Global Neighbourhoods

TechCrunch Announce Purchase of FuckedCompany.com

I just thought I'd post the headline so that Arrington would think I was stupid enough to fall for such a blatant April Fool's gag. I suppose he's going to name the  new entity CrunchFuck.com.

Besides, this would be a great time to announce I'm pregnant.


Technorati Tags: techcrunch, aprilfool.

Double Scoop Scoble unSands an Apple-Google Verizon Secret Device

Boy 'tis a fine day for Citizen Journalism, for those of us who believe that's what we should call stuff like this. Scoble didn't have feet on the street, but his buttocks on a seat in an over-rated Half Moon Bay restaurant by the beach, when he spied an Apple executive walking on the beach with a device that his Geekiness did not recognize.

Well, Hell, let Robert tell you what happened...

Technorati Tags: scoble, apple, google, cingular

Jajah buys Vonage

Pat "Scoop" Phelan says he has multiple sources confirming that Jajah has purchased Vonage and will be creating a new Ireland-based company tat at the outset, will have four million users, making it, by far, the largest of the new telephony companies that I classify as "cheap talk."

I'm not so certain if the talk will remain as cheap as it has been for Jajah.  The Mountain View-based privately held acquiring company is rumored to be losing significant money even as it continues to grow. Vonage, as you probably know, just got clobbered in a $200 million patent infringement suit.  The publicly held company has been bleeding money throughout its history.

There are smart people behind this deal and I am not privy to what they are up to. At this point, in a fast-emerging disruptive industry, it is wisest to go for position over revenue.

At the same time, I'm reminded of an old Jewish joke about Abie, who owns a shoe store.  His pal Hymie comes in to visit and asks how business is. "Awful," he says, "This price war with the guy across the street is killing me. Every time I sell a pair of shoes, I lose $10."

"So," Hymie asks, " Why don't you raise your prices by $15 a pair."

Abie stares at his friend in disbelief. "What, and lose the volume?"

The new company has volume, position and momentum.  All it needs now is to determie a profitable business model.











Technorati Tags: roam4free, jajah, vonage

A taxing time...

I am going to spend most of my week end doing something I love and something I hate.

First, I'll be watching the Final Four college basketball tournament, my favorite sports event of any year that the Red Sox fail to make the World Series. You can have your Super Bowl or whatever kind of football turns you on. You can have you NBA or Stanley Cup or whatever whatever they call the Cricket and Ruby championships. Me? I just love the passion and surprise of citizen hoopsters.

Second, alas, it is the time of my annual agony. It is tax time again here in the US of A. I have property taxes, state taxes and dreaded IRS taxes. I am an awful record keeper.  All year long, I stuff things into a draw in my desk and ignore the contents. Today is the day I open it up and discover, in the contents that all this perfectly good money must go to the rogues and scoundrels who call themselves public servants.

The IRS might as well just simplify the system and save us taxpayers some time.  They could boil it down to three parts:

A  How much money did you make last year?
B. What do you have left?
C. Send "B."

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.

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

Scrapblog goes live with Blogger Preview editions

TechCrunch just wrote a marvelous article about my client, Scrapblog except for one, itsy, bitsy correction. Scrapblog has almost gone live. We are offering, as of now, a Blogger Preview Edition. For the next few days, we ask all you bloggers out there to go to the Blogger Preview site  and try out it's entirely cool online multimedia tools that let's ou use what you are doing with Flickr, YouTube and on your desktop in ways that are entirely new.

Please, go start your own Scrapblog, but be gentle. You are the first strangers to touch our baby and we are a bit nervous. Let us know what you think or blog about it, favorable or not.

Let us know if and when you think it's ready for the world, or if we need to go back to the coding room. You don't need to be gentle with the us, just the product.

Technorati Tags: scrapblog

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.

ICE Conference, grazing sheep & Cattle on the same land

Back in the early 90s, convergence conferences were the rage in California. The underlying theme was that Hollywood and Silicon Valley were going to have to work together moving forward and the two very different cultures would have to converge. The subsequent joke that emerged is, "we thought this would be like getting sheep and cattle to graze on the same pasture, but it was worse.  It was like trying to get them to mate. If a child ever comes of the marriage it will be really, really ugly."

For the most part, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have not done much converging except where Steve Jobs is involved. The original animosity has increased for the most part and the two cultures have moved even further apart with Digital Rights Management serving as the barbed wire between them

It's now 15 years since those convergence attempts, and most people would agree that, when they're not playing hockey, Canada's culture is decidedly more polite and accommodating than either Hollywood or Silicon Valley. And ICE was certainly a very civil, well-produced event in a very pleasant venue, even serving tasty food at lunch.

It never claimed to be a convergence event, but it brought together over 400 executives from mainstream media, government-protected incumbent wireless, phone and cable providers, advertising,branding,  film, mobile, broadcast and computer gaming technology, consumer technology, new media networks, government and a few others that I may have overlooked.

In fact ICE, represented one of the greatest potpourris of  traditional and new media, top down-incumbents and bottom-up challengers that I have seen assembled in one place. The ICE producers had assembled approximately 120 speakers, most of them assembled into panels of 4-6 speakers, either in a general assembly room or in two large breakout rooms.

For me, the standout presentation was the opening keynote by Robert J. Sawyer, the prolific SciFi writer and blogger who sees the laws of Moore  and Metcalfe  causing an almost vertical growth path for computing power and  social network growth. A couple of decades forward, he sees the actual computer, TV and perhaps movie screen becoming obsolete as implants let us watch our entertainments and get our information behind our eyeballs and directly into the brain.

Is this vision or hallucination? I really don't know.  My guess is that his vision is right but the timing is overly optimistic. I believe there is a vanishing point to Moore's Law and we are arriving at it. But Hell, I wasn't the keynoter and I'm not a SciFi writer although I've occasionally been accused of being one. In any case, I thought Sawyer's quick sketch of a  huge picture was the right way to start this group cogitating.

I sat on two panels,  the first was called "New World Order," and the title made me wince a bit.  My understanding of the term is that it refers to a conspiracy to create one world government and thus end wars. When George Bush,the elder, used the term it has been written this motivated a survivalist cult to blow up a hospital in Oklahoma City.

Mark Kuznicki gave a mixed and accurate review of our collective performance. I thought Brady Gilchrist of Fuel Industries showed the clearest vision for a new world order that I believe in, one in which the power moves from the top-down, government-backed incumbents into the hands of the communities they serve.

The panel had an interesting composition.  There were six of us, three of us representing the disruptors and three representing the companies that we think should be disrupted. But few sparks flew.  There was a slight bump over user-controlled TV site Joost, but I thought civility got in the way of the chasm of disagreement that sat on that panel.

Second, with six people, plus a moderator speaking, each speaker had only about eight moments to speak, forcing us to go broad and shallow, rather than narrow and deep.

I would give an equally mixed review to "Blogging for Dollars," my second panel, which was accurately reviewed by Joe Thornley. With the notable exception, of the passionate rising star Ryanne Hodson, co-author of The Secrets of Video blogging (and is also editor of  The Scoble Show), I felt the remainder of us gave rather tepid performances.

I think we went off track at the beginning, when B5Media's Mark Evans noted accurately that to be a good blogger passion is more important than dollars, and I reiterated the point. This was accurate, and one that all panelists had figured out much earlier in our social media careers.

While the panel would have preferred discussing ethical issues related to money and social media, the audience had come to discuss  monetization. I had decided the night before to give out some personal numbers on my own so that the audience understood how few people derive money directly from blogging and how many make it indirectly because they blog.

I should have noted that less than 100 people in the world make a living directly from blogging. Naked Conversations, the blog is among the 1100 most popular blogs in the world according to Technorati. But if you slice it into a business blog, it is considerably higher ranked. Make that a marketing blog and it is probably in the top 100 of the category. As a book blog, I'm certain we are in the Top 10.

Last year, Scoble and I  divided less than $2000 between us in revenue directly from the blog. It was all from  our Amazon.com affiliation, which gives us each about 60 cents, every time we sell a book through the blog.  Because the keyword is "Naked," we cannot  use Google AdSense without demeaning our brand, but I doubt that would bring in much more than another $2K.

However, the blog also served to draw attention to our book, and while we cannot declare what we made, we can say we did much better because through our blog, we got publisher to compete for rights to the book. Because of the blog, we got people all over the world to talk about the book and that proved to be more effective in generating sales than the extensive traditional marketing dollars invested when the book was launched. Because of the blog, Scoble got a cool job as a professional video blogger, and I have more than doubled my consulting fees. I also now make a fair amount of revenue from speaking fees where for the last 30 years, my total revenue in that department was zero.

My point to members of the audience should have been that blogs don't generate revenue, just like press releases, goodwill donations, great customer support do not generate revenue. Revenue is generated because a company does it. It's an indirect thing.

All in all, I thought ICE was a great attempt at achieving a difficult goal. But there were two problems. While I had a great time meeting people at the conference, I found myself graviating to people like me, people who are dedicated to social media as a disruptive force.  Two of my favorite newly acquired friends are Michael Tippett, co-founder of NowPublic and Paul Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Orato, two Vancouver-based early phase companies offering fascinating forms of what I call Citizen Journalism they might use different terms).

The point is that people tend to hang out with others in their own culture. No one from Rogers, Canada's monopolistic cable, wireless and phone company came over to hang with us.  The two cultures are as likely to meld as Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Our side of the barbed wire is dedicating to snipping down the barbed wire and setting all the people that incumbents treat like sheep and cattle free. There side is dedicated to preserving the barbed wire and using the twin tools of litigation and legislation to protect the livestock as if it they owned them (or us).

ICE also erred, I think, by providing too much of a good thing. 120 panelists in two days makes it tough to drill into controversial issues, letting what few attendee neutrals there were in the room, here the two sides to potentially volatile issues.

I think ICE next year would be wise to develop a very similar agenda. But this time, put just two speakers and a moderator on the dais to debate each of the conference issues. Let the moderator as more controversial questions.  Let the panelist from either side, take off the gloves a bit and actually try to win a point.

And I'm willing to be one of those contenders. I do my best work without gloves on.

Google working on Instant Global Translations

According to Reuters, Google is working on a whole news approach to translating from one language into another.  To me this is extremely important because the largest single barrier I see to my vision of Global Neighborhoods is language.

As it stands now, computer translations, such as you get from Babblefish and Google translate are rarely close to accurate and often a bit goofy. The new approach, called "statistical machine translations" may still be a bit awkward and will still contain a few literal errors, but comes a whole lot closer to providing computer translations that come a whole lot closer to what human translators would give you.

Right now, I have conversations quite often with people all over the world, I like to say.  But in fact, they are only people who speak English, the only language in which I have any proficiency. With the right translation technology  could speak every day with people whose primary language was Chinese or Japanese, Russian, Farsi or whatever.

So could everybody.

If you think about it, the implications are really huge. People could everwhere could speak to people everywhere else.  We would not have the filtering of third-party organizations deciding on what gets translated and how that translation will be nuanced.

Kathy Sierra Receiving Death Threats

Just yesterday, I wrote that Kathy Sierra is among my favorite bloggers.  Today, it's going rapidly around the blogosphere that Kathy has received a series of ugly, twisted, perverted and frightening death threats. Two prominent bloggers, Jeneane Sessum,, of Blogher and Christopher Locke a Cluetrain co-author appear to be directly or indirectly involved.

Scoble says he is so upset he is taking the week off.  I'm not going to do that, but I have to say I need to step back for a second. I somehow did not expect something like this to happen.  It saddens and frightens me that it did. Kathy is one of the finest voices in marketing in the blogosphere or out. And for anonymous scumbags or famous bloggers to do something this goddam ugly just makes me very, very sad.

I wish I had a profound or dramatic statement to make but I don't. I wish there was something I could do or say to make it better for Kathy, but there isn't.

I think tonight I'll just go watch TV. It's safer.

Adam & Amanda, you've been 86'd

This blog has long had a Living Room Policy, which states that I have the right to take down your comments, if you are an anonymous blogger. I also can evict you for being generally an asshole. Amanda, unless you return under your real name of Brian Connelly of Chicago, I will no longer post your comments here.  Adam Zand, you are hereby banned for being an insufferable asshole.

Community grows as community gives.

I've said before that Kathy Sierra is among my very favorite bloggers. One reason is that I learn from her quite often. Another is that she makes me laugh and third, she makes compelling points very simply. Such is the case with her recent Community ROI.

Perhaps, this hit me so well because I've spent a part of my week end navel gazing in my garden, pondering the term "marketing." I've considered myself a marketing person most of my career, but lately the term has become lamer to me.  It implies some one who takes messages and tries to implant them into the foreheads of people who probably don't want them.

But you've probably heard all that before.

The problem is that if I tell a prospect that I'm not a marketing person, I'm not a PR person, the next question is why the Hell should I contract with you and what the just what the Hell will you do for the money.

I'm starting to think of myself as a markets person. I help company find markets and develop strategies for them to have conversations in those markets. Is this community-building as Kathy describes it?  I'm not sure, but in any case, she has the niftiest graphics this side of Gaping Void.


Technorati Tags: kathysierra, gapingvoid

Ban live blogging at Social Media Conferences? Be Serious.

Back a few weeks ago I gave Steve Crescenzo an unfavorable review for his role on a New Communications Forum panel called, "Winners and Sinners." A few seats away from me, Chip Griffin was also live blogging the event and he thought Steve's presentation was pretty good. In a follow up post, Steve himself characterized his panel as a "train wreck," but for some reason seemed to think that my live blogging was more to blame than his poor presenting. That's my live blogging--not Chip's

So it goes.  That's live blogging for you. It has as many viewpoints as the impassioned people who stood on soapboxes in Boston Commons when I was a kid. I've had my share of bad reviews and some have hurt a bit.  More times than that, I've learned from bad reviews and have altered course in future presentations because of them.

It turns out that Steve and I have mutual friends who have, in the back channel said that the two of us would probably get along if we met at some other time in some other venue. Perhaps.  I've had altercations on more serious matters than this and have wound up good friends with people who I first met through a blogcentric argument.

But that is not the way this one has gone.  Shel Holtz reviewed this dust up coming out also disagreeing with Steve. At that point I thought this matter had run its natural course. But since then, the thing has turned out to have more legs than a centipede.  In the past three days, there have been 17 comments added to Shel's post, one of them from none other than Mark Ragan, founder and CEO of Ragan Communications and co-producer of the New Communications Frum where the bit first hit the fan.

It turns out that Steve, along with Shel Holtz, is a regular speaker at Ragan events and if nothing else, Mark displays great loyalty to his own. He also asserts that Steve is more credible than I am because Steve is more popular. If the arena happens to be blogging, I think Technorati may be a more impartial judge of that, but in retrospect, what has popularity to do with it.

But it was Mark's other comment that as caused the stir and indeed taken the issue beyond and Steve v. [this] Shel. Mark declared in a comment on Steve's post that he was considering banning live blogging from Ragan events.

Ban live blogging from the pre-eminent conference on communications?  There is at once something quite funny about the thought, but simultaneously Orwellian.

It happens I am a senior fellow of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) founder of the event and Ragan's co-producer. In that role, I have to say Ragan Communications did a great job in upgrading the selected venue and doubling the attendance. I have spoken two years running at the Forum, and I  have some trepidation that Mark will see to it, that there won't be a third time.  I can live with that and I'm certain so can the event.

But ban live blogging from the pre-eminent conference of New Communications? I certainly hope the thought entered in the heat of the moment and the moment will pass.

It would be a terrible mistake to make because I gave a poor review. What would Chip do next year?






Technorati Tags: shelholtz, markragan, stevecresenzo, chipgriffin, newcommunicationsforum

Infoworld to Cease Publishing

Noted Co-Author Robert Scoble is reporting that Infoworld, the venerable tech trade publication has announced it will cease to publish. This weekly San Francisco-based IDG publication has been around as long as I can remember and for many years, was a must-read for the entire IT industry every Monday morning.

This was during an era when "every Monday morning" was fast enough.  In recent years the publication tried to establish an online presence, including blogs, but it never quite caught on. The death of this publication does not surprise me, but it also does not make me particularly happy.

Hugh McLeod and the Humanification of Business

Whenever Gaping Void's Hugh McLeod takes a break from being outrageous and funny, he reveals he is also brilliant. Such is the case in his recent posted talking point notes for his presentation to Edelman's London Office.He also may have invented an entirely new and highly useful description of what blogging does for business: "humanification."


Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, hughmcleod, humanification

Jangl bringing phone calls into blogs

My client Mike Cerda of Jangl has announced on his blog and at the recent VON conference a widget that you can install on your blog to let people call you on a "disposable number" so that you don't have to publish your real phone number and you can deactivate the number for any reason and at any time.

It's being released as beta right now.  Jangl's Tim Johnson told me, "keep in mind that this is a soft launch and we're doing it that way for a
week or two specifically to get feedback and -- if we can -- incorporate it
ASAP." There's more details on his blog.

If you are the early adopter type, and like telling companies how they can do their business better, just go here to download it



 


Technorati Tags: jangl, timjohnson, mikecerda

Canada's Revenge

I'm back from yet another great visit to Toronto, where I seem to be more popular as a blogger and visitor, than here in the San Francisco bay Area where I live. Perhaps they know me better here.

Anyway, on the flight up I sat next a Canadian who seems to fly the San Francisco-Tronto axis as much as I do and we spent some time by talking about the relationship of our two countries and jousted a bit in a friendly sort of way.

At one point we agreed that Canadians were generally more polite than Americans. Then I added, "except when they play us in hockey."

My flying buddy smiled. "Where else in the world, can people beat the crap out of Americans and get away with it," he asked me.

He had a point. We didn't talk for a while.  Then I asked him about the weather in Toronto.

KD Paine Reviews 3 Blogging Books

Katie Paine, the PR Measurement queen favorably reviews three blogging books including Naked Conversations. I've made it a policy not to point to reviews of our book because after a while it feels self-serving.

But Katie has done a superior job of comparing the three books, how they go together, and if you only have time and inclination to read one, then Katie's post
may help you select the book that is most right for you.




Technorati Tags: kdpaine, prmeasurement, nakedconversations, thecorporatebloggingbook, dispatchedfromblogistan

Stiffs on a Plane

Remembering my ordeal with British Airways (BA) and lost luggage, Adrian Moss  pointed me to this gem about the venerable airways upgrading a passenger to First Class after she died. I wonder if it was the food. When I dealt with BA, they were extremely good at saying, "I can't tell you how terribly sorry we are..." Perhaps that was rehearsal for occasions such as this.

Seriously, with millions and millions of people in transit at all times all over the world, some of them will die.  I don't know what else the airline can do in such cases. I've sat next to worse company on a couple of recent flights.

Technorati Tags: adrianmoss

Dear Amanda: It's over between us

Dear Amanda,

Writing to you is one way like writing to Santa Claus. Neither of you actually exists. But there, the similarities diverge. We think of Santa as a jovial elder, filled with goodwill and Amanda, that is just not you. If I write to Santa, I might expect to get gifts back.  Amanda, when I write to you I fear that I may receive hostility and venom in return.

Don't get me wrong Amanda.  You have been a good show. You are a talented writer and filled with the passion that the best bloggers seem to contain. The PR industry most certainly has its self-inflated members and poking holes in their bubbles can be fun to watch on occasion. In the beginning, Amanda, you were a surprise, even a shock, but not so much anymore.

Amanda, I don't know how to say this, but your act is getting stale, predictable... old. You no longer feel like a satirist, but more like a biting, angry hag, more like a divorcee angry about her settlement, than an observer of the foibles of an industry.

 

I must admit, I've always had my ambivalence about you. I have a love for blogging and  feel pride for the PR industry of which I was a member for 25 years. You are both a blogger and purport to be part of the PR industry.  You seem to hate both as much as I respect both. I am an advocate of honesty and humanity in business practice and  and Amanda, you practice deception and are not a human at all, but rather a fictitious character, and a pretty bitchy one at that.

Who are you, really Amanda? Is this diatribe of vitriol some form of self purge or self loathing? How can you call others out for not being transparent, when you are so transparent as to not really be there? How can you call for more ethical practices in PR when in your very first post, you boasted about sleeping with clients?

You stand on a virtual soapbox calling for transparency.  In fact, you are so transparent that you are but a shadow. You are not there. You are only a pigment of someone's imagination. You are a fantasy blogger, probably giving a strong voice to an essentially meek person.

Amanda, let's talk about truth for a minute, shall we? A few months back, your “webmaster” posted a phony AP wire release that claimed you were seriously injured in a car accident. This turned out to be a fictitious stunt.  The AP  Release was a phoney.  Worse, a photo of a crashed out  Porsche was embedded in the false release.  This was not your car, but rather one in which people had actually been killed.

Amanda, why did you cheapen yorself with such a stunt? this was not your usual nastiness in the name of satire.  This was something lower and I wondered why you had done this.  My guess was that you thought we bloggers would pick it up a relay it, then you would jump in and point out what fools we were, but that is not what happened. Bloggers went to work and showed the factual errors.  Within hours, the deception was revealed.  You whined a couple of times that the accident really happened then, miraculously cured, you just went back to doing whatever it is you think you are doing.

I also wonder about your obsession with the Edelman agency.  They certainly have been worth of criticism in recent times.  But so have just about all the other major agencies, or for that matter most large organizations. I have come to suspect that it's something personal between you and them, something that makes them your Moby Dick, a great  pale whale into which you obsessively wish to shove your harpoon.

I had to wonder about your response to my recent post on Edelman executive Phil Gomes, whom you recently addressed in what I thought was slanderous fashion. Now, I don’t know Phil very well. In fact, I've only met him briefly a couple of times before. The post I made was hardly lauditory, and in fact had a couple of gaffes that Phil saw fit to correct. But I thought he made a good point on the issue of captive and open online communities. I thoughtthat might interest some of my readers, so I posted a few paragraphs.

Thetwist was that I almost didn't write it, because the thought crossed my mind: “Shit, Amanda's going to come after me, if I say something neutral or favorable about Phil." But, Hell, we all have trolls, people who follow prominent bloggers around and say bad things about them wherever and whenever mentioned, and Amanda, you have become Phil's troll.

By the time my plane had landed in California, your Comment had been posted. You implied I had some secret agenda and that I lacked transparency. I do not, but the same back at you, Amanda. Why are you on an Edelman vendetta?  Did something happen between you and them?  C'mon you can tell us bloggers. And while we are at it, I don't seriously consider attacks on my transparency from people who hide anonymously behind fictional character masks.

Amanda, I suspect that you have multiple personalities because you are written by multiple people.  At one time detecting who you are interested me.  It no longer does. You are becoming predictable, too-often angry, too rarely funny. What you have to say is no longer fresh.

Amanda, I was 19 years between wives. I had many stormy relationships during those days. Like you, some of my partners were provocative as Hell, but over time, one of us would come to realize the relationship had died of atrophy.  That is what is happening for you and the blogosphere Amanda.  If we know what it is you have to say, then it is not all that interesting and fewer of us will read or talk about you.

Frankly, Amanda, I’m bored with our relationship. I refer the virtual company of real people. If you want to come back as whoever you are, you may find it liberating.  But if you continue down the well worn path you are on, you may find yourself hollering when no one is listening.

Yours truly,

Shel

End of the road--almost

I got home from Chicago at about 10 pm last night.  I head out for a few days at ICE 07Third Tuesday will be meeting on Wednesday Toronto on Tuesday. To accommodate my schedule, Joe Thornley and the good folk behind  instead.

After this, my travels will slow way down for the rest of the year

Since New Year's I have only been home for a solid week once. I have been speaking about once weekly and have spread myself thinner than a jar of Yahoo Peanut Butter.  It's time to stay home get reacquainted with wife, dog, cat and mother in law.

For the remainder of this year, I plan to speak no more than once monthly. It's great to be in demand and I've discovered I'm more of a ham than I thought I was, but I can't be really good at it if I do it all the time, and I can't give my clients the attention they deserve if I'm dragging butt from all the travel.

Also, there's this book I've been meaning to write.  I may have mentioned it here a couple of times. It is now the time for me to stop talking about writing a book and start actually writing it.

Phil Gomes at PR University

Phil Gomes the first PR Blogger, an Edelman VP is on the podium here at the Bulldog PR University in Chicago. Research shows that people trust people like themselves. He refers to Trust Barometer has for three years showed people trust peers more than doctors or academics. Entertainers and atheletes were dead last.

He divides social networking into two camps. One camp is a captive area. Sites that try to keep you.  He names MySpace, Friendster and Bebo as examples. More compelling he says are the open social network spaces which denote relationships that form online.

He's talking about B to B PR and pointing out that a blogger can get precisely to the audiences that matter to a company, without touching anyone else. Moving to consumer, he notes that an average MySpace visitor spends an astounding 172 minutes per visit. Facebook is consider the safest of these closed consumer communities and Bebo dominates Europe. Over in South Korea, CyWorld as a community of 19 million users. Gather, one I don't persoanlly know is described as MySpace for grown ups.  I think it will be interesting to see if MySpace will let users just leave when they reach a certain age.

Word of mouth is not new, it's been around since the beginning f time, an observation, I'll repeat when I speak later today. He gives a case study of how Edelman used MySpace via a "Forbidden, a popular, somewhat racy woman to promote their Game Killer client.  It got word of mouth going and it was transparent in the effort.

He says that as an agency the idea is to find the right voice inside a captive online community.  He found four message boards to promote Nissan G35 Coupe, prior t the auto show.  The idea was to give something of real value as opposed to just do a promo inside the communities. They went to four message boards.  The message board owners treated the video showing the new car was theirs.  They then evangelized it into the blogosphere.

He advises PR pros to not to polish videos when they post and to not treat bloggers like lower tier media.

Nice job, Phil.

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.

Austin Hill Assembling Calgary Blogger Dinner

My friend and newest client Austin Hill is going to be in Calgary Thursday night and is putting together a blogger dinner.  I'd love to go, but I'll be in Chicago. In any case, if you are in te Calgary area, the details can be found here.

Advice to PR Practitioners

I'm the after-lunch keynoter Friday at the Bulldog Reporter PR University in Chicago. I'm speaking, of course, about blogs and social media.

But I want to give some fresh advice to PR folk, both on a tactical and on a strategic level. Do you have any advice I should convey? If I use it, I'll credit you.

Thos. Hawke on Yahoo Image Search's Fading Popularity

Uber clicker Thomas Hawk talks about why Yahoo, who owns the wildly popular Flickr is losing popularity when you would think it is gaining. Why does this matter? According to Thomas, this is all about social search and social search matters a good deal.


Technorati Tags: thomashawk

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

Viacom Suing Google & YouTube for $1 B

It had to happen.

Viacom is suing Google for about $1 billion for unauthorized uses of its film properties on YouTube where the parent company has profited from advertising.

Back when Google announced it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion last October, it made all sorts of noises like it anticipated this time would come and they were prepared for it.

This will be a law suit, if you ask me,  that pits the way the law is, which would favor Viacom against the way the law should be, which favors Google.  This is a lawsuit that is destined to go to the Supreme Court.

Do you have the right to remix and share your digital properties with others, via YouTube is the first big question.  Does Google have the right to profit from it through advertising is the second.

The former question, in similar, form was presented to the Supreme Court back in the Napster days where the concept of sharing took a healthy bashing. Both the courts and the arguments will be changed this time.

The decision will impact the rights of intellectual and physical property and of free speech. It will be a case the impacts us all in ways large and small.


Technorati Tags: youtube, google, viacom

Blogging: Short v. Long

First, off thank for all the astoundingly valuable comments, once I shouted and pouted a bit. I am taking a couple of weeks to think through what I've heard and will do a version 5 of the Overview at that time.

But what has been interesting to me is that several people complained that the five sections of the overview was too much to read.  "People are too busy now, to read all those words, " I was told. "It may have been fine the first time around, but these days you need to keep it shorter.

This is interesting.  The five parts I posted came out to 3750 words.  The book will be about 80,000 words.  If I follow the pattern of posting interview notes and updates on all sorts of things, as Scoble and I did for Naked Conversations, it means that I will post about 250,000 words on Global Neighborhoods.  Some chapters will contain 10,000 words or more.

This was all pretty popular when we did it back in 2005.  But perhaps, as one person commented, "The Novelty has worn off."

Maybe. David Weinberger used his blog to some degree on his last book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined." He didn't to that this time for "All Things Miscellaneous." Taking the blog out of it makes it easier and faster to write a book. Your mistakes get caught by an editor, rather than the general public.

There's just one catch.  The blogosphere helped Naked Conversations to write a better book.  We could not have done it that well without the collaboration of hundreds of bloggers. This weekend I received the quantity and quality of comments that have already significantly improved Global Neighbourhoods.

This may cost me some points in Technorati ranking.  My goal however is to write a book much more than it is to bask in the glory of Technorati measurement. In the Big Media Era of paper publishing, now coming to a close, tabloids usually outsold more esteemed publications. I won't call me esteemed, but I think many of you visitors are.

I think some of you will stay with me. I value you and I hope I provide some useful and interesting material, although I will have little choice but to go long on this book project. For those of you who want it, I will offer either a downloadable version or I'll email a Word version to whoever requests it.

It will be interesting to see how it works now that the novelty has gone.

Blog Reviewers: Where are you guys?

Last week, I posted the first half of my new Global Neighborhoods overview.  I broke it into five parts, because last time around, folk told me it was too long to read as a blog post. This time, I received even fewer comments than I did on the previous free overviews.

Here are the links to Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. Please go there and take a quick read.  Then either post about it, leave a comment or email me.  Help me write a better book.

I cannot understand why almost no one has commented.  If you think the book concept and how I'm handling it needs great improvement, let me know.  If you think that it sounds like a candidate for the Nobel Literature Prize let me know as well. That's what collaboration is supposed to be about.

The deal is this: I work my ass of to write this book and you folks tell me how I can improve it.  You tell me when I ring true and when I don't. You tell me when my facts are a bit off. You give me leads and tell me what parts are boring.

Before I continue along the track I'm on I need to know if this is the right track. I'm kicking back on this topic for a while. I'll be sitting here alone in the dark waiting to hear from you.

The Economist invites Blogger Ideas

When Tom Shelley of the Economist invited me for drinks in London last June, I got really excited.  I thought he was a reporter and I was about to be interviewed. The Economist is the last paper magazine I stopped reading. I found it amazing in its depth and accuracy.  I also found it disturbing that they did not give reporters bylines, making it the publication of the corporate "we voice," a voice whose time I think should pass and is likely to.

It turned out that Tom was not a reporter, after all, but worked on the advertising side. He was also the staid publication's blog champion. I immediately liked him and quickly got past the disappointment that I was not about to be interviewed. Tom wanted ideas on how to get blogging going at the Economist and how they could benefit the Economist. I told him I thought it would be a steep uphill climb at that staid organization, whose look and feel had not much changed during the 35 years I followed it.

Every few months Tom pinged me.  I would reply with quick notes of encouragement and gave little thought to the matter at all. Tom was trudging, but the uphill trek was long and steep.

Now, low and behold,in the middle of the New Communcations Forum, a conference about how new media is changing traditional organizations I received a note from Tom telling me that there is a shot the Economist will be among them. If he has not yet reached the summit, he has at least made it to base camp, with authorization to start a skunkworks to investigate how to use blogging and the social media to improve and modernize the Economist.

He was ideas, not just from me, but from you as well. It's called, Project Red Stripe, I assume in reference to the strip on a financial document a compan drafts before it goes public. To understand what they are up to go to Tom's Blog. That will point you first to an official Economist page followed by a place where you will be allowed to fill out a form with suggestions on how the Economist can harness the power of us citizen journalists.

Tom, my first suggestion is that you change the way the Economist asks the questions.  we bloggers are not the fill-out-the-forms and submit-to-a-gatekeeper types. But if you change the venue into one that is more interactive and conversational, one that is  more egalitarian, I think you will find an enormous opportunity to have a great number of conversations, a few of which will be most valuable to the Economist.

In Tom's email to me he noted, "the Economist has been called the local paper for the global village." That comment leads me to my first and strongest suggestion.  As a blogger, I'm going to post it here and not on any steenking form.

(1) Braid blogging and social media into the Economist's existing fabric to actually be the local [online] paper for the global village. This is something I've been talking about for quite sometime. News organizations have several assets we don't have. You are a news gathering organization noted for impeccable accuracy and relevance. You  are masters of refined, quality writing.  You have significant financial resources  You have advertising revenue. people pay subscription fees to read you.

Bloggers have none of that.  I have little doubt that in the space of this blog I have one or more grammatical errors.  I hold a master's degree in unfortunate typos. This blog has not produced a single penny in direct revenue to anyone but Typepad, my authoring host.  Like traditional  reporters, I am available to serve as your stringer to cover what I see and to gather information from what I know.

So are my 60 million associates.

But the real power of what I offer is not just on my availability to you, but the fact that I am a node on a massive, relentlessly expanding network that is more than 60 million strong.  We are the feet on the street of your global village.  We walk around with cameras and microphones. Collectively, we know a good percentage of the people who occupy the developing world.

(2) Share ad revenue. A fact savored by every Big Media mogul is that writers are cheap help. We have too much passion for what we do. We negotiate deals badly. We value the prestige and distribution of your branded publications and we want in.

But if you want us to serve as your stringers, there is a great revenue share.  Online technology allows you to use the Internet's infinite space to become a conduit for low cost ads.  More important, the technology lets you sort by geography of topic.  We bloggers can make the Economist richer, which I'm certain appeals to your uppermost management. Just cut us in on the deal. If you use me to cover an event here in Silicon Valley, sell ads that are likely to click through from my page. Give me a cut.  Let's start negotiating at a 50-50 split.  Give me half the revenue for my small contribution. Give me no salary, not even gas money.  Do it for my 60 million associates and you will end up doing very well and so will we.  Trust me.

(3) Adjust for speed. The Economist is a venerable organization.  It's brand is connected to accuracy and eloquence and  it would be damaged if it lost those qualities.  It is also still tied to an antiquated publication and distribution system that involves takin perfectly good trees, thin slicing them, smearing them with dead berries, binding them, transporting them via fossil burning machines.  This is expensive, environmentally damaging but most it is dreadfully slow. The process talks a full week.

With all its shortcomings, the blogosphere is terribly fast. It is also always on.  We are there when news breaks. We don't know when the news will break, but we take pictures of a tsunami as it hits the beaches of Phuket, when policemen use excessive force, when a terrorist detonates death in a London tube.  We are there and we are very fast in distributing the news.

A challenge you face is how to integrate the speed of social media with the filters of the Economist.  There are ways.

(4) Hire someone like me, someone who has been a part of the social media explosion, someone who sees the impact of what is happening and the future of where it is heading. I would love to work with you.  if you find me geographically unacceptable, there are some really great UK bloggers who can also make you smart fast.  If Red Stripe is a six-month skunkworks project, you are going to need to harness the wisdom of experience as well as the wisdom of the crowd that you are going after with your request for input.

(5) Move it all to a blog. Make this entire project transparent and online. Ditch the lame forms and turn this into a conversation.  Let visitors argue with each other over the best ideas. join conversations on other blogs.  Ask bloggers, in their own neighborhoods, what you should do.

Good luck, Tom.  You've gotten further up the hill then I thought you would get.  You just might make it to the top after all.

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.

We all lose it, sooner or later

We all make jokes about virginity. Yet, if you think about it, it is a sacred moment in most people's lives, one which they will be unlikely to forget in their lifetimes.

Kate Monroe, a British woman has written a book about the loss of virginity.  She has gone all over England asking people to share their experiences and dutifully recorded them into what I think will make a most interesting contribution to understanding the human experience.

The book, called The Virginity Project has not yet found a publisher, and that is a pain I can feel. But I'm sure she will.

Now, Kate has started a book blog and it's good read on a topic that I think will interest most people. Go give it a look and wish her luck on both the book and the blog.


Technorati Tags: virginityproject, katemonroe

Toronto's 3rd Tuesday moves to a Wednesday so I can attend

The ubiquitous PR Pro Joe Thornley has posted that the next Third Tuesday Toronto Bloggers meetup will be Wednesday, March 21 to accommodate myself and other speakers at the ICE07 Conference including Brian Oberkirch . Go in to Joe's site and join the more than 50 folk who have already signed up.

I say Joe is ubiquitous because he seems to be everywhere.  I just saw him at the Montreal Blogger's Dinner and he'll be here at the New Communications Forum tomorrow to attend another blogger dinner. New Toronto.  The guy seems to be everywhere, but come to think of it, so I am I.

I keep wondering why I get invited to speak more often in Canada than in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I don't follow hockey, and I left New England where I was raised because I don't much care for snow and cold. Maybe, it's that there are so many fewer social media speakers up there. 

I'm not sure.  What i do know is that I keep meeting a whole lot of great people up there, many of whom have some fine blogs and a few of whom are starting to become old friends.




Technorati Tags: torontobloggers, ICE07, Newcommforum. joethornley

New Comm Forum--a Marshall McLuhan Forum

I'm at The New Comm Forum in Las Vegas, listening to David Parmet conduct an excellent workshop on the basics of blogging to a packed room of corporate communications folk.

At the break, I had one of those moments that authors dream about. It happened on the break a as I toasted a blog.  Two attendees were talking behind me.  One said to the other, "Right now, I'm reading naked Conversations..." I could contain myself no longer.  I whirled around and said, "I can get the author to sign it for you." It turned out she was Georgette Pereira and she's a communications manager for Dow. She told me about her difficulties walking around her conservative work environment holding a book with that title.

If you've ever seen the classic movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen gets into an argument about Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of an earlier age. As the argument heats up, McLuhan appears, and introduces himself taking Woody's side.

This would have been my Marshall McLuhan moment had I only waited a couple more minutes. In my excitement, I never waited to ask what Georgette thought of naked Conversations.

By the way, David just told the crowd that the more links we give him, the more popular he gets.  So David, have another.  Here's one more.

GN Overview Part 5: The Marketer's Delimna

Part 5. The Marketer’s Dilemma

People are a mixture sameness and change. Human nature for the most part has remained the same mixture of kindness and savagery since we were cave dwellers.  What keeps changing  are our tools.  For the past six or seven decades the tools of conversation were disrupted by the tools of broadcasting. As we evolve from generation to generation those tools have, among other things, allowed us to communicate and travel more easily with more people in more places.

But for a period of several decades, something went awry in the marketplace. As the benchmark Cluetrain Manifesto so eloquently pointed out, markets are conversations. But for about 60 years, the communications tools made marketing communications, a one directional.  Traditional marketing’s arsenal of advertising, promoting, researching and targeting customers worked well for a great many years. From the enterprise perspective, this has worked well for a long time, but all that seems to be coming to a rapid halt.

As almost any branding, advertising, marketing or PR professional will tell you, traditional broadcast marketing  programs have become excessively expensive almost at the same rate as they have become less effective. Part of the problem is that the messengers are dying. Newspapers and traditional broadcast media are atrophying. The head of the New York Times online division has predicted that the paper edition of the venerable publication will cease to exist in five years. In the US, TV network news has one third the viewers as it did 30 years ago and the average viewer’s age is 60.

That is the state of traditional marketing as that industry has practiced it.  Few would argue that it is broken, many would say irreparably. All this has occurred simultaneous to the explosion of blogging blogging, wikis, digital audio and video programs. Just as the communications industry has tried to get its arms around those innovations comes the remarkable explosion of new online social media tools that all everyday people to create, inform, record and store whatever they want without so much as a marketing jingle or focus group to study their behavior.

When a serious business strategist examines sites like MySpace, it is a scary proposition. Is this really where a company will have to go to build awareness, sales and loyalty with the next generation? Should a communications officer really advise a CEO to don a virtual costume and go barter for an intangible currency on Second Life?

With a few exceptions, these could be career shortening tactics.

The problem is that’s where the customers are.  That’s where conversations that will shape the future of your company are.  These tools are shaping the culture of an entire generation.  Even the politicians in most western democracies are flocking to Online Communities because that’s where the voters are and will be.

This is the marketer’s dilemma.  They are at a crossroads.  One route is safe and familiar, but it may lead to Jurassic park where the other fossils who could not adapt to change reside. The other choice is to start to understand the strange and mysterious world of Onliners, to use your ears and eyes to see how it works to join other people’s conversations before even trying to start your own about your company, goods and services.

Joining Onliners where they spend their time creates a classic good news/bad news situation. The good news is that by using the efficient and powerful new tools you will save your company a bundle.  You can use the money to improve products and support and still have some left over to increase investor returns.

The bad news is that you are going to have to do things differently, very, very differently and in the traditional enterprise change comes slowly and painfully. Even worse, while an established company contemplates change, a bunch of Onliners can start a company free of legacy baggage and built to exist mostly online where they can compete against you with amazing agility.

Global Neighborhoods does not advise companies to abandon the programs they have been using.  But it urges them to understand that the end to a great  many of them is coming and coming sooner than they may think. While harvesting those programs, the book urges companies to begin to understand the massive shift in direction coming over the next few years.
A few companies companies have been wise to start in this direction. None of them are considered radical disruptors to the status quo. A few examples:

•     Hitachi Data Systems who started a wiki, not about themselves, but addressing the issues of data storage.  Not only are customers and prospects invited to join in, but so are competitors. Companies can say what they want, but inside the wiki, the customer is the decision maker.  How does Hitachi win?  It started the wiki, thus creating an online water cooler for anyone who cares about data storage. Every sale that somehow connects to the wiki will not go to Hitachi, but, as first mover, it has earned the respect and is generally perceived as the topical thought leader.

•    Wells Fargo Bank, wishing to show it cares about home owners and property, has started a blog on disaster preparedness. When a disaster—a flood, fire or other act of natural violence occurs, Wells Fargo becomes the news center for information updates and advice on resources for victims. The goal is to have the bank’s brand perceived as the most caring in the category.  To achieve it, they need to write about matters far removed from how wonderful the local branch serves small businesses.

With an eye toward building life long relationships with young people, the bank also started a student loan and debt management advisory blog that educates rather than sells.

•    CNET, born online, CNET is best known for news and product reviews. But in the last few years, it has lost some steam, not to mention ad revenues to rival online media companies. A few years back, it started a communities division whose look and feel is very different from the remainder of the company. CNET communities attempts to amplify the voice of people who do not already have powerful voices online through blogs or other means. For example, if you dine at a restauraunt you love or hate, you could write a letter to your local newspaper editor.  You could review it on a personal blog or you could post as a member of Chowhound, one of CNET’s four, youthful communities. As such the people most passionate about dining where you live would find your comments and thus CNET amplifies your influence. In short, explained Martin Green, general manager, “we amplify the voices of people who feel like they are hollering in a hurricane.” All four communities receive heavy advertising support and are experiencing growth.

But, the book points out, all this has really just begun. Other companies and individuals with formidable track records are moving to adapt the creative and collaborative tools of social media to the enterprise.

Cisco, the leader in infrastructure for the last internet website generation, has moved decisively toward helping corporations modernize into the social media era. They  acquired Five Across, a social media platform as well as Tribe.Net, a once-popular social networking site.

Also of significance, is Ning, a company co-founded by Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s father of the web interface promises its online tools will let any person r company to build their own online social network. Who does what with it remains to be seen.

Hey Barack! That was slightly slick

It was only a tad bit deceptive, but deceptive all the same. About a half hour ago, I received some email from someone named Barack Obama.  Now, while I don't personally know anyone by that name, I have heard of a Barack Obama.  I've read two books by him and think highly of the guy.

So I opened the email. It turns out that it wasn't from Barack at all, but from a committee trying to raise funds to help the guy get a new job. It even bore a scanned replica of his actual signature.

Now political committees do this sort of thing.  Thy do a lot worse. But the reason I happen to like this Obama guy so much is because he seems to set a new standard for transparency.  He has built a personal brand that makes me expect more of him than of other candidates.

So I sent back an email politely saying how I felt. Sure enough, within seconds some robot server sent me back a quick note explaining that the campaign is overwhelmed by 20,000 emails a week and they wish they could reply more directly. This too was signed by Obama.

Now, it's early on in this campaign. Several candidates are looking better than average to me. But one of the places where I am going to watch as closely as I can, is in the area of how funds are raised and from whom they have been raised.

This is far from enough to stop me from voting for Obama. I am far from ready to declare my support so I am certainly not ready to send a donation. Ths emailing put me a small step further away from that point.

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.

Global Neighbourhoods Overview Part 4

This is a brief portion of the Overview, but it will be among the longest portions of the first half of the book, which tries to cover what is happening. keeps those cards and letters coming in. If you prefer, email your comments to me as several people have.

4. A Social Media tour

Social Media stats are both dynamic and astounding. Five times more people visit YouTube every day than reside in the world’s largest cities. MySpace is on track to have 200 million registered users by the end of 2007, making it more populous than all but five of Earth’s countries. Facebook stores over one billion photos for 30 million users, more photos than were processed by Kodak in the

US

between 1990 and 1999. The number of minutes spent messaging on cell phones in any given week might exceed the number of minutes there are in a century.

And this is all in it’s initial phases. Residents of more than 150 countries participate in social media. There are localized and globalize social media sites. An Estonian social network company has over 95 percent of the countries people between the ages of 14 and 25.

Global Neighborhoods will takes the business reader on a tour of these sites, large and small, global and local to show what’s happening and why it matters so much.

We talk to executives and founders. We also interview kids about what they do online and how much of their lives it has become.

Veerle's Brit Air Horror Story

Veerle is a beautiful, world class Belgian designer. Your going to love the work she did for Scrapblog when it goes live later this month. She joins a recent parade of people relating first-person airline horror stories lately, this one with British Air.

I seem to recall having one myself and British Air. It was sort of an On The Road story involving me and my luggage constantly trying to reunite while BA played the evil genius who kept putting me and my suit case in different countries. They had a parade of employee characters all deliver the same line: "I can't tell you how dreadfull sorry I am about all this. They also featured a lost luggage hotline that told you after a 20 minute wait that BA was too busy so I should hang up and go to the window and plunge to my death.

Airlines are very much like the Internet. They ae networks.  We count on them.  When the networks break and there is no one there to help us, it really hurts. When we are paying customer, it really pisses us off.  We recover from the messed up flight and lost luggage.  But when we don't get proper support, we remember it for a long time and we tell others about it.

Global Neighbourhoods Overview v4 Part 3

If you just got here, this is Part 3 of God only knows how many parts to the new overview for Global Neighborhoods.Please read the preceding two parts before you get here. I am looking for feedback. I want you to help me write a better book.

3. Culture Blending & World Peace

There’s another way that Onliners are likely to change the world. They are culture blenders. They meet somewhere online and discuss a local pop group in East London, or about Global warming. They sit in their own rooms or cafes or occasionally huts and they bring themselves transparently into the conversation. Because it is on the Internet it is available for others to see and will remain available for a very long time.

This process grinds slowly and steadily at certain historic barriers between cultures. People discover online how much alike they are when they meet to discuss a topic online. Clothing or race or sex may have prevented the conversation from even starting in the real world.  Some cultural barriers remain formidable, language for example.  Yet Onliners manage to side step them at east a little bit through universal languages of music and pictures.
The world of the Onliner is often described as small and getting smaller.  It is simultaneously getting bigger.

A case in point is Annie, a Scottish honors student whose parents rarely travel outside Scotland.  She was accepted into an accelerated languages program when she was 16. As her term project, she created a video podcast version of “The Dating Game,” using classmates as contestants.  Except for one little hitch.  The entire program was conducted in Japanese and was digitally produced on the Internet. There, the Japanese media picked it up and started emailing her for interviews.  She has become quite popular there and has been invited o speak there.  She has also had to turn down a couple of marriage proposals from older Japanese gentlemen.

Culture blending is making something else noticeable, something that has probably been going on all along.  But now, the tools are making it more obvious.

One example: Two Saudi teens are observed sitting at opposite ends of a table in a tent.  They are both children of a wealthy family. Between them, a stern chaperone stays vigilantly. Her job is to make certain that these two are never alone, that they do nothing improper.  Above all they must never touch, at least not until the wedding night that their two families decided on before they ever met. So their they sit at opposite ends, each seemingly ignoring the other, appearing slightly bored, each fidgeting with a cell phones, Beneath the unknowing eyes of their stern-faced chaperone, they are using these phones to send each other text messages. In fact, they are vigorously flirting.

On another peninsula, on another continent, a teenaged boy and girl sit back-to-back in a South Korean shopping center, their fingers dancing on cellular keypads. Even though they are touching each other in a very public venue, they are using phone messaging to send intimate notes to each other. This same behavior is also observed in Finland and among U.S. teens. Part of this story is as old as the human species.  Young people have always flirted with each othe.  But the tools they use have evolved.  They can now be miles apart while passing notes through this new channel. Text chat has other anticipated applications.  In Cupertino California, teacher have caught kids during exams, text messaging with friends outside the school, looking up the right answers in textbooks.

Yet, all this online culture blending cannot offset a universal truth.  Nothing quite beats a face to face meeting. Hopefully, nothing ever will. Most people hope this fact never changes.  But as the Onliners come of age, other low cost networks are making direct communications easier and much less expensive. While everyone knows the power of Skype, which now carries ten percent of the telephone traffic between the US and Europe, but there is a whole new generation of telephony services that will cost users a fraction of what Skype charges and will not require being tethered to your computer.
Even more important, low cost airline services have sprouted up in Europe, North America and Asia. They are providing a safe, bare bones means for people who could never travel before to  visit almost anywhere. This includes people who meet online, who are already starting to meet at international gatherings of people who found out Online that others shared their subjects of passion.

In many ways, the Online Generation is fulfilling the dreams of the Boomers. Like most generations, the Boomers ended up a pragmatic and productive generation.  But they started out an idealistic lot.  They talked of power to the people.  They talked of world peace.

The challenge for business is that the power is now rapidly moving to the people and they will decide more about their futures that enterprises and institutions. The challenge of many of the world’s governments is that their citizens may be more dedicated to peace and tolerance than they are.

There is little doubt that the social media are moving power into the hands of people.  Simple conversations online are already disrupting even the best financed branding campaigns. There is even some scant, but hopeful evidence that not only will  Onliners make business more efficient and transparent, they also accomplish more than the Boomers did in that touchy area of world peace.

Take a look at Ine Dehandschutter, now a professional Belgian photographer. At 19, she received a scholarship to study photography in Jerusalem. While there, she developed two strong friendships, one with a Palestinian and the other with an Israeli.  The two young men were equally shocked and disturbed that Ine would be friendly with someone on the other side of the barrier that separates Arab East Jerusalem from the Israeli sector. They continuously used Ine as a conduit to send messages to each other. At first the messages were acerbic, but over time, Ine’s diplomatic skills coupled with her personal passion for peace reduced the tone on both sides to a gentle chiding. After a while, Ine grew tired of serving as their mutual relay station. So she emailed them both and told them to pick up to chat directly and leave her out of it.
This resulted in several days of silence followed by light pings from one to the other then back again. The conversation grew more regular.  The arguments remained impassioned but they became less hostile. The online relationship normalized as the two discovered how much common ground they shared. Eventually they did the natural thing. They met for coffee, face to face and as Ine had predicted, they discovered that they really liked each other. They stopped being an Arab and a Jew and became two friends talking over coffee.

Well, Ine wondered, if it could work between two people, why not between two groups? So she found a teacher’s group already dedicated to fomenting world peace in the classroom and suggested they use social media for a new experiment.  They built a private online community and recruited to high school classes, one Palestinian and one Israeli.
The kids began by discussing simple matters. How do they help their parents prepare for holidays? What do the wear to school? How do they get along with siblings? The two groups share many photos and discover they all look a lot alike. The folk music of the two cultures has certain similarities as do their two languages. Eventually, they too got to meet, share food and play soccer together.  Ine’s biggest hope is that if teens can meet on a soccer field, maybe a few years later, they won’t meet on a battlefield. Buoyed by this success, the educators progressively expand the program to include other teenagers in Europe and Africa continuing to use social media to bring together groups of significant cultural diversity.

Global Neighborhoods V4 Overview Part 2

Here's the second installment. You should only read this if you have already read the previous installment about the boomer generation.  Again I m looking fr feedback on these.  if you find these to be tedious or boneheaded, let me kn.  If you find them to be inspirational educational or Pulitzer quality writing, I would not mind hear that either. More to come.

2.The Online Generation

Rather than living next door, your child’s best friend may live in another country. Instead of hanging out with other friends in a mall or on a street corner, these pals are increasingly likely to be meeting up on a social media site such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Flickr  or SecondLife where hundreds of millions of young people are going every minute of every day. They share words, pictures, sound or maybe video.
These new communities exist only on the Internet. They may be called “virtual,” but the relationships forming there are real. The information exchanged there is frequent, current, valuable and abundant. When it is particularly interesting or valuable, it can spread at lightening speed.

People who contribute the most on any given topic often become extremely influential to others who share their interests.  There are mechanisms set up to allow you to even vote on what commentary or pictures are your favorites.

No category of technology has ever been so rapidly embraced by so many people in so short a period of time. There are hundreds of millions of people participating in the social media including, not just these online communities, but blogs, wikis, audio and video podcasts.

Some business strategists dismiss the social media, particularly the communities “kid’s stuff.”  They have a point.  The demographic shows most users are under 25 and many of them are still pre-adolescent. But for a business o dismiss them could be a lethal mistake. The fact that they are kid’s stuff is the reason they are so important.
Social media is a defining characteristic of the emerging generation, the one that is about to take the jobs and occupy the homes and the physical communities of the outgoing Boomers. They are the Online Generation, “Onliners” for short.

If you want to hire the best and the brightest of them, sell them your products and services you are going to need to adjust course. Your current marketing strategies just may not work with Onliners.

They don’t read newspapers, or watch much television. They prefer MP3 to broadcast radio. Onliners have a Teflon ® resistance to traditional advertising and marketing.  They don’t much trust authority and celebrity endorsements rarely move them.
Instead, they influence each other.  The social media is influencing what Onliners buy, wear, watch, listen to or visit.  The greatest influencers in the social media are people who are the most generous in sharing valuable or interesting information through online conversations.

These influencers are developing their own personal brands and they will shape corporate brands to a huge degree in the coming years.

Onliners are moving the power from the company into the community.
The bigger your company the sooner you need to start. Global enterprises are very much like supertankers moving at full throttle.  It takes a long time to turn them around and not maneuvering fast enough may land you on the rocks.

Coming in September: Baby Scoble!

Maryam Scoble has just scooped Robert by announcing that she is three-months pregnant. In fact, this news triangulated to me. Robert just called, knowing that when I work on books I keep my head down and read blogs in chunks. While I was talking to him, Jeremiah put out the press release on it. That Owyang guy is sooo corporate.

All I can say Scoble friends is Mazel Tov! I don't use exclamation points often, but this is big and joyous news. I hope he or she decides to call me Uncle Shel.


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