www.nickhodge.com

my notes for #cebit­web panel.

Please read, take note and fol­low. There are a vari­ety of web pub­lished sources for these com­mand­ments; Laurel Pap­worth and Tim Longhurst.

Sent to presenters at the TEDTalks con­fer­ences, it has much to say to all pan­el­ists and presenters.

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Won­drous New Thing, Or Share Some­thing Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curi­os­ity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Com­ment on the Utter­ances of Other Speak­ers for the Sake of Blessed Con­nec­tion and Exquis­ite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vul­ner­able. Speak of thy Fail­ure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Com­pany, thy Goods, thy Writ­ings, nor thy Des­per­ate need for Fund­ing; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remem­ber all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Fol­low Thee.

Thanks to the pink pixie on twit­ter for post­ing this list. Very pre­cient. Oh, and I do note the irony of copy­ing and past­ing the com­mand­ments. I LOL’d too.

Please be respect­ful of the col­lect­ive time your audi­ence is invest­ing by listen­ing to you. Think deeply. Listen and learn from oth­ers before you copy-and-paste present.

How do you make money from your present­a­tion? Here is a hint. Speak to people after your ses­sion, indi­vidu­ally. One on one is where the real oppor­tun­ity for solv­ing a prospect’s prob­lem really lies. And I sug­gest that more than 80% of any audi­ence you have are not there to buy you, or your products. They want to learn, or just copy-and-paste your ideas.

Time to board the Present­a­tion Cluetrain. And when I fall off, I fully expect you to help put me back aboard.

Scott Hansel­man provides his Top 11 Tips for Tech­nical Talks and Presen­a­tions.

After 11 years doing tech­nical present­a­tions, all I can do is rein­force the accur­acy of his 11 Tips. They are tops.

Go read them NOW!

For other little per­sonal nuances, read this blog post on from my present­a­tion at BarcampSydney3

Ques­tions my AIM Present­a­tion Last Week:

A big thanks to Stephen Collins of acid­labs for his detailed response. As an expert who speaks to senior decision makers daily on Web 2.0 and social-networking, he’s an excel­lent resource.

1. Susan asks: Does Microsoft have a Cor­por­ate Blog­ging Policy?

For me, it’s encom­passed in this simple phrase: “Don’t be Stu­pid”

How­ever, the more formal policy is embod­ied in some more formal bul­let points:

• Above all, “Be smart.”
• Respect exist­ing con­fid­en­ti­al­ity agreements
• Don’t break news; don’t dis­close con­fid­en­tial information
• Be cau­tious with third-party information
• Respect prior employers
• Identify your­self
• Be cau­tious in how you offer sup­port or advice
• Speak for yourself
• Think about reac­tions before you post

This Wired art­icle on Jeff Sandquist, the quiet uber-boss of Microsoft’s com­munity sites provides another per­spect­ive from an inde­pend­ent point of view.

2. Susan asks: what about vis­ib­il­ity of your his­tory as an Employee?

Ques­tion from employer’s per­spect­ive is that they already have the abil­ity to openly vet poten­tial employ­ees: ref­er­ences, word-of-mouth. Many of the ques­tions are related to whether a poten­tial employee will fit into the organisation’s culture.

From an employee’s per­spect­ive: I can­not stress enough that you must own your own digital iden­tity. It’s bet­ter to call out what might be out there, and explain your per­spect­ive. Thank­fully, Aus­tralia has strong Equal Oppor­tun­ity laws that pro­tect employees.

Another ques­tion I would ask is was is the fact that “it” was done, or that its is sud­denly search­able that makes you uncom­fort­able? Much more of a moral ques­tion, I suppose.

Where you draw the line? It depends on the indi­vidual. Blog­ging and par­ti­cip­at­ing as an indi­vidual just for work pur­poses is appro­pri­ate. Lock­ing down your pic­tures and other per­sonal inform­a­tion for your own fam­ily and friends and sep­ar­at­ing your iden­tit­ies is also appro­pri­ate. Noone should ever be forced to write to the web against their own per­sonal values.

The final point I would make is that the inter­net is a pub­lic place.

3. Ques­tion From Phil: Thanks for a very inform­at­ive present­a­tion. I was inter­ested in a some­what “off the cuff” com­ment you made about your title being made “pro­fes­sional geek” after some debate with your employer, Microsoft. Do you want to elab­or­ate on the dis­cus­sion you had about this and whether it caused any con­sterna­tion? It strikes me as inter­est­ing if it was hard to con­vince people that a title like this might fit on an org chart in the brave new web world!

This post has the evid­ence. A proud moment when the cards arrived, and my former boss Frank Arrigo chan­ging the HR sys­tem.

OK, the story.

My offi­cial title is Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist. I love what I do, but this title is too marketing-title for me. I do work in the Evan­gel­ism team.

On my fourth day at Microsoft, the global team met Rory: a http://channel9.msdn.com/ host and a char­ac­ter. His cent­ral theme is “cre­ate a persona”

I decided my per­sona is myself. Be a geek. Be an access­ible geek for those who are enthu­si­astic about tech­no­logy. A Pro­fes­sional. Hence Pro­fes­sional Geek.

So, next step: ask for the busi­ness cards. Title: Pro­fes­sional Geek.

The internal order was quickly rejec­ted by Pur­chas­ing. Why? All titles prin­ted on cards needed to be reflec­ted in our HR sys­tem. After 3 weeks of back­wards and for­ward email (low pri­or­ity in my list of things to do) — Frank found a work-around. All it needed was an email from him “OK-ing” the non-standard title, and all is OK. I also remem­ber send­ing an email to Microsoft HR ask­ing for a title change. To no avail. Being in Frank Arrigo’s team at the time, I think they expec­ted some icon­o­clastic requests.

Later in the year, Frank found he could freely change titles in the HR system.

The univseral response of people when they see “Pro­fes­sional Geek” is one of glee. I starts a con­ver­sa­tion, and truly reflects what I am, do and stand for.

Microsoft is so cool to per­mit this.

So, how do you get this through your organisation?

Really, its about what you do for your organ­isa­tion and what that rep­res­ents to the out­side world. Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist was too inward looking.

4. Free­dom of expres­sion. Does the blog­ging influ­ence what I write?

Yes, it does influ­ence what I write, record and pub­lish. I am an employee of Microsoft; but con­text is also important.

For instance, there are per­sonal entries on my blog — and entries from when I was not an employee of Microsoft. The real­ity of Maslow’s Hier­archy of Needs drives us all; and this will influ­ence what and how I write.

In March 2007, Munir Kota­dia on ZDNet blogged how a Mac user’s cat had broken MacOS X secur­ity.  Now I am a sucker for cat stor­ies. And as a Mac user, I had seen our cats sleep­ing on our PC and Mac laptops around the house. Where there is warmth, there is cat.

My mis­take was blog­ging a ref­er­ence to this art­icle on http://on10.net/ with a pic­ture of one of my cats. This blog entry was pulled within a few hours. It was a stu­pid, rush-of-blood to the head post that added to value to the world.

How many rules I break above? About 4 or 5.

The car­dinal rule is sens­it­iv­ity to secur­ity as an issue. I wasn’t think­ing, and was stupid.

Thank­fully, Microsoft per­mits mis­takes. And admis­sion of mis­takes. Learnt my les­son, built a bridge and I am get­ting over it.

I still think the story is cute, and in ret­ro­spect it deserved at least a LOLcat.

Nick Hodge, star­ring in the de Bono Room (not that Bono, this de Bono)

Excel­lent to meet many new people, and a few old faces. A good 45 turned up for 1h15m of me talking.

Ques­tions:

• How does Web 2.0 make sales people more effective
• Example of an employee going blog-astray, and how it is corrected
• How do you know if someone is a dog on the internet
• Scal­ing up com­mu­nic­a­tions within an organisation

There are ele­ments of the present­a­tion that need some flesh­ing out from ran­dom phrases to sup­port­able statements.

Thanks to John Nor­for (on the micro­phone in the above photo) for invit­ing me to speak, and to a great audi­ence for participating.

Present­a­tion (.pptx) for Aus­tralian Insti­tute of Man­age­ment (AIM) present­a­tion on Web 2.0, eCommerce.

• Power­Point 2003 ver­sion of the presentation
• Power­Point 2007 ver­sion of the presentation

Just as a note: Down­load Com­pat­ib­il­ity Pack for pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Office

By installing the Com­pat­ib­il­ity Pack in addi­tion to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and Power­Point 2007. The Com­pat­ib­il­ity Pack can also be used in con­junc­tion with the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and Power­Point Viewer 2003 to view files saved in these new formats. For more inform­a­tion about the Com­pat­ib­il­ity Pack, see Know­ledge Base art­icle 924074.

Hav­ing grown up on a farm, I saw what my Dad did every day. I saw it grow; and helped around. I learnt how to read clouds and the sky to determ­ine the weather, and what the time was without a watch. From memory, at about 12 years old pretty much any­thing that could be driven on the farm I’d driven.

In 2000 on the Adobe Pho­toshop 6.0 Road­show, Liam and Avril atten­ded a night ses­sion of my “1980s Music Trivia Pho­toshop Tech­nical Ses­sion”. No sales and mar­ket­ing here; dis­cus­sion of JPEG vs GIF, arte­facts and Flock of Seagulls.

In the IT industry, it’s tough to show your kids what you do for a liv­ing. So hav­ing Liam and Avril attend was a major buzz.

Liam then real­ised what I did for a crust.

Now he is teach­ing me about this online stuff. Strange world!

So, how do you explain to your Mum what your day job is?

Read­ing this Social Media White Paper from the Aus­tralian Blog, Bet­ter Com­mu­nic­a­tion Res­ults will help out. Send it to your Mum, too.

Present­a­tion from Open­Pub­lish 2002. Scripting+XML=Productivity

For those who atten­ded the XML Asia Pacific con­fer­ence, the demo files I used Adobe Tips, Tricks and Techniques