Today, I spoke to Scott McGrew, who has 20 years experience as a television reporter, 10 of them as a technology reporter. His work has been seen on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and the BBC. He has been nominated for 10 Emmy Awards and reports on technology on the Bay Area’s NBC. In this interview, Scott goes over his impression of personal branding, why he has a website in addition to his NBC content, and then talks about authenticity.
What’s your take on personal branding?
I think people vastly underestimate the importance of managing their online presence. We’re all familiar with the idea of Googling job candidates or potential dates – personal branding is simply taking a interest in how you appear to the world online. The world is going to talk about you. Either you’re proactive about what gets said about you or you’re not.
In this sense, “branding” is just an extension of your reputation – don’t take the concept to seriously; you’re not developing a new line of shoes. Just manage your appearance to the outside world. Pay attention to what’s said about you, and what you say online.
Do you think of yourself as a brand?
I’m fairly new to the idea of personal branding. I had in the past depended on my network, NBC, to handle my public face. However, as my responsibilities and commitments outside the sphere of NBC increased and my online contributions got more diverse, it made sense to me to think of myself more as my own brand manager.
I was definitely influenced by my friend Sarah Lacy, who is an author and a TechCrunch contributor and a blogger and a half dozen other things (including a regular guest host on my TV show). She centralizes all her work at sarahlacy.com She’s also written extensively about creating your own brand – though she’s uncertain on its benefits.
I think you can take the branding idea too far – I’ve never taken myself very seriously, and having your own self-named website is taking yourself awfully seriously. So there are aspects of branding about which I am uncomfortable. I don’t like positioning myself as an expert or an influencer – I usually can’t find my own car keys. I blog occasionally, and the tagline to my blog is “because the world needed one more blog”. I hope you can detect the eye-roll there – the world was doing just fine before I blogged and is no better because I do it.
I Twitter, but even that isn’t very serious. I’m not posting deep thoughts – my tweets are usually just links to something I find interesting.
You have a personal website in addition to your NBC content. Why did you do this?
I needed a centralized way to pull all my content together. Some people listen to me on sports radio. Others watch me on the morning news in the San Francisco Bay Area. Others watch me online. And I Twitter. And I have a blog. Each website or channel I’m involved in has a way to contact me, but it just made sense to make one central place where it all tied together.
Far more interesting than me is how my website works. It’s absolutely zero maintenance, but it updates all the time. I’ve written it to take advantage the fantastic flexibility of a service called Feed Informer.
Feed Informer takes RSS feeds and turns them into HTML that you can use on your website. So my website www.scottmcgrew.net takes a look at what’s coming from my blog’s RSS feed and republishes the headlines from the blog on my main site. Then it examines the RSS feed coming out of my TV show’s website pressheretv.com and publishes links to and summaries of the latest four videos posted there. And then I use a similar service offered by Twitter to republish my tweets. So I have three columns of content that are changing all the time, which keeps my content fresh. However, I never touch the actual website at all – it’s all entirely automatic.
The site design is from EWtemplates.com – I think I paid $60 for it. Microsoft Expression Web is about $100. Combine those two and you can build just about anything.
Another terrific service your readers should know about is Posterous. I run my blog using Posterous. To update your blog, you just email it. Attach a photograph, and it’s automatically included in the post. Add a link to a YouTube video and the player is automatically embedded in your content. And then your Facebook and Twitter feeds are automatically updated with a link to your new content. It’s so easy to use, its almost impossible to explain.
There are a few downsides: if you upload more than one picture, it automatically creates a slideshow whether you want it to or not, and often times you have to go back and edit links to work properly, but on balance Posterous is great.
Can you talk about authenticity as it relates to TV media?
It’s hard to really be yourself when thousands or even millions are watching you. Being myself is the only thing I’m any good at – so it’s what I do on TV. That’s true whether you’re working on television or creating an online brand: you MUST be yourself. Viewers and the internet can detect a fake a million miles away. My TV shows are reflections of me and my interests. My guests on Press:Here for instance are not chosen through audience analysis – they’re chosen because I want to talk to them.
One of my favorites was an interview with cellist Zoë Keating who performed one of her newest songs for us. Some of my co-workers were a bit hesitant about using so much TV time featuring a cellist, but I like her music so much, we did it anyway. And it turned out to be one of our most watched shows.
“Do the things you love – have a passion for them – and others will share your enthusiasm.”
Now that anyone can create videos, do you think this will really hurt television?
I don’t think it’s the ability to create videos per se that hurts television. It’s that there are so many interesting things to watch or read or do online that hurts television – there are fewer eyeballs. Videos themselves are irrelevant – most are not very well done and lack the storytelling that television professionals are so good at. Even the really popular stuff (e.g., Dr. Horrible Sing Along Blog) is professional video, after all. The videos that DO get a lot of attention often get ported in some way over to TV. So in the end, TV’s still the dominant force. For now.
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Scott McGrew has 20 years experience as a television reporter, 10 of them as a technology reporter. His work has been seen on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and the BBC. He has been nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, but he’s quick to point out he’s never won any. He has been dabbling in computers since his first Apple II. Scott was one of the few reporters in the world allowed to fly Combat Air Patrol as part of Operation Enduring Freedom following 9/11, when he flew backseat in an F-16 tailing civilian airliners. He was also one of a corps of four reporters to witness the last firing squad execution in the United States. He wrote a piece about it for the London Daily Mail. Scott reports on technology on the Bay Area’s NBC, as well as produces and reports for the syndicated high technology show TechNow. He also joins sports radio hosts Murph, Mac and Gary Radnich on sports radio KNBR 680am on weekday mornings to talk business and technology.
