alex de carvalho

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Tagged: cnj595, communication, course, journalism, new media, pr 2.0, s10cnj595, social media, syllabus, um, university of miami

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Monday, November 16th, 2009 – 3:53 pm

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Social media

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Retrospective of South Florida’s startup community

As I drove home last night from Craig Agranoff’s “Pizza Tweetup“, I took a stroll down memory lane and thought of how far we’d come along as a community in three and a half years.

When I moved back to Miami, there were no new media meetups to speak of. I missed the Stormhoek geek dinner in May 2006, which was a one-off, and judging from the pictures, it looks like more jet-setters made it to the party than geeks.

Miami’s bloggers, web developers, designers and startup community in general mostly kept to themselves. Soon after I moved back, I lamented (April 2006):

“The South Florida blogging scene seems very laid back, as you might expect with the mix of great weather, beaching and boating … and perhaps a more conservative, “Southern” lifestyle. Relative to Paris, there seem to be fewer local blogs and no events to speak of”

As I look back now, that single blog post set off a chain of events in my life which led to the creation of four main meetup groups and the development of our vibrant community of new media professionals (see Craig’s post: “South Florida has no tech community?“). These include RefreshMiami, BarCamp Miami, Mobile Monday Miami, and Social Media Club South Florida.

An hour or so after I lamented on my blog back then, Lori Leach Forster — a web designer I have not met and who has subsequently moved to Georgia — commented on my post and introduced me online to Brian Breslin, with whom I co-organize RefreshMiami. I wanted to set up a regular event and Brian spoke of creating a local chapter of Refreshing Cities. Although I hadn’t heard of Refresh, having lived in Paris and London for the past decade, it sounded like a good fit.

After a few months and many long threads on Google Groups, five of us showed up for our first meetup at a Starbuck’s on South Beach; we should have known better than to schedule a meetup in Miami at noon on a sunny Spring Saturday! From that inauspicious beginning, Brian and I grew the organization to its current membership of over 1,500 South Florida web professionals and startups. Our monthly events gather 130 participants, on average, and have become a hub to meet new people, create friendships, and find job opportunities. RefreshMiami is held on the last Wednesday of the month. If you’re in town, you’re welcome to attend.

Five months later, I set the wheels in motion to develop Miami’s first BarCamp. I had met Chris Messina at the first BarCamp in Paris and loved the experience and the concept of a “user-generated conference,” where participants create their own learning experience. Professor Kim Grinfeder of the University of Miami School of Communication helped secure space and sponsorship, and we held the event in February 2007. About 60 people attended, 5 companies sponsored, 15 participants presented, and The Miami Herald wrote up a nice article about it (archived). I have since organized two more BarCamps, one in February 2008, with 300 people, 15 sponsors and 35 presentations, and this year’s event, which counted 600 participants, 38 sponsors and 70 presentations. The community has embraced the BarCampMiami concept and similar events have recently been held or are in the works, including LaidOffCamp Miami and REBarCamp Miami (Real Estate).

After last year’s BarCamp, I started up a local chapter of Mobile Monday Miami and invited Jeff Sass and Florian Seroussi to the board. Why Mobile Monday? I had worked for a number of years in mobile content distribution and had enjoyed attending MoMo meetups in Paris. Although our first meetup in Miami was about as well attended as the first RefreshMiami meetup, we held three more club meetings that year, including an excellent evening at Nokia Latin America’s Headquarters organized by Michael Tangeman. Michael and I fired up the club again this year and legitimized it by formally signing with the international organization. We’ve had some great events this year and club membership is growing. MoMoMiami meetups attendance averages about 45 people. Starting in August, MoMo Miami will be held on the first Monday of the month, unless we schedule a meetup adjacent to a local mobile conference. We are still discovering our mobile ecosystem and are eager to meet you at one of our events.

Over the last few years, I had been talking to and exchanging emails with Chris Heuer, Founder of the national organization of Social Media Club, about founding a local chapter in South Florida. There had been two previous attempts to set up a Social Media Club locally, but they had not panned out. I was working at Scrapblog at the time and would run into Chris at various web conferences, including Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and BlogOrlando. We shared an obvious passion for social media technologies and implications for business.

In the Fall of 2008, I founded the local chapter of the Social Media Club of South Florida and we started holding our monthly meetups, which have grown from an average of 30 people per event in the beginning to over 100 people recently.

Nearly a year later, the Social Media Club of South Florida is a dynamic community of professionals from all types of businesses who meet monthly to learn about social media best practices and case studies. Club meetups are scheduled for the second Tuesdays of the month and we’d love to see you there.

All of my work was social media related and I could see working professionals trying to understand the subject. For example, Scrapblog shared office space with one of the top 5 global public relations firms; I could see the PR professionals’ long-term progression in understanding social media, from initial dismissal to grudging acceptance to implementing social media initiatives for clients. I saw the same thing at the university, where I taught one of the first full-semester courses on the subject in the nation, to University of Miami School of Communication students majoring in journalism and in public relations (and workshops for professors). I had also co-founded a startup with Brian Breslin, StartPR, which provides an online hosted service for social media tracking and blogger relations.

As I stroll down memory lane, my thoughts are on:

Serendipity – How a single blog post changed the course of my life and opened up a whole universe of possibility and opportunity.

Community – The unique sense of belonging that only comes from creating opportunities for others.

Transformation – Not only in terms of personal growth, but in particular I’m thinking about the transformation of the community into a more welcoming region for technologists and startups. We’re not there yet, but it’s a far cry from three years ago.

Gratitutde -For the innumerable people and resources that came into place at the right time to make these initiatives possible.

The future – We’ve only just started building a viable technology future for the region; there are many more challenges on the way as we vie for the attention of our local media, of the city, and of investors.

One step at a time.

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Tagged: barcamp, barcamp miami, barcampmiami, conference, event, group, meetup, mobile monday miami, momo, momomiami, refresh miami, refreshmiami, smcsf, social media club, social media club south florida, South Florida, startup, technology

Published:

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 – 6:20 am

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Events

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In memoriam, Kashmir, 1998-2009

You brought joy to those you touched. You had an irresistible charm borne of innocent mischief. You saw yourself as more human than cat, and made your presence felt despite not speaking much. You participated in everything and your curiosity knew no bounds. You were a peacemaker and a soother. You ruled the house and you welcomed all into your sphere. You feared naught. You lived to eat and you ate everything — we understood this as a show of affection, of belonging, of participating in the daily family rituals. You lived a full life, and you gave more than you took.

So long, my steadfast companion. Thank you for the memories; you graced our lives. You are my friend and I miss you much. May you rest in peace.

The Best Thing in the World

What’s the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Love, when, so, you’re loved again.
What’s the best thing in the world?
–Something out of it, I think.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

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Tagged: cat, Dying of the Light, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, kashmir, love, Personal

Published:

Friday, May 15th, 2009 – 8:08 am

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Personal

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Rebuilding the World with Free Everything

Panel on Rebuilding the World with Free Everything, with:

Doc Searls – Linux Journal
Katherine Druckman – Linux Journal
William Hurley – evil genius project
Chris Anderson – Wired Magazine
Dave Taylor – filmBUZZ

“Free” is the future of business. Steve Larsen says the world has more than 500,000 open source code bases now — all free. That’s a tall challenge for a huge pile of building material. Linux Journal presents a panel of creative hackers and business crafters to discuss constructing the future.

Free as in freedom and free as in beer. Freedom gave us the internet. Free is the title of Chris Anderson’s book.

By giving away content for free, it means more eyeballs. One model for magazines is to lock up content for a time period, say, 30 days; another model is to open up the content immediately, recognizing that a certain percentage of people will like to subscribe to the long form magazine content.

Starbuck’s should give out free iPhone cases with their logo on it. This is a huge marketing opportunity.

There are things that become common knowledge as they evolve. For example, server monitoring has become a free service. Companies in this area are giving away the 90% to concentrate on the 10% of stuff that requires consulting and is profitable.

Was there a connection between “The Long Tail” and “Free”? Definitely. Free is enabled by infinite shelf space. The near-zero marginal cost of an extra Amazon listing enables the “free”. The fascination was in researching the history of a very misunderstood word, which is becoming an economic model and defining business for the next era.

The internet is our biggest marketplace, but we’re just getting our sea legs now and understanding how it works. There is this enormous invisible energy and building materials that are making the surface we’re walking around on. But this is how things work: you invent the medium frst and then figure out how to monetize it later.

Wired Magazine pays among the highest rates in the world: about $3 a word. So an exclusively online publication of Wired would still cost about 50% of a paper publication, because of the human costs.

It’s hard to think about what the premium product should be and what people will pay for. But you can get around this by building the product with the community … and they will give you the business model. Most people understand there is economic reality and that you need to make money: they will accept that the monetization is there. If you build a community first, you build trust and people will be ready to pay money for services.

The patronage model may not work well and is where the “starving artist” comes from. It violates economic principles. In fact, you want the opposite, which is for the market to figure out how much something is worth.

If you’re in a nosedive, “free” is not the problem. The problem is the underlying paper, product or service. Whether it’s free or not is irrelevant.

Not everything has to be a profit center in your business; some things can be loss leaders in order to make money elsewhere.

Reddit accounts for 20M uniques and 40M pages view per month … and costs nothing. This is user-generated content that costs Wired nothing. So Wired has the mass audience with the magazine, and the very specific and granular with Reddit.

In the coming years, as bandwidth increases, there will be a complete breakdown of the movie distribution model.

The monetization of free is difficult. For example, someone needs to click on adwords in order to make some money. But this is just a problem of content. If you have nice content that’s updated consistently, you should be getting good CPM rates. Google sinks or swims based on their abilty to match ads to content.

How to combat misconception that just because the software is free, the services are not? The answer is to disappoint people and to say no.

It is factually true that micro-payments have failed to date. One of the reasons is that the process of paying is so high. If the transaction were less difficult, there would be more micropayments.

How can free apply to products with a very high cost base? There is a company that gives away electric cars and sells you the electricity. There are a lot of monetization opportunities in services as well.

Open question: would the iTunes store make more money if Apple just gave away iPods for free?

Another model is to give away free derivatives of work. The problem will be distribution for the free stuff. How do you incentivize distributors?

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Published:

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 – 4:36 pm

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Social media

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SXSW Keynote with Chris Anderson and Guy Kawasaki

Keynote session at SXSW, with:

Chris Anderson – Wired Magazine
Guy Kawasaki – Alltop

In 2006, Chris Anderson introduced the concept of the Long Tail. His soon-to-be released book will talk about the power of free. Will his theories stand up to the tough questions of venture Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki?

If you want to create a freemium product, where do you set the bar? You don’t want to cripple the service, but you don’t want to set the bar too high to the extent no one will feel compelled to subscribe to the premium product? Twitter has crippled the product too much, to the point where it’s easy for Facebook to replicate the service and potentially catch up.

Free is the best way to maximize your reach because it lowers peoples’ barriers to entry. Converting 5% of a big number is the business model of free. The marginal cost of distributing a book is zero, so it should be free, since the optimal method of reading a book is still in paper.

Each one of us is our own platform and we each need to figure out how to convert our reputation and brand into money. That’s all of our jobs: build our audience the right way and give them something of value that keeps them there.

The problem is that our publishers are not making money from authors’ keynotes. For example, the music industry is perfectly fine except for one part of it: distribution and sale. The issue is, authors and musicians are now misaligned with their publishers and record labels. The question is, can labels and publishers represent bands adequately in social media?

What if someone follows me and I send them a direct message with a link to a free pdf? Is this a good model? “My test for spam: if I do it, it’s clever marketing. If someone does it to me, it’s spam.” -Guy Kawasaki

The word “free” is one of the most misunderstood words. Free is a word that’s laden with meaning. And the meaning has changed over time. Twentieth Century free is where products had a real cost, so you had to pay back the free quickly. Today, everything costs less to nothing, particularly digital media. Freemium is the inversion of the free sample model. Here, you give 95% of your product free and charge for 5%. Virtual worlds are experimenting with every possible way to charge and 5% of the population seems to be a good model. But people misunderstand how hard it is to convert 5% of people.

China and Brazil are the future of “free”. We have the first true truly competitive market, which is one where marginal costs are low. If you do not make your product for free, the market will do it for you by pirating your stuff. People then use piracy to cause celebrity, and celebrity to create cash.

Could Starbuck’s give away free coffee to attract and retain customers? Absolutely: it would be easy for them to do that.

The word free has a powerful meening in english, where we take the best part of the words (ie., freedom) and apply these associations to sell products. Imagine a flag in your head which pops up every time you hear a price and it raises barriers to you purchase. There is no correlation between free ad cheap. Utility comes first, price second. People now expect two levels from almost product: a simple, free version and a premium version.

Are people more motivated by something they lost, or by not getting something they could? Things that you don’t have and want loom large; that ’s what tradtional marketing has done. Some information wants to be free and some wants to be expensive. You can have Guy for free on Twitter, or his customized version for thousands as a speaker.

On YouTube, the quality of video is not as important as the relevance. Same thing with companies: nowadays, you can start a company for almost no cost.

Open-source is free as in kittens: you have to look after them. A lot of the free stuff we have is because we support it communally.

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Published:

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 – 3:11 pm

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Social media

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