Ryan C. Miller.com – Social Media, Business & Small Things -

Talking with Michelle Chmielewski – Social Media, Paris and Putain! – Part I

Posted on June 23, 2011 by MillerNo Comments

I had the pleasure of sitting down (via Skype) with Michelle Chmielewski who is a native Utican (my home town) living in Paris, France. Michelle is a blogger and works in community management for Synthesio and will soon be moving to Seesmic. Her video blogs about life in Paris are ones I’ve been following for a long time and her posts about Free Hugs and Putain! – have recently gone viral.

In part I we’ll talk about how she got from Utica to Paris and how she ended up at Seesmic (hint, if you want something – ask for it). We’ll also talk about the differences between the ways people in Europe and the US use social media.

In part II (coming tomorrow) we’ll talk about how she found her blogging niche, how she’s built a following and what happens when things go viral.

Thanks to Michelle for taking the time to chat. Visit her blog and also remember to follower her on Twitter.

The NY Times vs. Kevin Rose

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Miller1 Comment

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the different types of pay walls and freemium services that exist throughout the web and the likelihood of people ponying up to pay for content. It’s a fundamental issue of supply and demand. With an infinite amount of content, does the value of most content drop to zero? And once we get over the hump of paying for digital content, are we predisposed to any particular formats or brands?

Over the past couple of months I have signed up and paid for a couple of premium newsletters. The first being Gary V’s Daily Grape newsletter that gives me tons of wine reviews (text) and additional videos. Great content and very useful to me. It’s once a month and focused.

I also have subscribed to Kevin Rose’s Foundation newsletter. It’s basically a newsletter focusing on startups and really great (in my opinion) interviews with founders of some of these companies. It makes me realize how many brilliant people there are out there and hearing their stories / methodologies really inspires me to try to execute on my ideas. Is it extremely useful content for someone who isn’t in the business of angel investing or a serial entrepreneur? Maybe not, but it’s good content and I’ve been willing to pay for it each month even though Kevin releases the video interviews for free (after 30 days, on iTunes as a podcast).

So then, why am I so willing to put down cash for these pieces of content and not, say, a digital subscription to the NY Times (which I also really enjoy)? After a little bit of soul searching I’ve come up with three possible reasons and am curious if anyone else pays for content online for the same reasons…

1 – Price. This may seem obvious but Foundation and Daily Grape roll in at $3.99 /mo. (for one newsletter / video). I can squeeze that coffee money out of my budget without thinking much about it. NY Times on the other hand would run me $3.75 /wk and only could access NYTimes.com and the iPhone app. I currently can get their 20 or so articles free per month – and top emailed stories are free on my iPhone. That subscription cost adds up, when I get MOST of what I want for free, and I feel like (at least for me) my price threshold for content (online or print) seems to be between $3-$4. It’s the same with most of the magazines I get if you break down the cost month by month. My subscriptions to Wired, Time, Fast Co, Food & Wine and the New Yorker all fall within that range.

2 – Precedent. I’ve always paid for magazines. They’re rarely free (unless you count Sky Mall). Even the online editions of Wired, the New Yorker, etc, while well done, are not as good as the magazine itself. I think of it as more of a supplement. These premium weren’t free to begin with. You want in from the start? Gotta pay up. But again, the low cost makes sampling worth it. One of the problems with the NY Times (again, just using them as an example) is that the content has been free for so long, and the best content is still widely available as it’s being shared through social networks. It’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle – even though I KNOW that they have some of the finest journalism in the world and I should support it, I don’t feel like there is an access plan / price point that hits the mark for me.

3 – Hyper-Targeted. This is one of the same reasons I don’t pay for cable TV. 90% of the channels are not interesting to me, but I have to buy them. It’s the same to a certain extent with any news operation such as the Times, my local paper, or even a situation like the Huffington Post. Would I pay a buck or two a month to get access to the NYT opinion pages and anything, say, related to Technology, or International Affairs? Maybe. I’m not sure, because I don’t know that I would consume all that content. Much of it may go unused. With magazine subscriptions or Foundation or Daily Grape, the content is hyper focused, I know I’ll consume all of it, and I know it will be good.

Keep in mind, I know this is dangerous. Only subscribing to and consuming content you’re super interested in or that simply conforms to your world view is a dangerous thing. I’m not trying to devalue newspapers or the online editions of newspapers. I am though trying to work through in my head why I reach into my wallet for some kinds of digital content and not others. And as time goes on, will more and more content be hyper-targeted and paid? Or will free content always rule the day? Also, with apps such as Flipboard and Paper.li where you can highly customize the news that gets pushed out or the news that you subscribe to, are we doing ourselves a disservice by eliminating content that we think we wouldn’t enjoy, but also happens to be content that may challenge us?

So this was a long post but I wanted to just get the question out there and maybe a bit of dialogue going. Do any of you all pay for content (I’m interested in print and online in particular)? If so, what do you subscribe to? What is your threshold of pricing? Leave a comment and let me know.

In Defense of Letters

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Miller8 Comments

Yesterday I was listening to the Diane Rehm program, as I often do – and really got into her interview with Suzanne Marrs who had written a book covering the lengthy correspondence between Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty and her New Yorker editor and fellow writer William Maxwell.

For more than 50 years, they corresponded about work and family, likes and dislikes, griefs, joys, moments of dispair and humor. In the introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship, Welty wrote, “All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth – or perhaps untruth – some flash of light is just occurring… To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship.”

Listening as they read through some of these letters made me step back and think about not only the format of our communication but the length as well.  So much of our correspondence now is done on a whim – through Tweets, Facebook messages and SMS. But because they are rattled off on a whim in most cases can be a problem. Taking the time to sit down, collect your thoughts and then attempt to articulate them is for many people a lost art.

I’m not lamenting the death of the letter as an object, but rather challenging myself (and you if you’re reading this) to take the time to be eloquent. To think through a thought. To be, on occasion, a person of long format. There is a different emotional reaction to receiving a letter, postcard, or even a long email than we do with a Tweet or Facebook message. Social media has made it so easy to communicate with a larger group of friends on a more regular basis but it’s also in bite-sized chunks. This, I think puts even more value on long form communication.

I’m guilty of printing and saving so many old emails, travel logs, post cards and letters that I’ve written and received over the years and it’s these long forms of communication that really give us insight into those around us and ourselves. To me, they have more mass than a Twitter stream or a series of Wall posts. I wonder if biographers of the future will piece together (or have access to) the life stories of their subjects through social media interactions, Tweets, and cell phone videos as primary sources. Will we have many other options?

So my challenge to you (and to myself) is to on occasion get back to the long form. To sit and articulate thought. To try to be eloquent from time to time, instead of relying on 140 characters. When is the last time you’ve written a letter, or a long email that wasn’t business related?

Update: I’ve neglected to include one of my favorite blogs that illustrations the power of the letter. Letters of Note. Check it out. You’ll be hooked, promise.

What the F*%$ is RSS

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Miller1 Comment

In my opinion – the tool in the social media toolbox that is the most underrated and that folks that I talk to at businesses know the least about is RSS. So here’s a quick primer.

What the F*%$ is RSS? It’s a great way to keep tabs on your favorite blogs and websites without having to visit each site every day, checking for new content (and stands for Really Simple Syndication). That little orange button you see all the time doesn’t mean ‘BLOG’, or ‘Wi-Fi’, it’s a link to the RSS feed of that particular site.

By loading the feeds of your favorite sites in an RSS Reader, new stories will automatically be delivered to you and checked off as you read them. So what RSS reader do I recommend? I loves me some Google Reader. It allows me to easily add feeds from sites that I like as well as tag posts, and organize blogs into categories for easy browsing. Google Reader allows me to easily follow upwards of 100 blogs I like to read on a regular basis without having the sheer amount of content get overwhelming. Tagging and sharing posts that I like allow me to keep up with the latest news in social media, tech, business, travel, and the blogs of friends.

Now there’s plenty of other RSS readers besides Google Reader out there (I’m in love with Reeder for iPad), but I just wanted to get some of you started who may not be using RSS as a tool in your social media toolbox.

So if you do one thing this week when it comes to using a new tool – sign up for a Google Reader account (if you have gmail or a Google account by default you have a Reader account) and go subscribe to 10 blogs (including this one). I think you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to manage that data flow.

Speaking of RSS, I’ve started another little project for myself to try to document my 30th year. Small Things will be a stream of content that will NOT be part of my regular blog feed or really promoted via Facebook / Twitter- but available as a separate feed here on the website. Read more about the project and I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

Questions, comments, concerns? Fire away in the comments.

Oh, and if you are using RSS – what are some of the blogs you think people should subscribe to?

My Toolbox (so far)

Posted on April 13, 2011 by MillerNo Comments

I’ve been giving some talks recently to businesses and groups on promoting yourself online and some basic social media primers for business. I try not to get all caught up in the tools or the 3rd party add-ons because sometimes those are the things that can get confusing to people and you miss the point of the medium which is interacting, listening and sharing… It’s not about any one tool. So I try to leave those out as much as possible in order to get people acquainted with some best practices. But I often get asked what tools I use on a day to day basis for myself when it comes to managing all that data. So here’s a quick overview of what’s in MY toolbox:

TweetDeck - for Twitter management and sharing. I don’t load in any feeds from other networks to the system except for Twitter, though I do allow TweetDek access to my Twitter, LinkedIN and Facebook accounts so I can manage what I share across multiple platforms. The software allows me to separate, sort and search the tweets from over the 1,000 people I follow by category (Local friends, Conference Peeps, Social Media Gurus, Humor, etc), as well as monitor keywords I’m interested in tracking. It will also alert me anytime someone is mentioning my name or talking to me via @replies or DMs (Direct Messages). There a are a lot of other tools out there (CoTweet, HootSuite and the official Twitter Client) but so far for managing my PERSONAL accounts on a desktop, I’ve been sticking with TweetDeck.

Twitter (for iPhone) – While I use TweetDeck for my desktop, I use the official Twitter client for my iPhone. It allows me to keep tabs on my groups and conversations in a simple, intuitive interface, but lacks many of the bells and whistles that TweetDeck has.

Su.Pr - Su.pr is a URL Shortener that I use when I really want to track the sharing of my original blog post content. When I share a link (www.ryancmiller.com for example) it will shorten it to something that uses less space in your tweet (www.su.pr/Ekfjr). But by using their dashboard I can log in and track how many clicks each shared link gets in real-time as well as any retweets, and even let’s me easily submit my content to StumbleUpon. It allows me to see when my content is clicked throughout the day as well as which content strikes a chord with users. I can then use that data to make better decisions about when and what to post.

Google Reader – If you don’t currently use Google Reader or an RSS reader to subscribe and manage blogs you like. Sign up now. I subscribe to roughly 75 blogs that I read daily (or whenever new content comes out). Google Reader dumps down the content from all of these blogs into one place where I can read only new items at my leisure, tag posts, share them, and organize the blogs I subscribe to into categories (Social Media, Business, Photography, Wine, etc). Because let’s face it – I can’t read about business all day every day and using an RSS reader is a great way to manage all that content without having to go to each site every day to see if there is a new post.

Instapaper – I constantly see links or headlines to posts via Twitter or Facebook that I want to read – but don’t have the time right at this moment. So I use Instapaper to save those articles for later. Using a bookmark link in my browser it will extract the photos and text and format things in such a way that it’s easy to consume at a later time via my iPad or iPhone. Get it.

So that’s a start, right? Those are just my desktop tools that I use (though some of them cross over to mobile) to manage content and sharing of things I want to consume or share. If you’re looking to not miss a beat with news, keep better tabs on those in your network, or just grow your chops in the industry of your choice, some or all of these may help you out. I also consult and help to manage a lot of this data for clients at the agency, and we use some turbocharged tools for managing so many accounts and large mounds of data. But this should get you started on a personal level. Questions, comments, complaints? Leave me a comment and let me know what tools YOU use that I didn’t mention, and why.

Picasso Gets Social

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Miller4 Comments

This past weekend I hopped down to New York City to spend some time with some amazing friends, but also to check out one of my favorite bands ever, Over The Rhine. The show as awesome, to say the least but I thought I’d just share a couple of observations that I had while schlepping around Manhattan.

Since I had an afternoon all to myself, I went to MoMa for the first time and had a really wonderful time checking out all the exhibits. To be able to see some Warhols, Polllocks and amazing amount of Picassos all in one place was really cool. The piece that was simply a 12 in section of torn cardbord in a frame….well, I’m no art critic but there were definitely things I didn’t understand or appreciate.

I did however notice that an amazing amount of people were scurrying through the different floors and photographing every work of art that they liked or had seen before as a dorm room poster, with their cell phones. Hundreds of people, shooting hundreds of shots, textures, and group photos.

MoMa also has a pretty decent audio tour and iPhone app that guides you through the museum and provides some context to the exhibits and more famous works. I really felt like visiting this museum in particular was very much a social experience as much as it was a cultural or art-centric experience. Why do so many of us feel the need to take a low resolution cell phone photo of the piece we had as a poster in our dorm room, or have seen online? There are hundreds of pictures of Henri Matisse’s The Dance online – do we really need a cell phone version? No, but what the integration of the MoMa app, and a relatively lax photography policy has fostered is that going to MoMa (even alone) has become quite a social experience. We want to share the highlights of where we were, give our online network some context and content of where we are and what we’re about.

But is it good for art? Does it enrich the experience of visiting an art museum like MoMa for art’s sake? Do those cell photos posted to Facebook help expose people to fine art who wouldn’t normally take the time to look? Or does all this sharing take away for the experience of sitting (or standing) and reflecting on the emotions a piece brings out. I don’t know. But I suspect that Picasso could never have dreamed that his work would exist as cellphone wallpaper on thousands of phones. Regardless, I think MoMa understands that everything is now both a digital and social experience through social media and mobile technology, and they have for the most part embraced that same tech to provide visitors with some background and context of the pieces in their collection while also recognizing that some folks just want the social proof of sharing with their network where they are…or a Picasso as their cell phone background. What’s your take?

SXSW 2011 Day 1 -

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Miller3 Comments

When people say that SXSW runs on beer, energy drinks and breakfast burritos, they weren’t kidding. I’ve been having an absolute awesome time the past couple of days, with great panels and meeting amazing people. One of the highlights of the trip so far was getting to hang with Erika Napoletano, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tom Martin, Shelly Kramer, and Katherine Meyer – all at once and in real life, at an amazing party thrown by Jay Baer. All amazing folks to not only follow online but also to meet in real life. Lots of talent and good vibes all around. I also challenged Gary V to pencil wars (and was beaten handily – I think he’s still undefeated) ((video below)).

Experiences like this remind me how much of social media and SXSWi truly are social, but they’re just tools to facilitate relationships. Getting to meet up with previously online-only friends I think is something that SXSWi and other tech conferences really are about.

But of course the panels have been amazing. I’ve gotten to sit in on discussions ranging from the future of social media, ad agencies, and community management, but also have taken in amazing keynotes from the likes of Guy Kawasaki and Moot (4chan). And we’re not even half done. I’ll be posting, notes, videos and recaps as well over the coming days, but wanted to just check in to say hi and let you all know I’m having a kick-ass time so far.

The Away Team

Posted on February 21, 2011 by MillerNo Comments

I wish we’d stop getting caught up on platforms when it comes to social media and community interaction. Do you HAVE to be on Facebook? Do you HAVE to be on Twitter? That depends. Where is your community?

Lots of different businesses want to drive the conversation to their blog or website, but they may not be seeing a ton of traction, do to inconsistent content, or promotion, etc. That’s the downside – the upside? They may have a very active Facebook Community. Twitter isn’t far behind. That’s a win.

I’m asked all the time what platforms businesses should invest their time and resources on. The real answer is…. it depends. I think it’s important to put up listening stations on as many platforms as you can manage, because a user on twitter is just as valuable as a user on Facebook or a blog commenter – and we need to meet those users where THEY want to be met.

That’s one of the dilemmas of social media. Brands don’t get to control where people will talk about them, or where like minded people will set up shop. You don’t get to decide to drive them through one communication channel anymore. In short, you are always the Away Team.

That shouldn’t scare you. It’s just a fact. I really believe that to run an effective social media campaign you have to be comfortable being the away team – interacting and playing on fields that are not your own website. That includes, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Quora, and forums. (By the way, forums are still most definitely a part of social media, and in my opinion hugely under served by brands. Big opportunities there, but that’s another post.)

So, get on the bus. Listen. Then listen some more. Help people solve problems on their turf and maybe, just maybe you’ll be invited back.