To most people, a photograph is a two dimensional thing. To me, the good ones have depth. They tell stories that bring out the texture of the subject within the frame. The really good ones make you want to know the rest of the story.
The images below are a small sample of the people that make the Gluecon technology conference special. Each has its own story to tell, its own history, its own struggle, its own triumph.
Everyone knows the devil went down to Georgia. Only a few know he drove there in a Cadillac.
This past Friday night, a trio of long haired good ole boys took the stage at Philadelphia’s famed Theater of Living Arts, rocking a capacity crowd with a sound best described as ZZ Top meets Kenny Chesney meets Poison meets Aerosmith meets Hank Williams (with a dose of Steel Panther thrown in for good measure).
The Cadillac Three is a modern day Stillwater — a band on the brink of crossing over from almost famous to big stadium headliner. The band members met in high school, navigated a couple of name changes and toured as openers for the likes of ZZ Top. TC3, as their fans often shorthand the band’s name, also recently made their debut on PBS’ Front and Center. It’s the kind of evolution the phrase “breakout star” was made for.
The TLA concert was the latest stop on The Cadillac Three’s “Black Roses Tour” to support its new album on Big Machine Records: Bury Me in My Boots.
The three members of the band — singer-guitarist Jaren Johnston, lap-steel player Kelby Ray and drummer Neil Mason — put out a sound they describe as country fuzz. It’s a good description, but it doesn’t do their music quite the justice it deserves. Nothing in their sound feels forced. Whether coming through car speakers or blasting from powerful monitors on the TLA stage, the production quality is more Bruce Springteen’s “The Rising” or Van Halen’s “5150” than Nashville twang or country pop.
TC3’s catalog is a book of stories about the band’s life. There’s a strong mix of debauchery and tenderness that many bands find difficult to pull off. From their pedal to the metal breakout hit “I’m Southern” to the Bimmy Juffett inspired “Ship Faced” to the pure sex of the fast-paced “Slide” to the longing of “Running Red Lights,” it’s abundantly evident these guys know how to connect to an audience.
It should be no surprise to learn that Johnston is also the pen behind hits from bigger, established artists like Keith Urban and Jake Owen. And if you listen closely, you’ll catch him cleverly peppering the band’s lyrics with a host of other famous names.
The interaction on stage between the members of The Cadillac Three is not unlike watching the interplay of a seasoned, 40 year old band like RUSH. The performance is tight without feeling scripted. The sound is bigger than three humans playing a guitar, slide and drums should be able to pump out. And the connection to their fans is genuine.
The Cadillac Three is a band you want on your radar to say you knew them when.
Check out some of the photos from the concert below (you can find the full gallery here).
Music and the arts are an important part of education. Study after study has proven that access to a quality music education program improves a student’s brain — not just while they are playing an instrument, but throughout their life.
I’m fortunate to live in a school district that takes music and art seriously. I’m also fortunate to live in a school district where teachers go above and beyond for their students.
Late last week, I had the privilege of shooting the annual Central Bucks VH1 Save the Music Concert Series at Holicong Middle School. On their own time, the district’s music teachers put on a Springsteen-worthy two hour concert for the community. Not once. But three shows over the course of a weekend. Each show packed to capacity in the school’s auditorium.
The concert raises money to equip less fortunate districts around the country with musical equipment to jumpstart their own music programs. It takes approximately $30,000 to equip a school with the necessary instruments for a musical program. This year, the Bucks County School District raised $27,189.31. It’s an amount that keeps rising.
To date, the Central Bucks School District has raised more than $100,000 for the VH1 Save the Music Foundation.
The images below will give you a glimpse of what the audience saw on stage. Want to see the full set? Click here to go to my gallery.
Organizers were expecting 300 people at the Women’s March in Doylestown, Pa., the day after the 2017 Presidential Inauguration. Thousands showed up. Women, children, men and boys. I moved among the crowd to capture as much of the protest as possible.
Sometimes the story that sticks with you isn’t the one you expect. Click through to read the travelogue of a trip I took to Portland, Maine, using a fun tool from Adobe called Spark.
Looking back through my portfolio over the past year, these are the 18 images I made that resonated most.
I had the opportunity to shoot several of my daughters’ musical performances in 2016. We are lucky to live in a school district with tremendous support for the arts. That is not the case in too many parts of the country.
I dipped my big toe into the wedding photography world this year and look forward to capturing a small, exclusive number of nuptials in 2017.
I had a blast exploring the streets of Philadelphia a bit more this year. If you haven’t gone on a photowalk in your town or city, do it. You’ll see things you take for granted in a new light.
One of my goals in 2016 was to shoot more portraits. It’s an area of photography I enjoy and will continue to push in 2017.
When I look through the lens, I don’t see images. I see stories.
My iPhone rarely left my pocket as a camera in 2016. But when it did…
Sometimes you have to lie down in the middle of a busy Philadelphia street to get the shot you want.
One of the advantages of running communications for a big pro bike race is having a front row seat to the action.
When I click the shutter, I’m not just trying to take a picture, I’m trying to capture the personality and soul of the subject I’m shooting. Having a perfect sunset and the Jersey shore as a temporary studio doesn’t hurt.
The reason pro photographers always carry a camera is so they don’t miss things like fiery midnight protests at the foot of the Washington Monument.
2016 was an opportunity to remind myself that simple is often better.
This year was also a reminder that you don’t have to travel far to find beauty (this is my backyard).
Always say yes. It’s how you create opportunities like being asked to shoot promotional images for bands like Barrage8.
The past year was also a reminder to keep your eyes open wider and longer if you want to see the bigger picture.
Did I mention how lucky I am to live where I do?
I played around with some long exposure photography this year.
Get up earlier. Go to bed later. Life is lived on the edges.
As I curated my images from 2016, there was one I was never able to cast aside, despite knowing it wasn’t my most technically perfect shot or the one that got the most hearts on Instagram. Yet, something about it stuck with me. It’s the portrait I made of a man named Rudy during a trip to Portland, Maine, this past October.
The reason it meant so much to me this year is because at that moment — the 1/200th of a second it took to press the shutter on my camera — is when I understood why I kept sensing the collision of my profession and my passion. Organizations and executives got caught up in messages, forgetting that what people really want to hear are stories about other humans. I saw a technology industry continue to struggle with recruitment and diversity. I saw opportunity to use my experience as a storyteller and a photographer to help organizations and executives tell their stories better (and, in many cases, find the stories that need to be told).
To me, the portrait of Rudy is less about the photograph I see and more about the conversation I had. Yes, I took better photos throughout the year, but none evoked the personal emotion and introspection that this one did.
The inimitable James Governor — aka @monkchips, aka founder of the very developer community oriented Redmonk nuevo analyst firm, Redmonk — unleashed his top 12 predictions for the upcoming dumpster fire of a year. As always, the kid from Shoreditch brings the quirky heat.
A couple of James’ predictions struck home with me.
Right off the bat, he predicts increased attention yet again on APIs, something companies have been slowly waking up to over the past five years thanks in large part to advocacy by folks like Redmonk, Kin Lane, Laura Merling, Lorinda Brandon, Sam Ramji, Eric Norlin and Stephen Willmott.
We’re not building things to be used in the context that we decide…we’re building things to be used in the context that the user decides.
Coming into the fourth spot on James’ list is a prediction that we’ll see big vendors going on a bit of an acquisition/acquihire spree in 2017 as a way to clean up a messy and confusing market. What this means for startups is twofold: (1) The noise and confusion in the market means the competition for attention is at Jan Brady like middle child levels; and (2) Creating and telling a clean, compelling story is more critical than ever. Talk to me if your startup is struggling with this.
At number five, James hits on something I think is going to be even bigger and more challenging than many companies expect. He calls it conversational commerce. It’s the expectation that humans expect a human tone to their interaction with technology. This is another area where developers, designers and marketers will struggle over the next year, as they will be forced to abandon their years of metrics and buzzword-laden language to build emotion and understanding into their customer facing technology and interaction.
And, lastly, prediction number 8 from the Redmonk office in London: the rise of pervasive speech recognition. This one’s special for me. I led global communications for IBM’s emerging pervasive computing division back when the future was now. One of the technologies under our umbrellas was speech. Many folks knew it as ViaVoice in a consumer box, though it was embedded in a number of early devices we take for granted today. I had the opportunity to work with the Ozzie Osborne (no, not that one; though I did score a “Ozzie Osborne at IBM? No !@#$ Way, Man!” headline once), and the queen of speech technology PR, Geri Kan.
Huge thanks to James for taking me down memory lane.
Let me say something that shouldn’t need to be said: No seed funded or pre-A round startup should have a PR agency on their balance sheet.
Feels better getting that off our chests, right? I mean, come on, we all think it. Heck, we all know I’m right. But, we all also know that the seductive siren-like call of a meaty agency retainer and the promises of wave upon wave of media adoration are too enticing to pass up.
And how does that typically turn out? Exactly.
Most startups are created by people steeped in code, not marketing. Eventually, every one of these startups reaches a point where what they’ve built is ready for others’ eyes. My friend, Aneel Lakhani, wrote a great post on “PR 101 for Engineers.” His post was sparked by a tweetstorm by Craig Kerstiens on how non-marketing people see the dark art. There’s a ton of great, based-on-experience advice in both of their posts.
But, like the infomercial says, wait, there’s more.
The PR agency model was built on a foundation of media relations. Of building massive lists of reporters, writing buzzword-filled press releases and spamming out pitches with the hope that a couple of them will stick to the wall. And reporters — what’s left of them — despise that model. They despise it with the heat of a thousand bad trade show coffees.
That model no longer exists. Hell, it hasn’t existed for a couple of years. Yet, startups continue to throw away hard earned capital because that’s the way it’s always been done and that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone hands you a check to build your dream.
I see it a different way. Here are eight reasons why most startups should think differently about how they approach PR:
1/At best, your startup has funding news (which is no longer news to most reporters). The lucky few of you will have a strong beta announcement that ties into a larger industry gap or customer pain point. The rest of you will have something that looks a lot like a me-too or so-what story to reporters.
2/Most startups haven’t built a story. You’ve collected product facts and maybe a few generic industry analyst stats. You haven’t dug deep to develop your point of view on what you stand for. You haven’t built the narrative around why you do what you do. These are the things that set you apart.
3/Unless you’re part of the tech 1%, you’ve probably got one or two legitimate shots at a story each year. Most of you have less than that. It sucks to hear that, but it’s the harsh reality of today’s news landscape. This is where relationship building and establishing your team as smart, reliable and provocative sources pays off.
4/Which brings us to here. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the tech media has been decimated. You don’t need an agency building a massive list of reporters you should be contacting. Because there aren’t a massive amount of them left. You need to focus on building relationships with the 3-5 insiders that matter most to your biz. With emphasis on you. Because I don’t know a CEO or founder who outsources their top customers to a third party and it boggles my mind that anyone would do likewise with their company’s top influencers.
5/If you are serious about building a company, how you communicate needs to be baked into your DNA early. This means paying attention to your style, tone and frequency and staying consistent and true to it. This is where building your brand begins.
6/$10,000 a month as a starting retainer for 99% of startups is insane for what you need. Spend smarter.
7/Think of PR less as media coverage and more as a listening post to help you with your product/market fit early on.
8/This last point is applicable to executives across the spectrum, from startup founders to Fortune 500 vice presidents. Every leader needs a confidant, someone they can trust to bounce ideas off of, to test language, to advise them on who they should be talking to and how, to be their eyes and ears in the market and, ultimately, to be their voice of reason. This is the part of PR too many people forget.
So, here’s my advice: Go read Craig and Aneel’s posts. Read Caryn Marooney’s seminal post on the subject. And then email me when you are ready to get started and need someone to coach you without crushing your budget.
The town I live in is home to a number of interesting and notable people in American history: James Michener, Pulitzer winner and author of “Tales of the South Pacific;” Oscar Hammerstein, lyricist and playwright behind such classics as “Oklahoma!” and “The Sound of Music;” the famed anthropologist, Margaret Meade, who, coincidentally, is the source of one of my favorite quotes: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”; and Henry Mercer, the American archeologist, artifact collector and tile-maker.
Every holiday season, the local high school symphonic bands perform inside Mercer’s museum of 40,000 pre-Industrial Revolution tools. The students are strewn throughout the poured concrete structure, some on the main floor with the conductor, trombones on the second floor, a lone trumpeter in a third floor alcove, French horns tucked behind a wheelbarrow from the early 1800s. It’s a high testament to the young musicians to play as well as they did without being able to see the conductor.
As travelers and storytellers, we often dream of shooting in far off lands. But, as my friend Joan reminds us, don’t forget to get out and visit the sites in your own backyard.
It’s taken me longer than I expected to write this post. It’s been a decade since Eric and Kim Norlin sent out the first registration link for a small Denver-based conference called Defrag. 10 years for a tech conference is a helluva run.
Defrag had a long run because Eric and Kim made it something special. Attendees never knew what to expect from the agenda other than it would be mind-expanding and changing until about two weeks out. Unlike many conferences, the talks weren’t chosen by committee. They were chosen by whatever Eric saw coming down the pipe that the community might need to get in front of. From connections between housing starts and ladders falling off of trucks at one exit in Los Angeles to tales of dinner table conversations with computing greats and cosmonauts in training…Defrag never disappointed.
Luckily, much of what made Defrag great will carry on at Eric and Kim’s other long-running conference: Gluecon. Different time of the year (May instead of November), but same Bat channel. If you’ve never attended, I encourage you to register and come prepared to learn from some of the smartest people in the business.
And, if you’re like me and have been to more Defrag’s and Glue’s than you can count, I’ll see you, my friends, in May at the Omni.
Mike Maney 