West Park Park Bench Podcast - ep 08 #EdFringe2022 (02)

10:55AM Aug 9, 2022

Speakers:

Caron Lyon

Keywords:

programme

edinburgh fringe

roads

fringe

people

business

podcast

ageing

elise

free

social media

edinburgh

makers

put

tools

helen

stream

project

png

audience

Welcome to Episode Eight of the West Park park bench podcast. Recorded from West Park in Long Eaton and today the park is absolutely buzzing. The waterpark is full of kids and families. The bandstand is surrounded, every piece of shade that has been created by trees has got a family picnic underneath it. It's amazing. And of course it's week one of the Edinburgh Fringe.

I'm sat on the substitute park bench. There's a park bench at the top, which I'll sit on which is in the full sun and there's one that's a bit closer to the middle of the park, see thumbnails! So that's the introduction out of the way.

Episode Eight the second week of talking about the Edinburgh Fringe. Lots of people cannot get to the Edinburgh Fringe. But there is a digital fringe. All the people who might be close to the fringe, but don't have a lot of money, there is also free fringe.

There's a lot of Edinburgh activities and shows and culture and richness that you can experience without having to go there at all. Or if you are there, doing it for free.

So doing it for free. Get yourself a little backpack, water, sandwiches and go find the free fringe. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the free fringe in some of the live streams I prepared to do so.

One of the things that I've done last week was visit stream yard again, it's the browser based streaming studio that I use. I love it. I had not been in there for a while I wanted to see what had changed. They've introduced background music you can put a backing track behind you whilst you're streaming really good. They've introduced slides now so you can actually put your slide presentation into it so you don't have to do it as a screenshare which has its complications, especially if you've only got one screen and also they've had for awhile. overlays and being able to do an overlay saving out as a PNG means that the PNG bit that you've asked it to be transparent. You can see through and the bits around you. frame the picture. So I have set up myself a couple of graphics so that I've got some title Smite, set myself up a PNG overlay, which has got the QR code for tickets. It's got the QR code for the fringe itself and there's a QR code for the PDF, Edinburgh programme, which is what I'm going to base my own streams if I don't have a guest around and what I'm going to do is just have a look at that document and see if I was there.

That's been a bit of a thing when I've been tweeting, if I was there, what would I want to be going to see? Last time I was at the fringe was actually early days social media where Twitter wasn't really a thing and I was tweeting and there was a lot of my community tweeting but it hadn't really caught on. So it's just such a delight to see that Twitter is this hub where people are asking what should I go and see what are recommendations, people who are doing shows are putting them up their links.

There isn't a dedicated app to the fringe this year and that's caused a little bit of consternation, but the programme as a webpage, can can be used. So for me from the age of paper, when all I had was a notebook programme, and just writing down a table to be able to put watch shows I would really like to see when those shows are then having my own schedule which had when I'm actually available. And then seeing where that crossover lies and that's really what I'm going to be talking about in the stream.

Finding shows that your friends are in or you really want to see you need to have that list, but they might not fit in with the time you have there. And if you're only there to see those particular shows, then that's fine. You put those into your schedule, and then programmes stuff around it.

But if you are there to get the maximum Edinburgh Fringe bonus. You might have to make some compromises. You might have to see some wild cards that you would never have picked but you've got a slot and that's the only thing that seems to be running.

The Edinburgh Fringe Edinburgh free fringe... on Thursday, I am going to be on at Elise Harris's Edinburgh Fringe stream who is in the programme of the free fringe. And probably later this evening or tomorrow evening. I will be looking at the online programme to look for a show to watch on Saturday.

So Fringe is in the consciousness of the independent sector right now there are other festivals taking place. But the Edinburgh Fringe sort of consumes the consciousness, it's really a place where if you are an independent producer or you're a company that sees yourself at that scale. If you're a ITC company or you aspire to run shows under the ITC contract, that is where you can put your ambitions with a target in place. I would love to take some think to the Edinburgh Fringe next year. I would like to take my full singing and dancing virtual production mini audience Palace. I suspect I'm being slightly over ambitious but what I would like to do now that I've discovered the free fringe, which Elise is part of link in the description for Elise's show taking place mostly Monday. I can't remember if it's I think it's Sunday Mondays that she doesn't do neither dates. They will be in the description. Please go look at that. Please go and check out Elise's show. It's being live streamed to YouTube. So looking forward to joining her as a guest on Thursday.

I don't know how hot it is where you are. But it's warm here but I like it. Now I like it but I am able to dictate where it is that I spend my time I saw a really interesting article that came past me on Facebook the other day, which is two different types of time management and time management. There's so many complexities about different programmes. Whether you do the Pomodoro timer, with all these techniques, but for me it came down to really simple it really opened my eyes. One was the manager and one was a maker and as a manager, this hourly block of time that you allocate to meetings and you go from one block to another block to another block. Then is the makers shedule which is four hours and four hours. And it really illustrated for me how I spend my time business wise within the management structure and creatively and where I get my happy time from in the makers scheduling. And makers scheduling can be writing can be editing anything that you can't just pick up and put down.

This is one of the problems with the creative workers and makers is that when you get taken in on a project, there might only be an hour's work but to do the hours work, you often have to go back into files and back into projects and back into a headspace that allows you to carry out the hour productively to then close that down and to start your next work. So even though you've got a block of four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon, it may only be an hour of client work that you do if you are combining manager and make a time and it was just it's just such a nice way of looking at it. I like simple.

One of the projects that is ongoing from a few months ago was working with a great friend and colleague of mine, Helen raw shout out to Helen Raw, awesome woman and Helen is working on a project with war widows, Great Britain. And what she had done is working with the ageing demographic of the war widows. It's not all the older demographic but there's a large portion of demographic who during lockdown just had no contact any of those little social hubs that they congregated around they weren't allowed to go to. And not only that, they weren't allowed. They didn't want to and because of the protection of COVID and not wanting to get COVID So she formulated and got funded an iPad project and she's been doing I pad introduction workshops over the internet with an ageing demographic so that they can engage with video calling to talk to their families. And one of the things that now those projects are concluding Helen is a fantastic strategy producer. But one of the things that I excel in is being able to break down the priorities of strategy. And that's always been for me my seven roads of social media at the time.

How do you leverage social media was the thing that was always being asked of me. How do you leverage it? Now of course there's social media marketers. And leveraging social media is not what is asked now I think what is asked now is how do you use it productively? What did you use what it always was? But it was what's my return on investment? What will I get out for putting anything in? And social media has become this thing that just because you do it, it doesn't pay? Actually, it's a thing that you do with the thing that you've got, that extends your reach. And if you do it well and you've actually got something that people want, then you'll get your customers so it's just a better way of, of customer service. And there's all different parts of business.

So the seven rounds of social media kind of came out with all of those from all of those early days. conversations that I had, and say the seven roads of social media have become the seven roads. of business and social technologies. I was asked to put together a seven roads strategy document. What is it? I've done this. I've written this before, and I went back to the documents that were written in 2011 and those documents are as relevant today. As they were back then back then. I got so disheartened because nobody wanted to pursue that strategy. They all wanted to ask, what's it for? What's it for? What's it for, but they never wanted to put in any effort to make it work for a long time prior to COVID. People would always ask me what what do I do? What do you do? And I was like, Well, you know what I do? Because most of the people that were asking me of why the previous clients and it paid me money or they'd been around networking events and they'd they discovered social media through having dialogues with me. For a lot of people I was there, early anchor into social media, but they would always ask what is it that you do and I was always kind of why do people not know? Because I think it's very common with strategist it's certainly common with producers it was common with stage managers. But the what do you do?

The change for me? And when COVID began? The question became, do you do? Do you do live streaming? Do you do podcasts? Do you do editing? Do you do zoom? And that was such a mindset change for me.

So the seven roads of social media have kind of reemerged and I'm gonna give them a new airing. I'm going to try and write a little booklet for the magnet leads. I think they get called. And I did a little workshop recently through online with Louise Henry's programmes. Check out Louise Henry, she is amazing. So I'm looking at doing these of lead magnets, these books that you give away for free and they're the things that you know, you say if you sign up for my newsletter, I'll give you this for free. So you're not giving them for free. You're giving them in exchange for your email address. But I'm, I'm doing a new social media.

So I'm gonna wrap up. I'm gonna wrap up. I'm really enjoying doing these I come out of swimming, find a park bench, and I really look forward to doing another episode. So I'm gonna wrap up now with the seven roads of social technologies and business.

Number one, generating new leads. Building audience. There are things that you can do with social technologies you choose your tools, if that's one of your major priorities.

Customer service. Now customer services is not a technology word but social technologies can enhance they can extend they can support different tools for service. That is, you know, your instruction manuals. There's a QR code thing in there. There's passing on information you might want to blog to benefit the service that you provide. So, service customer service is one of these seven roads as customer retention. And this is your once you've used your service. Once you've got people coming in, you want to keep them and this is sort of the audience retention, making sure people come back time and time again, and how you use social technology. You might do a podcast to build an audience and keep an audience generating content making a regular pattern of media that will have the intention of addressing that road that notion of retaining a presence.

Business Productivity also goes in my seven roads. Now, business productivity are all the collaboration tools, the Google there's so so many tools that you can use, not as part of your media creation, not as part of your business but as the back end the back end the backbone of your practice that you know how how you're productive your business productivity. Then there's a whole set of tools and there's a whole nother road that you can focus on that is analytics research, customer analysis, you know, the metric bit of the internet tracking people are things being used, can you get audiences from Facebook into your mailing list, you know if that's if gaming and getting those things into your business that you know that is a road that you can look at.

You've then got establishing your practice. So establishing your authority. Now, that is your profiling that is getting your web right it is SEO, it's making sure that people can find you. And also it's about making sure the things you're really good at. People know where to find you. So establishing your authority in the field and that includes networking. LinkedIn, probably the biggest one, but just going out I could be guest being a guest on a podcast. Making your podcasts could be a target of making sure that you're establishing authority or field.

And then finally, and as ever, always when it comes to number seven, can't remember which one I've gone through. So I'm going to list the six and we'll see if the seventh one comes to me at the end. So we've got customer service customer retention, business productivity, establishing your authority, lead generation, business productivity,

and personal development. So using tools so seven is continued personal development using some of the tools LinkedIn have got a fantastic programme for you to learn new skills I've used Google prime is a free service that has loads of training and tuition. So deciding how you want to scale up and level up. So yeah, the seven roads of business and social technologies.

I'm putting together that document priority this week for Helen. I promised it her last week and I didn't. So I will be doing that. If you've got to this stage in the podcast thank you so much for staying to the end of episode eight of the West pot pot bench Podcast. I'm Caron @pcmcreative ... pcmcreative.com.

And of course, here on the podcast. It's uploaded to anchor please do check out other episodes. It's just me having a bit of a ramble from a park bench in West Park. So until next episode. Go well. Social Media Wombles.