Bob Goyetche and I invited Julien Smith to speak at the inaugural Podcasters Across Borders conference in 2006. Back then he was just Julien Smith, the relatively unknown yet popularly cool creator of the In Over Your Head podcast and scandalously one of the original members of Podshow, and PAB was in its only iteration as a purely podcast-specific and skills-based conference.
We hadn’t expected Julien would ask what we wanted him to speak about. Since I had extended the invitation, I had to come up with something pretty quickly. In the heat of the moment I suggested medieval alchemy and niche programming in the modern age. It made absolutely no sense and likely came to me because I suspect Julien once said the words “medieval alchemy” in his podcast and I wanted him to know I was still a regular listener.
The shocking thing is Julien actually delivered a talk not only with that title, but that connected the two thoughts and made a lot of sense (hear for yourself). He delivered the talk at 9am!
Nearly four years later, Julien was at my birthday party back-pedalling on a rant he’d done denouncing the iPad as four iPhones taped together. Among the points of his revised thinking is the iPad has completely reinvented Dungeons and Dragons for him. With one JOLT! opening available at PAB2010 (now transformed to a conference about content creation), I asked Julien if he could talk about what content creators can learn from D&D.
If you know Julien you know how he says “sure” with a calm and dismissive tone and a shrug of his shoulder as if to say “can’t anybody?”
What I love about Julien’s JOLT! is that he ties in content creation and audience engagement and he makes you feel like the whole thing just occurred to him.
One of the challenges I have is finding enough time each day to read. This means that a book like Trust Agents, which would take the casual reader a couple of weeks to read, takes me about three months.
Chris Brogan and Julien Smith aren’t just two people capitalizing on the the trend of pumping out books on the social web and digital engagement. They’ve been living the principles behind their book since before Twitter. They’ve blogged, podcasted and presented their ideas for years which has created a following large enough to have made Trust Agents a New York Times Bestseller in the first week following its release this past August.
To make their ideas accessible, Chris and Julien have broken up the concept of being a trust agent into six components:
Make Your Own Game
One of Us
Archimedes Principle
Agent Zero
Human Artist
Build an Army
They use stories to map out relationships between social media, real life and pop culture to add depth to their ideas. I particularly like the way they stretch your thinking at various points in the book rather than serve you the obvious.
Readers of Trust Agents who are new to world of social media and whohave picked up the most highly recommended of these books may think very little overall has actually happened since case studies like Dell Hell keep coming up. We really need a new batch of stories so we need more people sharing them — something Chris and Julien ask people to do by sending their trust agent stories to stories@trustagent.com.
My biggest takeaway from the book was being introduced to a basic theory of improvisational comedy: “Yes, and…”. I love this idea for three main reasons:
“Yes, and…” speaks to the importance of being curious, creative and adaptable, forcing us out of critical thinking and into creative thinking and collaboration.
“Yes, and…” reinforces the idea that we need to look beyond our own domains of specialty/interest and spend more time studying what other people do and how they do it, then figure out how to make it our own.
“Yes, and…” abandons the word “but” which is routinely used and defended even thought it puts an exclusive spin on one end of a statement. “Yes, and…” recognizes both realities co-exist and then seeks to make progress.
This, of course, means that I have yet another book to read — Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson. It looks like 2010 is going to be a read-y one for me.
And… while we’re on the subject of reading outside your domain of specialty for inspiration and ideas, I recommend the following books:
If you follow the Canadian Podcast Buffet, you know that Bob Goyetche and I have gone out of our way to prevent discussions of money on the show since it began. Over the last few months, though, we’ve allowed that topic to trickle in and recently, we promoted what we’ve been calling the Money Episode. We invited listeners that have made money through their podcasts to contribute the “monetization” models they’ve adopted and their experiences with them. Speculation was not welcome; we wanted reality, not fantasy.
We recorded the show on Wednesday. It includes nine comments in all, each one exploring a different approach to making money from social media. That makes each model proven. To what degree? We cannot say since, as Bob pointed out, only one person shared their actual gross revenue. I will say this, though; none of the models shared was based on CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions, an approach that pays money based on the number of groupings of one-thousand downloads).
I’m very excited about this show because it really does push the conversation forward and provides an informative destination for the people that (on their first awareness of podcasting) ask the question “how do I make money from it”. I think that it will be to the money conversation what our September 2006 car episode with Julien Smith was to the Social Networking conversation.
CPB episode 130 will be published at 6:00pmET tomorrow (February 15).
One of the challenges I have is finding enough time each day to read. This means that a book like 
