-reading Cognitive Surplus (Clay Shirky) and am about to start Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - and these are authors I've met and respect their brains. If I read every single social media book that claimed to give the marketer godlike powers, I'd have to quit my job and hire backup brains to help. I also respect enough of the discourse that I try not to clutter it with my own stuff too much if it's a bit "me-too."

But some of what I feel emerging is some observations about being a tech person and being a marketing/PR person, and I'm not quite baked on the notion. I caused trouble with developers on past projects by bringing in customer data and I cause trouble in marketing circles by pointing out that the traditional media landscape is morphing. Aside from being a universal pain in the behind, there has to be some advantage to this dual view, and what i hope by end of summer is to be able to write here more on my findings while walking the periphery of both disciplines.

Cheers, and hope where you are, there's more sun than Seattle.

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: In honor of my mom of science

Betsy — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:32:00 GMT

When I signed up to do this Ada Lovelace thing, I knew I'd have a few options on my hands.

I could research obscure women that needed to be brought out to public view.
I could name women in tech or science you probably have heard of already (but possibly not as much as their male counterparts).
Or I could go straight for home, to the first woman of science I ever met (since I shot out of her womb) - my mom.

I'm mentioning my mom in part because I want to give encouragement out there to the working moms of tech and science, who think "yikes this is tough doing both" and need to know that the struggle matters. Kids watching you struggle, matters.

Mom went back to work after my littlest sister was born, in the 70s. She had staff privileges in several hospitals, a private practice and an Ivy League medical school degree that later morphed into another public policy-type degree from yet another Ivy League school after all the kids were grown. As mentioned elsewhere, she went to medical school at a time very few women did, and if they were let in, there were very few of them.

As we kids were growing up, we heard the signals of the changing times. If my Dad had political battles and slights because he was Japanese American, he went jogging and we didn't hear much about it. My mom being more of a talker, we would hear about it.

There was one hospital doctor who we kids all knew over the dinner table as "That Turkey Dr. ____ " because he was the doctor who was always snide to my mom about her being a woman. (Mom used the word "turkey" in her desire to keep us expletive-free). When Mom and Dad shooed us away to "talk medicine" after dinner in the kitchen, sometimes it was about stuff like that. Her professors in medical school has given her crap too btw - just finishing her degree meant gaining a thick enough skin to ignore that stuff.

There's this poem of mine that depicts one of those scenes from childhood. A scene where you just do not want to be there, as your parent is determined to embarrass you and all you can do is slink down into the seat. Years late, you realize not only was that an important moment of outrage and one you should have been proud to witness (but you were too young and dumb to understand), it was an event that left its imprint on you and how you lived your own life.

Mom was a little flustered when I first read the poem below out to a public audience: "After all dear, I don't want people to think I scream all the time..." but later in the phone call she admitted, she was still mad at that guy in the poem. I think that's ok. It's not required that "she be a better person" just cause some dude didn't have it in him to be a decent one.

As for the title - Autobiography - well - I'm female in technology and there are plenty of people in my 15-year career who have directly or directly, told me I couldn't be here. If I hadn't witnessed the below, it would have been harder to decide they were all turkeys.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day Mom!

Autobiography

Your mother. Your mother is screaming

at someone else, not you. Your mother

is screaming at a stranger, some guy

with a red tie and a limp mustache,

some guy who hasn't eaten enough

protein, looks like his hair is falling

out, too greasy, no sleep, she's screaming

out the window of the big blue Valiant,

she's screaming words you remember

for the rest of your life, you remember

she's screaming at the stringbean

parking lot attendant to Leonard Morse

Hospital, she's pulling her face up closer

to his face, he's edging back into the yellow,

the asphalt reserved for hospital staff,

for the medics with staff privileges

and she's driving forward in a roar

and she's screaming for the four

women in the Yale class of '65

she's screaming for all the men who

said she shouldn't be here on this spot,

grinding the steering wheel she's screaming

so her daughters will remember:

you thought because I was a woman

I couldn't be a doctor.

Notes from my PRMKTNG Camp group on social media and storytelling

Betsy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:46:00 GMT

I was privileged enough to act as one of the "camp counselors" yesterday at the PR+MKTG Camp hosted by Dan Greenfield

www.prmktgcamp.com . I shared my leadership spot for " Blue team" with Patricia Vaccarino of Xanthus Communications, a veteran of the PR industry. After a wide-ranging discussion with the entire group, we agreed to focus down on storytelling and outreach.

Patricia and I came from it completely at different angles, which made us a good pairing. But since this is my blog, I'm going to discuss solely what I got out of the experience and from the social media perspective. :)

There's a definite danger in swallowing the hype of social media and not looking for the value. People who saw my IGNITE talk at Gnomedex saw me make fun of the hypsters. More responsible "social media gurus" bring it back to customer relationships that result in business or long term gains, actionable feedback, ROI. And in a big sense, social media technologies are like any other technologies - tools to get something done. Whether its invoicing software or productivity software or web applications, people are using technology to get something done.

But mistakes can be made the other way is thinking oh, social media is just like [insert marketing mechanism or PR mechanism here]. It's just like calling a reporter/placing a tv ad/ doing direct mail. Because the traditional systems relied on value propositions and efficiency of mechanisms that don't exist in the same format today. Media organizations are struggling and entire conversations are happening online about people and companies outside of the letters to the editor/complaints to customer support on the phone. While people remain as the most important ingredient in the information streams, how they get their information and inform their opinions is changing.

And speed is becoming important. Waiting days for a finely crafted PR response, or assuming the message can be controlled once it goes out to the public - those days are gone.Social media drives memes back into traditional media, just as traditional media (links to stories, videos, graphics) drives memes into social media. As opposed to damming (or boiling) the ocean, folks who do outreach to customers have to learn how to surf the waves.

This can create interesting challenges for the organization. If you are big, social media (as one of my camp attendees reported) can become a forcing function to get all the groups on one product together. If one group owns the twitter and blog and the other group owns the facebook presences and another group owns the traditional media - well, you gotta get everyone in a room with coffee and get your acts together. If you are small, that marketing person that was doing EVERYTHING now has EVERYTHING + 1 to do (or 3, depending on how you are counting social media channels).

And this can also play interesting havoc with control issues. Patricia, as a PR veteran, was more interested in the question of: how do I structure the org so that there is approval on every tweet that goes out. I (what do you expect - this is my story as Microsoft's Blog queen) was more interested in giving everyone tools to do the job responsibly with less mandated oversight. Systems can create stronger accountability or they can rob their participants of any accountability, but accountability was/is my byword here.

My whole Bing launch narrative (26 hours on twitter) relies on the premise that the PR team counted on me to do the right thing, as the most experienced social media person. I could have messed up then, and really any day I could mess up. But I think that's actually a realistic assumption, whether you are in traditional PR format or not. Someone can blow it no matter what approach they are using, and having an approval system never really eliminates that risk. It helps if the smartest/experienced person controls the approval process - but what if they don't?

One consultant in our group pointed out that one of his nameless clients never achieved a true brand presence because it took them too long to approve the tweets. Can you imagine that happening for Superbowl ads, and people in business being ok with it? "Sorry, sir, your ad can't air on the Superbowl - you guys took too long to submit your bid/content to us." Wouldn't be tolerated.

Interestingly folks in my camp group noted that customer support organizations and service-oriented companies may have a speed advantage in social media because they are already programmed for courteous, fast-twitch (though sometimes quite scripted) response to customers. But its also true that you won't want to get to know your customers just at the time they are most angry with you about the product. Ideally you are engaging with them in happier times, and the customer support stuff is part of a concetrated whole. One attendee called this kind of proactive outreach "friend-raising" (a term he heard elsewhere so if you know the original, happy to edit this post to properly attribute). You need to make the friends before you need them in crisis.

One last intriguing question - we didn't answer it in our group because this area is so evolving- is the fate of the nonprofit world inside social media. Events like Twestival or calamities like Haiti and Chile point the way to twitter being used as a fundraising tool par excellence for non-profits. Yet, you can also be so inundated with cause marketing on social media that they become like spam, one attendee said - we may end up just tuning them out. As people use social media to tug at the heartstrings and tell stories, will folks get annoyed with all the yanking and pulling and turn away from the noise?

This is why I love this area - the universe is expanding.

Live it vivd!

On Love: View from the Chicken Coop

Betsy — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Ok, both Tara Hunt and Mona Nomura have taken up the tricky topic of “love and greatness” and now it’s my turn. I feel compelled as a feminist, a geek girl, and as the only one of the three of us to be married right now, to offer a different perspective. I will note from the outset that in their essays greatness is narrowly defined as “career greatness” but even with that definition I believe you can have both things – it’s just tricky, a lot of work, and there’s definitely some luck involved at any given point in time.

And this is just how I see it: remember, your mileage may vary.

So here’s what I grew up with: My mom was one of a handful of women in her medical school class – back when medical schools were considered progressive for letting women in to be doctors AT ALL. She married in her 20s, had me in her late 20s, at a time when she actually had two years off from working by default (they were living in a foreign country and only Dad had a working visa for that timeframe). It got harder later.

The advent of the microwave (yes, there was actually a time BEFORE microwaves) and the rice cooker (no Asian family should be without) made her return to work after the birth of my youngest sister manageable. All of us girls learned how to measure out and wash the rice and turn the rice cooker on 45 minutes before dinner would be done. We learned to put the meat and veggies in the microwave at various times before the dinner would be done, so they’d be ready for when the parents got home. Dad left his work promptly at 5 to get home at 6pm. Mom – because she was re-entering the workforce – might be slightly later but she came home to a meal (however lame culinary-wise, it was healthy) ready to eat. We kids branched out and learned how to make spaghetti, chicken in the oven, “real” dishes from Betty Crocker cookbooks, but I’m talking about when we were too young for the real stove, the microwave was the Latchkey Kids’ Friend. We had a latchkey babysitter too, btw – she made sure we didn’t burn the house down with our cooking experiments.

So what do you see there? Training the kids, having a reliable sitter, and technological kitchen marvel = ad hoc way to make both parents get what they want out of their careers. As Mom put it to me once, “we just made it up as we went along.”

Mom and Dad are still married btw. Their marriage set a high bar for me in terms of what I expected from dudes – support of a strong woman’s career choices, a man who knows how to clean (my Dad is an exacting housekeeper and himself trained me to scrub floors), and a setup where both people liking what they do for their jobs. Mom and Dad would shoo the kids away from the kitchen and “talk medicine” (their version of shop) after dinner.

My choices – because of the generation I’m in - were different from my parents. For one thing, I’ve had more than one career (not just technology) and all my jobs were the ones where it’s easy to be workaholic. I married late (at 40) and when I did, I married someone 9 years younger than me (who works in my field so we can talk shop, who cleans like a fiend – Freud would no doubt have something to say here). I’m unlikely to have kids at this point; I have cats and chickens. I have succeeded at taking mostly “linchpin” jobs (see Seth Godin’s book of the same name) and well, linchpin jobs demand a lot of passion and a lot of time. I have an artistic side that doesn’t get enough time – it wants to be a linchpin all on its own and it doesn’t pay enough.

I wanted to get married all along in there, mind you. I was thinking I’d get married after college “sometime.” But the relationships weren’t right, or the relocation issues weren’t right, or as Mona points out the career achievements weren’t right (too early for everyone to sacrifice their career for a love relationship we were still learning how to have). Mine was the generation who had kids later in life, or, (gasp!) after 40 even. Having the biological clock ticking can force many women who want kids as a primary goal, to accept career regression and/or settle for a lame dude just so they hit that date. It's a personal choice but I promised myself I was never going to do that. I could always adopt if I wanted kids later.

And boy, you just can’t time when the right partner will show up. I won’t lie to you – being single that long while people marry and marry around you, can suck really hard. There were definitely people I saw get married early out of general fear of being alone (they got divorced later). The world at times seems built for couples and married friends can have “couples amnesia” or “couples denial” about what it was like to be single.

Guy CEOS of startups don’t talk about it much, but heartbreak is also tiring. There’s the heartbreak of your startup not working out and the heartbreak of your relationship not working out, and in tech, they can come at the same damn time and they hit on similar but different fronts. I remember one tech job where I left on lunch break, sobbed my eyes out, and then came back composed and kicked ass. I did this ritual for several months. You do what you have to do.

But there were also “career moments” I wouldn’t trade for anything. One joke I had with myself after a breakup was to ask myself, “if I won $100 million in the Lotto right now, would that make me feel better even though X dude is gone? “– and frankly, sometimes it would. Why? Because with that set of resources, my life would so clearly leave the plane it was on currently and rise up to enable a lot of other dreams I had.

Complex, interesting, GREAT people don’t have just one dream. Love is important, but no life is one-dimensional, and love itself is more dimensional than just romantic love. Except maybe in that stupid Twilight series. And if you want a bloodsucker or a lupine spouse, you have other issues going on.

(And no, I’m not going to trade my husband for a Lotto ticket. That’s how you know!)

To Mona and Tara (and anyone else struggling with the personal vs. the professional, male or female) all I can offer is my empathy and faith: the struggle to have what you want out of a career and out of your relationships maybe looks like a mess right now but it doesn’t have to be forever. It's just this snapshot in time.

Totally agree, pressures are harder on women because they have kids and historically men haven’t been used to women being the powerhouses of the relationship. Right now, there’s an inequity in how that all shakes out for men and women’s time. For men and women, it can be daunting to find that right partner and sometimes you just don’t have time for it cause too much is going on, or the right folks are not out there – yet. When it’s not working out, it seems like an OR choice. Love OR Greatness. But once it works out – and I believe firmly it will – then it will be Love AND Greatness. Everyone deserves their shot at both.

Keep the faith.

TEDActive was a different kind of conference

Betsy — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:39:00 GMT

TEDActive was a different kind of conference for me ( though similar to other technical conferences in its lack of sleep, regular pace, and of course, being thrown in with large quantities of people I didn’t know before I came). That lack of sleep hampers the writing of this blog post, but I wanted to capture impressions before they vanish back into the rhythm of my everyday life.

For those not familiar, TEDActive is an event affiliated with the main TED conference and who shares the slogan “Ideas Worth Spreading.” The main TED has been popularized by public exposure to the educational and inspiring “TED Talks” of about 18 minutes long that are shown on the TED Web site. TEDActive is a small conference, only a few hundred folks larger than Gnomedex in Seattle, whereas the main TED conference in Long Beach was over 1,500 attendees. Unlike Gnomedex ,TED talks are not streamed live to the public, but to the TEDActive and other satellite events only. Later, the public will see the TED talks on the Ted.com Web site but in the timeframe immediately around the conference, only a few trickle out at a time.

For this reason, and the fact that TEDActive is also curated in terms of who they let in, the conference has an intimate feel that I suspect (and was told by some folks) doesn’t exist at the larger TED in Long Beach. TEDActive takes place at the same hotel, and if you happen to stay there, you will see the same folks over and over at meals as well as in the conference sessions.

The Palm Springs conference viewing area had beanbag chairs, two elaborate circular beds with ceiling-mounted viewing screens(fits up to 4 adults) , couches, and individual stuffed chairs. The space shared with TEDActive attendees fosters more casual conversation, the TED talks themselves are provocative, and the picnic lunches (have to form groups of 6 to get the basket) also encourage more intense conversation.

What did I learn at TED? There was one point where I said to a woman stuck accidentally near me for a few minutes during a large party logjam of people – “we should probably chat because I’ve found at TED that everyone I talk to, I was meant to hear something they have to say.” Lo and behold, she was working in the education field, and though she was likely thinking I was a nut for being mystical, she had some observations about my critical thinking project and the challenges of online high school learning that were insights I needed to have.

Because you will likely get to view the TED talks themselves on TED.com I won’t report on those, but I will elaborate on the overall effect. The TED talks forced an intellectual and emotional focus that, even while prone in the TED bed watching the overhead screens, I felt like I had run a brain marathon. All my high school and college science and math classes officially mattered - otherwise I would have been left behind. The insights I could draw from design projects (Web or otherwise) and game theory articles reverberated as speakers invoked words related to those prior learnings. The insistence on being mentally present and exploring what it means to be a human, trying to do good, created a rigor that was exhausting even with coffee but brilliantly invigorating like a good gym workout. TED talks themselves referred to pattern-seeking, the difference between experiencing something and experiencing the memory of something, and hit home with themes like obesity and food. And the tone was positive.

While I was tweeting that TED’s message is that everything is possible and humans can do some good, (and I did a bad job on twitter, my phone was having button problems) UW Professor Kathy Gill reminded me that I was speaking from a position of privilege. And let’s face it, I am. I have a graduate degree, a hitherto exciting life, an exciting job, and I live in a nation with a better record of treating women well than some. I am not a slave and I can decide to divorce or marry on my own. I can vote.

But sitting pretty in the aura of privilege that is my life – or for many TEDsters, their lives – really isn’t enough after you’ve been through several days of the conference. By being shown the world’s problems and how we are all implicated and affected by them, it is just embarrassing to think about how little potential we are likely using. And one’s notion of privilege completely shifts when faced with some stark realities.

Don’t get me wrong, I did the businessy stuff I had set out to do there. I participated in the social media workshop (above photo), talked to people in the Bing innovation lounge, wore my Techcrunch50 startup shirts for our beloved-by-Bing TC50 startups, and cheered Microsoft employees Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Gary Flake on as they demoed fresh innovations from search and a new way to look at Internet data, Pivot. But don’t think that was the only thing I was doing at TED – far from it. I am still digesting the impact the talks and the conference had upon my brain.

But back to stark realities. Glenna, a woman at TEDActive with a terminal bran cancer diagnosis who likely won’t be around for Christmas 2011 told us how she reveled in her choices – to go to school, work, play, do only what she wants to do with her life for as long as she has left. Any of us who expect to live to see Christmas 2011 are privileged – rich or poor, able to attend TED or not, and she asks us: what will we be doing?

Most of you reading this blog have choices, have the smarts, have the capability to make this world a little better from where you stand. Let’s make this next year really matter.

Live it vivid!

Going to TEDActive

Betsy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:17:00 GMT

TEDActive is not actually the first conference of my year - CES was, and while I tweeted a lot about it during and after, I really didn't blog about it. There are some things still churning around in my brain from talking with Chris Brogan that are blog-worthy, but then I got derailed working on education stuff and... now I'm heading for TEDActive. Bing has sponsored a low-key lounge with amazing installations in/nearby, and I'll of course be supporting our Techcrunch50 startups by wearing the Bing Loves t-shirts during my time at TEDActive.

I've been warned to get sleep beforehand, be prepared to stay up all night talking (like those dorm conversations in college) and that my mind will be blown. It's the first conference that's insisted my whole self be represented - that is, not only the Bing shill or the person I am at work, but actually show the whole brain makeup. Fortunately for me, I never really had a decently hardened shell in the first place, so that stuff has been leaking through every so often anyway (poetry! bath bombs! painted shoes! chickens!) But it's interesting to have such an insistence on *presence* for a conference. No really, they told us to leave laptops and phones at HOME if we could.

Don't think I can leave all the electronics at home but I'm certainly ok with keeping it under wraps most of the time.

If you are reading this and are going/have gone to TEDActive before I salute you, if you are enroute, I meet you there, if you've met me, well, know that I write this with greater sleep backlog than probably when you met me.

Live it vivid!

Uncompromising customer service = Bliss (Soaps)

Betsy — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:15:00 GMT

So, folks who have followed this blog know that I know how to make bath bombs (or fizzes), have given a presenation at Foo Camp East on how to make them, give them away to fellow social media conference panelists, and mentioned Bliss Soaps, (http://blisssoap.com/ which is in the Capitol HIll neighborhood of Seattle. I had mentioned Bliss because they are such a great example of social capital (you can tell by their reviews on Yelp but ask any Seattle woman who has bought from them and you hear this sort of raving reverential tone)..

Well, over a month ago if you were on the Bliss customer list, you learned about some trouble that was happening with the company, and to rally back and stay in business they were offering essentially half off to their loyal community members. I wasn't planning on buying bath bombs but I figured Christmas was coming, I can certainly pack these into packages or suitcases to relatives.I bought about $100 worth online.

A bit later, an email was sent out from Bliss saying - wow, we are so grateful, but never expected this response - we are officially backlogged from all of your Internet orders, hope to get them done in the next few weeks.

As folks may have noticed from tweeted blog photos, I was then out of the country for the last 3 weeks and so didn't notice the stuff I had ordered hadn't made it yet (and in that sense also, no harm, no foul).

When I did realize this week the package never made it while I was gone, I sent off an email and said, hey, I'll drop by the store this weekend and if you haven't mailed it off, then I can save you the postage.. I stopped by Friday and despite posted hours, it looked like they hadn't opened yet, and chatted with another woman who was waiting and a UPS guy who assured us: those guys have been doing a lot of mailing, they are still around.

I'm lucky; I'm employed - I can eat the $100 if they had actually closed shop for good. But I had a pang: I liked these guys. I hoped to hell they weren't a recession casualty.

Today because of Christmas stuff, I didn't make it over to their store. Instead, tonight, the co-founder of the store, Chuck, HAND-DELIVERED my bath bombs to me at my house.

Chuck took off his shoes as he stepped through the front door, gave his profound apologies.They are still catching up on orders. He and the guy who is the front man in the store Phil, tend to be in the shop behind the retail part of the store, working on stuff. As a company, they are still working through the issues that made them have the sale in the first place. Chuck looked really tired.

Then he choked up in talking about how the community response was saving their business. "You can laugh at me after I leave," he said, kinda making fun of the fact no one expects the owner of a company at their house on Saturday evening - "but it's people like you that mean everything to us."

I told him Bliss is good stuff, and the community knows it, and I'm glad things are looking up. He shook my hand, put on his shoes, and left.

If you like bath bombs and go to Bliss, just keep knocking so they hear you in the back.

But if you aren't able to go to Bliss, but you do social media, or work with customers, or think you understand marketing - well, just think of Chuck on a Saturday night, fighting for his little company to keep going, and saying he's sorry in person to a customer he'd never met.

That's something for all of us to live up to. Live it vivid!

Giving a 5 minute talk at the Kodak Theater (140 Characters Conference)

Betsy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:29:00 GMT

Doing the Ignite presentation and chatting a little bit with Scott Berkun (who has a book coming out on public speaking) I figured I'd do a followup on another 5 minute talk and some things I learned from doing a non-Ignite, 5 minute talk. For 140 Characters Conference in LA, they started playing the music - the dreaded music - when you need to start closing down your talk. I wasn't the only speaker caught short, but since nowhere else in my world did they ever start playing music to shut me up before:) , I figure I'd share what I learned.

You can see how the talk came out here. For those who wanted to know how it was meant to close down, summary of the slides you missed..

Stefan's Expression upon seeing me in his office the next day at 6 am
Twitter Stats from the overall launch period
Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void cartoon about purists being the ones with no skin in the game (be relentless for your customers, it doesn't have to be perfect at all times, and after being up all night, how can it be?)

I figured from the fact I was giving the talk people would figure out that the Bing team actually supported everything I did that evening, but next time I'll front load some of the closing message up higher. I gave this talk again as a part of an hour-long NW Entrepreneur University presentation this past week (www.nwen.org) and it was nice to be able to give Hugh his due as well as credit to the twitter-friendly nature of our PR team.

All photos here taken by http://twitter.com/adventuregirl, otherwise known as Stef Michaels. :)

Timing and pace

First, don't let Ignite presentations, hard as they are, make you overconfident. I had less than 20 slides for my 5 minute talk but what I really should have had, was 5. Maybe 10. The fact I went over 10, set me up for danger.

I also did not auto-advance the slides, as I did with the Ignite talk, which would have forced me to complete on time (I was a couple slides short)

Instead, I drilled the talk at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. This was good for keeping me brief and moving off the slides without a timer, and I believe was the reason I finished with my story intact (though my kicker slides not exposed).

Expect what happened to me, will happen to you. They will start the 5 minute clock but your slide deck won't be up. Keep talking even as you fuss with it.

Content

For a 5 minute talk, do a brief overview and front-load. That's what saved me (once the music started) - my most complex and entertaining story was the first one I told (and possibly could have been the only one I told, but I wanted to balance the presentation with more data).
Ignite has it right - memorise your words and use vivid pictures. In my case I had to animate some twitter tweets because I was talking about them - but if you have a more visually oriented talk, go the Ignite route and do minimal words, big photo.
For 140 Characters, I saw some presenters lose their audience (10 minute was the longest, so not even that long a period in which to lose people) by being dry and not conforming to the "story" format that Jeff Pulver really espouses. The best stories were human and vivid (Wm. Marc Salsberry's photos didn't work and he had us all weeping from the narrative of his foray into tech photography and the support for his brother dying of cancer).
AV fallback = interpretive dance. I joked with my manager Stefan and coworker Aya that if I couldn't use the slide deck of the tweets I'd do an interpretive dance of what happened on launch night. I actually DID think of some poses I would have to do, if I got no visuals. That cracked me up and helped me mentally before going on stage.

Venue

The Kodak Theater is a 3,000+ seat venue. This is where people receive their Oscars and by custom Jack Nicholson has his own marked chair. If you have a chance to speak here, do, but be prepared to think "Holy crap, this place is REALLY BIG!"
The nice thing about Kodak is that it is a beautiful piece of architecture. There are lush balconies, an awesome sense of history, and while enormous, it doesn't quite scare the way a stadium or arena venue could, because it has STYLE.
The AV guy, JT, was awesome but I wasn't used to the cameraman actually flipping from me to the screen of my laptop. Other panelists I talked to, who had to sit in front of monitors showing thier faces, also had eerie feelings. There may be no way to rehearse the sensation without being in the venue, but practicing in front of a mirror could help people get over their own faces.

This photo is more of what I looked like to myself when the camera was on me and not my laptop. Lights are super bright when you are onstage -people warned me and it is true that you really can't see any faces in the audience.

Garb

I wore a skirt thinking I'd be miked and walking around, but I actually ended up behind a podium (to work the laptop). This meant that a key element of my presentation,a 1920s style cloche, stole some of the show (which was fine by me, its an homage to the decor of the theater). I know most of you won't want to wear 20s hats, but it helped disguise my bad hair day and turned me into a "character."
If I had walked around, I would have tried to imitate Berkun (see his ignite video mentioned in prior post) and his wider gestures. From my high school theater daze, I remembered that people see you as mostly tiny on stage and you can get away with more exaggerated arms and motions.
I saw killer boots at this conference (after all, it was LA). Next time I'm going for OSSM footgear and walking around the stage.

Hope this helps others in the same boat - live it vivid!

Betsy

Giving an Ignite Presentation - What I learned at Gnomedex 2009

Betsy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:47:00 GMT

Note: All photos this page Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com

I am grateful to Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media for nudging me into giving my first Ignite talk at Gnomedex 2009, in the same way I'm grateful for previous circumstances nudging me to bungee-jump off a bridge near Victoria Falls or tandem hang-glide off a cliff near Rio de Janeiro. Doing an Ignite - like doing one of those crazy stunts - changes your brain.

Because other resources online helped me get ready, and because it's not really like any other kind of presentation, I offer some observations for people wanting to do an Ignite talk themselves. I hope you find them useful and look forward to seeing yours at the next Ignite!

Preparation and Delivery

It helped that I'd been to several Ignite events, including the first one ever (held in Seattle). I had seen various topics presented really well and I kenned the general vibe. Though the Gnomedex venue last Friday had no alcohol, many of the Ignite venues do, which can help.
I picked a topic around which I had strong feelings (social media 'guruhood') and knew a lot about, and tried to make it funny. The important part of the formula there is the strong feelings - it's a hard enough format without adding apathy in to weigh you down. Passion buoys. Use it!
Read other people's pointers. Required reading and viewing were helpful items prepared by Scott Berkun (who is writing a book about giving presentations). His stuff especially helps you craft and prep the deck.
Scott Berkun will tell you about the double slide trick. I will tell you about the blurred slide trick. Meaning, have slides that could do double duty for each other, even though they are different images. For example the "trail" and the "foursquare" slide of mine are really about the same premise (social gurus tooting and you finding them). I could give either slides' points no matter which of the two were visible. Also, the "good" social media guru and the "bad" social media guru slides - since "bad" was the opposite of good, I had some breathing room to recover.
Get better photos than I had. I was paranoid about copyright and except for photos I took myself, and one Scott Beale photo with permission, the rest were (aiieeee ) Powerpoint stock art. If I had it to do over I'd have gotten better images.
Pare, pare, pare. My original idea for the ignite deck had 5 ideas per slide. Too many. I tried for 3 points per slide. I ran out of time on some of them, even in the final performance. Jason Grigsby's advice was my watchword here. Improv comedy is improv editing.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. If you haven't gone through your deck 12x (ie, one hour of solid practice) you are slacking. Sit with a long suffering friend for an hour and just do it. I could recite slide order driving to work. Those were days I did not carpool. :)
There are two modes of preparation for Ignite. The drill mode where you have the deck done and now you are practicing delivery, ad libbing at times but the slides are all set to move at 15 seconds. The prep mode, where the deck is still changing based on how you are talking about the slides. Know which mode you are in and no cheating!
It's important to drill without starting over, as Jason Grigsby notes. Even if you mess up. In drill mode, you soldier on til you have one completed rev.
Drilling daily also teaches you when you get stale and sick of speaking. It's like overtraining - the first run through of the day sucks, but so does the last one (if it's an ignite talk). I was very conscious of not wanting to practice too much day of the talking, but knowing I had to get the "first timer" jitters out.
In my early practices I was saying too much and running out of breath.Good thing you don't die after holding your breathe for 5 minutes. Have someone sit with you and coach you on when to breath. Usually it's after you make a point, but it's hard to remember.
I tried to figure out the right pace through a number of tactics. I did one rehearsal in a John Wayne accent just to try for alternate delivery. Then I watched Randy Pausch's Last Lecture and some Margaret Cho standup routines about race. Both of those two have excellently paced delivery with humor.
Use shame if you have to, and channel muses. I used Pausch to shame myself somewhat (dude is dying of cancer and he did it, so woman up Betsy!) and Cho for her insane faces and impeccable timing. (I know I had to have been channeling Cho because Randy Stewart, who took these pics of me, tweeted that I had made faces during the talk and he was glad he had a zoom. )

"We can take them!"

As you might expect, the actual experience of diving off a bridge with a harness and straps around your feet changes your perspective and likewise, so does an ignite talk.

I bought new clothes for this (hey, I'm a girl). The pants had to flow and I had to be able to raise my arms over my head without the shirt whacking out.
An hour before, find a nook to get your head together. Before the talk, that afternoon,I tried to practice. There really was no place to do it at Bell Harbor without being like the crazy old dude on the street corner who talks to people you can't see. What I should have done was snuck off to my car in the garage and drilled - instead I ruined some guy's cell phone call in a side conference room by babbling to myself. I also did some yoga stretches which was also fairly embarrassing but I was starting to clench up.
Mental breaks help. When I got sick of my own voice in the hour before the talk, I went back to looking at Margaret Cho routines. I was trying for funny so I needed her as my muse. Pick a Youtube video that has the tone of your ignite talk and watch it when you are sick of drilling. It really helps shift the chemicals in your head.
Remember the challenge and cut yourself some slack. Watching Elan Lee leave the stage after nailing the first Ignite Gnomedex talk - he is a fabulous presenter innately - showed me what it really costs to do an ignite even if you are a veteran. The two people before me, literally stood against the wall and panted afterwards. You can't help it - your adrenalin is up and you are coming down from a chemical cocktail.
Take what comfort you can. Brady introduced me and I used that time without the mike to ham it up. Cynically, I was thinking - hey, better bow now before I do the talk, just in case I bomb and they don't want to clap later! But the movement (bowing, flourishing my arms cause I didn't know what to do with them without the mike) actually loosened me up and carried me through most of the talk ok.
Being on stage, you can be more expansive with your movements. Death grip on the microphone does not work. But more than that, at the beginning of the presentation Brady was with me, and it's psychologically much easier on me when I share a spotlight. Knowing I was sharing let me be expansive and I tried to use that feeling while I had it (it fled quickly! ).
You are supposed to pick out faces in the audience and talk to them - I blew that part. I just looked around randomly.I have no real memory of anyone I looked at. :)
I made mistakes and kept going. The audience does not know what you leave out. Use that fact!
Figure out what your best last sentence is head of time. It's hard to tell when the slide will blank out, so I ended slightly early with my last sentence and handed the mike to Brady.Other presenters seemed to end right on time. Your mileage may vary.

Live it vivid!

Blogher09 - the evolution of a conference

Betsy — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:42:00 GMT

Coming back from Chicago inundated me with work, and so I'll admit to only lately becoming aware of negative Blogher09 reactions to both the size and the swag-gish aspect of the conference. You'd think I would have been in the thick of the ire, being a sponsor, but I didn't get the same vibe as the critics at all. I wrote this after seeing Blogher co-founder Jory DesJardin's post which resonated with me on a lot of levels (In my blogging I don't care about ads, product reviews, or being known for much except enabling others to do community stuff).

It's true, that Bing came to Blogher with swag at ready. I forgot most of my business card stash and handed out Bing stickers with my name scribbled on the back instead. Microsoft Spa appointment recipients left with travel packs and meetup attendees ended up with Pokens, a cute little gizmo that exchanges social media info like a USB. To be honest, the Bing folks felt like bringing swag was good manners. We weren't sure what other companies could afford this year, and we knew that for many bloghers this was the only conference they might attend all year. Unlike the geek elite who are drowning in USB keys and t-shirts, this was it for some people and so we wanted to give away stuff that would be worthwhile.

As to brands, I personally (as an experiment) wore three different Bing-branded t-shirts and juxtaposed them with the brands I encountered for fun. So, you could say I contributed to making the conference more like Spons-her.That wasn't a medal, that was Bing across my chest. But everywhere I went, it showed I was willing to answer questions about Bing and people asked them. Or they savored their favorite crazy Bing ad.

Branded shirt or not, I also made time (despite meetup and booth required shifts) to attend one session where many people were tearing up or opening up and weeping. I say this because, no matter how bad you think Windows Vista has treated you, nobody but nobody is crying at PDC or Tech Ed. :) And a gaming conference? Forget it.

I sat in the front to help take pictures of the panel so I saw it all up close, women telling their very real stories of grief, change, and transformation. Babies died, innocence died, old ways of thinking died and you know, when something dies or changes, often people cry. Bloghers in the audiemce told their stories and cried. At that point there is only one brand - human - and we all have it tattooed across our chests. It's hard for me to think anyone went to the session I went to, and then felt like Blogher was only commercialism.

(And, yes, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile team was in the audience too, and they told me they were as moved as I was. )

I wasn't able to be at the Community Keynote but I was told later it was the same intensity. The blog posts people read aloud ripped through to the heart of the listeners and people at the cocktail party I talked to, still had to shake themselves to get out of the funk (in a good way) the keynote created. Talking about it brought the bloghers "back there" to the narrative of the keynote .

You know, some people may have had a hard year, and maybe being showered in free swag was what they got out of blogher. For them, maybe it was the chance to feel like for once, having too much, abundance, pampered materially. I'm a geek girl who has too many USB keys and conference t-shirts. I am lucky to take or leave material things.

For others, surrounded by all this emotion (and writing is a very private effort even if the results are public) the brazen storytelling and constant talking, sharing, expressing may have driven some to just spend a few nights with a book and the bathtub in the hotel. There was one night I did that, the last one I was in town. The sleep deprivation just crashed me out, and I knew I'd be meeting someone for breakfast the next day before my plane.

Blogher as it grows up to become its next phase, and the phase after that, is only going to get denser and richer like one of those ridiculous lava chocolate cakes. It will be in different languages, it will combine new groups of women, it will engage on all sides of the political and economic and social fence (I would have loved to see the Palin session as well but again, only heard from others how that went). It can't please everyone in the same ways but it can continue to be a rich and supportive mix of both old and new bloggers, niche and broad topic writers, paid and unpaid.

Blogher10 is an awesome prospect - the 10th year, New York, and incredible momentum around the voices of women. Whether I'm a Bing booth babe again or not, I'm going. See you there.

Live it vivid!

Brands Gone Wild - Bing & other brands at Blogher 2009 (Part 2)

Betsy — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:25:00 GMT

As an experiment, for most of the Blogher 2009 conference (except when I worked out in the gym), I opted to wear a Bing t-shirt everywhere I went. We are a new brand, and I figured it would help not only spread brand awareness but would allow me to be remembered if anyone had questions about Bing when they saw me.

Yes I had clean ones for every day, thanks for asking. :) There was the ibing, ubing (employee), the regular plain bing (official ones we give away), and "bring it/bing it" (don't ask) -- visually enough alike that I'd jog the memory but different enough you would not get bored if you knew me.

This meant that the truly wacky moments of branding during Blogher, I was showing the totem or waving the colors. And there were wacky moments.

My first moment of brand wildness was realizing I was sitting next to the guy who drives the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile at breakfast. You know what's coming here don't you?

Doggone Dave, at the helm of the Oscar Mayer Wiener

That breakfast, I was also sitting with Betsy Weber of Techsmith (I'm the Other Betsy) and we vowed upon hearing they were giving rides at lunch that WE HAD TO GO. I mean who can resist the Big Bun?

Here it is in full glory...

The Oscar Mayer crew took video of the "Betsy and Betsy" show as part of their ongoing tips for bloggers; stay tuned at the www.hotdoggerblog.com for more info on that.

Betsy of Techsmith really is an instigator - next she wanted to go for a ride in a Bitchun Yellow Camaro - we didn't EXACTLY follow the route GM wanted and we MAY have been irregular in our driving habits. People got out of our way though. No photos are provided here to protect the innocent and GM. :)

Next, I was getting ready for the cocktail party when I had more close encounters of the Brand Kind; an unusual visitor to the Microspa led by some Office folks.

And on Saturday (once again with Betsy Weber - do you see a trend here? :) - posting with the Michelin man. Note how the curve of the Michelin brand is echoed by the phrase on my shirt. And yes, dude was self-inflating the whole time we posted for that photo and I don't mean ego. :) I mean that suit is its own air conditioner....

What can we conclude from this experiment? Apparently if you are riding in a giant hotdog, anonymously screaming by in a yellow Camaro, following a giant feminine potato down escalators and huga beehive-shaped tire dude, nothing really bad happens to you from the brand police. At least, Stefan didn't call on my cell to fire me.

Bring it and bing it!

Bing at Blogher 2009 (aka #blogher09): Part One

Betsy — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:24:00 GMT

I'm writing this in the Chicago airport in the familiar happy post-conference exhaustion. Unlike my previous Blogher attendance, I was doing more booth babe/evangelism of a product than being a social media expert, and it was cool to see how folks have reacted to Bing. And I got into Chicago at the right time - luckily for me - to catch the Chicago appearance of Tara Hunt and the Whuffaoke crew at a meetup at The Coop, a Chicago co-working space.

The Coop Party - met some really cool local folks interested in creativity and design

The Whuffaoke crew parked outside The Coop.

What drivers see - the view behind Winnie the Winnebago above.

Tara Hunt,right, getting ready to rawk the mike at Whuffaoke

Blogher this year was a sold-out conference - and it sold out months ago. To help combat disappointment, they added "Lobbycon" and some additional registration spaces but I think we taxed the Sheraton to its limits. I tried to find a photo setup that was emblematic of Blogher and honestly, other people took better ones. See here for a stunning array of bloghers' photos.

As mentioned, I wasn't really free to roam too much, between presenting at the MicroSpa with some amazing women bloggers and working the booth. As part of our presenations about Search Overload and Bing, I met Devra and Aviva, cofounders of http://www.parentopia.com/ and authors of Mommy Guilt . I also got to meet Beth Blecherman of Techmamas. All of these women are presenters of great poise and grace and I learned a lot from watching them in our presentations.

Here's me at the booth demoing video search:

I did see a panel moderated by Ponzi Pirillo, and featuring Kelly Russell-Donner, Kate from Sweet|Salty and Daniela Capistrano about Transformational Power of Blogging . It reminded me that blogging was about bravery and storytelling.Corporations could learn from the storytelling skills found in these "issue blogs." If your brand packed as powerful a punch as discussions of babies dying and sexual assault, you wouldn't need marketing programs.

I snuck away from the booth, leaving Nathan Buggia behind, to see one more session. Here's Nate:

I'm always interested in learning more about search issues that cross all engines, and Vanessa Fox's Advanced SEO session was fabulous - she is really great at adjusting the level of discussion for technically wonky and technically newbie audience members and really approachable. She was mobbed at the end. :)

Next year, Blogher turns 10 years old, and it will be a blow-out celebration in New York (and no doubt even bigger than this conference, which burst the Sheraton at the seams). See you there!

Transparency is good, but not a replacement for the "old objectivity"

Betsy — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:08:00 GMT

I was a newspaper reporter before I went into Web technology as a profession, and well before becoming any kind of blogger, so when I comment on journalism I have both perspectives ensconced in my brain. I was also a reporter before the journalism field took a lot of flack for lack of objectivity, so my expectations may surprise some of you jaded by disappointment in journalism.

The title of this blog post riffs from a well-written piece by David Weinberger Transparency is the New Objectivity. In his piece, he notes that the hyperlinked nature of online articles and blogs, which enable presentation of reference documents (ie, the materials used by a reporter to create a news story) create a more authoritative sourcing and thus more respect for that author's work. Also, he believes respect is fostered by an author's transparency with regard to personal and political views.

In other words, if I know your political bent,and I see photos/scans of all the documents you used for Watergate, I'd believe you more 'cause I know where you are coming from. I could reconstruct for myself how you came to the conclusions of your news story, and agree with you based on that knowledge.

While I am actually a fan of transparency, and it's nice especially for journalism students to be able to recreate the thought processes behind great investigative journalism, I'm not sure presentation of author views and reference material alone is enough to create the kind of journalism that was the goal of the "old objectivity." We can't afford to mistake the gloss of transparency for the heavy lifting objectivity in journalism was supposed to do.

Transparency of reference materials

Transparency will not always result in the most accurate reporting coming out. As I tweeted to Dare Obasanjo, what happens if your sources are people in Iran who are afraid for their lives, to go on the record. Do you not publish a blog post from Iran because you can't be 100% transparent about the sources?

Another problem is that the kind of investigative journalism that creates social change (see Seattle Times Health special project on MRSA) may require creating a new record of assembled data (a db for example). Do you as a reader now distrust the data because it was assembled by The Seattle Times and not an easily referenced document? How will you vet their db analysts? Will you look at the code to ensure they coded it right and their select statements are properly formed?

Even if the reference materials are simple flat files and/or readable in a browser, will you as reader really have 5 hours reconstructing each detail of the Seattle Times data processes, or do you just want to look up the hospital near you to see if the doctors wash their hands? Why pay for the paper for access to this information if you have to re-create the reporting entirely yourself?

Placing a higher value on linkable reference materials also brings out the question of coverage skewing toward what is easiest to link to. Will reporting just become groups of links to documents that are already public? Link to videos and photos that were already reported (but maybe presented the wrong experts or sources in the captions?)

And while we are at this presentation of a collection of links, well, doesn't this notion sound like a search engine results page to anyone? I have yet to see anyone claim that a search engine can replace heavy-hitting, muckraker journalism. Why? Well, often a reporter has studied an area for far longer than the casual Web surfer, so the content value added in synthesizing the information will be higher (it's why you ask only certain people to help you fix your computer, and others you don't bother - the experienced people know what to look for and how to troubleshoot).

But also, search engine results are presented in response to queries, and are dependent on the user knowing what terms to put into the box (this is why the bing user experience is so interesting, it tries to visually nudge you to get more of an idea what you really want back). If the searcher doesn't know what cognitive linkages to make between documents beforehand, it's not likely the materials would come back together.

To get 3 document links back that resemble the 3 reference materials for a news story, you'd have to know what was in the docs, and their relationships to one another with regard to the investigative conclusion. In other words, you'd have to know the horrifying statistics of MRSA before you put down the search terms. This is why the term "human aggregator" doesn't begin to talk about what a good reporter does with information - they really have to analyze it enough to teach other people how to make these connections.

Reliance on only linkable/readily transparent items creates other dynamics. Doesn't even have to be laziness but shortage of time...What if you are blogging nights and weekends and have a day job, without the time to look at older documents on microfiche at the courthouse or pull public paper records to affirm for yourself things got done? The temptation will be high to link to what's easy and write about what's easy and the bar will lower to ease of linkage. Really, only one rich news org has the resources to do any real reporting - then the rest of us just link to that, right?

People hotly debated whether Techcrunch should have released the Twitter business documents they blogged about, but few really talked about whether actual journalism was being committed around the documents. (Michael Arrington would argue yes of course, but to Silicon Valley outsiders the docs themselves became news. In a j-school context, you could argue that the docs were really just one "fact check" against an emerging Twitter story that Techcrunch has not yet written and now may not ever write.)

Transparency of author viewpoint

Fear of a reporter skewing news coverage based on their background, political views or opinion is at the heart of the objectivity debate. However, this fear of non-objectivity applies to other professions as well and people tend to forget that.

Every day, you hope that your doctor doesn't mind treating people of different political views than her, and will prescribe you the right medicines for your cold regardless of your choice of vacation home. You hope that your bus driver drives the same (safe) way regardless of who is on his bus. You hope the guy giving you the fries and hamburger didn't spit into your food because he hated the rock band on your t-shirt. Heck, people work with people all the time that they can't stand, and for professionalism's sake, they put personal feelings aside.

It's so interesting that people more readily trust there isn't spit in their Coke, but are sure that a reporter is hiding something from them.

What were my own standards of objectivity?

Here's what I understood to be my standard of objectivity, when I was in the journalism profession. I was told by one news editor early in my career that essentially if everyone disagreed with the "bias" of my story - all the special interest groups opposing each other hated it equally- there was a likelihood I had hit the sweet spot of objectivity. I was supposed to get along with my sources, but they were not supposed to be my best friends, and they should not be able to guess which way I would vote in an election. They should not see me as biased against their religion or point of view. To do my job well, both sides had to trust I'd represent their point of view fairly (or at least piss off the other side equally).

So to do a good job, I had to be free to aggravate everyone, because the truth is often complex, hard to get at, and debateable, and if I was always worrying about pleasing people in power or high in celebrity quotient, I wouldn't be representing the truth correctly. The newspaper would stand behind me, protect my notebook (paper not digital), and bail me out of jail for the stories I wrote when powerful public figures or companies went after me. In return, I had to be meticulous in my accuracy, get as much on the record as possible, and as scrupulous about representing as many points of view as would fit in a 6-20 column inch space. It helped that both states I worked in had decent public records laws and my note-taking verbal memory was really good. And I had good editors, who took out things from my stories they felt weren't decently backed up or were redundant and therefore presenting too much of one source's point of view.

Transparency meant something other than documentation or stating my political views of the moment- it went straight to the heart of where I got my money from. If I had ever worked for an organization, owned stock in that organization, had relatives in an organizaation, I either did not cover the story or (as sometimes you see in MSN Money) I would have had to disclose my interest "this columnist owns 5 shares of stock in Microsoft." The appearance of being unable to cover a topic area fairly was good enough to keep me from it. Mostly, journalism kept me out of public activism because as a cub reporter I really didn't want to close down story areas I could write in. Other journalists who were more established (ie, could focus on one beat) could afford to have private causes not related to their beat.

BTW, I found I always had more notes and material than I could fit into a news story. It wasn't sinister, it's that people hate reading anything long.

Even as a freelance book reviewer, which is pure opinion, The Seattle Times constantly ensured I was reading books by people I didn't know, or have any ties to. Being "out of the scene" was helpful because it meant I didn't have a social or political agenda to like or dislike the books.

This is the kind of self-policing relative to a standard of objectivity. A standard of transparency for online journalism might help someone get caught violating the standards of objectivity and fairness but I think the root issues would still remain: did you try to get an objective truth? is the article or post accessible to people of all persuasions and initial points of view? Do you have documents, facts, quotes, witnesses to back up the conclusions of your piece? Are you being a lazy journalist/blogger, or are you digging deeper even as you seem sure the conclusion can be reached for this piece? Have you annoyed everyone equally, even the people you are supposed to be in the pockets of?

So, while I think transparency is good, I don't think it replaces the old goals of good journalism and transcending the reporter's personal point of view to get the complete story out. Empathy is key to good journalism and blog reporting- the ability to put yourself in the flood victim or the astronaut's shoes as they tell their stories. A piece of reporting that goes beyond him/herself to reach other people is usually the most powerful kind of reporting and I'm not sure a page full of links can take the place of that human processing information for a public/purpose well beyond the personal.

bing.com and a decent shot of courage

Betsy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:38:00 GMT

I haven't written much lately because I've pulled some weird stunts, like stay awake 26 hours and tweet for a good percentage of that while triaging bugs. I've put on my painted shoes and my marketing hat and gone to conferences while blitzing in and out of ops calls. This being in PR while shipping web stuff is a little nutty. ( My main search feature is http://www.bing.com/community and like any new community site it is in a constant state of improvement.)

There's a lot of blogging and tweeting going on about bing - some of it even from my team or me - and I think its best if other folks try to parse out the brand, the new features, and the context of what this means for the industry. As usual in my community woo woo way, I have to go back to the people both inside and outside of the search team and that's where I get my bearings on bing.

This search release was assisted by the internal testing of thousands of Microsoft employees on their lunch breaks, spare time, late nights. Way more people than is represented in the search organization, which despite all "still hiring" reports, is still not as big as you'd suspect for an org taking on a major player like Google.

Those employees' feedback made bing what it is today. That's an important difference from other launches.

Then of course there's our twitter and facebook accounts. I know more about those because they started really during the time I joined my current team. Those are the folks that keep us honest, cheer us on, kick our butts, and make us think. This too is an important difference, which I hope will only be assisted by the /community site's forums and blog commenting capabilities. There's more you in bing than there was in Live Search. Because we have these new tools and the folks ready to listen.

People who have gotten email from my Microsoft email address know I always carry the Anais Nin phrase "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage" in my signature. I remember being in the search engineering building, talking with Andy Oakley about the search presentation to MVPS at the MVP summit, and being spontaneously dragged by him into some sort of beer thing with the entire org and VP Satya Nadella giving a short speech.

Satya may shoot me for this bc I don't remember what he said. But I remember looking around at the faces of the search employees around me which were carrying a totally different vibe than two years ago when I left search for Xbox. It's hard to explain those ineffable crowd moments where you know folks are committed and its a quiet commitment, not rowdy, not arrogant, but just in it. Every time I faced a skeptical customer at a demo (you know who you are MS Hater Guy) I remembered that sea of faces, just in it. Showing up and saying hello to the doubters and the haters.

There's a bit more smiling around the building now, because it always feels good to get something out the door. And everybody knows there's more work to do, we can't just stop here. But the essence of bing to me are those non-search employees who never gave up on us, and gave us feedback whether we liked it or not. And the customers, who, whether they liked us or not, cared enough to give us feedback. And of course the search team, who have spent a couple years since I left, working to create this thing you have now before you, called bing. They pushed and pushed through it. Here it is - a start at what we hope will be a new way to think about search.

We hope you try bing of course. And send us feedback via the feedback link, the twitter acct, the blog, the http://www.bing.com/community site. But remember us when you are faced with something tough, where you commit without knowing the outcome, and do it because you choose to & your heart says so. That's what we made it for, that's what we made it with.

Live it vivid!

Community tip of the day: Give the props to people who have helped you

Betsy — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:50:00 GMT

Recently, in the process of promoting Will Code for Green, our killer Live Search API contest that lets you use whatever technology stack you desire to write your Web app, I dug deep and went back to one of my old teachers Tim Maher from http://www.consultix-inc.com who is a Perl guru around these parts of the Northwest. His educational company essentially gets people ready for system administration gigs using some variety of Unix.

Even after more than a decade having passed since I took his class, Tim responded pretty quickly. He kindly said he'd pass the contest along and that he remembered me and was glad I found a tech job I liked.

Which consideirng I'm part of the "Evil Empire" to some Open Source folks, I felt was very gracious and also why I'm blogging about Tim here.

Tim is one of the better technical teachers I've run into in the course of my nefarious tech career and it's because when I took his courses, they iterated each time they were taught. The feedback from one class drove a better experience for the next. When I went, the courses on Unix had been honed to concentrate on things that you needed immediately to get oriented. It had smooth building blocks. Things progressed fast enough that your head stopped just short of exploding, and you could leave his classes and feel like at least some tasks, you could do at your job right away.

What Tim does in his classroom is a great model for certain kinds of software evolution (Agile anyone?), or in my current line of work, honing your presence in social media. Keep listening, keep honing, and keep it central to what your passion is.

I outgrew my passion for Unix/Linux (when it became readily apparent I don't have the temperament to be a system admin - of any stripe) and my ability to explain Unix concepts faded with my memory of where everything was in the filesystem outside of dev/null . I'd be a sucky OSCON evangelist. But Tim lives in this stuff, and he loves it, and I remembered him and his company al this time because he had stayed central to his calling.

There's a complete credibility gap in me recommending his classes - I did not ultimately go into Unix system administration you may have noticed. Also, I'm essentially a PR shill for Microsoft, and I truly think Win7 is sweet, and writing C# games for the Xbox is cool, and Silverlight is da bomb, so I'm not believable as testimony. You have to talk to other people who took him recently and actually remember any of the curriculum to get the detailed goods. :)

But over a decade later, who Tim is as a teacher, his "personal brand" if you will ( I hate that term) is what stands out over time. So it brings out the question - how will *you* be remembered?

Live it vivid!

Tips on personal brand as it pertains to painting your shoes

Betsy — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:10:00 GMT

I was going to write a long post about personal brand, and how I don’t really believe in it as a phrase. I believe in protecting your good name, and standing for something, but I personally am not a product, I personally can’t be bought (only rented) and it was going to be this long diatribe.

Then, as happens in Seattle sometimes, it got sunny and like any other Seattleite, serious thoughts fled my brain and I only wanted to be outside. It was then that I decided to paint more shoes, and from this exercise you can probably learn more about ‘personal brand’ than if I went on a long rant.

First off, I have been dying to paint some shoes ever since Howard Rheingold declined to paint some for me, but instead opted to teach me to paint my own. (He is such a wise sensei of the internet – only when I realized what it meant to paint shoes did I realize why he would not paint shoes for me). I also hadn’t realized this shoe-painting movement or frame of mind, is a pet thing of his and he has been part of the paint-your-shoes movement for quite some time.

Howard’s amazing how-to (which talks about the philosophy too) can be found here: http://www.rheingold.com/paintyourshoeshow.html

The other resource I’ve been reading is the guide to customizing your sneakers by Sabotage in this forum post (there is apparently a book called Sneaker Freaker that really tells all):

http://forums.n-sb.org/index.php?showtopic=11778

Unlike Howard, I don’t trust myself as a visual artist, so the first shoes I tried to paint were some secondhand ones purchased at a thrift store – the loafers you see above. I was overly optimistic – when I read the part about sanding and acetone, I thought – but maybe MY shoes are worn down enough – they seem worn down enough. Ooh lookit the pretty colors!

WRONG! You can see in this photo that the paint is starting to crack on them. I can still wear them places but they won’t last long.

Personal brand tip # 1 – Believe what sage experts who have done this before tell you, even if it means more work you hate. It'll last longer. :)

Personal brand tip # 2: Think about the underlying materials you are working with – old leather shoes have chemicals on them to repel things like paint. You can’t get around the intrinsic nature of what you are working with. In social media, that’s the tools or the tech or the industry OR EVEN YOUR OWN PERSONALITY :) . When you make a name for yourself don’t ignore underlying material.

So this time, I bought 2 sizes of shoes that don’t fit me – so I wouldn’t be as tempted to cut corners or have personal angst if they flaked out as well – and proceeded to follow Howard’s advice more closely.

This time, I skipped the acetone treatment bc he said the sanding is more important – if you listen to Sabotage though, acetone is the way to go.

Once I had sanded to raise a “tooth” I painted white dots. You can't really see the tooth here bc of the distance but the shoes looked suede-like.

And then after that dried, I went for the color.

Personal brand tip #3 that would apply here is: Do not be boring. Black and white works for some people, but in my case, if I was going to go to the trouble of artsy shoes I wanted them to 1) not necessarily match 2) be COLORFUL. You want people to remember who you are right? At least let them remember you on a day when you were "on" and not say, when you wake up in the morning.

I did all this outside. It’s a good idea to paint and to sand and to (next step) spray the clear coat on outside because of the mess/fumes. This is the picture of the shoes drying from the clear coat. I have about 3-4 coats total before I can see if these will flake like the originals.

Personal brand tip #4: If there’s a lot of makeover in your brand, do it in a well-ventilated place. :) (There’s a lot of bad jokes to make here, suffice to let you do it on your own!)

My next step after these shoes dry enough from their clear coat, is to get some friends to “test drive” the shoes and give feedback.

Personal brand tip #5: Try out your social media experiment/identity first with a few people (friendly or at least not haters) to make sure you are on the right track. If my friends find that the 2nd wave of shoes flake like mine do, then I know I need to go the Way of the Acetone. Since I’m recycling these shoes into ‘new shoes’ from Goodwill, I don’t mind taking the time to figure it out.

Bonus tip: Why not test out your personal brand on free services before you start playing in the paid (advertising) or other market? Don’t be afraid to be wrong or innovate.

....I'll let you know how they progress. Thanks again Howard!

Foo Camp East: Some tips for survival and what I presented

Betsy — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:40:00 GMT

This blog post is a combo conference narrative and a summary of my presentation. Because so much of the conference is in the conversations done without fear of blogging (or tweeting), I felt better about airing more on what I presented than speaking for others. Really other folks said more brilliant things – I just don’t own their words. :)

Oh and it rambles a bit – my sleep deficit is starting to look like the national deficit. :P

By all accounts, our experience in Cambridge, MA and the first Foo Camp East was a bit upscale from the normal Foo. For one thing, the building facilities were new – so new they’d not been used yet!

An essential aspect of Foo Camp has often been, well, the camping. Because it was still wintry and rainy and this is Boston and they do things posh there, folks who camped did so on the inside of a snazzy building with shower facilities and a beautiful staircase (in this photo Barney Pell, founder of Powerset, vaults down the staircase).

I, as my readership may expect, was a total wimp and slept at a nearby hotel. But the key to the Foo Camp experience is not to sleep much so I didn’t.They advise you to overdo on sleep before Foo and unfortunately for me, that wasn’t really that possible.

Foo Camp is one of the great unconferences. Participants were told to come expecting to present. I presented on Social Media and Bath Bombs which actually dried faster than expected so folks got to take them home.

Readers of my blog know where the bath bomb recipe is. I first got everyone setup with their own soap molds (stars and hexagons) and artistically arranging the petals/petal fragments at the bottom of the molds before putting the bath fizz mixture in. We used blue as a coloring agent for one bowl of mixture and kept the other white.

While people pressed and stirred and such, I told them why bath bomb making has such parallels to community building and social media. For one thing, you can’t rush the process. It takes about 10 min to spritz a bowl with witch hazel and you can’t skip or over do, you have to keep checking on the consistency to make sure it is gelling right.

Just as community managers have to test the waters repeatedly, and build trust over time. Have the right ingredients to hand. Timing is everything. Gelling seems to happen on its own and you have to be watchful.

Everyone’s bath bomb designs actually (to me anyway) surpassed the ones *I* usually make. A testimony to the power of many people approaching a design problem - imagine what you could do with your software.

Rob Faludi even managed to figure out a way to put his business card elements at the bottom of the molds, and pressed hard – when his came out, his business info was embedded in the bath bombs. He could give them out as business gifts. Dong that had never occurred to me!

I told them about how I had posted the bath bomb recipe on Wikipedia, and how its gone now. I pointed them to bliss soaps in Seattle, whose word of mouth, their many free samples ethos, and warm and friendly storekeeper demeanor have made them the darling of Yelp. In fact if you look at their Live Search results, the yelp references are among the highest. Think of how much the avid endorsements mean to a small business online!

Liz Lawley got us all started talking about social objects, that is, those things we talk about with others that help form bonds. I give bath bombs out to co-panelists and people I know from the social computing symposiums at conferences just for fun, and she pointed out they become objects of conversation, shared experience (scent is a very powerful memory-enhancer and emotional connector), and created a community of folks who knew what the bath bomb experience was like.

I know if I do this presentation again I’m going to improve on it – for one thing, I will suggest to them the business card trick. I’ll also increase the number of molds so that more people can have a bunch of fizzies to take home. I’ll also factor in the dryness of doing it in an office complex vs. my old Craftsman house – my house is often too wet for the bombs to dry out in one day, but a Microsoft office building? those puppies were dry in 24 hours! (note the photo below depicts an actual chair)

I am grateful to the folks who tried out my class (Other Foo Camp advice is to go to things you wouldn’t normally attend) and to the folks who gave the talks I attended and stretched my neurons considerably. I hadn’t thought much about vendor relationship management, social media in government, open source stuff, or the origins of the Web and folks opened my eyes. I’ll admit death of newspapers I had previously thought about, but I’d forgotten some of the key things in my past that made being a reporter so solid for me: that people respected the newspaper, that the newspaper would fight to get me out of jail and prevent people from taking my notebook with confidential sources in it.

Oh, and the Poynter Institute. If anyone asks you to take a class or attend a conference there, you should go. The Dali museum is right near it with amazing art, but more than that, the folks there are smart and will blow your mind. I hope for one they can help keep the journalism flame alive, regardless of the form the new world order for newspapers might take.

Now, I pack for San Francisco! I'll be tweeting you... so...

Live it vivid!

Boston in the Springtime: Foo Camp East

Betsy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:07:00 GMT

Well, I admit it; I've been textually unfaithful. I've blogged in everyone's blog but my own (Live Search, Eileen Brown) about my adventures and my tweet stream probably equals 10 blog posts in length (if not in actual coherence or sanity).

Community tip of the day (or reminder): Try to live large enough that you can either repurpose or re-use your textual genius. I'm just old school and hate to repeat posts.

While Search Road Warrior Aya is tearing it up in New York I will be in Boston this weekend, attending O'Reilly's FOO Camp. Next week: San Francisco and Web 2.0. Then after that, we actually have to do real work on this team and stop drinking mojitos. Too much mint, bad for you.

Anyway, I would tell people I was going to Foo camp and they'd say: Food camp, how awesome, is the Iron Chef coming? You marketing shills have all the luck, etc. etc.

Then I would say no, Foo. Like Foo Bar.

Oh you mean like there's a bar?

No F-O-O. Like Friends of O'Reilly. Oh forget it. I hope to be presenting on bath bombs and social media.

Bath bombs...?

Yes, like I was making in Search a while back. I actually gave bath fizzies out to my team at XNA too, but people looked at me funny. Like, there's no fire button on this thing, why do I care? Although their female relatives and significant others benefited.

Anyway, O'Reilly tends to favor hands-on presos and as I was preparing for this craft and crafts session I realized there are actually a lot of things I can say that tie the making of bath fizzies and social media. I have a great example, http://blisssoap.com, local to Seattle, that I can talk about Whuffie with as well as the supplies store for making them. Well, as long as the package I mailed to Microsoft Cambridge made it. :)

More from the other side of the country - live it vivid!

Heading to Texas and South by Southwest, but leaving the black Stetson behind

Betsy — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:34:00 GMT

Last time I was in Texas, I bought a cowboy hat outside of San Antonio. It was a real Stetson, would keep the rain off, and of course to work with my urban wardrobe, I bought it in black. I think I made Paul Tidwell on the XNA team wear it once or twice, but there was a Viking helmet they used for "dude you broke the build" and that really reigned supreme.

This time, like last time, I am going on behalf of Live Search, but unlike last time, I don't have to present and I've realized with all the other stuff I have to pack, the Stetson has to stay at home. A nice offshoot of not being on a panel (since I didn't know a year ago I'd have this job) I get to enjoy the experience without the "speaker jitters" dominating my thoughts and also just get to meet up with folks I have not seen in ages.

I will also get to meet Nadia Payan for the first time; me/Live Search ended up sponsoring her on her odyssey to go to one of my favorite conferences ever.

Internet geek girl (lurv that pink!) has a nice post about the tweetup Live Search is sponsoring - 4-6 pm on March 13th at point in the conference while people presumably still have intact livers. :)

Windows Mobile setup the space but we provide the drinks, food etc so you can prefunc prior to the rest of the evening.

I will also be booth babin' it for a couple of days in the convention center, as will Aya and Stefan. Then on to MIX09, another adventure entirely....

Paid to tweet, like I was paid to blog

Betsy — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:03:00 GMT

So, I've done many awkward things in my bespeckled and bespectacled community career.

I've worn speaker Oxford after speaker Oxford - and you tech geeks know the ones. The ones that have embroidery that say "Speaker - Teched Amsterdam 2005" and you feel you can't give them away, yet you can't wear them to a hipster bar - or anywhere except your own house - without feeling like Class A Dork.

I've been recorded saying "um" on channel 9, channel 8 and other random podcasts. Be ready for more!

I've been photographed with Ms. Dewey. That, may not come again.

But now.

Now, it's my duty not only to man (or woman) a blog for Live Search on occasion, but to drink and stream into (now, that doesn't sound right does it) the firehose that is Twitter. And more than that, I have to pick a twitter client. Because like blogging, mystic vital forces forbid you actually type into a Web interface. Nonono. The hands they must not be sullied in touching web...parts. No, you have to find some desktop client with a t in the first part of the name - twhirl. Tweetdeck. Twitterific. T-rouble my friends. T-rouble right here in Twitter City.

Pray for me. And if you have a favorite Twitter client (sorry no Macbooks - just a T-Mobile Wing and a T-hinkpad laptop running Vista) feel free to tell me what to do. I am currently fascinated by this writer who left the choices of his life up to the community.

Live it vivid!