Global Neighbourhoods

Monster in a Bottle

As he uncorks his integration of the Stormhoek and Microsoft brands, maybe Hugh should change the name of his blog to "Graping Void." He could also give the Microsoft Blue Monster a name.  It's a shame Moby Grape has been used.

BlogHer, ScrapBlog, Contests, Horses, Pigs, Cows and Braided Marketing

Like Tara Hunt, Scrapblog is a client of mine and like Tara, I usually think contests are pretty lame in a social media environment.  They are often tools of mass merchants trying to resusitate fading brands. But also like Tara, I think the one that Scrapblog has just jointly announced with BlogHer has some interesting twists.

Yesterday, I was at a workshop where attendees discussed the difficulty in
braiding new and traditional marketing together and I expressed doubts
that you could do much of it. In this case, I think they've done
exactly that.I like this one because I think both companies and the user win more than some goofy prize. Here's what's happening.  Scrapblog has long realized that it's primary users are women on line, about three-fourths of them.  Not only that, but they spend more time on the Scrapblog site and make more Scrapblog. BlogHer is the largest community of women online and the people who run it need to keep finding new things that will be either useful or interesting to its millions of users.

So the two companies made a deal and Scrapblog could have employed members of its team to design Scrapblog templates that seemed appropriate for the BlogHer community.  That's called targeting and it's how traditional marketers do it.  Instead, the two companies thought, why not let BlogHer community members design Scrapblogs and have the winner gets a free most-expenses paid pass to the upcoming Blogher conference, a prize you have to assume a lit of BlogHer members would want?

So users get introduced to a creative means of expression.  Scrapblog gets closer to a community that they may be more suited to than say, NASCAR racing fans, BlogHer women get a shot at a free pass and everyone wins. Scrapblog gets user generated content that BlogHer gets to offer exclusively.









Technorati Tags: tara hunt, blogher, scrapblog

Kawasaki spreads Truemors at SVASE

[Guy Kawasaki at SVASE. Photo by Shel]SVASE

I spent a few hours over SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of StartUps) yesterday at the Microsoft Mt. View Campus. It was a professionally produced event, spotlighting promising startups in front of an audience comprised mostly of VCs. I saw five presentations from Boorah,  DivinR , Jaxtr , kongregate and TelID .  I saw reasons that each of these companies could succeed. It was a little difficult because they all had calibrated to present to venture people, meaning they had to drag out tired PowerPoint presentations and list team credentials, when each of them could have more easily plucked my magic twanger by emphasizing the beauties of their products and strategies rather than previous employers of team members.  I wish a couple would hire me to coach them on presentation or better yet, just take note of the charismatic keynoters who preceded them, a guy named Kawasaki.

Kawasaki simply reeks of charisma. After his former employer, Steve Jobs he is consistently the most interesting and valuable speaker the tech community has yet to produce. He was there to talk about Truemors, his newest company. His talk was originally billed as, "How I Launched a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for only $10,918.09," but there must of been cost overrun. It was revised to  $12,107.09.

His key point was that truemors went from site registration to live in just 7.5 weeks for $12K  plus pocket change, as opposed to the usual $2 million and 6-12 months.

He told approximately 25o attendees the idea for Truemors was inspired by Hot or Not, a  social media site started by two guys at a party who disagreed on whether a certain person of the female persuasion was or was not hot. They took her picture, sending emails to 40 friends.  They asked them to vote on the hotness of the woman in the picture and invite friends to do the same.  Overnight, 40,000 people voted.

Fascinated by the overnight success, Kawasaki set out to create a business on a minimalist strategy. He said he saved six months by not writing a business plan and not parading up and down Sand Hill Road pitching investors.

He outsourced virtually everything. Kawasaki found Electric Pulp in South Dakota who designed and developed the online polling mechanism and then the site in a few weeks. His logo was designed by Logoworks, another online service for $400. He spent $1000 registering 55 domain names.  He could have cut that in half, but he did not like the implicitly sexist GoDaddy Superbowl ad, so he used the more expensive Network Solutions where he already had an account. His biggest expense was $4800 in legal fees. He warned that if a company succeeds, cutting corners in this area can be a fatal mistake.

He stated with apparent pride that his total marketing budget was zero and yet Truemors was flooded with 250,000 page views in its first day. Ah, but it seems to me, that Guy Kawasaki invested a great deal of time in marketing and the marketing got attention because of the significant currency of his personal brand.  Kawasaki is a one-person marketing machine and if he charged his own company what he's worth an hour, it probably would be a cost equivalent to what a traditional PR agency would have charged to help with the launch. Kawasaki has better access to editors and bloggers than just about any PR practitioner and the launch of Truemors was a heavy media play.

The site has been praised by some but vilified by many more. He complained that he was criticized by some bloggers for allowing crap and hearsay to be posted and rebuked by others for removing crap and hearsay.

Still other bloggers point out Truemors has generated so much noise so far is because Kawasaki is the guy who's doing it. His retort: "That's obvious." He's right. I visited Truemors  because it was Kawasaki's new thing. I decided to attend the SVASE event because I wanted to hear what he had to say about it.  Hell, I made sure to put Kawasaki's name in my headline above because it might spike in my daily Google juice. We are all self-promoters, but it only works if you like what we are promoting.

In the end, Kawasaki's name will not sustain Truemors. In the end it needs to provide a product and/or service that is valued and sustainable by some sort of revenue model. So far, Truemors has not done so and the enhancement of Kawasaki's personal brand may have already faded. Webware's Rafe Needleman, showed me Truemors' Alexis graph, which looks much more like a Bell Curve than a hockey stick.

Kawasaki had four takeaways:

1. There is no such thing as bad PR.  His point was that most bloggers had ripped his new company and generated huge traffic in doing so. He overlooked the fact that his own blog is the 14th favorite in the Western world and its a favorite of over 550 other bloggers.  He also  overlooked the fact that he is an experienced PR machine and one of the inventors of product evangelism as it is practiced in the technology community. Let a couple of brilliant computer scientists try doing what he has done and they will have a much greater likelihood to fall flat on their faces.  While Arrington covered Kawasaki three times, without Kawasaki asking.  Other startups grovel for the sort of coverage that Kawasaki can get on his own with little or no effort.

•    12 K goes long way. Absolutely true. Companies all over the world can use the efficiencies of the Internet to go further faster and cheaper than has ever been true. Kawasaki was followed by CEOs who all showed they were using classic approaches and conventional wisdom to raise money and go to market. There are new efficincies and disintermediating the money lenders and high marketing costs is a tactic that morecompanies should consider.
•    Remote teams work. The relationships we build over the internet are not virtual, they are real.  And we can share just about everything over the internet short of touch, taste and smell. Startups have an enormous opportunity to build global teams at low cost.
•    Life is good for entrepreneurs these days. Kawasaki is a poster child for "Life is Good." But he is right.  There are more opportunities today than at any time in my 28 years working as a tech consultant (4 years more than Kawasaki).

Help! This site is being hijacked

I was just informed that when you type in http://globalneighbourhoods.com, you get hijacked to a link farm. I have the site registered with GoDaddy and auto forwarded to my core url of http://redcouch.typepad.com.

I need your help because I have not a clue how they can do this and who or what I contact to fix this.

Ben McConnell knocks the Times for Knocking Citizen Journalists

Under the clever headline of "Chicken Little Pecks Again," Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer takes on the NY Times recent piece about the dangers of citizen journalism, in which the only people quoted are those who like to believe they are in command and control of the message.

I have never been big on the Journalist v. blogger debate. I kind of think their are blogging journalists, and people paid to fill newspaper space who are far from journalistic. But I have noticed an increase in what I consider the sour grapes of some newspaper writers. A couple of weeks ago, a Boston Globe sports writer was up in arms about 38pitches, a blog by Boston Red Sox pitching great Chuck Shilling.  Apparently a professional athlete was unqualified to write about professional athletics. I wondered what that guy would have said about Mark Cuban.

The times are changing even if the Times is not. Their readers and subscribers are beyond there command.


Technorati Tags: church of the customer, ben mcconnell

Marketing to women online

A couple of days ago, there were headlines declaring that fashion has eclipsed technology as the most popular e-tailing category. It's about time. I can remember back in about 1995, when "e-tailing" was a new and sexy word, and everyone was writing about buying stuff in their pajamas and the traditional newspapers were posting the inevitable warnings of it not being safe. I was working with my first online retailer, a start-up named Virtual Vineyards and the founder and I were manning a small booth at a conference in New York City. Next to us was another pioneer retailer.  I think they were called Amazon.com.

I chatted with some guy named Bezos who told me that the challenge would be to get everyday people to buy online and we would know that was happening only when consumer goods outpaced computer sales online. It turned out that selling books online was a more lucrative idea then selling artisan-produced wines online and the Bezos guy did pretty well.
But still the #1 item online for an entire decade has been computers.

I don't know know if this observation is politically correct or not, but guys buy computers and cars.  Women buy shoes and accessories.  Bezos, was fortune because both men and women buy the stuff his very large store now sells.

For a decade, I've been wondering when the tables would turn. Back in 2000, Pew observed that the surge of women online would change the Internet and would change what happened there because women were more social than men. In 2004, Shop.org listed a barrage of statistics that would argue the Internet was the eCommerce purview of women and that this was altogether fitting because women did the shopping.

Now, in 2007, we finally see evidence that a trend that is nearly a decade old is proving to be true. Perhaps it took so long because computers have cost so much more than shoes or handbags. Perhaps it is because computers are lasting a little longer now that so many of the requirements are moving online.

The buying power of women online is rising.  When you look at demographic breakdowns, you discover, that in higher age categories, the people who shop online are men, and when you look at younger age categories the shoppers are female. Selecting a 30-year-old woman for a customer seems a wiser course than trying to sell to a 60-year-old guy.

And the success for companies focusing on marketing may be on the hot path. Take Riya, for example, a company I helped position as a photo search company when it launched in Fall 2005. The media loved them. The blogosphere loved them. The problem was after the first wave of coverage and adoration, they found they had very few repeat customers. They went back to the drawing board repositioned themselves, coming back out of the box as Like.com, a visual shopping network aimed at women who wanted to find something to buy that looked like a garment or accessory in a photo. I have no current data, but I am told that response has been strong and growth seems to be ongoing.

Most recently, I've been involved with Scrapblog who just went live a few weeks ago.  Slightly to their surprise is that three-fourths of their users are younger women who are using the service to creatively share personal milestones with a small handful of friends and family. This has changed the company's thinking and its opportunities. First, there's a whole lot of companies offline and on, who want to market to young women, and they seem to be lining up with business partnership offers. Second, Scrapblog can adjust its marketing to this identifiable group and third it can begin to design new content and features to this group.

These are just two examples that I am close to. I'm certain there are a great deal more. It has very much surprised me that it has taken this long for women to outspend men in the online marketplace. But then things always take longer than I think they will. By now, I thought blogging would be about as common as using a telephone. It is not.  But I remain convinced it will be.  Its just going to take longer than I had thought.

Farecast upgrades its site

I've written a couple of times previously about farecast.com, whose online service has helped me save money by predicting accurately whether plane tickets would be going up or down. Mike Fridgeon, Farecast VP marketing pinged me this morning to let me know it upgraded its site with a whole lot more traveler's options, such as alternative airports, one-way, cabin class, eliminating dreaded red-eyes and filtering out tight connections.

In features and options, this new rev has pulls it ahead of Orbitz and kayak.com , not to mention it's primary asset of telling you whether its wise to buy your ticket now or later. Farecast's frosting is that it tells you whether plane tickets are going up or down with about 75% (audited) accuracy and they'll even sell you insurance to cover if they are wrong. Personally, I think Farecast has a prettier face than Orbitz and other competitors.

Founded last August, Farecast claims over three million visitors.  According to Mike,  the service has saved people $10 million as a direct result of its predictions.

I believe that online predictive technology, another infant industry is going to emerge with speed in numerous areas in the coming months. For example, I'm working with a San Francisco company, My-Currency, which has not yet launched. My-Currency will help prospective home buyers determine whether the price of houses for sale in a particular neighborhood will be rising or falling in coming months.

Thanks Hugh. It's worth a thousand words

Hugh MacLeod, has drawn one of his inimitable masterpieces in honor of our upcoming "Starting the Conversation" workshop series starting June 11 at SAP headquarters in Palo Alto.

Josh's Dictionary of Corpspeak

In Naked Conversations, Robert and I invented a few words.  Ine, which we enjoyed was "Corpspeak," referring to language used by large organizations that no one else on Earth would ever use. Before us, of course, Cluetrain also mentioned it, and before them, George Orwell had some fun with it in a little book called "Animal Farm."

My friend Josh Hallett seems to have started a dictionary of corporate euphemisms and circle-speaks. This would be a very funny piece if it weren't so true.

Why can't companies just have a simple naked conversation with customers and the public?


Technorati Tags: josh hallett. hyku

Could Microsoft Assimilate Hugh Macleod?

I have a few things in common with my favorite illustrator, Hugh MacLeod. We both try to be humorous, edgy and generous with our blogs. [He succeeds more oftan than me.] In return, we hope somehow to pick up enough business to survive economically.People vastly overestimate what either of us make, or in Hugh's case, what I think he makes.

Hugh and I chatted briefly about this at the San Francisco blog dinner last week, but because of his recent affiliation with Microsoft he seems to be getting a certain level of unjustifiable crap lately. At the same blogging dinner, someone who should know better referred to Hugh as "just another Microsoft flogger."

More recently, at the Girl Geek Dinner, he recently wrote, Sarah Blow told him that before he arrived at the event,people were speculating  there was speculating on Gaping Void "being assimilated by Microsoft."

I think the reverse is more likely, and good for Sarah for telling Hugh what was saying when he was not present to hear it. Hugh, as usual took the comments in stride down the high road. I don't blame people for speculating.  That's what people do.

Personally, Hugh gives me something for free. He makes me laugh more than once a week. He manages to bite the hypocrites without being cruel.  He gives me insights into not just blogging but the human condition without it feeling like a tutorial.  He does it for free.

My thanks to Microsoft, Thomas Mahon and Stormhoek for allowing him that luxury.  Thanks to you who bring him in to consult for money and for you who buy his Street Cards and T-Shirts.

My only question: If I start drawing funny pictures, will you do the same for me?

Technorati Tags: hugh macleod, microsoft

Technorati and the "A-Word."

Technorati has once again come up with a formula who they say, determines who among bloggers have the most--or least--authority. Frankly, once again, I don't much care. I think Technorati deserves credit as a social media pioneer who has given us the power tool of discovery. I just wish they would drop the elitist obsession they seem to have with the "A-word."

It is such a top down word. It implies that some bloggers have more authority than others, when in fact all they can prove, through links or any other means is that some bloggers are more popular than others.

I could be a political blogger, and have only three readers and no links. Technorati could see I was a garbage pail with no authority.  What if my three readers were the president of the United States, the president of Russia and the premier of China. Zero authority?  If I could influence them to move toward world peace, I'd be the first Nobel Blogger.

I have argued this before. Relevance is different than blogging.

What is relevant to you or your company is different than what is relevant to me or my company. Last time I checked, Technorati said I was a more popular blogger than my friend and erstwhile client, Pat Phelan. But if you are interested in VOIP or low-cost telephony, I would wager that Pat has at least ten times my authority on those subjects and well he should. Technorati has no way of understanding topical relevance other than through tags and has no way to measure that pat is more relevant to some subjects than I could dream of being.

Do not get me wrong. There is power in popularity.  In some ways and at some times, their influence is huge, perhaps greater than any other communications resource. When Scrapblog, a current client launched , it received a great deal of so-called "A-List" coverage and that coverage has been very helpful in cutting some very important deals and attracting the attention of investors and traditional press. It has made a huge difference for my scrappy client and I do not deny it.

But the A-Listers have not done the ultimate job.  I didn't expect they would.

To succeed, Scrapblog needs to reach everyday people online, people who want to share pictures and clips of their kids and dogs and trips with a few members of their family or some friends. You will find most of them in the bottom of the Technorati authority bucket. Many, if not most of them, never have heard of Arrington or Scoble and think the A-List has something to do with getting into a trendy nightclub. But they are Scrapblog's most relevant audience and Technorati's estimation of their authority is absolutely irrelevant.

Kami Posts a great case study

Kami Huyse has posted a nifty case study that she has done for her client, San Antonio Seaworld. Working with the  usually brilliant   Josh Hallett,  they have created a social media launch for a retail attraction called Journey to Atlantis.

I'm looking for case studies like this to use in my upcoming workshop series with the Social Media Club. I'd like new cases of ways that traditional businesses have successfully entered into the social media.


Technorati Tags: kami huyse, josh hallett, journey to atlantis

Mike Manuel on How to Pick Social Media Counsel

Mike Manuel, at Media Guerrilla has a sage piece on how to pick consultants for a new media project.

"I think the market has reached a point now where it's fairly easy to find knowledgeable people and more often than not, initial talks and meetings can give you surface-level insight into someone's experience and know how. Often, if the price is right too, well, for some folks that's enough. Decision made.

But let's say you're the crazy type that wants to get past surface-level questions and responses, and really dig into someone's skill set - to ensure that they can really be the trusted adviser that you and your company are seeking. In this case, what sort of questions do you ask? And more important, what sort of responses should you expect?"

He goes on to ask several great questions that shows success may not be steeped in someone knowing what an A-Lister has for lunch or can talk about Kryptonite and Dell Hell, but needs to have real hands on experience with dealing with a web crisis.

Mike does a good job of showing you he's one of those who has been there and done that as a PR consultant.

Advertising and the User's Right to Choose

Lately, my double spam filters have been eating more than they should, and I have been thinking of opening the ratchet a bit. But this morning this gem got past from some company I did not know, called Feed Blaster (trust me, you don't want the link). Here's what the email said:

 

 

More and more people are subscribing to feeds every
day and there are millions who are already subscribed.
Thus, your ad will reach a very broad range of potential customers with each use of Feed Blaster!  

Feed Blaster is the first & only submitter that can submit your
ads to thousands of feeds within a few minutes!

Post your ads where people read them!

- What if you could place your ad into all these feeds ?

For Full details please download the attached .html file

To Unsubscribe please click here

There was a download attachment.  For some reason I decided not to download. At a minimum, it would confirm that I was a real person and that I would probably get unwanted email from this guy for the rest of my life. For another, I want advertising in my RSS feeds about as much as I want lice in my hair.

So I decided to Google this operation. This was my first click:

 

Posted By: Geoff Hibbert
Date: Saturday, 18 March 2006, at 6:15 p.m.

 

Has anyone in here used a piece of software call Feed Blaster, Its by a guy called Sebastian Foss. I boughtone of his products before and it didn't seem to produce results so if any of you have used this I would love to know if it works.

Geoff

There are several comments saying, "Save your money it doesn't work."

What a relief. I hope it never works, but I'm fearful that sooner or later something like Feed Blaster will work.  Then some entrepreneurs will scurry to create an RSS ad blocker, followed by a new way for RSS ads to bypass the new RSS ad blockers, and so on.  It's the Cold War all over again.

I just wish advertisers and direct marketers would read Doc Searls article on the Intention Economy.
There are times when we all want to see ads. Advertisers should learn how to respect the user's right to choose.

 

   

Kryptonite starts a blog

Kryptonite makes locks for two wheeled vehicles. It is etched into blog history as the first company to have been soundly trashed by the Blogosphere. In September 2004, the company heard from someone who claimed he had picked one of the company's popular tubular locks with a BIC pen cap. A few days later the same claim was made on bikeforum, a cycler's bulletin board.

The story soon spilled into the Blogosphere.  Darren Barefoot posted a video of a Bic picking a lock and it hit Engadget who released a video on how to Bic-pick a Kryptonite lock.  From there, all Hell broke loose and the story spread like wildfire into traditional media.

The 25-person, Massachusetts-based company was overwhelmed with what suddenly, from almost out of nowhere, it was immersed in a well-publicized crisis that was mentioned by bloggers, usually in a negative light, over a 10-day period.

Kryptonite remained mute in the Blogosphere.  By january 2005, it was the legendary poster child of how to do things wrong in the blogosphere as well as the case study for the power of bloggers to raise attention and damage unresponsive companies.

That was how Robert and I wrote it in an early version of our Naked Conversations Chapter on Doing it Wrong posted here back in summer 2005. We emphasized in particular how the company hurt itself by ignoring the Blogosphere.

That is when Donna Tocci, Kryptonite's dedicated, passionate PR manager decided to break the company's silence via a comment to our blog, and then through an ongoing email conversation with us. Her side of the story described a company overwhelmed as a 2x4 whacked them from behind.  She talked of the company's entire workforce working around-the-clock to assess the situation and how the locks could be fixed. She talked about how the company replaced all locks with new secure ones at a cost that Forbes magazine estimated at $10 m.  She talked about Kryptonite not know anything about blogs and how the company answered all calls from traditional media and paid its closest attention to customers.

Our chapter got revised--and considerably improved--by reporting Donna's side of the Kryptonite story.

In the end, bloggers learned a bit about balance. I think we have a bit more to go. Kryptonite, the media and a good many other companies learned a good deal more about the Blogosphere.

Now, a year-and-a-half later.  Kryptonite has started a blog, called Unbreakable Bonds and several posts have already been entered. Like most business blogs, it has started a bit gingerly.  This is a company that has reason to be apprehensive about negative commentary. But it is nce to see Kryptonite joining the blogosphere.  It is a company, well-positioned to get conversations about the joys of cycling going, and this is a subject for which there is great passion.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Kryptonite. I look forward to watching your evolution.

Is Ajax scrubbing out our Reader Rankings?

Kami Huyse points to why Ajax, the peek-enabling software may be reducing our social media reader rankings. This is something that never occured to me.  It screws up advertising matrixes even as it deflates blogger egos. Now, I need to think about whether or not this is aq good or bad thing ...


Technorati Tags: communicationovertones, kamihuyse


Technorati Tags: kamihuyse, communicationovertone

Scrapblog: The thrill of the ride

There is nothing like a launch.

So much depends upon it. So much work goes into it. Their is nothing quite as lasting as a first impression, so the way a company launches, even in these days of perpetual betas and soft launches makes a great deal of difference.

The most important part is, of course, the product.  It has to be remarkable and it has to be ready for people to have a good user experience.

I've been addicted to the roller coaster ride of first launches since about the time the wheel was launched.  I wasn't involved and I like to think if I were, you'd know the developer's name.

Scrapblog has given me quite a rush over the past few days. I didn't mind the rolling and the coasting, but there were a couple of hairpin turns that scared Hell out of me. The worst was when the site went down for about five hours yesterday, as the phone company would say, "due to the unusually high volume" of bloggers trying to get in at the same time. This now seems to be fixed and we are reasonable certain it won't happen again.

There's also some sort of glitch with Wordpress. You cannot post directly from scrapblog.com. You have to grab the EMBED code and paste it into your blog editor. One irony is that Scrapblog’s blog is powered by Wordpress, and that they have to take this slightly cumbersome etra step themselves to post. Fixing this will require some help from the Wordpress folk and we are not sure just when we will be able to make the problem go away.

About 100 bloggers have posted about Scrapblog so far. They have pointed out several little anomolies, which the company has fixed. The general feedback is overwhelming and positive.  The product is working as it should work.  Bloggers are telling us they think it is as good as we think it is, and we are planning to go live to the general public in just a few days.

I am always surprised by the speed and zeal bloggers have in helping people.  I have seen it work for helping Scoble and me write a better book, in reporting on tsunamis and terrorism, but particularly n helping companies like Riya and Scrapblog build better products.

In a week dominated by ugliness in the Blogosphere, it was nice to have such a positive experience in another end of the neighborhood.

Kathy Sierra and the Death Threats

Years ago, when my blog was still ItSeemstoMe, I wrote a piece cause-based ice cream brands. It was a fairly light essay, but it invoked a vitriolic, anti-Semetic comment from someone who demonstrated he or she knew where I lived, knew my wife's name and owned a gun. It scared me and for a long while I stopped mentioning Paula's name and that I live in San Carlos, CA. As it turned out, I never wrote about gun control again and I cannot tell you whether it is coincidence or not.

Kathy Sierra has suffered a great deal more than that, and apparently a good number of women have also suffered disturbing and outrageous offenses. I feel for her and I am saddened that what has occurred has done so.  The fact that it occurred on the blogosphere is not a key point to this story.  It just makes it more personal for me because the Blogosphere is one of my global neighborhoods.

It is the same as learning that something violent or criminal or ugly happened in my physical neighborhood, or that some women I knew in college was sexually assaulted. Maybe it shouldn't be this way.  Maybe we should all focus on the more massive ugliness that takes place every day in places like Darfur.

But we don't. We ignite when something bad happens close to home, or to someone we know or knew.

I say all in response to the lead story in today's  San Francisco Chronicle by Dan Forst entitled "Bad behavior in the blogosphere."

Forst, conducted some decent journalistic legwork, getting good quotes and providing a very clear chronology of the events leading up to this controversy. But what bothered me is that the useful and informative stuff was buried, after the story jumped inside the paper. The Page One sections seems to me dominated by Tabloid type inferences that exaggerate a serious and complicated issue.For example:

"The incident and its aftermath have drawn back the curtain on a computer
culture in which the more outrageous the comment, the more attention it gets.
It's a world that many women in particular see as still dominated by men and
where personal attacks often are defended on grounds of free speech.

In addition, many of the newest tools of the Internet are coming into
play. Blogs and online communities were supposed to herald an era in which "the
wisdom of crowds" guided online behavior to a higher plane. Instead, instances
of mob rule appear to be leading the discussion into the sewer."

The Blogosphere is a pretty transparent place with very few curtains except maybe in Amanda Chapel's cross-dressing room. The more "outrageous comments" are regularly taken down by most bloggers and therefore they get no attention.  Women have legitimate complaints about their treatment by some men in general.  This is not unique to the blogosphere. Personal attacks are defended by free speech in general.  it's a Constitutional thing.  Personal threats is another story.  They are illegal online or off and should be.

I wish people would actually read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which i considered a brilliant book. But a few comments on a blog, or a few hundred comments on Digg doth not a wise crowd make.What Surrowiecki is talking about is that a largecrowd--an electorate, or visitors to a county fair, very often comes out with a more accurate answer than does a panel of so-called experts.


My point is this: What has happened to Kathy Sierra is a bad thing.  It is not a BAD BLOGOSPHERE thing.  It shows that their is ugliness in our neighborhood. If Dan forst wants to see a high incident of neighborhood, violence, threats, female abuse and ugliness, he only needs to walk out the doors of the San Francisco Chronicle building in San Francisco and walk one block in any direction.







Technorati Tags: kathysierra, SFchronicle, danforst

Citizen Journalist, PR Guy. What's in a name?

Words mean a difference to me. I don't think it's just because I'm a writer.

I felt my feathers ruffle during an ICE 07 panel talk called, "Citizen Journalism: Weapon of Mass destruction?" when panelists agreed that the term "Citizen Journalist," was inaccurate. When I asked a floor question, that was a bit contentious," panelist Angus Frame, editor, of globeandmail.com, Canada's national newspaper retorted, "what difference does it make?

To me it makes a great deal of difference. To discount the term, implies we bloggers are somehow less. While a great deal has been said about the structural differences between professional news gatherers and bloggers, the word "citizen" is too often overlooked. We are volunteers, just like "citizen soldiers" were. We lack the training and discipline.  We are often inaccurate, but we have a lot of feet on a lot of streets and we are changing what the public comes to know. Citizen Journalism predates blogging.  Abraham Zapruder's film of the JFK assassination was a citizen journalist and so was George Holliday's video of the Rodney King's beating.

The whole experience got me to thinking how often many of us struggle with terms. Despite the impression  that authors become fabulously wealthy, my primary source of revenue still comes from consulting. In the process of being selected, I have to struggle with the terminology surrounding just what it is I do.

For years, I was perfectly content to be called a "marketing consultant" or "PR executive." Less formally, you could call me a marketing or PR guy. It was what I did.

But it's not what I do anymore.  When business prospects use those terms for me, I get uncomfortable. Yet I am well aware, Ican rarely get hired by telling people what I do not do.

A marketing guy figures out messages and the devises ways to insert them into people's foreheads, even people who do not wish to have them inserted. This is no longer what I do.

Lately, I’ve started calling myself a “markets guy,” which is someone who finds markets relevant to a business and joins or starts conversations that are useful or interesting to those markets. If you think about it, this is very different.

I've had a great deal of struggle with the term “public relations.” The profession, as practiced by a great many people today is not about relationships with the public.  It is more about taking messages from clients and injecting them into the markets, often via the media.  Such a routing creates the impression that these marketing messages are more credible. There remains some truth to that, but again, it  is not what I do.

Yet I am all about public relations. The term literally implies developing relationships with your public. Social media makes it efficient, effective and scalable to have transparent relationships with verylarge numbers of people.  If you think about it, these are public relationships.

Maybe in all cases, I'm just mincing words.  But then, words are very important to most people.

Bulldog PR University Talking Points

[NOTE: I tweaked this after posting it and have just changed the text from the original throughout the post.]

The following are my draft talking points for my talk Thursday in Chicago at the Bulldog reporter PR University. I am not entirely satisfied with the closing poiints and would welcome some more additions.  If I use your comments I will credit them to you in my talk.

1. I am a “recovering publicist.” One day, early in  2001, I scrawled “Stop me before I pitch again” across a mirror. …been going to “Pitch-enders” ever since.

2. Was in PR more than 25 years. Worked with tech startups. Loved it. Loved the creativity and integrity of most PR people I knew.

3. I left for many reasons. A few I recall:

• Tech bubble popped. Left no clients, no payroll and a bunch of bubble goo all over my nice Italian suit.
• Role changed. PR went from relationship-building to buzz-generating. Buzz is the last sound you hear before you get stung. PR moise level had become Deafening.  Trying to tell a client’s story was like“hollering in a hurricane.”
• At the same time the audiences we were struggling to reach were exhausted from the pitches they had already heard.
• Result: PR image deteriorated. Nasty jokes. Lawyers/PR guys. Screw you in PR talk: trust me. Edelman says:  Less credible than lawyers.

4. Environmental changes

• Traditional media went into atrophy. Will be fatal for many. NY Times forecast.
• Relentless rise of blogging, wikis, internet audio video and online communities.
• ‘Kid’s Stuff.’  New generation emerging with Teflon resistance to ads, PR & trad marketing. Don’t read newspapers. More time on YouTube than TV. Listen to more iTunes than radio. Ignore authority.
• Online, people started to ignore marketing. They went back to the way the market worked from the time people were cave dwellers until the 1940s in the US. They influenced each other on what to buy, where to go, listen to, watch and even maybe who to vote for.
• Only one small significant change had occurred. Instead of exercising this influence in cafes and over the backyard fence, we started doing it online.

5. The generation now emerging, the one who will inherit my desktop and my generation in the workplace is now 25 or younger. They are the Online Generation –“Onliners” for short.

6. The overriding question that you need to ask yourselves is what happens when the Onliners come of age, replacing we 60s kids and boomers as we drive off to Jurassic Park to join the other fossils who could not adapt to change? What tools to reach the Online Generation?

• Forget the press release. That won’t reach the Onliners, even if somehow tangible newspapers still exist down the line.
• Forget your sacred list of influential contacts. Those influencers can’t even get their kids to put down their cellphones and come to dinner.
• If this is kid’s stuff, there seems to be a whole lot of kids.  Look at the numbers. Over 60 m bloggers, but that’s chickenfeed.  YouTube has 100m daily downloads. MySpace 200 million registered users by year end. Facebook more than 1 b photos. 3 m elementary school kids forming global friendships at Club Penguin.
• Onliners are today’s early adopters. Early adopters as most of you know, influence everyone else. You can’t reach them by smiling and dialing, although text chatting would help.
• If you always do what you’ve always done, you will get less response next time than you did last time.
• Political candidates figuring this out. Mayor of DC, governor counsel of Canada, John Edwards, Barack Obama. David Cameron, Three Italian cabinet members. President of Iran blogs as does disgraced congressman Tom Delay. The California Republican Party blogs.  So do members of El Quaida.
• Why? Because that’s where the young voters are going and will be found for years to come. These voters won’t stay young.  They will stay online and they will be voting for the next 50 years.

6. So once again:  How does PR adapt? What is the practitioner’s role moving forward? Does PR even have a role? Is this change a threat or an opportunity?

7. I'll answer that last question first.  It’s the easiest and the most ambiguous: Social media is both threat and opportunity for PR. … a threat because there is a fundamental change in the way people are influenced on what they buy, watch, read and listen to. Change is disruptive.  When there is disruption some companies rise and others fall. Rarely do they ever rise again.

Social Media is simultaneously an opportunity because PR people are generally great conversationalists and we are entering the Conversational Era. In it, we are transitioning from monologue into dialog. Through conversations you can find out what customers want simply by asking them. You can deliver more popular products just by doing what they tell you to do.

PR also has an opportunity also because advertising is more broken than PR and will take longer to fix. Companies will be turning to PR sooner for more immediate answers. It will be a wise agency who is ready with answers.

8. This Conversational Era has just now begun. PR in 5, 10 & 20 years will have a far more value than it does today—not just for your clients, but for the communities those clients wish to be part of. What's also relevant about the next 20 years is a fundamental shift in the habits of the people leaving the marketplace and those who are preschoolers and young adults today.

9.  Two cautions:

• Don’t stop doing what you’re doing. Not yet. These are transitional times. Moving from Broadcast Era into Conversational Era. The day the physical newspapers die has not arrived. And only a fool would disdain the influence of prominent coverage in say Page One of the Wall street Journal.
• The bigger your agency, the faster you need to move. You move like supertankers  at full throttle. You need time and distance to turn around. If you don't start soon, you just might wind up on the rocks.

10. As you take a look at social media consider this phenomenon: Power is moving from the large organization into communities. People who are most generous in these communities are the most influential.

11. Consider also: The online community is nt confined to any single URL. You won’t succeed by marketing to MySpace and more than you would by sending the same messages to the ruling class and shantytowns of Sao Paolo and MySpace is many times larger.

12. Here’s what’s actually happening. People with shared interests from all over the world are bopping from one place to another.  The same people are meeting up with the same people at blogs and photo sites.  They are downloading the same music and videos. In these virtual spaces, real and lasting trusted social networks are forming. Often people meet online first, then encounter each other face-to-face later.  It's like meeting old friends for the first time.

13. I call these groups who are defined by neither geography nor URL Global neighborhoods. They are smaller and more intimate than the huge online communities. They are comprised of people who share diverse passions,  on almost any subject: hummingbirds or Hummers, Global warming or urban terrorism,  Religious fundamentalism or fundamental paganism. I'm writing a book called Global Neighborhoods, which is about just their relevance to business. The challenge is to be brief.

14. Global neighborhoods work very much like the tangible ones where you live in. You get to know some of your neighbors. The more time you spend there the more familiar you become. Trust builds on neighborhood issues. You know to ask about recommend movies or where to get your car fixed. You know how to avoid commuter snarls and where it's safe to walk alone or not.

Over time, each neighborhood resident earns a personal brand.

Transition:Now, Bulldog folk don’t let you up onto the dais without specific tactical advice. That’s hard for me because I’m more concerned with where you are going than how you are going to get there. But I’ll try to give you a few tips. I blogged about this and got a few tips from people in my own Global neighborhood, which includes a good number of PR bloggers.

• Use your eyes and ears more than your mouth. Start reading the PR bloggers. I read Phil Gomes and PR measurement maven Katie Paine, who spoke earlier today. I also read Mike Manuel, David Parmet, Brian Oberkirch, Joe Thornley, Kami Huyse and Scott Baradel to name a few. They, in turn point me other bloggers and online places that are either interesting or useful to me. I rarely see these people face to face, but I consider them my friends. It starts with just reading, but overtime it evolves. You leave a comment. You start your own blog and link back. You become another node in the global neighborhood. You meet face to face and it keeps getting broader and deeper and richer.
• Learn generosity. I think this goes to the nature of many PR people. But instead of giving fame to clients, news to editors and special promotional offers, this new technology gives you the tools to give insight, information to your global neighborhood. Do not just give information that is useful to your clients. Contribute to the community interest and needs. They will give back and much of that will be valuable to your clients. More important, you will be more valuable to your clients.
• Be a node. Metcalfe’s Law proves that the power of the network is enhanced by each additional node. It sed to be the node was the computer. You are now the node. If you have news, the social media allows you to distribute it without disintermediation. In short, as newspapers and traditional media get smaller and less influential you become the direct distributor of news. You are each part of the newspaper of the future.  But remember, the most influential members of the Broadcast Era now closing were the most credible. This is even more true in the Conversational Era.
• Be an intelligent agent. Use the simple search tools that let you find what is written online on topics that matter to your clients. Join those communities, not to pitch, but to hear and see and learn.  Look for the most favorable and negative comments impacting your clients.
• Treat the brand as a community. This came from a comment on my blog by Chuck Tanowitz of http://mediametamorphosis.blogspot.com says : “Start thinking about your brand as a community, with the customers, partners, advisers, etc. as members of that community. Once you do that, the tools of PR become about building the community, not simply making announcements. You start conversations rather than shouting from mountain tops.” This seems to me to be great advice.
• “Share, learn and connect,” says Joe Thornley, of Pro PR who reinforces the Cult of Generosity. He adds “You'll get back more than you give. If you listen to what is given back, you'll learn, learn. And if you blend online exchanges with participation in real world events, you'll find you make friendships with people from all over North America (and the world) who share you passion.”

My closing thought: those of you in this room, are part of a profession filled with brilliant conversationalists, people with knowledge and passion.  You are more generous than your current image would have people believe. We are entering  ‘’The Conversational Era.’

This is your time. Join the conversation. Enjoy.

Craig's List, Newspapers & Community Service

Through church elder Ben McConnell, I was treated to this quote from the always quotable Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List:

"The more you think about business as being a community service, the more successful you become. What I've told newspapers -- when they've asked -- is that newspapers used to be in the community service business. Now they've been positioned as cash cows."

Great quote.  Unfortunately for the newspapers, the cows are drying up.

Technorati Tags: benmcconnell, craignewmark

Leaving Las Vegas

[Vegas Strip at  Night. A great place for lovers of traditional marketing.]

I'm done with the conference. I'm going to miss what promises to be a great half day of presentations that wind up with maestro Shel Holtz. It was a good conference for me, catching up with old friends and being encouraged by conversations about blogging I've had with people from some of the world's larges enterprise organizations. They have smoothed any doubts I've quietly harbored every time I recite the mantra of blogging has just begun.

Last night, I had a great small dinner with the highly intuitive Kami Huyse; David Parmet and his wonderful wife, whose name I have forgotten; Shift Communications Principal Todd Defren; April 1 prankster Josh Hallett; an effervescent Joe Thornley; and Michael Sommermeyer a local blogger who understands Vegas from the inside to the outside, yet mysteriously loves the place. The food at Maggione's exceeded expectations and the conversation even better.

On the way back to the Venetian, we took a bunch of photos of the legendary Vegas strip, a place that feels like the it resulted from a collaboration of Tony Soprano with Walt Disney. You can see my shots of both the strip and conference here, and you can see everyone else's there.

This morning, I got up early, took a few more clicks around the Venetian canals of the Nevada Desert.  I made my $20 contribution to the state of Nevada via a Poker machine that I swear dealt from the bottom of the deck.

Now all that's between me and a return to the normality of my home is packing a bag, listening to yet another cabbie with a story, a line through security and the glamor of a jet plane ride.

Next week--Chicago. Then Toronto.  After that this cruel schedule slows down for a while.

 (Note: This post was reedited and photos and links were added.)

New Comm Forum: JD Lasica on Grassroots Video

JD, the old master  of digital journalism follows up the previous panel which was filled with jetBlue talk  begins with a quip, "We know you have a choice in workshops this afternoon, so thanks for flying with us."

He begins with a Terry Hatcher  film clip, that shows that the only choice if you didn't like TV was to turn it off.  Until now.because  we now have entered an age of Internet-based grassroots video.

JD begins be asking what the audience wants and the audience is generous with what they'd like JD to address. JD shows a still of his, kid about age 7, and JD explains that his son is already becoming a digital story teller.

JD explains that in the past, Big media has had control but now that power is shifting and shifting big.  60% of all  the bits moving over the Internet is video and MIT folk predict that number is zooming to 98% in two years.  Today YouTube controls 60% of that 60%

JD talks about why he doesn't like YouTube, starting with a clip themed to the tune of the revolution has just begun. His point is that there's lots of grassroots video that isn't on YouTube and YouTube is making several controlling issues include the inability to create a Creative Commons protection.  They don't allow downloads so that Google can surround the video with ads.

He talks about people who are doing cideo casts, digital storytelling, personal newscasts all sorts of diverse grassroots stuff. One of his personal sites is "Ask a Ninja."

JD has been working with screencasts a grassroots newscast, often quite brief. JD believes a great many businesses will adopt this over text press releases.

The bulk of the conversation however centered on jetBlue, which seems to be the touchstone issue among marketing people everywhere these days. Attendees are mixed across the board with most people feeling the jetBlue, in the long run, will come out of the recent meltdown an even more respected company, if it doesn't screw up again. Giovanni Rodriquez notes that discount airline have always been a tough business model and that makes jetBlue's challenge the greater.

He then goes through a brief tour of the available free tools that makes it so easy to embed a video these days. A very entertaining and useful wrokshop, or so it seems to me.

It should be.  The issue is not whether or not JetBlue blogged.  It's the transparency shown by the CEO who essentially said "We screwed up.  We will do better."

JD then transition the animated conversations over to mashups, the mixing and matching of digital video for personal use and sharing. He showed a series of very diverse clips that were mashed up with the same music. It had a dramatic effect here as it did when he showed it to pros at last year's South by Southwest Conference, where pros told him that the free multimedia grassroots, fully legal, mashu would have cost $100,000.

New Comm Forum--Winner & Sinners

Steve Crescenzo begins by slamming a David Weinberger .  He's been talking about his successes for five minutes now without mentioning a single winner.  Now he's declared that 95% of corporate executives should not blog.  Now he's saying any idiot can blog and proves his point my mentioning his blog. He argues that CEOs are not comfortable in situations where they are not in control.  Now he says, that as a consultant he should coach CEO, who apparently need not only to be in control, but without his help they will be clueless on what to say in the natural conversation that is blogging.

David Strom, the other panelist disagrees and Steve cuts him off pointing out that McDonald's has a great internal blog after having a public debacle.  We'll have to take his word for it.  Strom points out that it's about the conversation. Strom names Jet Blue's CEO Dave Neeleman taking out full page ads when he ignored his corporate blog. Strom points out that the primary problem for JetBlue was a crew scheduling issue. John Cass talking from the audience notes that the company got some credit for an immediate response to the audience. He does note a Razorfish wiki that workers "incredibly well" for client collaboration.

A vintage moment: Moderator Jennifer McClure is posting all this real time on the big screen.  At that point, Strom predicts that the year 2007 will be the year when the wiki died.

New Comm Forum: Changing Media Panel

Dr. Bernard Luskin, a social psychologist and  media expert observes: "Media is social change.  The only time the fishes notices the water is when it is gone. The key question, he said is "what makes the change?

Tom Foremski, observes that newspapers may die, but there will always be a need for journalism.

An audience member notes that the quality of newspaper reporting just keeps getting more shallow. Tom observes that his media consumption has increased because his lifestyle is always on. Carol Thomas talks about lifestyle impact sales of media.  She used to read the NY Times on the subway.  Then she changed jobs and moved to the suburbs. She had t drive to work and poof, the Times loses yet another subscriber.

Tom Abate notes that loyalty is to the distribution system because of habit. He's the only reader  of newspapers in his family.  His kids never touch the stuff.  Tom Foremski likens newspapers to seeing a light at the end of the train tunnel yet being unable to survive the crash.

Blogher co-founder Lisa Stone says that we are at an inflection point where advertisers are finding a more targeted audience online.  Blogher helps advertisers to reach women where they are working--on blogs. Blogher is like eBay.  It exists to support a blogging community.  Margins are lower but these bloggers are creating a new form of journalism that can succeed at east slightly through ad support.

Tom Abate tries to explain what convergence is all about.  The question is whether or not all media is moving toward a single point, most notably, the handheld. Tom says the main point is we all need to be multilingual in communications and be able to communicate in  multimedia terms. He gave several on line resources including a Brigham Young Powerpoint from a 2005 Conference.

Tom Foremski wonders if we are in a period of convergence.  Everywhere they look, there is divergence.  He has a point I think. Steve King of the Institute for the Future says we are an an ironic period of simultaneous consolidation along with fragmentation.  He notes the Reuters publishes citizen journalism content every day.  This is giving them broader content while reducing costs.  He illustrated some exmples of  NBC doing the same thing.
Abate notes that the capital of media companies will not be destroyed.  He predicts big media will start looking at it as free labor.
Foremski talks about his experience as a journalist.  He gets reader feedback all the time which did not occur when he was with the Financial times.

 

New Comm Forum: Weinberger Keynotes

This is realtime, live blogging, so please forgive the typoes I am about to make and the broken links that I'll repair when you tell me about them.

David Weinberger, NPR commentator, a Cluetrain co-author and a founding father of blogging is keynoter.  He is amazingly nattily dressed with suit and necktie. He demonstrates with great humor his short attention span in his talk, "Life after Broadcast" For centures, he tells us broadcast has dominated not just marketing but our entire culture.  Now it is being put in it's appropriate place.

Social media is replacing it.  Social media is not about content.  User generated content is important but it is not THE THING.  Broadcast likes everything to have its place, which happens to be the theme of his upcoming book, Everything is Miscellaneous.  Broadcast decided where everything fit in culture, what would be our common knowledge

Marketing he says is the selective release of information.  When did marketing become a verb, something you do to people, rather than with them? We force messages on people and people hate it. We have remote controls so we can turn them off. "We've been at war with customers for 100 years. Marketing terminology are the terms of war, strategy, penetration, etc."

He describes the tools of social media, about how they let eople find what they want and respond to it.  He talks about how social media is about we are interested in--real conversations, not the articfial stilted ones of marketing or like when you laugh at your boss's bad jokes.

"Weblogs are what we care about."  These are miscellaneous things if you go to Wikipedia you find such gems as how to deep fry a Mars Bar, things that the committee who decides what goes into Encyclopedia Britannica will probably never include. Yes, people care about cats and they want to write about them.  people decide what tey write about, no one else decides.  They decide what they read.

Blogging is not journalism, but there is a relationship.  Bloggers write about what they read in newspapers and journalists use bloggers as  sources. But something has happened.  The editorial boards of middle aged white guys deciding what you will know, is coming to an end.  It is being informalized by sites like Digg where people vote on what is important.

Sites a USA Today piece that shows how many readers gave thumbs up, but they don't report on thumbs down, eliminating what readers want the most--revenge. Blogging is much more democratic.

We read blogs with much greater forgiveness.  We understand that blogs are not written perfectly.  We forgive typos.  We know the writers are human and fallible and blogs reflect that while marketing does not. We use links as little acts of kindness, we send people away because we think there's another place of value and marketing tries to capture you.

In blogging we try to make the world more complex.  The web is a new public space and how often do you come across a new space.  So now we are filling it up. The old authorities used to organize things to their best interests of selling you what they want you to buy.  Now the power is going to them.

"Person to Person communications is much bigger than marketing.  It is about making the world ours, again."

Bravo, David, Bravo.

New Comm Forum--Rocks in Venice, er... Vegas

[ Canal surrounding 2nd story shopping mall in Venetian Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas]

I'm at the surrealistic Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas for the third Society for New Communications Forum and I'm having a ball. The conference has doubled in size to over 400 since ast year.  It is attended by an international array of corporate communications folk.  From everything I could make out during brief visits to "how to" workshops led by the knowledgeable David Parmet, Shel Holtz and Giovanni Rodriguez, this is a serious crowd of attendees.  They are not here to casually kick the tires of social media.  They are here to learn pragmatic information on how they can can use the new interactive tools.  Their mission is to bring them back to enterprise environments where they are not always well receive and to educate their companies on how to better to talk with and learn from customers.

It was an easy conference for me.  I'm an add on to a panel moderated by Mike Manuel this afternoon.  But mostly, I can spend my time talking to old friends. I know most of the speakers here and I think very highly of those who I know.

Jennifer McClure who has been the driving force behind the Society for New Communications.  A year ago that was still a dubious claim.  This year it is a distinction.  Under her passionate steerage, the Society is gained recognition and respect as a source of expertise on every aspect of new media.  The organization has grown in recognition and stature and she deserves a large portion of the credit. The quality of presentations of the conference places it high on the A-List of events I plan to attend every year.

I stayed up too late last night talking with old friends. I sat next to the amazing Tom Foremski , last night at a wonderful but overpriced, speaker's dinner. We only live a few miles apart, but somehow or other we always bond at the NewComm Forum as everyone is calling it. I love his combination of passion and wisdom.

I'll be live blogging now and then from the conference today.  But I'm going to spean a chunk of my time kicking back and catching up with old pals.

Early Rise to NewComm Forum

I'm heading to Las Vegas at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning to be one of more than 400 people attending New Communications Forum. This promises to be a really superior gathering of corporate communications and marketing people with a virtual who's who on the corporate blogging consulting side.

I am on a panel, moderated by VOCE exec Mike Manuel, who has done a great job of prepping panelists, something which is not done by moderators often enough. Mostly I am there to meet up with old friends and meet new ones.

I had hoped to be done with my Global Conversations Overview before leaving, but that is not possible. I'm pretty sure I will be able to squeeze off the next significant section before going to be early for a 4:30 am wake up.

Infopresse Talk Notes

I am speaking in a few hours at an Infopresse Web 2.0 event in Montreal. Sorry for the sloppy formatting, but I am running behind. Here are my notes:

1.    The question: Are the social media a threat or an opportunity to brands and traditional marketing? Answer: a resounding yes.

•    Threat:  fundamental change in the way people are influenced on what they buy, watch, read and listen to.
Threat: Change is disruptive.
Threat:  Traditional marketing more expensive and less effective.

•    Opportunity: Social media making communications more efficient/effective than at any point in history. 
Opportunity: Dialogue beats monologue. Through blogs, you can find out what customers want just by listening.  Most passionate.
Opportunity: A whole new generation is coming of age—the Online Generation. Start now and they may be friends with your brand for 30 years.

2.    As True for Canada as Silicon Valley?  Nodes on same network. True in developing & developed world. Geography is becoming less relevant.
3.    Tipping Point.  Little things have already made the big difference and there is no going back.

4.    Stats. @ 60 million blogs.  100,000 new blogs started daily.  Over 1.3 million daily posts. 2000 a minute. Half Fortune 500 companies blog. Biz blogs not  the most interesting part.
5.    Most interesting—and valuable is what every day people are doing: Creating spontaneous, grassroots, fast-spreading conversations. These conversations increasingly impact the fate of your products, services,  destinations, gadgets, entertainment—just about everything. People are influencing each other without the benefits of integrated marketing campaigns. Without WOMMA & Viral marketing efforts.
6.    What’s an enterprise to do? What’s an ad agency or branding team to do? Simple: Join the conversation.  How? By offering useful/interesting/unselfish information. (Scoble in the camera store) Not about your own brand. Tell, don’t sell.  Become a trusted colleague.
7.    Encourage mid-level employee blogging.  Personal brand impact on company brand increasing.

8.    2 neighbors at backyard fence.  Trust  over time. Not about tech but conversation.  Goes viral organically, because people serve up engaging information and they want to share it.
9.    Blogging 1st tool of emerging arsenal of Internet-based communications tools. These are the social media.  This includes YouTube-100 million visitors a day. MySpace, photo sharing, wikis, video and audio podcasts.  Even includes Skype and new “cheap talk” Voip tools.
10.    Online community numbers misleading. Sao Paolo v. squatter village.  What’s relevant is  people self organizing along shared interests—Global Neighborhoods. Not forming under the aegis of brand. Don’t recognize institutional authority. They avoid company towns and walled gardens. The customers owns himself.
You need to play by their rules—or you don’t get to play at all.
11.     Three more key points on global neighborhoods
•    Geography is less relevant. Chat phone in Korea, Saudi Arabia and California malls. Ryan Air. Culture changing by internet.
•    Influence is generosity-based. The power is in the giving not branding, not promotional giveaways.
•    Social media is kid’s stuff. In that fact, you will find the tsunami.

12.    The Online Generation is about to replace the boomer generation in the work and marketplace and that changes a great deal.
13.      Example: NY Times habit.
14.    Online Generation. Don’t read newspapers…don’t see those award-winning ad campaigns. Authority figures.  Sports heroes. Global brands.
15.     Again.  Members of the online generation trust each other. If you want to get back in, you need to join their conversation on their terms. Be like neighbors on the backyard fence.  You can try to game this system, but no one seems to have been able to fool the people for very long.
16.    Example: Hotel photo on website, in brochure, then  on Riya or Flickr.
17.    Huge opp.  Online Generation is just starting, just now taking form. Already all sorts of companies are finding really innovative ways to extend their brands.
18.    Corp Blog cases:
•    Wells Fargo—Disaster avoidance.
•    Wells Fargo—Building young relationship. 
•    Wells Fargo—Hosting a community they don’t control. Small Business Blog
•    Hitachi—Leading by giving. "data storage industry" wiki
•     CNET—building communities by passion.
  Chowhound , Webshots , Consumating  & Urban Baby.
19.    Personal brand shapes company brand. Scoble/MSFT
20.    Social Media different from trad marketing.  Treat it separately.  Do not try to braid it into your current integrated marketing solutions.

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

The Blogging Church is on the fast track

I see where The Blogging Church, by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch is hitting it out of the park over at Amazon.  They were down as low as 30 on Friday and are just a shade over 1000, on this Saturday.

There is some sort of paternal pride between this book about why the modern church needs to blog if it wishes to maintain its community and attract more people and our book.  We wrote a case study in Naked Conversations about their Fellowship Church in Dallas amd interviewed Brian for our book.  Our editor at Wiley, Jim Minatel, himself an evangelical Christian was quick to contact Brian and Terry, suggesting they write a book for another Wiley imprint.

The Blogging Church is the result and I am personally very pleased to its being so very well received.  Way to go, Fellowship guys. Oh yeah, one other thing. If you click on our book icon to buy their book, Scoble and Israel get to split another $1.20.  Sicty Cents here.  Sixty cents there.  Sooner or later it adds up.

Scrapblog Taking beta requests

My client Scrapblog is about to go into public beta and you can request an invite here. I'll be helping them go live at We Media 06 in Miami next week.  If you are going to be there, Scrapblog is also hosting a Miami Blogger Dinner which you can find out about here.

I've seen the product and it goes well beyond what they showed at DEMO last fall. It is really a powerful tool for the Online Generation. The beta period is expected to be fairly brief, letting them see what a larger number of people think and testing whether it can scale rapidly. 

Hopefully, it will need to.

How Scrapblog picked David Parmet to do PR

Carlos just announced to my great delight that he had chosen David Parmet to be the Scrapblog PR guy. In fact, this follows the second time that I had suggested David was the right guy to Carlos.  This time, my tactic was simple. I told Carlos to go read  David's  blog. Carlos did, and he came back with a succinct comment:  "I like him," Carlos said.

Hmm.  He read some postings and felt he actually knew the guy.  How very different than if David had sent some sample press releases down in a fancy folder. How very different than if David had been required to come down with a PowerPoint deck to demonstrate "thought leadership" or "best practices" with three case studies selected from his work over the past 20 years. David was never asked to use a few mirrors and some smoke to try to make Carlos believe that both Robert Scoble and Walt Mossberg were sitting around waiting for David's next phone call.

In fact, the blog, and a previous telephone talk was enough to make Carlos feel enthusiastic about the thought of David having conversations on behalf of Scrapblog. That's what PR is now about.  The PR guy needs o be a trusted participant in conversations.  These conversations can help a client only if the person bringing that client into a community is already a trusted resource.

David is not alone.  There are lots of PR people who get this.  They tend to know and respect each other and enjoy each other's company.  They will compete against each other if they have to, but in fact they would much refer to collaborate.

This is the first time I'll actually work with David.  In writing this blog, it has slowly dawned on me that I don't really know him that well. Our relationship started when I was writing about English Cut for Naked Conversations and Hugh MacLeod told me I just had to speak to the PR guy. So I dialed him up and found myself having this wonderfully transparent conversation with someone I had never seen, whose blog I had not read until that same day and when I hung up the phone, I felt like I had gained a few paragraphs for the book and had made a new and lasting friend.

That's what blogging does.  It lets you see a real person before you actually talk to that person. Blogs facilitate relationships and in fact, the new PR guy needs to be a facilitator as much as anything else.

Meanwhile, Carlos has done a Hell of a good job in aggregating conversationalists.  In the last week he signed up David and me, not to mention our soon-to-be unveiled mystery community guy. He's got an ongoing relationship with the Citizen Agency folk.  It's getting kind of clear what sort of people Carlos wants to have on his team and I'm just tickled to be part of it.

Winning by joining communities

I just spent a day in Miami with my friend Carlos Garcia who has asked me to help his Scrapblog company go live. I helped Carlos get ready for DEMOfall, where his six-minute presentation went quite well. Most people who saw their presentation of a multimedia scrapbook was impressed.

[Carlos and lead developer Omar-Photo by Shel]

If you are among those who have seen the product, take it from me that you ain't seen nothing yet.  These guys are going live in February, a few months later than planned, but the new online Scrapblog service has come a very long way in making it easy to include music and video along with your pictures, 3D clip art and ability to personalize it. Don't look at the website pictures. Just wait for the new stuff.  Trust me, and I'll save the product pitch until there's really something to show you.

What I think may be interesting is how you launch a new company in these days when the word marketing itself is held suspect? You want to get the word out, without spending your energy on shameless self promoting chest-beating.  You don't want to fall into the contrivance of starting a blog that spends day-after-day talking about how great the product, will be and is. You know communities are formed by people not companies, unless you think people will willingly join some sort of Information Age Factory town.

Carlos is in the process of hiring somebody whose job it will be to join communities, rather than start one; who's job it will be to join conversations, some of them having nothing to directly do with Scrapblog.  The result, we expect will be that this new community enthusiast will become known and trusted in the community, and when Scrapblog has authentic news, other community neighborhoods will be involved.

There is no job description for this person. You cannot go to an HR manual and find the requirements. In fact, the only person I know so far who has had a job anything at all like this is Tara Hunt who tried it for Riya, before she co-founded Citizen Agency. The good news is that Citizen Agency is working with Scrapblog as well and it will be nice to have the role model available to our Scrapblog community developer.

[Citizen Agency-Photo by Shel]

Tara and I were part of a team that broke new ground at Riya. With Scrapblog, we hope to take what we learned in one experience and extend the impact of online community relationships still further. In Scrapblog we have a technology that we hope and believe a great number of people who enjoy sharing video, sound and photos will embrace, if we make them aware if it. After that, it's up to the community to decide if Scrapblog is as cool as we believe it to be.  It is up to the community also, to let us know how to make it better.

Likewise Carlos needs to join the conversation. He is the spiritual fountainhead of the company and the online community needs to know him better.  Like most CEO's he's extremely busy, not to mention he and wife Margarita will be having their second child at about the same time as Scrapblog goes live and public. But he has agreed to resusitate his blog and to post regularly.  I'll save my link until that happens.

What about traditional media--despite my recent post, traditional media is still alive and a great many people still read newspapers and watch TV when they are not online. So we will use a traditional PR person to handle media relations.  But we are choosing someone who understands online and blogging and is already known and trusted in the growing universe while continuing to be effective in the shrinking one.

I don't want to be cagey about the two unnamed people in this post.  But deals that are almost done and not quite done can get screwed up if names are announced prematurely.

I just wanted to talk about this, because it is personally a very interesting opportunity. It has a good deal to do with the sort of consulting I enjoy most--helping to get something started and going well enough so that I am no longer needed. In Scrapblog, I see a framework being built--sort of like the house-building scene in the movie Witness.