4 of msn’s “10 careers that didn’t exist 10 years ago” are new-media related.

Need a career change?

A couple weeks back, msn had a story called “10 careers that didn’t exist a decade ago.”

40% of them are related to new media:

Bloggers
Bloggers can either be self-employed or work for an organization. They write conversational posts to promote a product, service or cause. The article profiled a health and fitness blogger who increased his income from $25,000 to $60,000 a year by writing ebooks, hosting a podcast, and making YouTube videos. He calls his new media venture his “dream job.”

Social media strategists
Can you really Tweet for a living? You can if you get a job as a social media strategist. These folks stay on top of all the new social media sites. They use social media to help their companies promote themselves online, being careful to observe the rules of social media etiquette (Offering help and information, not overt sales pitches).

User experience analyst
User experience analysts study how people use a website, and find ways to make the site easier to use. They’re in charge of making the site “sticky,” so users stay longer and come back to the site more often (See my earlier post, “What’s in your storefront window?”).

Video journalists

Commonly called “One Person Bands,” these video journalists tell stories through words and pictures. Used to be that they’d have to work at a TV station. Not anymore. Today they could be working for a newspaper, a radio station, a stand-alone news website, or post on sites like YouTube. Sometimes called  ”Backpack Journalists,” this new breed of reporters use today’s smaller cameras to shoot interviews and b-roll. They even shoot their own on-camera segments, called “stand-ups,” without the help of a videographer. When they’re finished shooting, they pull soundbites, write and record a script, edit the piece, and make the video ready for the web.

Read msn’s full article here.

New Media’s New Frontier: Apple’s iPad.

When Apple makes a new product announcement, as it did today with its new iPad, I feel like I’m living in the future I grew up watching on The Jetsons.

Apple’s products aren’t just gadgets.

They are beautiful machines.

When I purchased the first Mac (a G5) for our mass comm department in 2004, I got a lot of quizzical looks from students.

There were many people who thought that the PC had simply “won” the never-ending battle of competing products.

Like VHS beat out Beta.

One media technology product is supposed to replace another.

It’s nature’s way.

Besides, everyone knows Windows. Why learn a different system?

But the iPod and iTunes and Drew Barrymore’s boyfriend changed all that in a very fast few years.

In 2010, everyone has an iPod. Everyone uses iTunes.

Everyone is getting very comfortable with Apple’s Jetsonian way of doing technology.

Today, the company changed the game again with its introduction of a 9.7 inch tablet computer that was talked about so much in the news my grandma said she was tired of hearing about it all day.

But I can’t hear enough about the iPad.

That’s because it opens up the market even more for the new media products we’ll teach students to create.

As another indication of how new media is beginning to heat up around niche programming, take a look at the buildup to this product announcement today …

Podcasters and bloggers  have speculated about an Apple tablet for over a year.

Sites like Gizmodo, Appletell, and Engadget had reported on rumors and posted Photoshopped pictures of what such a device would look like.

All of this talk lead up to today’s announcement, which was covered  live on web tv shows like Leo LaPorte’s MacBreak Weekly.

I watched the coverage on my laptop over lunch today.

At one point, Leo said they had 114,000 webcast viewers. To put that into perspective, some niche national cable channels are lucky to have 50,000 viewers at a time.

With the iPad in the hands of millions of web surfers when it goes on sale in late March, the audience for targeted new media content (audio and video podcasts, blogs, social media, Internet radio, live streaming events) will grow exponentially.

So, what do you think? Are you buying an iPad? Will it replace your netbook or laptop?

Pioneer 90.1 takes MN Arts on the Road.

Some really exciting things are happening at Northland’s student and volunteer-staffed radio station, Pioneer 90.1 KSRQ.

Installation of our new HD digital transmitter begins this week.

As soon as it hits the air, Pioneer 90.1 will be the first radio station in our region to multicast. We’ll have three channels of audio on 90.1 that can be received by anyone with an HD radio.

(Best Buy’s in-house brand Insignia makes a great little portable HD radio that sells for under 50 bucks. It even has RDS, so you get scrolling song title and artist information on analog FM stations, too.)

MN Arts on the Road

Pioneer 90.1 receives a MN arts and culture grant that allows us to create programming to be archived online and shared with the other stations in our statewide AMPERS network. 

Beginning later this month, Pioneer 90.1 will go on the road to record area arts interviews and musical performances that we’ll broadcast locally and share with other AMPERS stations using PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.  

We’ll also use our Tricaster portable video switcher to present these performances online, bringing a new media element to radio programming as we did with the Saturday Morning Barndance broadcast I wrote about last month.

Our new “MN Arts on the Road” series will give area artists and musicians a new outlet to share their work statewide, and with the online world.

Here’s a video explaining how PRX allows public radio stations like ours to share their programming.

I’ve been mining the site for programming we can add to Pioneer 90.1 and our digital channels. There’s a show about social media I’d like to add to our weekend lineup.  

So, what else would you like to hear on the radio in northwest Minnesota and northeast North Dakota?

Do you know of any arts or music events we should feature on “MN Arts on the Road?”

What’s in your storefront window?

Your website is a storefront window. You need to use traditional media (radio, TV and newspaper ads) to make your potential customers aware that your storefront is there and how to get to it.

And once those customers have their noses pressed to the glass, you need to have something in the window that will make them want to come inside the store and shop.

There’s a new term for those drool-worthy doodads in the virtual storefront window.

They’re now known as “engagement items,” and they make visitors to your website stick around longer then they otherwise would.

Engagement items are things like audio interview clips, polls, interactive maps, blogs, photo galleries, Tweets, live webstreams, and what I consider to be the most engaging — videos.

You’ll notice that our college website uses many of these features.

Now, besides traditional advertising, how to get people to your site?

Leave them “breadcrumbs” to follow all over the web:

comment on other blogs,

be a guest on a podcast or a blogtalk radio show,

join forums related to your business or service,

write articles on your area of expertise and distribute them via content distribution sites.

Paid search is great, too. I’m learning the ins and outs of Google AdWords right now, and as a frugal person – I love the concept.

There is no waste.

You only pay when someone clicks.

And as with the YouTube analytics I wrote about in an earlier post, taking a look at the most popular search terms related to your product or service can give you valuable insight into what your customers are looking for.

CNBC has a show running now about Google. They showed how a small boot company was able to grow their business by 30 percent using AdWords.

It would be just about impossible for this little custom boot manufacturer to use mass media to advertise.

So many people who would see the ad on TV or in the paper just wouldn’t be in the market for boots. The boot guy would have to pay to reach those people, regardless.

But with AdWords, only the people mostly likely to be interested in handmade boots see the ad. And that’s a worldwide audience.

When I first thought about Google ads, I only was thinking about search. But Google also places your clickable ad on websites and blogs specific to what you are trying to promote.

So if I place a Google ad for our radio business program here at the college, it will show up in search results for “radio broadcasting schools mn” and on radio blogs and webpages participating in Google’s “content network.”

It’s a great deal for local businesses as ads can be limited to show up only within a specific demographic location.

Here’s Google’s YouTube video describing how it all works:

What are your experiences with AdWords?

What kinds of breadcrumbs have you used to lead people to check out your site?

What kinds of engagement items do you give them to keep them there?

The next big social media thing?: Give me 12seconds.

YouTube + Twitter = 12seconds

At 12seconds.tv, you use your webcam or cell phone to record a video (12 seconds, max — like Twitter’s 140 character limit).

12seconds gives you a unique email address where you send the clip, and it ends up on your 12seconds page.

There you can get an embed code or widget to share the clip on your blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

I’d make a video right now to demonstrate, but my hair is messy.

Check it out here and tell me if you agree that 12seconds is the next big thing.

Will you use it?

Getting real about radio.

As the new semester begins here at Northland, I’ve been hearing from a good number of students interested in our New Media and Radio Business programs set to start in August (I replied to 3 more just today who were interested in radio, and registration doesn’t open for another 3 and a half months!).

It’s been awhile since we talked radio on the New Media blog, so we’ll do that today.

The big reason to come to Northland for an education in radio is Pioneer 90.1.

Northland is the only public 2-year college in Minnesota with its own student-operated radio station. In fact, we’ll soon have three radio stations.

The station is converting to HD digital broadcasting in a couple months, which will allow us to broadcast three channels of audio on 90.1FM. We’ll be able to operate our radio department much like stations are run in the “real world” today — as clusters of several stations belonging to one company.

Almost all private broadcast schools use simulation to train students. Here, they are on the air, on a real station with real listeners, almost immediately.

New Media has changed the radio business in the past few years. Listeners expect more from us. They expect an online presence.

Students in the Northland Radio Business program learn the new media tools of blogging, podcasting (audio and video), social media and web streaming in a business environment that’s changing very quickly.

This isn’t “DJ school.”

If your idea of a career in radio involves sitting in a studio playing your favorite songs all day, you need to do a little more research.

Small market station owners and program directors can rely on voicetracking and satellite feeds to cover much of the music programming.

Instead, they need employees who understand that radio is a business, first and foremost.

They need employees who can handle a variety of tasks — voicetracking, setting up music logs and commercial scheduling, sales, sports play-by-play, interview programs, remote broadcasts, commercial script writing, audio production, newsgathering, reading obituaries without mispronouncing names, maintaining websites, and the new media requirements I just mentioned – podcasting, social networking, and whatever new thing pops up in the months ahead.

Small town radio stations (where almost all new graduates get their start) are still thriving (even when their big-city counterparts are hurting) because they still do these core community-service things.

They need employees who can get excited about doing a remote from the convenience store at 7 AM on fishing opener Saturday or travelling 3 hours in a snowstorm on a Thursday night to call a basketball game.

So what about job prospects?

If you can’t move after you graduate, radio is probably not a good option for you.

In rural communities like ours, full-time radio jobs can be hard to find. Most likely, you would start doing weekends or evenings. If you can prove your value to the station, you’ll be ready to step in when a full-time slot becomes available.

If you can move, you’ll find it much easier to find a full-time radio job after graduation. For an idea of what’s available, please check the job openings on these sites:

http://www.minnesotabroadcasters.com/careers/ (MN Jobs)

http://www.allaccess.com/ (National Jobs)

A career in radio can be extremely rewarding … and a lot of fun.

You get to be at the center of happenings in your community.

You may get to hang out with celebrities and introduce them onstage.

And on a snowy morning, you get to be the one to say, “School’s canceled today!”

I know there are some Northland Broadcasting grads out there who read this blog. It would be great if you could comment about what you’ve been up to in your careers.

YouTube’s Insight: Useful and free.

It’s amazing what you can get for free these days. If you haven’t checked out Chris Anderson’s (Wired, The Long Tail) new book on the topic, it’s a thought-provoking read on how the internet is changing how products are priced.

Some of the most useful freebies for new media creators are the great analytics tools available from Google and YouTube.

With traditional advertising, you craft a message for your target, then buy a commercial on the station with the most viewers in your demographic and hope that enough of them see your ad for the ad to make a return on your investment.

You will reach some of the people you want to reach, but you still have to pay for the people who have no interest in your product and will never have an interest in your product. (Although … I did buy a Snuggie, and I’m probably 30 years under their target demo.)

With YouTube, you can make a video about your product, put it up for free and leave it there as long as you want. Then people search it out, and watch it willingly — sometimes a number of times. YouTube makes it ridiculously easy for others to embed your video on their sites, too, giving you even more free exposure.

And best of all, YouTube gives you all kinds of information on who is watching, where they live (well, roughly. They don’t give you their addresses), and what terms they typed in to find your video. There’s even a cool graph that shows you “hot” and “cool” spots in your video — the graph rises at points where people rewound the video to watch again, or where they clicked away from your video out of boredom (or to find a better lolcats video). It’s like what CNN does during election debates.

(Like some of the other topics I write about here, this is old news to many YouTube users. But I am writing this blog for those who are investigating how new media can work for their small businesses, schools and other organizations. When it comes to web media, a vast majority are still passive viewers, not active contributors.)

So out of curiosity, I signed in to our account and took a look at Northland’s YouTube Insight statistics last night.

We started our channel in 2007 with some videos we had made about some of Northland’s academic programs. To begin with, we hadn’t really intended to put the videos on YouTube. YouTube was only a couple years old at the time, and not as well known as it is now.

The videos were made for program pages on the college website and to send out on CD to prospective students.

Posting to YouTube was just an afterthought. We know better now, though I still have several Northland videos available on our website that I haven’t gotten around to posting on YouTube. That’ll be fixed soon.

Our 8 videos have just shy of 6,000 views. That’s after they were just dumped on YouTube and forgotten (by me, anyway). The only promotion they have received is a link to the YouTube channel page on Northland’s home page.

Unlike entertainment videos, our student testimonial videos are aimed at a very specific niche audience, so we don’t expect to see big quantities of views.

It’s the quality of the viewer that counts — In our case, someone who is trying to find out more information about a specific program of training. That’s the game-changing value of new media. Your audience gets to actively pull in the specific content he or she is interested in.

The video for our Criminal Justice program has received 606 views — 138 from Minnesota, 61 from California, the rest from all over the country (you can check state-by-state) — again, helpful to know where the interest is since we’re trying to broaden our recruiting efforts beyond northwest Minnesota and northeast North Dakota.

Insight's "Discovery" Analytics

The most helpful information Insight gives is a 3-page list of search terms viewers typed in to YouTube to find the video. We’ll be able to use these keywords to refine our other online marketing efforts (Google Adwords). Sometimes it’s hard to guess at what keywords your users are typing in. With Insight, you get a user-generated list.

YouTube isn’t the latest flavor of the month in the new media world, but they’ve done a great job in capturing the attention of the mass market, and continue to innovate. With devices like AppleTV, WDTV Live, and Samsung’s Blu Ray player offering an easy way to get YouTube videos on your TV, anyone generating web video needs to be on YouTube.

What do you think? Have you checked out Insight for your own YouTube videos? What have you learned about your viewers?

A video contest uses new media to recruit employees.

There are creative people in your organization who would probably like to work with new media. Give them a chance to shine!

In 2007, the tax and accounting firm Deloitte & Touche was trying to recruit new employees. Instead of bringing in a professional video production company to make a “help wanted” video for their website, they enlisted the help of their employees — with amazing results.

The company held a “film festival.” Employees could make a video on their own or work in teams of up to seven. The videos were to be under 6 minutes and needed to convey the company’s culture and values. The best videos were used in college campus visits to recruit new employees.

Here is one of the 370 creative results:

Is there a way your small business, school, or community group could use an approach like this as a fun way to engage your audience?

With the amount of interest generated in making the videos, voting for the best ones, and commenting in social media forums around the videos, isn’t this way better than a typical “help wanted” ad?

Search engine optimization and video: Six ways to rank higher on google.

You have a website. You want your site to show up on the first page or two of a google search. With millions of pages on the web, how do you make it to the front of the line? The answer lies in search engine optimization (SEO) … and video is an important tool in effective SEO.

A recent Business Week article finds that “videos are 53 percent more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages.”

Web pages with a video embedded have an 11,000 to 1 chance of landing on the first page of google results, compared to a half-million to 1 chance of a text page making it to page one.

Here are a few ways to get your video ranked higher on a google search:

1. Upload to YouTube and embed the code on your site. Almost always, when a video shows up in a google “blended” search (meaning the search shows a mix of photos, text pages, maps, news stories, etc.), it is a video that has been uploaded first to YouTube.

2. Don’t limit yourself to YouTube. Use TubeMogul to upload and tag your video once, and have it instantly placed on a number of video sharing sites like Blip, Revver, Vimeo, Facebook, and others. Tubemogul also offers solid analytics tools that will give you lots of graphs showing who is watching your videos.

3. Link and encourage links. Google looks at links to and from your site as “votes” for your site’s relevance. Encourage Facebook and Twitter friends and fans to link to your video on their blogs and websites.

4. Surround your video with “engagement items.” Things like interactive maps, photos, video and audio are ways to make visitors come to your page more often and stick around longer when they get there.

5. Practice on-page SEO. On-page search engine optimization means including keywords and phrases that help visitors find each video you make. Embed your video on a page that includes text with copy that relates to the video. This will help google find you much easier.

6. Don’t forget the “call to action.” If you are posting your video as a marketing tool, chances are you want the viewer to do something after watching the video (buy your product, make a donation, register for a class, etc.). Don’t forget to tell them what to do next. Include your URL within your video. You should also put your URL in the description field on YouTube.

Be your organization’s storyteller.

I walk. A lot. I have two dogs who wouldn’t have it any other way.

The hours spent on the end of a leash give me ample time to check out a variety of audio content via my mp3 player. Sometimes it’s radio, sometimes it’s music of my own choosing, and more often than not, it’s a podcast.

In my ears tonight was a recording from the 2008 Blogworld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. The speaker was Joel Witt from the Maryland Zoo. He and a few other zoo employees roam the grounds of the zoo each week and find interesting stories for a video podcast series called Maryland Zoo TV. It’s another great example of an organization whose primary product is not media taking a DIY approach to the creation of compelling content.

While the zoo doesn’t see a profit from the podcasts directly, they have seen a spike in attendance despite an overall reduction in marketing spending. You can call it guerilla (or gorilla in this case) marketing, education, entertainment, or even hyper-local community journalism, but what Maryland Zoo TV is doing could be applied to many diverse organizations who want to share their stories without needing a huge ad budget.

As I walked in the 8-degree-below-zero temps of northwest Minnesota tonight, bundled like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, Joel’s zoo stories got me thinking about my previous job as a reporter/producer/show host for a TV station based in a central Florida retirement community almost a decade ago.

WVLG Radio The Villages, FL

At the Villages News Network in 2000, we were doing the kind of hyper-local, hyper-focused content creation that would make for a fantastic video podcast. Problem was, no one had ever heard of the word podcast in 2000. Our work was created for a cable TV channel. If you weren’t already a cable subscriber in The Villages or the surrounding counties, you couldn’t see Around The Villages. But the stories we told (in Faux TV-news style) would have been a great sales tool for homes in the retirement community if there would have been an easy, free way to distribute them worldwide as there is today through iTunes and other podcast aggregators.

Our staff of mostly  rookie reporters covered every aspect of retirement life in the The Villages. It’s incredible how creative story telling can bring even seemingly mundane community events (Mahjong tournaments come to mind. Never covered one. Still don’t know what it is. Still think it’s funny.) to life.

We covered the opening of every new store and restaurant. We did feature stories on World War II heroes. We interviewed singers and other performers who came to town (I got to sit in Whisperin’ Bill Anderson’s bus and hang out with Melanie of “Brand New Key” fame). We did features on singing grocery baggers. We covered big events like the visit of Vice President Cheney.

Those of us telling the stories came from diverse backgrounds. Some of us were in our first TV jobs after graduating with journalism or mass comm degrees. We helped the others who didn’t have previous experience in video storytelling: retirees, high school students, and moms who unexpectedly found new careers at The Villages News Network.

Our employer’s main product was newly-constructed homes, not media. Nonetheless, we told the community’s stories for 30 minutes each day.

How will you tell yours?

Cameras are cheap.

Everyone has a story to tell.

There’s someone out there googling your small business, non-profit, college, town, product or service right now.

Give them a story.