Talking to the media kids

A mock-Polaroid photo of me pretending to lecture taken by Dubber

The Media Talent Bank from Birmingham City University was an online directory for people working in the media industry that, well, hasn’t quite met its expectations, shall we say. As someone who sees something like this emerge every few months with the best of intentions before quietly fading away this doesn’t really surprise me, but this isn’t really the place to go into that. The point is it’s sitting there not really working so, as I understand it, a bunch of 3rd year students have been given it to play with as their final project.

I had a chat with Jamie Futers, one of the bunch, who told me they’d decided to put on a series of events and workshops for those about to graduate from media courses at BCU. My take of this being if the Media Talent Bank wasn’t the right model, what should the students be doing to get the talents and interests noticed by the right people?

I agreed to do a talk (which turned out to be the only talk) and take part in some workshop discussions with the students and other folk who’ve done interesting things with the social web from a variety of backgrounds – Nicky Getgood, Alison Smith, Kate Hughes and Simon Partington.

Jamie asked me to cover the following areas in my talk:

1. The different social media tools – uses/limitations
2. What social media brings to creative individuals and the opportunities it can bring
3. Birmingham’s social media scene – contacts and networks
4. Personal social media success, how it worked for you etc..
5. Balance of personal and business
6. Being interesting

I pretty much ignored the first one. The second was pretty much the theme for the talk. The third was answered with “there is no scene, there are many scenes and networks.” The fourth was a brief talk through my blogging history. The fifth made for a nice look at my different online personas and how they relate to the “real” me. And the sixth was my big concluding point.

I’d been thinking recently about “being interesting”. It’s probably the surefire way to success in this lark. If people think you’re interesting then they’re more likely to follow and interact with you. If they think you’re boring then they’re not. The problem is “interesting” is incredibly relative, especially when we’re dealing with the granular nature of online activity. The conclusion I came to is you have no control over whether you’re interesting or not. All you can hope for is that someone out there thinks you are.

What you do have control over, however, is how interested you are and how you show that interest. And, I believe, interested people are inherently interesting to those interested in the same things. So be demonstrably interested. That’s probably the best advice I can give anyone.

Above all I should say I really enjoyed this talk. Partly it was because it just worked and I didn’t fluff anything major but mainly, I think, it was because I had a huge stage to run around on. I would appear to have become the sort of person who’s comfortable on a huge stage. Hmm.

Thanks to Jamie and team for organising the event and framing it so well. Watch these kids. They’re onto something.

Appendix

Andrew Dubber graciously let me have the recording he made. Sadly I was too far away from the mic during the Q&A but the talk itself is in these three mp3s (each aprox 5mb).

Me and my blogs

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Some other examples

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Musings on social media

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Laura Hogan posted her notes online and they’re shockingly close to what I intended to get across, which is nice to see.

The group was using the #mtbworkshop hashtag but since Twitter has a goldfish memory I’ve taken a screen grab.