Speaking: The greatest audience is the toughest crowd
I love speaking. To any audience. Whether they love what I am saying or don't get it I learn an amazing amount about myself and about other people everytime I have the opportunity to speak in front of more than a few people. When different groups ask me to speak I am quick to accept which often makes for challenging times; both in regards to the availability of time and the time to prep for your audience.
This summer I was lucky enough to speak to a variety of different groups. Two audiences really stuck out for me this Summer. One was possibly the toughest audience I've spoken to and the other may have been the audience I was most nervous to speak with.
This is being published late, but I am fired up to deliver Fall highlights in a post soon. Leave me your feedback or queries always up for a good thought.
TMI: Too Much Information
Decades ago (2 or 3 decades to be exact) we couldn't get enough information. When the Encyclopedia Britannica person came to our door we couldn't wait to buy the $1000+ set of soon to be outdated books.
The world has changed. I remember over a year ago when I turned a fellow instructor at BCIT onto Twitter. He was super excited to start. He couldn't get enough. When he didn't have time to read stories he would 'favourite' them on his Twitter app. One day he turned to me in passing and said, "Hey, Kemp when do I read all these great stories I found on Twitter?"
"It's time to give up," I said.
It was true. He had to change the way he thought about information. We all do in a world where we can search for the latest links on education in an instant. I had thought him how to tap into the latest news on social media, technology and digital media, but was it for the better? Or for the worse? He now had access to more information than ever before but he had to sift through it. He had to evaluate it and he had to decide if it was worth his time to read.
The reality like my current favourite read: "The Shallows" states quite clearly is that our brains are going through a transitional phase. We are building new pathways to move from spending tons of time in the stacks finding relevant information in books. To moving through the digital stacks learning how to find, filter and evaluate information. This is our future or the future of our media consumption.
More than a year ago when I was employed part-time or a student I had time to do these three vital tasks: find, filter and evaluate. Now that time no longer exists. I rely on Techmeme, SmartBrief, Summify and others to do those tasks for me. Lucklily for me they do a damn good job.
What will the future hold? As many have said the ability to curate and filter the best content will remain vital for people like me. But who will do the best job and as a recent article in Wired stated can a computer do it for me based on my previous posts to social networks like Twitter and Facebook? I sure hope so because I don't have the time, but I need someone to do the job. If you have anything to add I am dying to hear it so don't hesitate to tell me how you deal in the age of Too Much Information.
Sharing Information + Diverse Audiences
more presentations from kemp edmonds
I recently had the pleasure of presenting (slidedeck above) at a one-day conference in Calgary called Social Media Marketing Unplugged. The organizer Jonathan Chow was an awesome organizer and the other speakers were people who I admire personally for the work they do in their areas of focus. It was my lucky day as having recently started working a dream job of sorts with HootSuite, THE social media dashboard, managing their learning program I was invited to fill in for my community wrangler Dave Olson.
It was a joy to present outside of Vancouver and in another Canadian city. It was very different from Vancouver where the use of social media is more prominent. Ask anyone who speaks regularly to audiences about social media and you will find out that the greatest challenge we deal with is the diverse knowledge base of our audiences. Some are 'going to try Twitter soon' while others are tracking website visitors' every move using Custom URL parameters and Google Analytics. If you didn't understand that last part don't worry few do, but it's the kind of technique that is basis for successful online communications. Sharing knowledge is an amazing part of digital culture in fact it lives at the core of our culture.
Kris Krug, Open Everything, Pecha Kucha.
Without sharing knowledge and allowing others to build on it we would not be where we are as a civilization. We would be stuck in the past. I've been inspired on my mission to share the knowledge by two individuals who started out as my heros and long ago became my mentors, my peers and my friends. Kris Krug and Dave Olson speak the gospel of openness.
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