Career Success with New Media
We were happy to visit with Douglas E. Welch today on The Bigg Success Show today. Douglas is an expert on building the career you deserve and spreading the word about your talents using social media. Among other things, he’s the host of two great blogs and podcasts: Career Opportunities and Careers in New Media. Here’s a recap of the conversation:
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I have to ask, Douglas. How do you do it all? My gosh…
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I get that question a lot. I'll give you my secret. I tell people, especially when they're getting into podcasting, that you have to integrate it into your life. The fact is, we produce content everyday and we throw it away! We don't record it on video or audio or we don't have our iPhone on us. When I write a column, it comes directly out of my own life, out of the dealings I've had with a client or a peer that day. It's just the point of capturing what you already do and then having a mechanism – a place to put it. You have to have a blog or a podcast set up so that when you do capture something it's easy to say "Here it is".
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That's something you do really well with Careers in New Media, combining career tips with free online tools to help people market themselves and showcase their specialties.
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Career success depends on it
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My whole thing is about visibility. I stumbled across that idea about three years ago. Success of your career depends on you making what you do and how well you do it visible to as many people as possible. Using new media – online video and audio – is a great way to do it. We have the ability these days to reach out to whatever audience we can find and let people know what we do and how well we do it.
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Your New Media Interchange site is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to learn how to start using these tools to promote their abilities.
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You bet. I get so many questions throughout the day from so many different people – people who have the ability to pay, people who don’t have the ability to pay, people who are just getting started and people who are experienced. So I put together New Media Interchange as a way of bringing people together around the concept of new media. It serves two purposes: first, to show people what new media is, what it is all about, and what it can do for them; second, to allow the community to share information both from me and amongst themselves about new media, how to create it, how to make videos, post them online and stuff like that.
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And Douglas, one of your more recent endeavors is CareerCampLA. Tell us about that.
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CareerCampLA is, in this case, a hybrid conference unconference. An unconference is almost the antithesis of your typically planned conference where you have all the speakers lined up, it's very expensive to go to and it's held at some fancy hotel where you have to spend a couple hundred dollars a night. An unconference is organized by a few local organizers and then the conference program – what’s being presented – is actually defined by the attendees. With CareerCampLA, we have a few planned speakers – I am one of them as are the two of you – but the majority of the schedule, both for speaking slots and breakout sessions, is going to be determined entirely by the attendees who come that day.
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That sounds wonderful! How can people get the information that will be shared if they can't be there?
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We won't be able to live stream there. It's being held at the Congregational Church of Northridge. They do have internet but it's your typical standard DSL. But, one of my big things about any conference is that you should capture all the content you are creating and share it as widely as possible. So we're going to make a bigg effort to capture as much as possible and then put that up on the website. So even if you can't be there in person, you will be able to get some of the great content that will be there.
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The most important part of creating your own unconference
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Douglas, before we let you go, there are a lot of people out there who have great ideas and who could put together a community. Do you have any suggestions for anyone who wants to create their own unconference?
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The best thing about it is finding like-minded people in your area. Over the last five or six months, I've run into several people (like you guys) who are dedicated to helping people with their careers. These include career consultants and entrepreneurial consultants. We were sitting around at one of the other events I do called LA Friday Coffee …
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That's just your excuse to go drink coffee!
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Well, yeah! Actually it is my excuse to get out on a Friday night. But anyway, we were sitting there and I realized, we've got a half a day of conference content sitting right here at this table. So why don't we do something! Once it hit me that I had all this content in my back pocket it was easy to say, "My dad's got a barn, let's put on a show!"
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So reach out to your network and put your minds together to make something happen.
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You bet. The great thing about unconferences is that it doesn't take some splashy personality and it doesn't take a lot of money. The hardest thing will be finding a venue, which we were lucky to find easily for this event. But I'll even tell people to not forgo the city park because the most important thing is getting people together and getting them talking. Everything else is secondary.
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Now Douglas, one last question … is 7-Up the only soft drink allowed at an unconference?
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Oh geez, because it's the uncola!
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Ba-Dum-Bump!
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Thanks Douglas. We’re looking forward to CareerCampLA!
Douglas is a great guy who gives and gives to his communities. We highly recommend him to you. Here are some additional places to find Douglas online: DouglasEWelch.com or WelchWrite.com
Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00562-031010.mp3
