I’ve got very little time to spare these days and for the next little while, as we are fast approaching the date of my organization’s major event on Sunday, August 3, at the same time as we are getting ready to launch our new website (about to launch in beta in about ten days - want to beta test it with us?).

Things are only going to get more hectic over the next few weeks, which has made me think more about my online habits, and specifically, what happens to those habits when I am truly pressed for time.

What happens? I spend much more time sending out short bursts of information, via microblogging like twitter, or audio posts on Utterz.

These are technologies that allow me to broadcast on the fly, and let me just keep folks up to date on what’s going on. Useful, very useful, for when times are so busy all I can do is act, not reflect.

It seems to me that blogging is more for reflection, assimilation and synthesis of information, whereas the tools I mentioned just now — often referred to as lifestreaming tools — are for real-time updates.

If my life were a baseball game, Twitter and Utterz would be the play-by-play announcer, and my blog is where I write the column for the next day’s newspaper.

And Friendfeed? Friendfeed is my wire service.

If you want to watch (and participate in) something really fun and interesting while I am over here going 100 miles an hour, check out the NTEN Be The Media Project (to be renamed soon, we promise). I am participating and contributing to it as I can, but there are bound to be many interesting contributions and discussions over the course of the project (curated by none other than Beth Kanter), so mark it and stay tuned.

In the meantime, I’ll be in the play-by-play booth.

Ever since I started writing this blog, I’ve thought about my role in social media in terms of some of my favorite metaphors, like Translator, Interpreter, and Ambassador.

As time has gone on, I have only become more convinced that this is what I’m really good at, that this is really what I have to offer.

I’m a translator, and, like most translators, I spend my time straddling two different worlds. Hopping from one sphere to another, listening for common themes and for different ways to tell each other’s stories.

Something Chris Brogan wrote in today’s newsletter clarified some of that for me, and extracted a lovely robin’s egg of clarity out of what had become a bit of a bird’s nest of twigs — at least for some of the folks who know me. Namely, why exactly am I getting an MBA?

Chris wrote part of his newsletter this week on how to talk to the “senior team” about blogging and social media. This is a topic that I care about deeply.

YOU’VE come to accept that blogging and social media are cool. You believe that Facebook has business value, and that Twitter, used correctly, might be the greatest idea in the universe to build customer relationships. But how will you convince the powers that be of all this? Connect to their state of mind, their words, and to your existing practices. (Italics mine)

That’s the key, right there. Connect to their state of mind.

Why do I want to spend my precious time learning about accounting, and economics, and finance, and traditional marketing principles, as they are taught by a top business school?

So I can speak the language of the decision makers. Honestly. They don’t really have the time of day for me unless I do.

And it’s not enough to just toss around the occasional buzzword or acronym, like ROI or SCR or whatever else people are muttering this week. To get deep, heartfelt buy-in, you need to have a deep understanding of what makes business RUN. And, perhaps more importantly, what sends it running the other way.

But wait, I work at a nonprofit, right? Things are so much softer and fuzzier in nonprofits, right?

Please.

Get this: instead of only having to convince one CEO of the value of social media, I have a team of — that’s right — THIRTY Board Members (most are VPs or CEOs in banking, insurance, education, finance, real estate, etc.) to win over, on every single newfangled idea of mine.

Thirty. Every single one of them operating from a business point of view. Every single one of them very good at what they do.

So, rather than spend my time and theirs trying to get them to see my side of the story, I’m going to invest some serious time trying to figure out theirs. Because it turns out that their way of seeing things is a lot more common, a lot more pervasive, and in fact holds a lot more water in this world, than mine.

As Chris points out,

Businesses WANT to be innovative, but that costs money, involves risk, and rarely pans out.

Businesses and business leaders aren’t deliberately setting out to be killjoys, after all. They would love to be a step ahead of the field, and to stand out in a positive way. But there’s always that real chance that they might stand out in a bad way as a result of your brilliant social media idea, and that tends to be really very off-putting. And can you blame them? Who really wants to be on the list?

What I love doing more than anything else is teaching. And by teaching I don’t mean that I get to stand up at the front of the room and tell you all what I think is true. It means doing tons of research, digesting it all, finding the patterns, and then talking to you about it in a way that resonates with YOU.

If I don’t speak your language — and understand your culture in a deep, meaningful way — then I’ve got a pretty slim chance of success.

I see the MBA program as a very specialized study-abroad, cultural-immersion course of study.

I already know how I think. It’s how YOU think that interests me.

I’m starting an MBA in the fall, and so I decided to spend some time this summer brushing up my quantitative skills in preparation for what promises to be a pretty intense first year.

I’m fine at math. It just… takes me a while. It takes me longer to grok things expressed in numbers and formulas than it does other people. So I have to give myself that extra time, have to budget that time in, and have to plan on repeating the lesson material, rereading the chapter, and reworking the problems, a bit more than other people.

Average? It takes me about three times longer than it should. I have to read the chapter three times, maybe do the problem three times, before I feel I have a true, deep understanding of the thing.

Yeah, I could memorize these things a lot more quickly; commit them to my short-term memory and fake my way through a bit more, but I found out a long time ago that that is nothing but a plan for short-term mediocrity followed by long-term failure.

I need to actually get it, to know why, to have an intuitive understanding of math, finance, stats, whatever. Otherwise I’m just a parrot — speaking English, sure, but really just repeating random strings of words and phrases that have little if any bearing on the topic at hand.

It’s useful for me to remember this when I am trying to teach other people about things that are easy for me (like all this social media internet-y stuff) that is not easy for them to grok right away.

What works for me might work for them. Time, repetition, rephrasing the problem - until one of these stories sounds relevant to my life, until it strikes a chord.

Strike a chord, and you might learn the song.

Sometimes I think we structure these conversations too much like they are fights, or debates: how to get your worthy adversary (your boss, board, constituents, colleagues, etc.) to think like you do! See the value of a blog, admit that Twittering can be more than trivial chit-chat, get excited about the possibilities of social networks.

For me, it’s an easy intuitive leap. Just like some people can look at a formula and recognize on sight the theoretical underpinnings and practical ramifications of a series of numbers, letters, and symbols that takes me hours to decipher.

You know, sometimes it just takes time. Some things, you have to do at your own damn pace.

Museums are among my favorite things ever. When I travel, that’s what I look for first: the museums.

While I’m intensively partial to the classic fine arts model, I also very much enjoy a good science museum, and am frankly plain nuts for historical homes and preserved sites.

I love museums because they are some of the most fascinating, complex, and revealing instruments we use to tell ourselves stories about ourselves. How we choose to tell those stories, and which stories we choose to tell, is endlessly interesting to me. (Also, this book basically spells out my central childhood fantasy for all to see.)

I spent some time this weekend at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and it helped me pick up the threads of a conversation I’ve been having with myself since last fall, when I went to the Technology in the Arts conference in Pittsburgh and saw Jake Barton give a keynote on how he was working with museums to design truly interactive exhibits and exhibit space.

Some museums are in the forefront of exploring how social media can help make their storytelling more inclusive, more democratic, more reflective of the many voices rather than the few — all of which either leads to a richer and deeper story, or to a narrative that is confusing and nonlinear to the point of distraction, depending on how successfully it is executed.

Some are holding tightly to the traditional model of storytelling, keeping it in the hands of the few, the specialized, the elite.

So I’ve been thinking about branding, and how cultural institutions like museums go about creating and managing their brands, especially in the changing dynamics of today’s distributed, interactive, co-created world.

How does a museum, with a (presumably) carefully constructed brand, often based largely on its carefully curated collection (whatever that may be), invite its patrons to co-curate that brand? Is that even a desirable goal? Does it depend on the museum, or the type of museum?

How are other museums besides the ones I mentioned here going about answering, or not answering, these questions?

What do you think social media can, or should do, to transform how museums tell our collective story, how they hold their individual mirrors up to ourselves?

I am still having this conversation with myself, but I thought I’d open the floor for discussion. What do you think?

I’ve been experimenting with a handful of new social networking sites lately, seeing how they work for me, and exploring what they might do for my organization.

Brightkite is a location-based social network, in which you post your location when you feel like updating. You can also post photos, which is nice.

However, I am already in the habit of using utterz.com for that, and I especially enjoy posting photos to utterz and then recording a brief snippet of what it sounds like to be in that place. Sometimes I narrate, sometimes I don’t. Mostly, I’m enjoying letting the sounds of the place tell the story without my help, if possible.

Plurk is the fallback twitter-replacement darling these days of the Twitter-obsessed. I signed on and poked around a bit, but, like most Twitterers, I am waiting for Twitter to get its act together and am loathe to leave until there is little doubt that isn’t going to happen.

Of these new tools, I’d have to say that Utterz is my favorite right now. I’ve had a great time using it to lifestream some of my recent travels, to my 15-year college reunion and then to Yankee Stadium in New York, and found that it fit pretty seamlessly into my life.

People talk about the barrier to entry for Utterz being as simple as (1) do you have a cell phone and (2) can you press the number 2, but I have found that all these tools have a hidden barrier to use, which is,

How much of an idiot do you look like while using it?

Of course, this differs for different people. Some people wouldn’t be self-conscious standing in Times Square and using semaphore to convey their deepest feelings.

But some of us feel self-conscious even using a camera in most situations (having grown up in a tourist area, I’m over-sensitive to looking like a tourist, even when I am one). So a successful application has to ask no more of me behaviorally than I would feel comfortable with in the normal course of life.

Utterz passes this test. I don’t feel conspicuous snapping a quick photo on my iPhone, it’s a piece of cake to email it to go@utterz.com right then and there, and then I just have to call the number for recording an Utter (it’s saved on my favorites list).

When I am recording my Utter, it looks and sounds exactly like I am talking on the phone to a friend.

I love Utterz as a tool for conveying the excitement or unique feel of a special event, and hope to use it at some more of my organization’s upcoming events this summer — especially those involving live music.

If the demographic is right, I could see getting a core group of people at events using Utterz to broadcast little snippets of the sights and sounds of a major event. I think it’s a fun — and powerful, and easy — way to communicate what’s going on right now, right where you are.

In the meantime, I’ve also been learning how to use my new MacBook Pro to make movies with my Flip camcorder. It took a few weekends of serious research and trial and error, but i finally ended up with some video to share.

See what you think. I don’t think it’s all that bad, for a first try. (I could be wrong.

My organization hosted an event this last weekend, with about 150 people — artists, business leaders, community leaders, etc. — in attendance. In the days leading up to the reception, several people called me to ask me what the dress code for the event was.

Now, things are pretty casual on Cape Cod, as a rule. Even fancy events don’t get that fancy. It’s just too much of a beach-and-leisure culture.

But many of the folks asking the question were artists who were being honored or featured in some way, and so my answer to them was “dress like an artist.”

And then they asked me what that meant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal branding, both because we just finished leading a class on this (and other) PR-related topics at work, and also because some of my favorite people have been writing about personal brand management lately, too.

A lot of folks get turned off by the idea that they should have a personal brand — that this all sounds way too market-y and salesman-y, especially for artists and other creative types.

Fact is, you have a personal brand. The only question is whether or not you’re aware, and are doing anything actively to manage it.

Your personal brand is nothing more or less than how you present yourself. This means in person, in writing, on the phone, online, at the grocery store when you don’t think anyone is looking — anytime you’re visible, you’re creating an impression.

Does this mean you have to always be “on?”

No, not as long as your personal brand is in alignment with who you actually are.

A friend of mine says of one of her favorite people that, no matter where you slice her, she’s the same through and through. It always makes me think of Neapolitan ice cream. No matter where you slice it, it’s always strawberry, vanilla, chocolate

Beyond this basic premise of Be Who You Are it’s just a matter of polishing yourself up a bit for public consumption.

For this polishing job, I lean on a second mantra: Be Who You Wish You Were.

I wish I were kinder, more thoughtful of others, more generous, less critical, and just generally nicer.

So I act as if I were.

I hope I am as responsible, helpful, and dependable as I like to think I am.

So I act as if I were.

What does it mean if I tell an artist to dress like an artist?

Be who you are. And then some.

(By the way, Chris Brogan really does have this one nailed as far as what a personal brand is, and why you should care. Please do read.)

I’ve been watching Beth Kanter traipsing across the globe over the last couple of weeks, as she traveled to Australia to give some workshops and a keynote on social media for nonprofits. She’s been blogging and twittering and uploading pictures to Flickr the whole time, and I’ve checked in with her updates a couple of times to see how things were going (mainly to see if she had met up with my friend Jules Woodward, the Executive Director of Flying Arts in Brisbane — she did).

One of the best things she pointed to during this trip, for me, was the blog maintained by Seb Chan, of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, fresh + new(er). (Thanks to Beth Kanter for the image.)

Seb writes about all manner of things touching on social media and how cultural organizations (including museums, performing arts venues, and others) can use these tools to get things done. The depth and intelligence of the coverage of this space on this blog is just superb — among the best I’ve seen.

A recent post that spoke to what I’ve been working on lately was Seb’s review of Groundswell by Forrester senior analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I recently finished reading Groundswell myself, but haven’t reviewed it yet because I’ve been too busy incorporating its ideas into the round of workshops on social media and nonprofits I’m in the midst of right now.

One of the most useful points I’ve found in Groundswell is the importance of planning for how engagement in web 2.0 will change your organization — how it works, how it processes information, how it responds to praise and criticism, and more. Some of this you can’t plan for — but you should at least know that change is likely.

Put simply, if you do engage, you organisation will change. If you engage strategically then this change can be managed and paced appropriately. For some organisations it might be most appropriate to deploy a range of ‘listening’ techniques and technologies before leaping into a poorly planned social media project. Even here at the Powerhouse we’ve had social media projects fail because we have over-estimated our intended audiences and their predicted behaviour. {Seb Chan, fresh + new(er)}

Often, I think we embark on social media “strategies” thinking that we are going to change our audience’s behavior — that we’re going to “get” them to do something we want them to do.

This is the sort of strategy that is likely to fail. People don’t like being “gotten” to do stuff. If there’s one thing people can sniff out, it’s coercion.

That’s where my other favorite part of Groundswell comes in (and Jeremiah Owyang talks about this a lot, too): Fish Where the Fish Are.

It’s not about getting people to do something new, so much as it is about going where they are already engaged, and getting down with them there.

That’s why the folks at Forrester are always banging on about this POST method of theirs — it makes you look first at the people you are trying to reach, second at what they are already doing online, and then you can start talking strategy and tools.

I banged on about this myself at some length during my class at Mount Holyoke on Friday, when I presented to a roomful of alumnae of various ages on how they can start thinking about using tools like blogging, social networking, and photosharing for their own nonprofits.

I used the occasion of my own 15th reunion at Mount Holyoke to sharpen some of my favorite event-broadcasting-through-social-media skills. As a result, I know I experienced the weekend very differently — I was more reflective, more thoughtful about how I spent my time, where I stood, and what I noticed — because, I suppose, I wasn’t just there for me. I was thinking about what you might want to see, what you might care or not care about, and what I might be otherwise taking for granted.

If you want to see some of what I got up to during my reunion/social media workout, you can check it out on:

Utterz

Flickr

Twitter

and coming soon to YouTube…

I’m leaving work a little early tomorrow afternoon and driving out to Western Massachusetts to attend my 15th year reunion at Mount Holyoke College. I’ll be giving a workshop on Web 2.0 for Nonprofits first thing Friday morning, which is really kind of a thrill for me, to teach a class at my old (and much-loved) college.

I mentioned to a few people that I plan to document the heck out of the weekend, through my various social media outlets (seesmic, utterz, blog, twitter, etc.), and one of my friends responded that I was sure to be the only one there doing so.

She meant that I’d be the only one from the 15th reunion class to be doing any of these things, and I think she’s right. There won’t be more than a small fraction of my already very small (<450) graduating class in attendance, and only a very small portion of the population is at all attuned to this sort of thing at all, really.

But what about the graduating seniors? Reunion takes place on the same weekend as graduation, so we’ll be sharing a lot of events with the senior class throughout the weekend. Do you think anyone will be live-tweeting graduation?

You know, not really.

It isn’t really about age. Whether or not you “get” social media — or engage, or have certain feelings and conceptions about it — depends a great deal more on those classics of the detective genre: motive, means, and opportunity.

Motive

You gotta wanna.

What is your motivation for being here in the first place? There are lots of different reasons given for the sometimes astounding amounts of time and energy we spend blogging, podcasting, twittering, and otherwise behaving mysteriously to most of the general populace.

Meeting new people, generating new business, researching new ideas — whatever your jones, you can feed it here.

But if you don’t have the jones, you probably won’t bother.

Means

It helps enormously if you have been exposed to these tools, been given a fair chance at understanding their basic premise and architecture, and have the technology to get involved (i.e., access to a computer and the internet).

To a lot of people, social media remains mysterious because nobody has seriously tried to explain it to them, in a way that meets them where they are — and addresses their possible motives.

Opportunity

It takes time.

It takes a little (or a lot, if you’re lucky) of time each day to do this right, and it takes a certain duration of time to start seeing results.

But I really kind of hate it when people who aren’t into social media dismiss it (and me, my time, and my passion) with something along the lines of: I don’t have the time for it.

You know what? Neither do I.

But I make the time, because:

• I wanna, and
• I can.

I don’t exercise enough. Why not?

Not because I don’t have time. I can easily get up an hour earlier and go for a walk each morning. But I don’t because I don’t wanna — I’d rather stay in bed with my cat curled up under my chin. Each morning, this proves to be a more persuasive argument than the one provided by my alarm clock (and scale, sadly).

So I lack the proper motivation, despite having the means (legs) and the opportunity (time).

You really need all three.

What’s holding you back?

For a couple of years now, I have been increasingly fearful of driving my car in what I tend to refer to as “weather.” Meaning, of course, rain or snow of any sort of noticeable intensity.

So much so, in fact, that a few months back I missed a chance to have lunch with a friend in Boston — really just because the forecast was for rain. Heavy, torrential rain.

So I called and canceled, even though I had been looking forward to it for weeks.

Then a few days ago, I replaced the windshield wipers on my car. And today, I drove to Boston in a heavy, torrential downpour. No sweat.

Why? Apparently, the only reason I hated driving in the rain was because of the diminished visibility. I thought that the lousy vision I had through my windshield was what everybody was burdened with — and I couldn’t understand why everybody wasn’t as freaked out as I was in nasty weather.

As I made my way home through the heavy rain, hands pleasantly unclenched, heart beating at a normal rate, I though about how such a simple piece of technology — inexpensive, and something I was able to install myself — made such an enormous difference in my perception and my experience.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that I should have figured out sooner that it was my wiper blades, not my bravery, that was the real issue here.

To me, it’s a reminder that simple, everyday technologies can have a significant impact on our lives for the better. The addition of one simple thing can lead to a disproportionate increase in things that are not so simple, like freedom, confidence, independence.

It’s also reminding me how one minor success can lead to a disproportionate willingness to risk more, and to gain more.

Like, when I first learned how to change a tire, it suddenly made me feel like Hey, I know a thing or two about cars! Even if that wasn’t technically true, it was my attitude that allowed me to feel confidence when dealing with the automotive shop guys, the people I eventually sold my car to, and the people I bought successive cars from.

Because I took that small step years ago to learn one basic thing about my car — how to change my own tire — I benefitted from a serious ripple effect for years after.

I see the same thing with the adoption of online skills, especially in my work with relative novices, mostly artists, teaching them about the online tools that might help them be more successful.

While there might be resistance at first — and in some it is, in fact, never overcome — in some, all it takes is one small success, one tiny experience of well, I can do THAT to open up a world of possibilities, to plant the idea in someone’s head, sure, I know a thing or two about computers/blogging/podcasting/whatever

Rachel Happe was talking about the importance of getting to the AHA Moment not long ago, and I think this might be a variation on that theme.

And, since she was the friend I stood up a few months ago, before I knew a thing or two about wiper blades, I hope I can celebrate this AHA moment with her, by rescheduling our postponed lunch from a few months back.

Have you had an AHA moment — in any area of life? How did it change things for you?

Len Edgerly was my featured speaker last night in the class I’m presenting at work, What’s Your Story: Personal Branding, PR and New Media for Artists. (Check out the class blog here.)

Unfortunately, we ran into some logistical problems when, minutes before the class was to begin, we noticed smoke coming out of two outlets in the wall — one of which had Len’s MacBook Air plugged into it. Via a surge protector, thank god.

Because POP! SIZZLE! and suddenly we were scrambling on the floor, unplugging everything in sight, while the acrid smell of electric… things… burning wafted through the air.

We called the fire department and, while we were waiting for them to arrive (they were super prompt), we made arrangements to move the class across the street to Cape Cod Community College. MANY THANKS to our friends at the college — they really came through for us and hooked us up with a large auditorium and a technician (after hours!) to help us with the a/v.

Len was presenting on podcasting and video podcasting for artists, so the visual portion of his presentation was to consist largely of live internet demos of audio and video on the web. So there was a lot of a/v to be handled.

Len was a real pro and rolled with the punches, striding effortlessly into his presentation like we had planned this all along.

Of course, because he is a podcaster, he was recording all the while, and you can listen to the resulting podcast here. (To hear the whole talk, minus the firemen, go right over here.)

Thrill to the sounds of fire engines, several incredibly large and helpful firemen, and a room full of artists getting turned on to the joys of podcasting!

Watch an unsuspecting artist tell his story and have it be immediately posted to Flickr video, as an object lesson of the ease of posting video to the web!

Read all of Len’s helpful links on the delicious page he created for the class!

It was a great session — Len is a terrific speaker and is really effective at conveying his enthusiasm to others, all while keeping it at a friendly level for a group of technology novices. And he really keeps a cool head under fire.

Thank you, Len!