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Julien Smith: “Your Environment is Everything”

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julien smith When I was in college, I was very interested in learning about nature versus nurture (i.e. the debate about what is more important: your innate abilities/genetics or your environment/experiences). It was the first time I had stepped outside of my secure, rural community to meet people from all over the world. It was uncomfortable and exciting at the same time.

Nature versus nurture was a topic brought up in my Psychology 101 class, and I began looking at my own life through more refined glasses. What I realized is that certain beliefs and personality traits that I thought were just “who I am” (nature), were more likely a result of the environment in which I was raised (nurture).

Writes Julien Smith, in a blog post on In Over Your Head,

Where you live is not trivial– at all. Your environment is everything for you. It shapes you. It’s made you who you are, from the people you spend time with to the very streets you are driving in and walking on every day.

This can be both good and bad. For example, I consider myself to have an extremely strong work ethic, and I attribute that to the fact that I grew up in a rural farming community where everyone had to work hard just to make ends meet. There, you won’t find a tolerance for laziness. But I also am extremely hard on myself when I  face any kind of failure, large or small, because where I grew up, failure in your career meant no food on the table.

So what does this have to do with content creation or your online business?

I believe, that the same way your physical environment can effect how you interact with the world and what level of success you achieve, so do our virtual environments. As Julien writes, where you live is not trivial, and because we “live” online these days, we need to broaden our horizons a bit to include your online presence in this idea.

Think about the people in your closest circle. Think about the websites you visit the most. Think about the online communities where you choose to interact, and the online communities where you consider yourself a member. Think about how your own content reflects the online environment where you live. Think about how you can step out of this cycle and build new relationships or simply just find refreshing places to hang out online, at least occasionally.

It’s about growth, and about ensuring that you surround yourself with an environment, both online and off, that is aligned with your personal and professional goals.

See Julien Live on the NMX Stage (And Download a Free Session Featuring Him!)

We’re happy to be welcoming Julien to the keynote stage at NMX 2014. If you missed our recent keynoter announcement, you can check it out in full here.

To go along with this announcement, we’re giving away past sessions featuring our keynoters, including Julien. Download these sessions now while they’re still available!

Why the Virtual Ticket Will Feel “Even Closer to Being There Live” This Year

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As the guy in charge of BlogWorld’s Virtual Ticket program (which allows people who can’t make it to the live event to “attend” on their own timetable from their home or office), I’ve been given a very interesting puzzle to solve.

Here are the two questions I keep asking myself:

  1. How can we most effectively bring the content and experience of BlogWorld to people who want to go to New York to attend…but can’t?
  2. How can we make an online conference as much like being there in person as possible?

See, BlogWorld is HUGE. There are over 140 speakers, and at the live event, ten sessions will be happening at once…pretty much all the time. Even if it were feasible to live-stream the entire conference to our virtual attendees, we wouldn’t want to.

Why?

Because if we did, then virtual attendees would face the same problem that live attendees face: They’d have to choose one session to watch at a time and would, hence, be physically unable to view 90% of the conference due to most people’s pesky inability to be in ten places at once.

The content in the Virtual Ticket isn’t live. You wouldn’t want it to be live. In fact, a huge number of people who sign up for the Virtual Ticket are people who will be there at the actual event. They get the Virtual Ticket to fill the gaps in their live conference experience, so that after they come home from BlogWorld, they can watch that 90+% of the content that they missed.

(NOTE: If you already signed up to attend BlogWorld in New York and would like to add the Virtual Ticket to your registration, you can do so for only $97. Just email us and ask us to add the VT to your registration. If you haven’t yet signed up for the live event, you can add the VT during the registration process.)

But because the Virtual Ticket’s main content is 100+ hours of non-live video recordings (and the accompanying MP3 downloads), that dilemma comes right back at us. How can we best convey the BlogWorld experience? How can we make it “almost like being there live” for people who can’t be there live if most of our Virtual Ticket content is not live?

And the answer, of course, is that we can’t. But we can come close.

See, there’s nothing like attending a conference. If you’re actually there in person, you’ll get the networking and handshaking and hanging out and the strange “inspiration osmosis” that comes from being in the live atmosphere. We can’t replace that, and it’d be insulting to suggest that we could.

But I asked myself…what would be close? What would help simulate an in-person experience as much as possible?

And the solution came back loud and clear: Provide daily content.

The recordings — which you can play, pause, and replay at will for a full six months on the website (or forever if you download them) — will show up about a week after BlogWorld ends. For the Los Angeles 2011 Virtual Ticket, we did a bunch of video interviews — behind the scenes stuff, intended to give that “at the conference feel” — and we provided those about a week after the event, too. And that was cool.

But this year, in addition to all of that (and with an upgrade in video and audio quality for the bonus interviews), we’re going to give Virtual Ticketholders content every day.

There’s something different about daily updates. If you get daily updates, then you can learn about Day 1 stuff while it’s still Day 1. And if you learn about something on Day 1, then you can see what happens with it on Day 2 and follow along.

In other words, daily content gets you immersed in the experience so you don’t feel like you’re just watching from the sidelines.

So, in addition to the 100+ recorded sessions, in addition to the bonus video interviews that are exclusive to the Virtual Ticket, and in addition to our prolific social media activity and picture-sharing from the conference floor, we’re adding two things to this year’s Virtual Ticket:

  1. Every day, we’re going to record a handful of audio interviews and behind-the-scenes segments. And every evening, we’re going to post those files on the Virtual Ticket site for attendees to listen to.
  2. Every evening, we’re going to write up a daily recap. We’ll tell VT attendees who we captured on video that they’ll be able to watch later, we’ll tell them about big happenings, and we’ll tell them if we spot The Bloggess eating a burrito for lunch. (Or if she brought her giant metal chicken “Beyonce” with her.)

Will this content make the Virtual Ticket “just like being in New York”? Of course not. But will it bring Virtual Ticketholders into the fold, finally making them a PART of BlogWorld as it unfolds instead of sitting on the sidelines, waiting patiently for the event to end and for the session content to be delivered to the private Virtual Ticket website.

If you can’t make it to New York this year, check out this year’s BlogWorld Virtual Ticket if you haven’t done so already. The price is only $347, and you won’t have to book a flight or a hotel room. Good luck finding this insane amount of content for that price anywhere else.

And if you’re attending live in New York, definitely consider adding the Virtual Ticket when you register for BlogWorld so that you can go back after the event and review the huge amount of content you missed while you were there live. It’s only $97, and will be the best conference bang-for-your-buck you ever spend. (NOTE: If you’ve already registered and want to add the VT now, you can’t do that through the website. Please email us and let us know you want to add the VT and we’ll add it for you.)

Hello, I’m Ewan Spence. You’ve Never Head of Me Before

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Let’s start with a simple statement, as I stand and look at myself in a metaphorical mirror.

You don’t know me.

There we go, simple as that. I’m just a name, but think about this – you already know a lot about me. The first is that Rick and the team at BlogWorld must think I know something, because they’ve asked me to do not just one blog post here on the site, but a series of them on podcasting. I take it you trust the team here, which means that I’m now a name you’ve just heard of that has a little bit of credibility.

You’d probably head off to do a bit of searching online for me to find out if I have the experience to go along with that trust. I you do that you won’t find a wikipedia page (not enough people know me, remember?), but you’ll likely find a Twitter account (@ewan), a website (www.ewanspence.com), and the obligatory appearance on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ewanspence).

What about podcasting itself? Well I’ve done a few – there’s six years worth of unsigned and unknown bands over on TPC Rock, my annual “daily chat show” from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe picked up a British Academy BAFTA nomination, and the Eurovision Insight podcast is one of the leading shows based around the annual Song Contest.

Hopefully this gives you an idea that I’ve been around the block in terms of podcasting, and that I’ve experience in a number of different areas of production, using a variety of techniques, and monetised many of my shows.

I can also be subtle.

If I was handed your name, what would my first impression be? What would I find online, and how would it reflect on you? Would it make me curious, would it make me want to read your site, listen to your show, watch your videos? Or would it leave me cold, would it leave me thinking “there’s someone that missed something”, would there be something that would discourage people?

The old rule of first impressions counting applies equally as well online as it does in a real-life social setting. It was simple to look in the mirror before being introduced at a debutantes ball, it’s a lot harder to remember to hold up a mirror to your online self and see what is reflected back.

Over the next weeks and months, I want to explore podcasting with you, here on the BlogWorld blog. But to do that I need you to be willing to join me on that journey. No matter what you want from an online presence, you’ll likely want people to join you, be it through a story, to buy a product, or to engage with your media.

They’ll pick up on clues around your site, around the internet, and around what you do. Are you leaving the right clues for your audience?

Image Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

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