Lessons from iMeme

Actually, I interview people all the time, but they’re clients, and I’m asking them to tell me all the details so I can condense them, later, into writing. No one hears those hours of MP3 recordings but me. Recording an interview to be played on a podcast is something different, particularly when you’re asking strangers if you can record them.

The asking was not the hard part. After all, everyone expects the people wearing “press” badges to ask for interviews. Of the people I asked, only the PR staff helping out at the conference refused.

But getting even a few minutes to talk to a person that everyone else also thought was brilliant and fascinating is a challenge. At a conference which had a large number of people packed into a small area during the breaks, with sponsor demos, conference videos, and loud music simultaneously blasting away in the background, it was nearly impossible.

I did get to talk to some great people, though. The audio quality varies from adequate to abysmal, even after following the editing tips in Shel and Neville’s book. But everyone I interviewed said something worth hearing, and you get to hear some concluding remarks from David Kirkpatrick at the very end of the conference.

Here is the list of interviewees:

• Sam Whitmore, Sam Whitmore Media
• Eva Chen, Trend Micro
• Paul Plushckell, Spigit
• Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone
• Esther Dyson, EDventure, Release 0.9
• David Kirkpatrick, Fortune

Recorded July 12 & 13th, 2007. Edited on July 22nd, 2007.Posted to the FIR Interview Feed on July 31st, 2007.

 

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The first I heard about Fortune’s iMeme conference was not a press release or a magazine avertisement, but an e-mail message from Shel Holtz of the For Immediate Release podcast:

Could you listen to the interview Neville and I conducted with Fortune magazine’s David Kirkpatrick? (It’s on the FIR site.) You’ll hear him offer us an invitation to the iMeme conference as bloggers. I’ll be out of town and Neville can’t get there from the UK, but since it’s in San Francisco, we’d like to send you, if you’re game. You’d report for FIR.

I’m inclined to help Shel and Neville out whenever I can, so I looked at the website, listened to the interview, and started to get very excited about the terrific opportunity I’d just been offered.

Since I have no idea where readers of this blog will be coming from, I thought it would be good to include that interview here. The audio is cross-posted from the FIR show blog.

What follows is a series of reflections on an intense two days at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco, and one set of recorded interviews which were included in the FIR interview feed.

If you’ve never listened to For Immediate Release, what are you waiting for? Click the “play” button and then head on over and subscribe.

 

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