Scott Porad

I had the pleasure today of presenting on Product Development and Functional Specs Notes to students at the Arizona State University “Digital Media Entrepreneurship” program.

If you’re interested, here are my notes.

Yesterday I participated in “the shortest marketing conference ever”…The Influencer Project.  I was one of 60 people who discussed how to use social media to build relationships, develop influence and grow reputation.  You can register to receive a transcript and audio recording of the entire event.

The gist of my remarks were that the best way I’ve found to build influence online is to develop relationships offline.  In other words, solidify the relationships you’ve built online by making a “in real life” connection with those people.  Social media is excellent for building a broad network of friends and contacts.  But, in my view, real, genuine deep connections happen in real life.

Now, let me stop all the haters here: I’m not saying real relationships can’t be built online.  There are endless anecdotal stories of this happening, so I’m not going to assert that it’s impossible.  (Along these lines, Mark Pilgrim wrote recently on the notion of 25-year friends.)

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If you’d like to learn a little bit about what goes on inside Cheezburger, then listen to Episode 8 of the Naked Marketers podcast. [web | iTunes]

Pete Wright, Megan Strand, Dane Christensen and I discussed a variety of topics including

• our approach to launching new sites,
• the metrics we use to measure the success of a site,
• how we source ideas for new sites,
• and the occupational hazards of working in the happiest place on the interwebs!

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I presented at Web 2.0 Expo NYC today.  For those of you in the audience who asked for my slides, they are embedded below.  (For those of you not in the audience, these probably won’t make any sense.)

Below is my presentation (very brief…sadly, my time was cut short) at #140conf LA about Seven Things that Influence Whether or Not I Engage With You on Twitter (including a bonus 8th item from Robert Scoble!)

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Below are the videos from my presentations at WordCamp Portland and WordCamp Seattle.

In Portland, the first video, I talked primarily about our development philosophy at Cheezburger.  In the second video, Seattle, I spoke about how we use WordPress at Cheezburger.

[wpvideo QtZG996T] [wpvideo nbEOWOKh]

I’m very excited about several upcoming speaking engagements that I’ll be doing over the next two weeks.

• On Thursday, October 15th, I’ll be on a panel at the Grammy’s MusicTech Summit in Seattle about how musician’s can “build the perfect web site”.  My message: your web site is just a tool for building a stronger connection with your audience.  When you go about building your web site, think about if the things you’re doing are enriching that relationship for your fans, thereby making them stronger evangelists for your music.

• On Friday, I’ll be speaking at BlogWorld in Las Vegas (October 16-17) about LOLs, FAILs and Life at the Cheezburger Factory.  I plan to talk about how we’ve built Cheezburger, and lessons bloggers can learn and apply to their own sites.

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I know you’ve all been waiting for it, and after several long months, the video is finally out!  WordCamp San Francisco 2009 was probably the biggest audience I’ve ever spoken in front of, and you can watch below.

If you live in the Northwest and want to catch me in person, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Portland in September.   And, I’ll be speaking at Web 2.0 Expo and UGCX in New York this fall.

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#140conf Recap Week: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

I am very passionate about the message of the talk I gave at #140conf–that what separates Twitter from other social media, and how it presents a transformative opportunity is Twitter’s ability to create, connect and listen in the context of community.

However, I have been thinking a lot about the talk because, to be honest, I was not satisfied with myself and my presentation of that message.  I didn’t feel like I moved my audience much or made an impact.  To me, the delivery felt flat.

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#140conf Recap Week: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

Anybody who knows me knows that I am a visual guy.  I am always drawing sketches to explain my ideas and half the time literally need a whiteboard to think straight.

At SXSW 2009 I serendipitously met Jonny Goldstein of envisualize.com.  We were walking toward the same session and struck up a conversation where he explained how he used animation to help businesses teach, train and explain.

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