Are You Ready To Pimp Your Widget?

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How To Effectively Pitch Your Show to a Sponsor: Step-by-Step Prospecting, Intro Call, Deal Structure, Follow Up and Closing the Sale

The New Media Expo is the world's most popular convention for podcasters, bloggers and online content creators. If you are serious about online video it's an event that you shouldn't miss.

Today I'm starting a weekly blog series that highlights a session or event happening at New Media Expo - hopefully enticing you to come join us online video content creators in Las Vegas August 14-16, 2008.

Last year one of the best sessions with the most useful take-away information was Susan Bratton's session about the business side of getting advertisers and sponsors. This year the Dishymix of Personal Life Media returns to the New Media Expo with:

How To Effectively Pitch Your Show to a Sponsor: Step-by-Step Prospecting, Intro Call, Deal Structure, Follow Up and Closing the Sale
Track 3: The Business of New Media
Instructor: Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media

Description: Description: You want to sell advertising and sponsorships into your content, but it's not your area of expertise. Susan artfully covers everything you need to know to successfully pitch your content to an agency or marketer. Susan's candor and insight combined with running an interactive session make this a must-attend event. Learn how to find and engage prospects with a professionally developed pitch. Understand how agencies work with clients and exactly whom you should pitch. Walk through a mock introduction call so you'll know just what to say. Understand the client's strategy by asking the right revealing questions so you can craft a proposal that gets to "yes!" Review various forms of advertising and how to combine online and audio/video ads to create a robust sponsorship program that performs for your advertiser and shows ROI, even if your audience numbers are small. Learn to create value beyond CPM to maximize revenue. Ad units, standard rates and advertising buzzwords will be explained. Susan explains insertion orders, media kits, collecting and presenting demographic profiles, RFP's, proposal generation and invoicing. Most importantly, you'll learn how to be pleasingly persistent, handle rejection and keep motivated. You will leave feeling informed, organized and confident about presenting your show to sponsors.

The New Media Expo conference web site has outstanding resources including the Official New Media Expo podcast and various podcaster templates and documents.

Oh, you might also want to book your hotel now and get your free Expo Hall Pass before the price increase.

Size Matters: Ad Buyers Need to Buy Big

Susan Bratton Co-founder of Personal Life Media hits one out of the park with her DishyMix interview with Doug Weaver of Upstream Group about what is needed in the world of digital ad sales.

"Ad networks are changing the playing field. Media exchanges are shaking up the market. Sales revenue is down - a big surprise to publishers who have enjoyed steady growth since 2001.

Hear Doug’s recommendations for how you need to align your team today. Find out what kind of selling organization is required now to succeed in the long term - it may be very different from how you are staffing today."

Whether you are a media buyer or a media publisher (online video producer), if you are going to be involved with the buying or selling of ads you need to listen to this podcast.

Friends vs Fans

How can you have over 1000 Friends? If you did, how often would you talk to each and every one of your friends? How often would you see them? Send them a gift? Have dinner with them? What makes someone your friend vs a fan?

I think a little common sense goes a long way here but beyond that think about your brand vs you. Are you your brand or is your brand your brand and you are you?

If you are building a brand online your online "Friends" need to be treated as fans and feel free to get as many of them as possible. If you are building relationships to help grow your brand be careful about mixing your fans and your friends. It can come back to hurt you.

I hate it when someone I know in real life sends me a SPAM email about their project. "It feels very disingenuous and makes me want to "unfriend" them. I'm sure there are things that I've done and continue to do that rub people the wrong way as well but that's not going to stop me from talking about this.

Last night Chris Brogan (who I really enjoy hanging out with and drinking beers with at new media events - especially cause he's the one usually buying) twittered (or tweeted as some of you like to say) that he had posted over 10,000 times on Twitter. That got me thinking about how many of his postings were of any interest to me. The answer was very few and I removed Chris from my list of people that I follow on Twitter. Eric Rice then Twittered that he had Chris beat by a few hundred posts. I then thought about removing Eric but I realized that some of Eric's posts are informative to me because Eric likes to mix things up and create controversy. Eric also interacts with others way more than Chris. From what I see, Chris is usually Twitter Out" not "Twitter back and forth".

This morning I saw Susan Bratton twittered that she "just crested 1,000 FaceBook friends" and that prompted me to write this post.

Ask A Ninja is a Brand, and serves as a good case study for this. Associated with Ask A Ninja is Digital Filmaker, Beatbox Giant and the shows creators Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine.

On Ning, they have their official Fan Page, with 4802 members (at the time of this posting)on Facebook they have a Ask A Ninja Page and Kent has a page and I don't know if Douglas has a page.

They have kept their fans separate from their friends.

Now comes the gray area. Sometimes as a content creator you will have fans within the Internet video community that want to be friends with you. This makes things very confusing. I think the best way to approach this is to set some standards for yourself and think about what works best for you. Don't just click the "accept" button thinking the more friends you have the more money you will make because in the real world, the more "friends" you have the more you will dilute your relationships. However online the more "fans" you have the more money you have the potential to make.

All that said I'm sure Chris Brogan will still buy me beers because he's that nice of guy but my point here isn't really to ridicule anyone it's to have us all focus on the real power of the social networks and how we can best use them to grow our brands and monetize Internet Video not just have the most posts.

Remember, "Fame without fortune turns you into Joey Buttafocco." and you can't pay your rent with Twitter posts.

I think Chris Pirillo explains the "friends thing" pretty well in the above video and he also talks about how sites not sharing revenue "cheeses" him off.


Lower your head, watch your step and enjoy the rest of your day on the Internet.