2008 October

DMEX Cross-media Exchange for North West Freelancers

I’m very pleased to announce I am working on a new project with The White Room, a progressive new creative and digital consultancy based in Manchester where we’ll be giving 20 North West TV and media freelancers a unique opportunity to work on a paid 20 day work placement, workshop and mentoring programme to help them working in digital production and cross-platform environments. Exciting stuff – the North West are definitely ahead of the pack here in skills for the digital age. Here’s the blurb:

The White Room have been commissioned by Northwest Vision & Media to run a cross-media exchange programme, commencing in October 2008. This is your chance to get involved.

Northwest Vision & Media, the regional screen agency, are committed to developing the skills of its digital and creative workforce to compete in the increasingly digital media age where cross-platform and 360 degree commissioning, digital marketing strategies and online video are blurring the lines between the skills needed to produce ‘old’ and ‘new’ media.

DMeX Cross Sector Exchange is a new pilot programme, which will lead the North West in a pioneering approach to work placement training, linking the wisdom and skills of traditional media producers and placing them in digital production environments, with the opportunity to get paid to work on live briefs for cutting edge projects, along with high level master classes and mentoring from leading digital industry pioneers.

If you’re intrigued by Twitter, Linked In with many social networks and have heard about and now want to experience Second Life, commercial blogging, vlogging, virals, digital distribution and production skills – DMeX will help you with the knowledge and real-world experience to go digital.

This programme is designed for broadcast or ?lm media production professionals (TV, radio, ?lm or corporate video) with at least 3 years production experience and the equivalent job title of assistant producer or producer, assistant director, script writer/editor, vision mixers, animators, camera or crew.

The programme takes place from November 2008 to March 2009 in a ?exible delivery period, in response to opportunities to deliver live client projects and allowing for a range of types of learning to ?t in around your other work commitments.

We are recruiting 20 media professionals for this pilot programme. They will undertake a paid (BECTU and PACT equivalent rates for a 37.5 hour week) placement within companies whose core business is producing digital content. The White Room are currently recruiting for this project which runs from November 08 to March 09.

If you are interested in getting a placement, please call or email Susi O’Neill on 07981 222799 or send your C.V and covering letter to susi@thewhiteroomcec.com to register your interest.

For further information on the programme, email dmex@visionandmedia.co.uk

What do I get?

A training diagnostic planning session to identify your development needs in working in digital environments Opportunity to learn skills vital to producing media in digital age
A paid 4 week work placement at a NW digital business working on a live brief.
Individual training and development plan.
Attendance at 3 master class seminars with leading digital industry pioneers to offer handson experience and Q&A on topics including Digital Commissioning, Pitching, IP and Collaboration.
Access to an individual mentor with senior experience in digital environments.
Access to the on-line DMeX learning resource Access to all training and resources with encouragement and support to record your placement and training through blogging and video diaries.
Opportunity to participate in a virtual worlds collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University MA Creative Writing tutors to produce a digital short with Moviestorm or in Second Life.
Become part of a network of Freelancers and leading Digital Companies in the NW The support of dedicated programme co-ordinators to ensure you have ongoing benefits from the programme.

How do I get it?

Call me – Susi O’Neill on 07981 222799 or send your C.V and covering letter to susi@thewhiteroomcec.com to register your interest.

About Northwest Vision and Media

Northwest Vision and Media works on behalf of the TV, film, radio, digital and games industries in the North-west to grow a world-class media economy within the region. We provide strategic leadership, help to build businesses, develop skills and talent, encourage and invest in production and inspire audiences. Find out more at www.visionandmedia.co.uk
Northwest Vision and Media is funded by the UK Film Council, the Northwest Regional Development Agency,
European Funds, Skillset, local, city and council authorities across the region.

Broadcast Learning & Development Conference 08, Oct 07, BAFTA

Had a more interesting time than expected at the Broadcast Learning & Development 08 conference in the swanky confines of BAFTA HQ (usual film types abound) on 195 Piccadilly yesterday.

Bit trepidation as Learning and Development (or L&D as those in the profession call it) is a bit outside of my knowledge zone – thus the trip to this conference – the first of it’s kind to discuss issues around skills and training in the broadcast (primarily TV and radio) industries.

It was jam-packered with HR and learning profs from places like BBC, ITV plus some indie people and a few freelancers. Generally they seem to be ‘nice ladies’ in their late 30s/40s who go into this line of work, and good on them because I believe in my own consultancy practice, and indeed my own professional development, you really can’t think enough about how you can keep improving and thinking about the impact of skills and the growth of people on your business practice.

Expertly faciliated by Radio 4’s Roger Bolton (of ‘Right to Reply‘ fame), my highlights of the day were:

Sell the value of L&D to your business – a balloon debate

This involved bailing out the dead weight of the least interesting speaker in a series of knock-out rounds. More Oxford Debating Society than Weakest Link. Frank Ash, Creative Consultant to the BBC discussed taking producers back to ’storytelling school’ fared second best, but Leah Harrison Singer of Bloomberg News scooped the prize by discussing measured journalism and training that ‘their man in Kazakhstan’ could access, use and make relevant – a huge challenge in training a global network of several thousand financial journalists. I tend to zone out when I hear a slick American presentation, so didn’t quite get it.

Workshop 2: Managing Talent

Jo Taylor of Channel 4’s 4Talent talked about the four pledges C4 have developed with their network of indie producers. Which were:

1. Book-end each production with a meeting discuss your personal development.
2. Establish mentoring relationships between senior professionals and less experienced staff.
3. Share experience and expertise through master classes.
4. ?
The handout they distributed was wrong so if anyone knows the answer to elusive pledge #4 please post in the comments.

These are all solid and good – cheap and easy to implement, whether you’re ITV or a micro-indie producer. However, the language still seems to frame L&D as something to implement in-house – the discussion across the day quickly zoned in on the favourable (nay jealous in present economy) position of the BBC and its responsibilities at training all of the increasingly freelance broadcast industries. Freelancers have the least access to training, and also to even know where appropriate training exists – or to even access a learning plan to know what their skills gaps they should be plugging are. A thorny issue, I felt not fully undertsood by the largely corporate broadcasting attendees. My own view is that spaces like Production Base website can become ‘watercoolers’ to connect people more effectively – all freelancers chat and learn from one another informally.

Brian Kelly of BECTU, I think sort of got it – saying we should empower individuals by collating learning resources under Creative Commons licences to distribute and share. David Knott from IBM talked about using platforms like Facebook to enable people to leverage existing technologies and structures – interesting take from the world’s leading supplier of IT services!

Many of the experienced faces in the room concluded that we’re very good at induction and starting to get better at diversity recruitment and bringing in talent. But after the early years, people get lost in the system and their actual personal plans and goals end up under the hamster wheel.

Yet lest we not forget how hard it can be to win the battle for diversity in the still largely ‘mini me’ TV industry. At a college open day in Hammersmith, a BBC HR rep was asked by young students – ’so what is the BBC, I’ve heard of it but I don’t know what it is?’. Many see the BBC as something not ‘for them’. (Though us digitalists may argue that many in this generation don’t even see TV as something for them). But from my own experiences of highly nepotistic, inaccessible and exclusive BBC recruitment over the last decade(“Regional development? But don’t you know we’re a national organisation?!” I kid you not), I’m tempted to agree with the girls from Hammersmith.

Yet the C4 Diversity Programme attracted 5,000 applicants – and yielded a diverse trainee group which included a traveller, Chinese, second careers and young black males. The BBC’s programme attracted 3,000 – many of the 71,000 page views wisely put off by a ‘reality check’ quiz before the application (“do you want to give over your days, nights and LIFE to programme making’? etc). A big question is how can we support the thousands who are rejected at the ‘open door’ stage – give them opportunities to develop themselves and come back next year.

What can we learn from other industries?

In short – not a lot. Or at least not that much from this generic collection of guys from IBM, Cegos, PIXELearning (sorry Kevin!) and Master Training Institute.

But what we did learn from Jeremy Blain from Cegos , Europe’s largest training and development survey you’ve never heard of, was that Europe has the highest participation in training in business (61%) and the highest ROI, yet the lowest budgets for professional development. Exit interviews show the majority of people quit, not because of their relationship with the company, but with their line manager.

Using Henry Ford’s analogy, you wouldn’t let a factory run at 60% capacity, yet we allow our human capital often to work on auto-pilot. Look at improving 100 people by just 1%, and that’s 100% growth. I’m not sure I like or agree with this analogy of people as ‘performance’ machines, but I do agree that people need to be empowered to develop their own training and learning. In France this is acheived by a 1% “do it or get taxed” levvy on professional development, yet this was thought to succeed due to the power of unions and also the generic non-bespoke nature of much of the training provided.

Richard Bradly from the Master Training Istutitute believe the most important question in planning training is WHY? You should ask yourself this at least seven times before starting to do anything.

- What – analyse the need. Maybe we don’t need to do anything.
- How – can managers be used to deliver it.
- You – walk the talk in delivering and doing.

David Knott of IBM believes online learning is key to success. The enterprise of the future needs to tip the 70% classroom to 30% online on it’s head to 30% classroom with 70% online resources to succeed. (In a later talk, Daniel Wain believes e-learning is most effective when combined with other types of ‘blended’ learning). An interested lesson an academic experiment teaches us:

Half the students were given an iPod lecture and resources. The other half attended lectures in the normal way. The iPod students came to seminars better prepared – not because the i-lecture was better, but they had access to the resources in advance to prepare. It’s how we set up the learning as much as how we deliver it.

The future of learning

Vanessa Arden-Wood of Illumina, one of the biggest and most interesting producers of cross-platform content, gave us a damning vision of the producer of the future from a persona of characters. The old media producer is a Tarentino wannabee, enabled by a love of consumption and nepotistic real-world connections. The producers of the future is highly mobile, networked (working remotely from Germany was the example), connected to streams of content via mobile, a broad media education balanced with a specialist technical education and an active contributor of content. This character description, I think, genuinally scared the largely old media room. Perhaps the media producer of the future is less of the ‘master hustler’ of old and more an expert leader in the future?

The skills gaps between old and new media:

- Online v TV platforms – requires active consumption and production
- Understanding that audiences create their own content
- Multi-platform strategies need to be specific to the requirements and benefits of each platform
- Commissioning – less about a drink in the pub, more about ITT’s and technical compliance.

Illumina often find staff who are skilled in old media or other areas and train them in-house using cross-department skills (‘i-schools’). As a company they aren’t big enough to outsource training, so everyone needs to contribute to the learning of the organisation. They provide breathing space for R&D activity for everyone – because again as a smallish producer, there is no seperate R&D function.

David Wain, consultant, believes training is the law of the jungle – stand still and be the gazelle that gets eaten first by the lion. But get the tools right – are we selling hearing aids by telephone? Consider the intent, the content, and finally the technology to judge the best way to deliver training.

Summing up

Mr Bolton summed up nicely – there are more plurality of channels, yet less diversity of voices. Broadcasting is not a democracy but needs to be elite in order to be outstanding. The BBC and others are just about broadcasting – the rest of what they do follows from that.

Myself, I learnt a lot. OD actually means Organisational Development, not the continual bleeting on about the economic situation. ‘Blended learning’ means doing different stuff – on and offline. And training in broadcasting is an area where technology and the changing nature of doing business online is having a great impact, but importantly training must deliver – organisations in these uncertain times need to fight to retain and develop their human and intellectual capital – and fight to survive.

Broadcast Training Awards

The post-event awards do presented by the new two-day old minister for skills (who he? exactly). It was a shame they were all big players nominated, but that probably says a lot about indie’s resources and abilities to implement dedicated training programmes in-house. And the nomiations were:

BBC – “Operation: Hamster Wheel” took Radio 1 producers of the treadmill and out and about to meet their audiences. In Scunthorpe.

Bloomberg News - Sophisticated tools to analyse the rapidly shifting markets delivered to a global network to help stem the overall economic collapse of the western world. Apparently.

ITV – Get a bunch of trainees in black t-shirts and trainers and get them to make a film about what ITV’s vision and values are. Everyone gets it now.

GCap Radio – Stemming the outflow and retaining more of their news staff, by, err, well not quite sure but Helen starts her new job at RAM FM in Derby next week, so it must have worked.

QVC - Their staff had a lot of fun at ‘The Office’ style new age workshops trying to sell each other a bottle of water QVC-style. QVC’s CEO thinks all his people have the ability to become leaders of the future.

And the winner was…

Bloomberg. Well given then impending economic apocalypse, we’re putting a lot of faith in their hands from now on. So let’s hope they’ve got their training plans right…

Promoting your music as an independent artist using social media

I’m a musician by training – and occassional after-hours trade. So I often meet up with muso-types and they are often bemused when I hand them my ‘digital consultant’ business card. “So do you make websites?”. “Well”, I reply, “not exactly…”.

Lately a young chap called Yinka took me up on my strange business card and asked me for some advice on using social media to promote a new EP for his band Sabatta. I love this challenge as:
a) It makes you really think about how to apply theory to a real situation – how is this stuff all useful to someone on a low/zero budget? and
b) I think a great skill in life is just to ask and ask again until you get a bit of what you want – and I’m all in for people taking up on advice and giving back when they’re up the ladder.

So here’s an extract of my advice:

“The biggest problem you have as a self-managed and unsigned act is that, if you pardon the pun, there’s a lot of ‘noise’ out there in independent music – and it’s not just about guitars and singers, there’s just a thick cloud of information everywhere in the music space. All the ‘ear time’ at the major new media platforms (Bebo, Youtube, MySpace etc.) is taken over with the professional pluggers – so in this respect getting to the top of the channel and ‘recommended’ sections is still in the hands of the old-school music industry. This has to be done through the old fashioned plugging virtues of hard sweat, with the hope that you can create something that’s either so good, or so quirky (strange, weird, funny, dark) that people recommend and share. Short of becoming a serial killer notoriety is hard to achieve

First up – just about all the best advice that can be give comes from Mr Andrew Dubber and the excellent New Music Strategies website – sign up to his blog and be sure to download the free e-book.

And of course read Kevin Kelley’s excellent article “1000 true fans” about using the ‘long tail’ to be sustainable as an independent artist.

Take it with a pinch of salt though, some people think you can’t make any money of the ‘long tail’ in music – and all of us scraping about to make any money at all probably suggests this is true.

There’s just so much stuff out there that you can create some great content (a song, a video, animation, photo shoot, podcast) and it just sort of goes ‘out there’ into the ‘deja you’ land (not ‘deja vu’ in that you’ve seen it in a past life but you’ve seen it all before!). So the crucial thing is what marketers call “stickiness” – why you would stick around, come back – it’s the repeat visitors that become fans, then they buy – and there’s no shortcut round stickiness. Stickiness is about creating the right ambiance and the right space – like creating a great cafe or bar where people are happy to hang out and chat or just check out the vibe. That’s the philosophy behind a lot of the social networks like Bebo anyway.

Looking at what’s big…

I noticed recently that novelty videos on YouTube were getting frightening high viewing - like Ninja cat, the whole Kersal Massive phenomena of loads of remixes from one naive teenager attempting to rap or the Cillit Bang techno remix.

This probably doesn’t help if you’re not into novelty and comedy music, but gives you an idea of how important humour is to make something viral - so maybe a collaboration with an upcoming comedian to make a video/viral could be an interesting idea.

Another lateral idea:

Seth Godin says go buy CDs wholesale of artists you sound like, then post them a CD of yours in the package. A low-cost way of putting yourself in the centre of potential fans.

You’ve already identified what artists you think you sound like, and who likes your music - you say: “Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Kravitz, Thin Lizzy, fans of the quirky often like us also – someone told me the other day one of my songs sounds like Elvis Costello meets Metallica – which was cool.”

So this is interesting – but would EITHER Elvis Costello or Metallica fans like you? Some will, some will not. This is a kind of crazy idea in itself of two quite different kinds of music - I could see you translating this into some kind of animation if you’re able to do this, or even something simple like a mash-up of Costello and metallica videos with your latest single as the soundtrack – coudl be big on YouTube and will show you’ve got a good sense of humour too!

You’ve got a great professional looking website – well done, you’re up on 90% of artists who struggle with an out of date site or just use MySpace. It suits your image – which is strong. Of course you’re a band who value your authenticity highly and have already established your musical style, so it’s not a case of jumping on the band wagon! But there’s something here I think which connects with social media – it’s more about engaging with people directly, so they get an insight into your world and see things from your angle.

Social media let’s you engage manageably with literally thousands if not tens of thousands of people – but what people want today is a ‘piece of the action’ – I don’t just want to hear about the artist or know when they’re playing in my town, I want to understand what they are writing about, their motivations – even what they had for dinner is interesting to the real trainspotters! So a micro-blogging platform like Twitter is really great for updates, particularly when you’re on the road, or to announce what you’re doing with the band. what are you listening to? What other gigs have you seen? Fashion, even hair tips (?). Social media is all about conversations.

I notice you have a blog too – well done on this front. BUT it’s rarely updated and seem to focus on what your’e releasing and is, if I may say, a rather ‘hard sell’ approach focused on what releases you want people to buy rather than a sustained relationship, i.e. getting people to know what you’re doing and to want to commetn on it and feel a part of it, and feel part of a conversation with you. That doesn’t mean you have to spend your life posting stuff, but a once a week update is nice – or even a bit of a ‘tour diary’ – There’s plenty of tools to make it really easy to upload photos or video from your phone etc. It shouldn’t just be about text!

Play around with stuff too – like you could do a series of short posts on a different theme or set yourself a mission – do reviews of all your favourite record shops, talk about what happened when you got in there, who you met, what you bought. Them a shameless plug for your new EP…then people may find your post who are into the same music and bingo…the association of your ideas with your music starts to set. But it takes a long time for these things to work! So you have to enjoy the process.

Some artists use the whole idea of ‘crowd sourcing‘ to get people to buy into (literally and metaphorically) what they’re doing. Elbow did it years ago when they got the names of everyone at their show to put on the sleeve of their concert DVD. Of course, a lot of people who weren’t even at the show put their name on the list for the craic (me included ) but it was a way of getting more people to pre-order the DVD – and Elbow seem to have been doing OK lately…

It’s basically an extension of the ‘fan club’ idea – people like Richard Cheese go heavy on it as it’s the primary way by creating ‘exclusive’ content (even getting Richard to sing your voicemail message) he can make money, particularly as an artist doing exclusively cover versions.

It’s so easy to set up polls, forums etc to start getting the ‘fans’ to contribute and help you filter your ideas a bit – maybe do your A&R for you – after all, they are the people who are going to be buying it, so give them what they want! MySpace is a great way to start out.

I notice you’re on all the big platforms – facebook, Last Fm, Myspace, Youtube etc. which is all good – you’re doing all the right things. You may want to think a little strategically about how these spaces interact rather than duplicate one another – it can be a lot of work doing the ‘copy and paste’ from one to another. Maybe each space may have a specific objective (like one is the ‘green room’ for lateral stuff to do with band, YouTube obviously for videos, MySpace may be exclusively focused on recordings and music) – but cross promotion is good too – like linking to your ‘proper blog’ from the MySpace blog.

In short, I don’t think there’s any real shortcuts – and it would take someone far more creative and imaginative than I to tell you what would work – and even then it’s still a bit of a lottery. The crucial thing is to be hanging out in the places where your online users are – that’s probably email, Facebook and MySpace primarily. Anywhere else is a plus, but that’s where your focus should be.

You need to engage and create a volume of ’stuff’ and content that reflects what Sabatta are about, but remember : ‘no one shits a masterpiece’. In today’s environment, people have voracious appetites and want a lot of new ’stuff’ and you need to feed them with it – titbits and hors d’oevre – remixes, exclusvie tracks, blog posts, videos, photos – not necessarily always the highest quality but the mass of it will give you presence – after a while people will be aware of you from a link here or there and that’s how you start building notoriety!

The offline stuff, flyers, flyposting, press reviews all works in pretty much the same way. But importantly – dont spend your life being an administrator of MySpace/Facebook - spend more of your time on the art than the message – decide how much time it is worth spending on social media to meet your creative and business goals, and stick to a rigid timetable otherwise it can get too time-consuming and demoralising.

The live video on your MySpace looks good, you’re a great live band – so more of this! If you can get the gear together to film all your shows or get a film-maker in your entourage, you’d be suprised how much great content fodder you can produce from just one camera and a few cut-aways.

Good luck!”

I’d be interested in any more worldly advice you have for Yinka and Sabatta, and if you want some advice yourself why not drop me a line.

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