Global Neighbourhoods

Happy Birthday Naked Conversations

[Child of the Marriage. Israel & Scoble with 1st Copy of Naked Conversations, Jan. 5 2006, Las Vegas. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

Naked Conversations celebrated it's second birthday this past Saturday.  Robert and I both seem to have missed it. We touched our first copy of the book at CES at a presentation to Booksellers meeting arranged by our publisher John Wiley in the New York, New York Hotel.

The day was among the best of my life. It was a highlight of what has been the best phase of my life. Working with Scobe was the best collaboration of my life.

It's hard to believe it has only been two years since the book was introduced.  Sometimes it seems the writing of Naked Conversations happened a very long time ago.  Sometimes I think the stories we told are ancient. Yet the book is still selling moderately well, which please me almost as much as it surprises me.

Then I realize that the stories are old only if you have already heard them.  Blogging has, of course, become only a single tool in an enormous social media tool shed. It has also become fruitful and multiplied.  We wrote when there were about 14 million bloggers.  Now there are more than 100 million. There may be as many as a half-billion people involved in social media worldwide.

What has remained intact, I think, is our key point.  There is a revolution going on that is transforming the way businesses talk with customers. That revolution has a key attribute. It's about the conversation, not any one tool.

To all of you who have bought the book, recommended the book, or just heard about it and in some way, what we had to say, impacted you, thanks so much.

Naked Conversations at Age 2

[Israel & Scoble with 1st Copy. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

We are just a few days short of Naked Conversations 2nd birthday, not from the date of publication, but from the date when Robert and I sent the final manuscript to our publisher for publication. It seems like yesterday to me. Simultaneously it feels like a million years ago.

So much has happened since then in terms of social  I won't event mention how the numbers we used in the book have dwarfed over two years ago. I think my favorite paragraph for irony is at te beginning of Chapter 14.

"Twenty years from now, people will look back at the blogging tools we use today and smile at how quaint they were. What will have replaced them?  We haven't a clue."

We went on to talk about the promise of RSS and something just starting up called podcasting,and we  speculated that something called "tagging" showed promise. Forget the 20 years.  We were pretty clueless about FaceBook and YouTube and online video and Twitter and so many things that have exploded on the internet in the past 24 months.

All ths came to mind this morning over on Facebook this morning when Scott Sykes, a PR practitioner for Weber Shandwick in China sent me a message asking me if I had any thoughts to share on changes since the book was published. I have quite a few, but here are a couple of to level thoughts:

• Naked Conversations was essentially about conversations replacing messages because of the internet.  We called that part a revolution and we still do. We talked almost exclusively about blogs because they were the only power tool of the conversational revolution at the time. What has changed is that there are now a great many tools and anyone can use any combination of them.  So the book is still correct on a philosophic view, but it's data has aged faster than Dorian Gray on steroids.
• Kids grow up. The younger generation is an online generation and it has started replacing my generation in the workplace.  Any company that is still not adapting to the social media revolution may discover it is too late to adapt and that some new company is going to disrupt their status quo by hijacking all its young customers.
• Two years from now, everything that is amazing now will be normal. Robert and I once again, don't have a clue as to what new and exciting and different tools will be introduced between now and then.

Scoble on Sabbatical

Of the many things that makes Robert Scoble among the most remarkable people I have ever met is his sheer output of social media work.  He is a pioneer in blogging, online video, Twitter and whatever tool has come to market.  He got Facebook's importance while I was still ignoring it. Few people in few areas have ever been as productive as Scoble has been.

Yesterday he wrote an amazing post, in announcing he would take a sabbatical from posting. He said his blogging has gotten shallow and argumentative and it has. He gets like this from time to time, the same way, Barry Bonds gets for weeks at a time when he too cannot connect to get a hit.

An expectant father, he wrote a powerful truth "holding a 19-day-old baby in your arms is a cathartic experience."  This is true in so many ways. Essentially, it makes a point that sometimes is hard for Robert to remember:

Real life is more important than virtual life. The lives we are immediately responsible for need more attention than the audiences that expect us to entertain or educate them.

Robert is taking some time off and reflecting. I spoke with him last night.  His voice is hoarse.  Gnomedex has burned his candle down.

At the same time, he is on fire.  Robert is playing with a new concept, an idea that ties together the shred and bits that are social media. Robert is not just resting, he's reflecting and when he comes back, I am pretty sure he will have a really good, fresh idea to share with the world. And it is a really good idea that the rest of us will embrace and debate.  We willflatter and insult him as we always do.

I just hope he keeps in perspective that the idea and the contribution will not exceed the importance of one new, little life form named Milan.

Executive Summaries of Cluetrain & Naked Conversations

Steve Sloan, a New Media in Journalism instructor at San Jose State University has posted a series of synopses of both Cluetrain Manifest and Naked Conversations.  For those of you who would like free executive summaries, these are the "go to" posts.

This link brings you to the beginning of naked Conversations and the end of Cluetrain. Read up and click forward to follow Naked.  Click back a few times to get to the beginning of Cluetrain.

Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers

UK Microsoftie Darren Strange reports that Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers among its 71,000 employees.  Both numbers show significant growth.  As irecall, when Robert and I were writing our first chapter of naked Conversations there were 2500 bloggers among 56,000 employees.  By the time we finished the book in October 2005, the bloggers were topping the 3,000 mark. This would mean that the number of Microsoft bloggers has grown by over 50 percent in about a year and a half.

By percentage, I'm not sure whether Sun Microsystems or Microsoft has more bloggers, but both companies continue to grow and continue to extol the virtues of doing it.

One interesting aspect in Darren's report is that there is no longer any controversy about it. When Joshua Allen, became Microsoft's first blogger, the first call to fire him for blogging came just a few hours later, as we reported in Naked Conversations.

Now it is seems to me, blogging is normalizing at Microsoft and that is what should happen.


Technorati Tags: darrenstrange, joshallen

Ernie the Attorney walks me down Memory Lane. It turns out to be a Perpetual Loop

I had almost lost track of my good friend, Ernie, [the Attorney] Swenson, who today reminds me of how my path into the Blogosphere had first been carved. It was at PopTech. It was at PopTech in Camden, Me, one of my favorite conferences. Buzz Bruggeman, invited me to join him at a table, where he was sitting with several people I had never met before. I immediately got into a passionate argument with some overly caffinated guy named David.

That was how I met David Weinberger, JD Lasica and Ernie. Ernie and I immediately hit it off.  Ernie encouraged me to read the book of the guy I was arguing with, something called Cluetrain Manifesto. You never know when you are having a watershed moment in your life and it turned out I was having one.

David's book would inspire me more than any other I have read. Cluetrain, Buzz and Ernie would all be covered in Naked Conversations. Buzz would eventually introduce me to another guy named Scoble, and his friend Andy Ruff would suggest at that dinner meeting that Robert and I collaborate on a book.

To make it all go full circle, Ernie was writing about me today to help promote the  upcoming WOMMA Conference being held in New Orleans Apr. 17-18. The last annual WOMMA Conference was held in San Francisco.  Scoble and I were the co-keynotes at it.

I thought it was a fabulous conference, and if you should attend if you can.  David is the best of us on the presentation circuit. Trust me on this.

 


Technorati Tags: WOMMA, ernietheattorney, jdlasica, davidweinberger, cluetrain, scoble, nakedconversations

Techdirt: Publisher Attempts to compete with Google book scan plan are lame. I agree

One of the many Mikes at Techdirt has an interesting post about how traditional bo publishers, uncomfortable with Google scanning and making searchable the content of all books have started to try to compete by offering excerpts of their own books--with a high level of restrictions on usage attached.

Techdirt thinks these efforts are pretty lame and I have to agree. Naked Conversations was not the first effort to use blogs in support of an authoring effort but it was the most comprehensive until that time.  Our publisher John Wiley wisely went along with Scoble's plan (it scared Hell out of me at the start) to publish early drafts of the entire book on this blog. While there has been some scraping, by the bad guys, there has not been a single case that we know of involving the plagiarism that publisher's so dread. More important, while no one knows any precise figures of who influenced people to buy our book, my guess is well over 90 percent of sales have resulted from some connection with the blogging experience and sales have been pretty good.

While rumors that Scoble and I have become wealthy from naked Conversations are greatly exaggerated, Cory Doctorow, one of blogging's most brilliant bloggers told Forbes Magazine, "I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money."

It seems to me, that Google's scan will not hurt book sales, but will help them. Reading books on computer screens, or in Bubble Jet output form, is just not as good as in the book. One of our dirty little secrets about the Naked Conversations experience is that the actual chapters we published, were not as well read as the interviews or the daily banter on the topics we were covering. The chapters ran from 3,000 words to 10,000 words, and that is just too long for people to read on a computer.

Technorati Tags: techdirt, corydoctorow, googlebookscan

Montreal Blogger Dinner

I think Scoble invented what has become the blogger dinners. He, of course, called them "Geek dinners." I'm not a geek, so when I came along, I refused to attend unless the name got changed. But the idea is very similar to tactics used by evangelists of other categories such as religion or politics.

The idea is to get a group of people with shared interest together.  A visitor from out of town is a great excuse, but the event is really for the benefit of the local community.  Blogging is great, but there is still nothing quite like a face-to-face meeting to strengthen bonds.

I had an absolute ball at the Montreal bloggers dinner, set up by Marc Snyder, attended by about 30 bloggers, many of whom already knew each other through YUL a local networking system.  I didn't get to talk with everybody, but I just met and enjoyed so many people, enjoyed great wine, food but mostly conversation.  did not speak to anyone who did not give me something useful or interesting that I had not yet heard.

I enjoy the friendly bicultural aspect of Montreal bloggers. Half of them may have posted terrible things about me, but I would not know because my French is so poor and the quality of computer translatirs is even worse.

I hesitate to name anyone by name or link, because I will  unavoidably omit some people I should include, so I will just say thanks to all for the fun, the passionate and well-informed conversation, the humor and good times.

I was just supposed to be an excuse  for getting bloggers to have a dinner together but I had a ball. I also understand there were some very promising first meetings for people who may do business together. That is always a good thing and I hope I get the chance to be an excuse to get together in Montreal again. It's a wonderful city, even if it was colder than a witches left nostril.  The people were warm and that is what rally mattered.

Thank you, Montreal.

JetBlue may not blog, but it is transparent

First off, I'm extremely happy that my horrendous travel schedule did not deliver me to the Northeast last week. Second, I'm a JetBlue fan, even if most routes I'm taking condemn me to United and American Air most of the time.

JetBlue is a young company, who just revealed the first blemish on the face of its seven-year history, and it was a pretty ugly one that left people locked on unventilated planes on the JFK tarmac for up to 10 hours. My wife is claustrophobic.  Had we been on that flight it would have been extremely hardon her.

Still, I had to wince when through Personal Bee, I was directed to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, where Paul says that the airline company's lack of information to the public could easily have been a case study for Naked Conversation's. If the book were being written now, I'm sure we would be all over this case. Paul might see it going into "Blogging in a Crisis," or perhaps "Doing it Wrong," but he would be surprised to see us put this one into "Doing it Right."

Paul, you may have missed the startling Page One interview in the New York Times with David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, who described himself as "humiliated and mortified," with how JetBlue customers were treated and how his organization melted down.He admitted that part of the problem, was the low-cost model upon which JetBlue is built and he publicly aired additional problems, such as flight attendants being unable to reach the company to find out if a flight was on or off.

This is transparency and it is a case study for how a CEO can use it. Using a blog would have been a better communications tool, but I think it's important to remember that like a hammer, a blog is just a tool.

JetBlue has sinned, it has suffered and it has repented.  The guy at the top probably ignored a whole bevy of lawyers telling him not to admit any kind of culpability. He says they'll do better and next time the suffering passengers will be compensated.

Naked Conversations began with the statement that we live in a time when most people don't trust corporations.  Personally, I trust this one because of Neeleman's comments.  I will be surprised if they do not do better next time.

And, by the way, when the communications officer at JetBlue, reads ths post, they should pay heed that a blog woiuld be a most efficient commnications tool when your next crisis takes place.




Technorati Tags: jetblue, nakedconversations, infectiousgreed, paulkedrosky

Happy Anniversary, Robert Scoble

[Israel & Scoble with Naked baby. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

I can't believe it has only been two years. It feels like so much longer.

Two Valentine Days ago, Robert Scoble and I were at DEMO.  We had an ouline for a book we were calling The Red Couch.  It was about why blogging was good for business. Robert had surprised me with this stunt, proclaiming to the world that we were going to blog the book and get publishers to bid for it on eBay.

I hated the book blog idea. I knew publisher's would never compete on eBay, but on the blog Robert started, over at MSN Spaces, a lot of people were saying a bunch of encouraging things to us.  Some were giving us leads for the book, others were helping us find the right tone.

Plus four publishers had popped up, expressing interest in the book.  None were going to bid on eBay.  Two had made serious bids.  To be honest, they were bidding well above what we had expected to get as an advance to two first time authors.

One of the publishers, John Wiley and Son sent a team of three down to DEMO to to persuade us that they were the right team. We found ourselves at a circular table in the middle of Morton's Steakhouse surrounded by Valentine couples intent on uttering sweet words in loud tones.  It was perhaps the noisiest table I would know until I attended my first blogging dinner.

The Wiley folk were terrific.  They tolerated Scoble's penchant of ordering wine by price instead of bottle (Scoble Rule #1: When publisher is paying, select only wines costing three three digits amounts). Somewhere into the second bottle, the surrounding couples had their food arrive. As the focusedon devouring pieces of steer, the noise level got tolerable and the Wiley guys, made an incredibly nice offer.  They talked about partnerships and marketing dollars and something called a "Big Book" deal at Amazon.

Like so many of the guests at surrounding tables, we were being swept off our feet. I was ready to do whatever these guys wanted to do. Scoble wasn't.  He was staying way back.

Finally, he laid out his concern with Wiley.  It seemed the competing publisher blogged and Wiley didn't.  Robert felt it important that we have a publisher that had a blog.  I was just happy finding a publisher that was offering this amount of money and tossed in a sumptuous steak as a bonus.

That's when Wiley's Joe Wikert offered to start this blog and our acquisition editor Jim Minatel started this one. They are both damn good blogs that they tell me have served Wiley very well. Robert agreed to do the deal and said he would help them with their blogs. That help would turn out to be a single event,  when Robert posted at Naked Conversations telling Joe everything he was doing wrong.

But we had a deal and it was the most monumental one I've made so far in my life. We had a deal and the Wiley folk left us, as did all the couples at the surrounding Morton's table.  Robert and I found ourselves sitting at the steakhouse bar, drinking XO Cognac at $50 a glass.

We went outside into the desert night to discover a torrential rain, the kind you expect in the tropics. I called my wife to tell her the good news and I heard tears of joy.  I later found out that was in part because she had learned that day that she was about to be laid off from her job at a time when I was at just about zero revenue.

In the end, it all worked out pretty well as I look back two years later  The book went through as many name changes as Murphy Brown went through secretaries, but as Naked Conversations, it has done pretty well. Paula and I seem to be living happily ever after.

Scoble has moved on to become a new age TV star and I'm at least talking a lot about starting a second book. The blog has changed names and colors, but if you are reading this, it is still doing pretty well.

Thanks Robert.  It has been my favorite two years.