The following are my talking point notes for tomorrow's workshop on Starting the Conversation. If you want to see the workshop as it happens, we will be Ustreaming it from 9-5:30 Pacific time and it will be archived there as well.
Just so you know how I work, I write an entire presentation out so I can understand how my points connect. Then I just go up with an outline. Reading a speech seperates the speaker from the audience. I'd much rather just talk with the folk even if I fluff a few points which I invariably do.
View from 30,000 feet.
1. I’m supposed to talk about the view from 30,000. I can tell you that it’s often clouded when you look down. That mean you miss a lot. You look at entire cities and all you see is a bunch of boxes connected by little lines.
2. From 30,000 feet you may have a big picture and that picture may even be accurate but there’s a certain human element that may be overlooked. Looking down from up high you don’t hear the voices. I like voices. A great deal of the wisdom I may have acquired has come from conversations with people. The smartest business people I know and the most successful have conversations with everyone all the time.
3. From 30,000 feet up, the view is spectacular, but you are out of touch with too many things. During the time that I worked closely with Robert Scoble, we talked about a lot of things. One time, when we were observing how far Google had risen and how far Microsoft had sunk, I asked him what went wrong for Microsoft that is beyond all the obvious stuff.
4. “Bill became too big a deal,” he told me. “He couldn’t slip out of the office and hang with the geeks for a while. This put him out of touch” Robert desperately wanted Gates to blog, not just because it would be cool and popular, but because it would have put him back in touch with the technology community. He would have had to suffer a little shouting at times, but if the community saw he was listening… really listening, the Microsoft and Gates would have gained measurably. Yes, they need to build more innovative and better products but just the act of starting and joining the conversation would have made a difference or so it seems to me.
5. The trouble with top down views is that you can easily miss the human element. If you have a business, and you’re smart, then you already know that every human has an idea, a complaint, a thought or a data point that can be useful. This is not the wisdom of crowds. This is the wisdom of people.
6. But if you own a business, a global enterprise or a startup, and NPO or a consultancy, you’re a busy person. That’s where social media comes in. Social media is what makes it scalable. Social media lets you have conversations with lots of people efficiently.
7. But I digress and upstage a bit. Chris Heuer who gets to follow this act will be talking about the value of listening before one engages. Let’s get back up to 30,000 feet.
8. A while back I accepted a speaking engagement in London. The budget required I fly for 11 hours in coach. This usually sucks, but this time, I happened to be on an AA Boeing 777. Let me tell you the 777 is an awesome plane. It has the most spacious coach I’ve ever seen and I fly a lot. The coach seats went all the way back and it was a very quiet ride so I got a good night’s sleep. The food wasn’t bad and every passenger can even choose it’s own movie
9. If you have to go coach on a long flight, I recommend you look for a 777. I know AA has them…
Do you see what I just did?
Could American Airlines or Boeing influence you as quickly as I just did with an ad or a PR campaign? This is the difference between conversational recommendations and a traditional marketing. One is efficient and credible and the other is getting less effective as we speak.
10. 10. Let me give you a ground level example. Let’s land the plane and go into the yards behind a couple of those boxes we looked down upon. There are two guys leaning on a backyard fence. They are supposed to be mowing their lawns, but they are not mowing their lawns. Instead, they are leaning on their shared backyard fence and chatting. They are talking about the things guys talk about when they are supposed to be raking leaves on a Saturday morning. They discuss sports and movies, home repair, and the difficulty of finding a decent gardener. Their conversation covers cars, books, music, movies, why the Giants can’t win two games in a row, where to eat and stay on vacation.
11. Let’s call these two guys Jeremiah and Giovanni. Over time Jeremiah realizes that Giovanni knows everything about restaurants, particularly Southern Italian ones. But his music tastes suck. So he knows when to use Giovanni’s recommendations and when to seek talk with others. When others ask Jeremiah about restaurants he refers them to Giovanni, with a warning, “just don’t ask them about music. He digs the HipHop crap.
12. Over the course of time, these over-the-fence chats shape a great many buying decisions, even as the lawn suffers. Their referrals of each other help shape their place in their community.
13. This has been going on for centuries in local communities, but now, thanks to social media, communities are no longer just shaped by physical borders of streets and fences.
14. Now communities are forming around shared interests, be those interests hummingbirds or Hummers, photos or music, sex or terrorism, data storage or dating and that brings us to social media.
15. Social media is not about technology. It’s about conversations. It’s about people using the Internet to find others who share their interests and influencing their decisions on a wide variety of matters through simple, candid informal, unpolished, spontaneous conversations. This is a powerful thing.
16. Conversations are more effective than traditional marketing tools because people like to be talked with not to. People usually trust each other more than they do an official company spokesperson or an athlete or an actor.
17. This is really nothing new. It has pretty much been this way ever since when our ancestors sat around campfires talking with hand and grunts or drawing pictures on cave walls with blood and berries. It is the nature of humans to engage in conversations. The Cluetrain statement that markets are conversations is a universal truth.
18. But something happened during the last half of the last century. Physical businesses outgrew neighborhoods and went global. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker grew up and became the chain, the franchise and the Big Box.
19. Conversations couldn’t scale. Mrs. McNulty telling Mrs. O’Malley about the great deal she got on a whole chicken from the local butcher was too penny anti for Foster Farms. Business needed to get the message out to mass audiences and they needed to get people to absorb their messages. Plus the technology of that Era made it efficient to distribute these marketing messages. We had nuclear families mesmerized by what was once called the miracle of television. Radios went wireless with teenagers on beeches who really cared about miracle pimple creams were ready for what became the Golden Age of Broadcast Marketing, an age that flourished for over 50 years but is now coming to a close,
20. What happened to Broadcast Marketing? Why is the press tour less effective today than it was three years ago? The answer is long and complicated.
21. Part of it is that it became what Seth Godin warns you should not become. It became unremarkable. When is the last time you saw a purple cow in a TV spot? It got smothered in its own abundance by every company and its subsidiary getting into the act.
22. It suffered by the fact that it only needed a two percent response from the people being “targeted” to be financially rewarding. That meant it was okay to send out messages that 98 percent of the people receiving did not want to get, and over the years each of us got tired and cranky about being part of the 98 percent.
23. The Internet also happened. And one incumbent institution is being brought down. Among the victims are traditional news distribution mechanisms. Mid-sized newspapers in this country are in freefall. Only one third the number of people watch network news on TV as 30 years ago, and their average age has doubled from 30 to 60.
24. This is not to say that traditional market is dead, because it is not. I am not going to stand here and tell you to go back to your offices and delete you marketing and communications teams. Hell, most of you are the marketing and communications teams.
25. But I will tell you that we are in transformative times. Traditional marketing is on the wane and scalable conversations organized by market are rising. Companies that elect to do only what they have always done may find themselves at some point in the near future sitting in the middle of Jurassic Park with the other fossils who could not adapt to the challenge of change.
26. It may not seem that this is all happening so fast, but that depends on where you sit. Through background conversations, I know that some of you work in organizations that have not seen much change yet, nor have its decision makers seen much reason to change.
I think they have a false sense of security. Let me tell you why.
27. It may feel today pretty much the way it felt yesterday, from where you sit professionally, but it is not. If you happen to work on the Equator, you are moving in circles at a rate 1000 miles per hour. But that’s chicken walk. You are simultaneously orbiting the Sun at about 67,000 miles an hour. If that doesn’t make your heart go lub dub dub, we are all sitting on rock in a galaxy expanding so fast that humans cannot yet calculate how fast we are going or where we are heading to. So that fact that you don’t sense motion doesn’t mean the environment to which you cling isn’t moving at dazzling speed.
28. I’m the sort of person who likes the speed. I’ve worked with startups most f my professional life. I keep my eye on the edge and watch what emerges. I like to tell others about what’s coming. I’ve been watching social media for about four years and it continues to take my breath away.
29. When Robert Scoble and I completed Naked Conversations, way back in the quaint era of January 2006, social media was not yet a term in common use. Chris Shipley had coined the term during a keynote speech at Demo a few months earlier. The hot word was blogging and that’s what Naked Conversations was all about.
We wrote 276 pages about blogging and used the word in our subtitle. We did cover emerging technologies for what most people thought they were worth. We dedicated four pages to podcasting. Video blogging merited two paragraphs. We mentioned “social networks” twice in passing. We ignored wikis completely. MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, SecondLife either did not exist or they did not seem relevant to business. Twitter was a sound that came from birds.
30. When we went to press, there were 6 million bloggers. Now there are 71million and blogging has become so ubiquitous, many people find talking about its benefits to be about as provocative as discussing why people should use email.
31. Sometime in September or October of this year, MySpace will register its 200 millionth user, making that virtual community larger than all but five of the world’s countries. Conservative estimates say there are over a half billion members of online social communities. Of course there’s overlap, but the number is equal to almost 1/13th of the world’s population and growth is rising quite rapidly.
32. But those numbers are the mere equivalents of the speed we travel at the equator or around the sun. The incalculable growth is in video. In March, 55 million people streamed 1.2 billion videos. The number of videos being uploaded and viewed and shared
33. Why do I include online communities in all my business-related talks? For two reasons: First and is the business reason companies and organization get online communities. They are rapidly adopting the features that make a community and those features are rapidly becoming a commodity. The question that remains unanswered here is the question of open v.closed communities. MySpace is the largest online community and it is closed. It exists so that ad can be put in front of users so that those who own the community may prosper. Facebook has just decided to become an open community and my hope is that will let them take category preeminence.
34. To me closed communities are like the Depression Era factory towns. The places looked inviting enough. But once the employee moved in they discovered the company owned everything—the houses, the churches, the hospitals, the police—everything. The community served the owners not the members and people found they didn’t much like living there, but it was hard to leave.
35. Open communities are an entirely different story. These are founded by enlightened companies and organizations who understand the power of the online cult of generosity. Jeremiah will be speaking later today and he will tell you about what he did in this area for Hitachi a company that has proven devastating to its competition through generosity.
36. The open/closed issue and the current popularity, however, is not why I think the organizations you represent should embrace online communities. Online communities are the new marketplaces and understanding how to join and start conversations there effectively is a survival issue for marketing and communications people moving forward.
37. If you want to understand where the markets that matter to you are heading in the next three, five or ten years, go look at some children, teens and young adults. Watch their habits. Chances are they will retain those habits as they go through life.
38. A friend of mine—David Parmet-- has a pre-schooler who spends time on Club Penguin. His son has not yet reached kindergarten but he has friends who live hundreds of miles from his home. Club Penguin may be a virtual place, but the friendships being formed there are very real.
39. David’s son is on the young side but he is part of the generation now emerging. They are the Online Generation and some of them are already taking seats in the cubicles of a company near you. As the boomers focus on retirement homes and medical packages, they are being replaced in the market by new members of the Online Generation. While boomers don’t know their wealth because they don’t know how long they will be retired, Onliners have started accumulating and spending discretionary income and will be doing so for a very long time.
40. As marketing and communications people, how do you reach this emergent Online Generation? It has Teflon resistance to traditional advertising. They don’t read newspapers. They listen to iTunes downloads not radio.
41. Their biggest love however is video and this brings us to the part of social media that is currently expanding at about the rate of the Universe. JD Lasica, a citizen media guru says that over half of the web is now moving as digital video and by 2012, MIT says, it will be all but 2%. There are some deceptions to this number in that video requires many more bits than does text, but still, we are moving toward a video Internet and you should be thinking about that, or so it seems to me.
42. But is this all about published and downloaded YouTube. Or, as Joost believes, will we simply use the internet to get commercial programs for free by bypassing the hated cable carriers and ad blocking the commercials? Is there a business app?
43. Try this. Go talk to your boss—the one who may have ignored you last year when you harped on him or her to start a blog and post three times weekly at a minimum. Go back in. This time, say you want to video record an interview on any subject he or she wishes and you want to post it on the website. You may notice a warmer reception.
44. But then, maybe you don’t even need to record it. See this guy with the muscles and the camera? He’s Johnny Ham, co-founder of Ustream and right now he’s live casting, this workshop to anyone in the world who has unrestricted Internet connection and a desire to see what we say here. Just think of the possibilities for what this can do.
45. I think today Ustreaming is on the forward edge of social media. But that’s today. God only knows what it will come tomorrow.
46. In Naked Conversations, we called blogging “the conversational power tool.” Now, 18 months later, it is mere A conversational power tool. Now there is a whole power tool arsenal for you to pick and choose from. Each of you can select similar tools and go back to where you work and build something entirely different from each other. You can use a hammer to build a house or bludgeon a spouse. That part is up to you. We will be talking about the various tools at some length later today and I think you will find it a very valuable session.
47. “But wait a minute,” some of you may be saying, “ that’s not my world. I don’t spend my time dangling at the edge of the universe grooving on the speed of motion like this guy. Where I work, I’m a lone voice in the wilderness. I’m still hearing questions about the ROI, protecting IP, controlling message. I didn’t come here for a pep talk. I came because I need help. I need help getting my company to get started and I need to find a path that makes them feel safe and me secure that I won’t get fired trying.”
48. Well, this pep talk is coming to a close. My job was to discuss what is going on and to paint some areas of the big picture. I had the easy part, sort of like ice breaker games at a college mixer.
49. The rest of today is packed with real and actionable material delivered by some of the most capable and experienced players in the business of social media. We hope to answer some of tough and specific questions, such as:
• How do I get started? What is the first step? How should my company start a conversation our customers?
• What is the safest way to introduce social media into our corporate culture?
• What are the best tools for my current situation? Where do I find them? How do I learn how to use them?
50. Today is our best effort to help you find the answers. We want you to go back to work a hero rather than an irritant trying to change systems in place and perceived best practices.
51. The remainder of today will not be at 30,000 feet, but down on the ground and in the trenches. I am joined by a team of incredible people who have a mountain of hands-on experience helping companies start the conversation.
• Social Media co-founder Chris Heuer will discuss the three phases of social media engagement and the importance of each;
• PodTech’s web strategist Jeremiah Owyang is going to escort you through the social media toolshed and share some of his own experiences.
• Hubbub’s Giovanni Rodriguez will share with you the results of some research he has conducted, part of it for his client and our host SAP.
• Consultant Deb Schultz, formerly VP Marketing for Six Apart will candidly share what went right and what went wrong through a series of case studies.
• Futureworks principal Brian Solis who is also a Social Media Club co-founder will share his vision for how companies can mash up traditional and new media tactics during these transformative times.
• You will all participate in what may be the most important session of the day: a Social Media Club Café session where you look for answers to an overwhelming question: How do you get started without getting fired?
I hope the result is that you go back to work tomorrow armed with what you need to bring your companies forward in this new Conversational Era.
Thanks. Let’s start the conversation. Are there any questions?
