After David Meerman Scott’s headlining talk at the AMA Boston breakfast event on Nov. 23, Tim Washer, senior marketing manager at Cisco, took the stage for a closing presentation on “The Business Case for Nonsense,” where he explained the value in being ridiculous. With his background in comedy, Washer wields a particularly human take on what makes marketing and branding effective.
So many brands, even the most open and human of them, either avoid humor or handle it with kid gloves. Why? Well, for one, there’s the fact that some brands find it difficult to poke fun at themselves or take themselves less seriously. But it’s also because humor, while exceptionally powerful, is also incredibly tricky to pull off well.
As we’ve all experienced at one time or another, a joke that falls flat is like an anvil through the floor. When done right, though, humor is among the most effective communication and branding tools you can wield. I think it’s because humor is a great equalizer. It brings communication to a level plane, rather than a top-down conveyance. A humorous message isn’t delivered; rather, it’s shared — with laughter.
You can watch Washer’s AMA Boston talk and view his slides below. Want to learn more about humanizing brands? Check out the broadcast and updates from today’s BrandsConf in New York City, organized by Jeff Pulver, where Washer will be speaking on this topic.
I will fully admit to having a total crush on David Meerman Scott — well, his ideas at least — so I was beyond excited to see him speak, even if it meant getting up at 4AM to catch a weird express bus to the suburbs (but since when am I one to turn down an MBTA adventure?).
The talk echoed a lot of the content I’ve read on his blog, but he is a very engaging speaker, so it was great to see it all pulled together into what he made a very interactive, compelling event. The short version: if your organization is not acting and reacting in real-time, you will soon be left behind.
Few companies operate effectively in the present — most are focused on the distant past and the distant future.
Companies need to listen to the market in real-time and respond accordingly, acting quickly to take advantage of the window of opportunity before it vanishes. This is why speed and agility are decisive competitive advantages.
Companies must also engage the media in real-time to get coverage and exposure.
There is a positive ROI to real-time engagement. According to Scott’s research [PDF], the Fortune 100 companies who engage in real-time communications outperformed the S&P 500 stock index by 3 percent in the first eight months of 2010.
All companies, says Scott, must take four actions to become real-time players:
Appoint a chief real-time officer, someone who is charged with finding the opportunities to act and react in real-time
Implement real-time systems. Scott foresees future marketing offices looking not unlike a trading floor, with a real-time data infrastructure set up to monitor and assess the flow of information and inform decisions/conversations. Pepsico/Gatorade has a mission control that embodies this vision.
Develop a real-time mindset.
Scott shared several examples of companies doing real-time right (as well as wrong):
The recently rescued Chilean miners emerged from below the earth sporting $180 Oakley sunglasses. Considering all of the media coverage of the miners’ rescue, that exposure has been estimated at being worth $41 million in equivalent advertising. At $180 per miner, and 33 miners… that’s less than $6,000. Oakley capitalized on the attention surrounding the miners’ rescue to give their product amazing, nearly free publicity.
Paris Hilton was arrested in Las Vegas on felony drug possession charges in late August. A few days later, Wynn Resorts responded by banning Hilton — a hotel heiress — from its properties. The media ate it up, giving Wynn tons of free ink. In the talk (and in a September blog post), Scott described this tactic as “finding something that the news media is talking about and then drafting off of it in real-time.”
Who broke the news about Michael Jackson’s death? Not People magazine — it was TMZ. People did not get the story because they are not acting in real-time. For every Politico that’s breaking the latest story out of Washington, there’s a WaPo or BusinessWeek missing out. Taking a closer look at BusinessWeek, after being a huge mover and shaker in the business publication market since 1929, they were sold in 2009 for just $5 million to Bloomberg. Why Bloomberg, says Scott? Because Bloomberg (and its $6.5 billion in 2008 revenue) lives in real-time.
In July 2009, Dave Carroll of the Canadian band Sons of Maxwell created a song and video called “United Breaks Guitars,” detailing his months-long ordeal to get United Airlines to compensate him for guitars they broke in the baggage handling process at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
What would Scott have recommended they do? Respond to the crisis in the media where the crisis broke. Strap a flipcam to a suitcase, send it through the baggage handling process and have the chief of baggage handling for United at O’Hare narrate the video and describe the process. There is no time to consult lawyers; the priority is to respond.
Last summer, when Amazon yanked George Orwell’s “1984″ and other titles off of Kindle users’ bookshelves, the community went ballistic. Amazon responded, but not for a week. Once they did, however, the community immediately re-embraced them.
The more instantly you can react on the web to an emerging event, the better positioned you will be as an actor in that event. Casein point: the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which formed a website just a couple days after coming together in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, raised $2 million in its first day and $30 million total.
One heard tweet became $250K in business for Avaya, a corporate telephony company. As Avaya’s Paul Dunay explains, responding to a tweet by someone weighing Avaya versus a competitor, his company’s response to that tweet helped seal a quarter of a million dollars in new business — $4,000 per character.
Shaun Dakin, founder of StopPoliticalCalls.org (a site advocating for the end of political robocalls), blogged about Zane Starkewolf’s sexy robocall in the days leading up to the 2008 election. By drawing the media’s attention to a very newsworthy story, he in turn got attention for his organization and his cause.
A blog post by Eloqua CEO Joe Payne, adding commentary and context to the purchase of competitor Market2Lead by Cisco, gave the media some substance aside from the terse one-paragraph statement issued by Cisco. Payne’s blog post came just hours after the announcement, as he saw the opportunity to respond in real-time and become a part of the story. The resultant coverage included prominent quotes by Eloqua’s Payne, and Payne’s take on Oracle joining the marketing automation party helped shape the tone of that coverage. In short order, Eloqua’s marketing team smartly reached out to Market2Lead customers — and that e-mail was the first they had heard of the sale. In the weeks that followed, needless to say, Eloqua raked in some new clients, including a $250K deal with Red Hat.
Stay tuned for a follow-up post, where I recap the closing presentation by Tim Washer, marketing manager for Cisco, on the value of humor in business communications. Thanks, AMA Boston, for an awesome event!
One of Pulizzi’s first points was this: Your customers don’t care about you, so stop talking about yourself. The 80 / 20 rule of content says that while 80 percent of our actual content is customer-centric, companies tend to push the 80 percent that talk about themselves. Content, says Pulizzi, is a promise to your customers, and I really like thinking of it that way. What are you promising to your audience with your content? Are you living up to that promise?
Content marketing is centered around the premise of marketers as publishers, owning and not renting the media. (In fact, 90% of brands are already publishers.) This is not a new idea, said Pulizzi, bringing up historical examples such as John Deere’s magazine The Furrow(published since 1895) and the Jell-O cookbooks. The catch is, if you are going to publish, it has to compete, so it has to be great — not good, great. Luckily, brands often have more resources than the mainstream media at their disposal to get their stories published and shared. But creating and sharing valuable content on a consistent basis is at the core of content marketing. The standard should be compelling. Let quality guide publication volume.
Pulizzi touched on the distinction between content strategy and content marketing, and noted that in actuality, they are two sides of the same coin. While content strategy is more focused on internal process, he explained, content marketing is focused more externally on engagement, action and establishing expertise.
The future of content marketing is promising, as the findings from the 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends indicate. Companies that prioritize and fund content marketing see the results and feel good about their efforts. But other companies are not confident in their efforts to date; they need help to develop an executable content marketing plan and create engaging content, and they are willing to spend the money to get it.
That generated an interesting side-conversation about journalism, and how so many ex-journalists are becoming CCOs (chief content officers) at companies or working in various content marketing capacities. When we got our journalism degrees, no one told us we’d end up in marketing. But it’s all storytelling, right? Same craft. You just become a beat reporter for a brand. (More on this from me soon.)
Here are some videos from the event, going into depth on some topics I didn’t cover above. It was a great evening, and Pulizzi was a great speaker and a really nice guy to hang out with. See you at the next CSNE event on Nov. 15, where Erin Kissane and Mandy Brown will discuss “A Pragmatic Approach to Editorial Style.”
Lately, I’ve been researching affiliate marketing. I’m in the very early stages of learning about it. ProBlogger and Chris Brogan have provided some helpful gateways and how-tos.
But as I was thinking about it, I realized I’ve already learned a couple of solid lessons about affiliate marketing.
Back in 2003 or so, my husband decided he had perfected the method for removing the marble from a Ramune soda glass, and he wanted to document it on the internet. I was playing with web design and learning HTML/CSS at the time, so I thought it would make a good little project. We took photos and wrote copy, I designed a site, and there we had it. On a lark, we decided to add the affiliate links to AnimeNation and Yes-Asia.
Months, probably years, passed. We occasionally got e-mails from people questioning the method or thanking us for posting it. Then one day, my husband got an e-mail from one of the vendors, telling us we had about $80 in affiliate earnings piled up, and where should they send the check.
$80. We took ourselves out for a nice little dinner with that windfall.
Fast-forward to this past summer, when I published my best songs of 2010 (so far) post on Safe Digression. Later that same day, I got a note from an editor at WordPress (who knew they had editors?) that my post had been promoted to Freshly Pressed on WordPress.com. How nice, I thought. I’ll get a little bump in traffic from that.
That day, I got almost 1,700 hits to that one post. The next day, 1,709. I had nearly 1,600 two days later. To date, I’ve received almost 8,000 hits and 97 comments. (In fact, I’m still getting 30+ hits per day on that post — some from spam links, but most are legit.) For my modest little personal blog, this was unheard of. My previous high traffic day was just over 600 hits, and typically a good day for me will come when I bump up against 100 hits in one day.
Of course, when creating the entry — stocked with 30 references to current bands — I completely forgot about my Amazon affiliate partnership. (I did, however, include YouTube videos with each song… yeah, priorities.) I wonder how much of a windfall I missed out on there?
So, as I continue researching affiliate marketing, you can bet I’ll keep in mind the lessons I’ve already learned.
On Sept. 25-26, I attended Podcamp Boston 5. Last year’s Podcamp (my first) really opened my eyes to a field and a way of thinking that was still relatively new to me. This year’s event presented some great learning opportunities, but also a chance to connect with some of the friends I’ve made since last year’s event and to make some new ones, as well. It’s just nice to be thrown into a room for 48 hours with smart, curious, creative, engaged people. That’s when the cool stuff happens.
Kickoff
Chris Brogan and Chris Penn got us started, talking about how we live in an incredibly disruptive time and we are all capable of amazing things if we just step out of the box and do something different. The future will only go in the direction we push (and kick and scream) it.
Great Presentations
Dave Wieneke and Scott Brinker kicked off my Podcamp experience with their presentation, “Web 3.0: The Wave That Follows Social.” I love thinking about this kind of stuff, and it showed when Dave asked people around the room to define web 3.0. and I said, “It’s when everything is everything else.” My definition caught on and kept coming back up during the presentation. It’s true, that’s where I see this stuff going — you don’t have social media over here, and your website over here, and even your print newsletter over here. It’s all just different shades of the same color, all saying the same thing. Everything converges, and the silos fall away. As Dave said (and I wrote about back in May), media doesn’t die, it just reconfigures. Web 3.0, Dave said, is about doing things. It’s about being intentional. It’s about building networks, using data and leveraging APIs. Great, conceptual discussion to start the weekend. Here are his slides:
Marc Pitman talked about social media for nonprofits, particularly the importance of connecting to people with stories (a topic I plan on blogging about at some depth in the near future) and building (and maintaining) relationships over time, keeping in mind the long tail. Stories can help develop those relationships, especially when you pull back the curtain and give your audience something exclusive. And if you’re telling a story, be sure you encourage people to share it.
Something that came up here and in a couple other sessions was not housing your base on social media — get e-mails, etc. — because Twitter or any other service could close up shop tomorrow, severing your connection to your base with it.
Marc also talked about distilling messages into action items (like one campaign that encouraged people to lose weight not by talking generally about healthy eating, but by promoting skim milk — and in a visual way, by equating the fat in a glass of milk to a comparable amount of bacon in a glass *ew*).
I was really impressed by Stever Robbins, the “Get it Done Guy,” who was highly entertaining in relating his tale of how he developed a personal productivity podcast into a book deal… into a one-man musical theater production? He embraces his nerdiness, and for that I applaud him.
Tamsen McMahon absolutely killed it in her presentation outlining the “Scientific Method for Social Media.”
She also presented on “Mosaic Branding,” which I did not attend but I heard was also extremely well received. Check out the slides for “Mosaic Branding.”
Morriss Partee led a great discussion about geolocation, which gave me some new thoughts about QR codes and made me better appreciate Facebook Places (because, for all of its lack of usefulness now, it serves the purpose of introducing half a billion people to the concept of geolocation, sowing the seeds for future enhancements).
Katie Cohen and I ended up leading a small discussion about content strategy during the last session on Sunday, which was unexpected and fun. We had seven others join us for a great conversation, and it inspired me to want to submit a presentation to next year’s Podcamp Boston on that topic.
Random Takeaways
Ja-Nae Duane led a session about entrepreneurship, but for me, the best part was squeezed into the last five minutes: everyone went around, said one thing they could offer and one thing they wanted to learn. It hearkened back to the charge Penn and Brogan gave us at the outset of the weekend, to frame conversations as “I know how to X. I would love to know how to Y.” I almost with there was an established framework to facilitate those conversations, a matchmaking service for skills and needs. I think that would be a great complement to Podcamp programming, since Podcamps bring such a blend of skills into the same space.
There was a reprisal of last year’s Girl Geek Power conversation, which I had blogged about in some detail in 2009 because of my strong feelings on the topic. In short, I don’t see a lot of value in focusing on gender-branded, geek-sisterhood initiatives — I’d rather just focus on my area of expertise in the general arena. I felt like I was speaking heresy a good amount of the time — I think at one point I actually said, “I don’t care that I’m a woman.” It sounds brash, but it’s kind of true. Professionally, for me, that is not a relevant identifier. And I can’t help what other people may call me, but the more I call attention to the woman thing, the more likely I feel someone else will start calling me the “woman blogger” or the “woman writer.” I’m wary of creating echo chambers that, while comfortable, don’t really lead anywhere. That said, I did appreciate being a part of the discussion — I do think it’s an issue worth discussing, since there are problems and perceptions that persist, and there are people who need support from a community. And I think we need folks on either pole of the issue (I am clearly on one far pole ) to help the discussion go where it needs to. Thanks, Rakiesha, for setting up the discussion.
Podcamp Boston is a swell event, giving the local brain trust a change to converge in one place, trade ideas and hang out. I wish more of the sessions were discussion-based and less presentation-based, but overall I was happy to see the focus on content and stories, and on strategy-before-tools. You can bet I’ll be back next year — and in all likelihood, leading a session.
I’ve written before about what #140conf is all about (and asked other web thinkers to share their thoughts on the impact of the real-time web), so I’ll get straight to a recap and review of the event highlights. (Yes, it’s long, so feel free to skip ahead to the bold header that intrigues you the most.)
Jeff Pulver began by giving an overview of the event, and how the first #140conf coincided with TIME’s cover treatment of Twitter and the Iranian elections. He mentioned how one person referred to the convergence of people from different backgrounds at #140conf with the agricultural term “hybrid vigor,” and that seems apt. Jeff said he tries to connect to people at a “soul level,” and his upcoming Day of Giving in Detroit and small town #140conf in Hutchinson, Kansas, attest to that — it’s not about big business or big cities, it’s about people and how this rapidly changing web affects what they do and how they do it. He also touched on the concept of legacy, and how our life streams today will be the records our descendants (or even our future selves) pick through to learn about us — something that was not as thoroughly possible in the past. It’s on us to take the effort to say something and add an idea to that record. “Every tweet matters,” he said. Watch Jeff’s intro.
Investing in the Real-Time Web: Some interesting thoughts by John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures about how Twitter is “eating its own young” and depleting the ecosystem by one-upping the innovative apps created by developers via its API. He urged entrepreneurs to think more broadly than Twitter when it comes to developing apps for the real-time web. It made me think about the Read Write Web Real-Time Web Summit, and how of the vendors who demoed apps and services for us, not a one (as I recall) was solely focused on Twitter.
Media Panel: I had been eagerly awaiting this panel, but I think it could have benefited from a moderator to challenge them a bit. David Beard of Boston.com talked about the value of listening and how the future lies with peer sharing. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub talked about “what the hell” journalism, which means responding when people wonder what the hell is happening with the traffic, that explosion they heard, the Red Line grinding to a halt, etc. He talked about the value of asking the community he has built to fill in the blanks for breaking stories. Some of the panelists acknowledged the need to compete with Gaffin and how much better he is at gathering news together, but I’m not sure that’s their role. As Gaffin said, what he does is not a replacement for long-form/investigative reporting, but it fills a specific niche. My broken record when it comes to the real-time web is the need for context, which is what I believe centralized news organizations are better equipped to provide over the long term than roving citizen reporters. I was heartened to hear the panelists acknowledge the need to exalt great journalism over competition, pointing their audiences to the best story regardless of where it came from, and also the value of attributing content and information that comes in from their audience via the social web. Stephanie Miller from WBZ said some great things about training reporters how to use real-time web channels to connect with and build their audiences and sources, as well as incorporating social media into storytelling. Watch the video.
C.C. Chapman is a dad and he is damn proud of it. I am shocked at how many opportunities big brands are missing by ignoring dads and catering only to moms — it seems like really outmoded thinking. I’m glad C.C. is around to wake people up. Watch C.C.’s talk.
Finding Your Voice in the Real-Time Web: Doug Haslam talked about the importance of voice in supporting content, and how voice comes from knowing who you are. Figuring that out always comes ahead of tools. Consistency in voice is critical, as is being aware of the context in which you are using your voice. He identified five archetypes of voices on Twitter: lurker, bot, helper, personality w/corporation and corporation w/personality.
Meet Meme, Date Meme: I was unsure what this talk by Jessica Randazza was really focusing on. As someone who met her husband indirectly via a social network (a BBS!) I can appreciate the idea that this is a viable way to meet a life partner, and I was surprised by her statistics indicating the negative attitudes people still hold about online dating. But I’m not sure Facebook or Twitter will start recommending dating partners much like they recommend people to follow or get back in touch with.
Christopher Penn killed it, and I am happy I finally got to see him speak (since I missed his Podcamp sessions last year). He talked about how the real-time web lets us be superheroes – knowing all languages, seeing everything, knowing everything. But with great power, of course, comes great responsibility. Superheroes have responsibilities to help. We still have to make ourselves worth listening to. He showed examples of the real-time web doing everything from helping locate earthquake victims in Haiti to tracking down a missing girl. A great demonstration of the power of the real-time web for good.
Real-Time Education: It was powerful to hear a group of educators talk about the need to decentralize learning from the classroom and expose students to the social web as a tool for learning and community. There is a new story of schooling waiting to be born, said one of the panelists, and the real-time web is midwifing that story. While there are some schools, teachers and principals that get it (such as in Van Meter, Iowa), parents need to act as activists to get the others to come around and help schools “unlearn” their current way of teaching. It’s not a technological revolution, they said — that would be easy — but rather a cultural one, which is a lot harder to affect.
Jeff Cutler, a self described “social media journalist,” talked about the difference between citizen reporting and social media journalism. He said his 21 years of experience enable him to tell meaningful stories, and social media enable him to create a broader perspective of news from around the world and share news with people who otherwise could not be there or be informed. The new model for journalists, he believes, is free agency, finding funding to go out and compete with citizen reporters, banking on their own accountability, ethics and experience to get support for their work. It made me think about how increasingly valuable I am finding my journalism degree in my line of work, since stories (and context) always win in the end.
Why Your Social Media Strategy is an Octopus: An interesting though not revelatory analogy by Jeffrey Sass. The body is your brand, the tentacles are your social media outposts. Tentacles can intertwine, but that should be shaped by objectives. You can always lose a tentacle and grow a new one. An octopus is an expert at camouflage, and similarly, your strategy should be invisible.
Eric Proulx, creator of the documentary “Lemonade,” emphasized that the real power of a social network is the personal relationships you forge out of it, and the benefits you can subsequently reap from those connections. That’s how his documentary got made.
Innovation in the Military: Blake Hall of TroopSwap.com impressed me with his examination of how enterprise 2.0 tools can be used to save lives — which, in the military, is the bottom line. The armed forces are awash in data and information, and it can be incredibly challenging to share, store and organize that information to achieve military objectives. He touched on my favorite theme — context — in explaining what needs to be done with this information to make it valuable. The traditional upward flow of information does not work in today’s wars, he said; information needs to be democratized across the military so everyone has the data they need. “Tactical efficiency will only take you so far,” he said. “Information is king on today’s battlefield.”
Chris Brogan hit a bunch of points, seemingly at random, but they all tied into the theme of connectivity. The industry innovators he encountered in Birmingham, Ala., needed to connect with the talented bloggers. Stories help people connect with people, and brands connect with people. Be giving and embrace serendipity (love the network, be the network). The network is the big picture, and it’s scary, but it’s the truest thing there is. That’s where the opportunities are, so we need to wade in and find them.
Steve Garfield talked about the next dimension of video entertainment: finding ways to involve and engage the audience. He talked about Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night Hashtags and CBS Backstage Live as good examples of this. But, as the audience becomes more involved, they have to receive proper attributions for their contributions to the product. In his new show, SteveGarfield.TV, he goes “behind the tweet” to get people on the show to go into further depth (context for the real-time web!) about interesting tweets. Steve demoed an interesting video platform called Yowie, but I found the demo less compelling than the points that preceded it.
Boston Police are doing great things on Twitter, reaching out to inform the community and listening to help solve crimes (like the Craigslist Killer). They are planned to create online version of neighborhood patrols and localizing their Twitter efforts, which is great. I was surprised and disappointed they didn’t talk about how BPDNews.com and how Twitter fits into their broader online strategy (which is impressive).
Harvard’s Perry Hewitt delivered the first of two higher ed-themed presentations on the day (the second being my own!), discussing how Harvard has adapted to “social shock.” The world changes, she explained, and Harvard has to change with it.
Music Panel: I had really been looking forward to this panel, which of course featured Amanda F—ing Palmer, who has done amazing things with Twitter and her blog to advance and own her career and cultivate her fan base. I was grateful this panel had a moderator, the official musician of social media Matthew Ebel, since, well, no other panel on the day had a moderator. The panelists echoed a lot of points I’ve been hearing from the Rock Shop sessions across the river: the old model of stardom is dead and artists need to work hard and tour hard to succeed; musicians need to gain a modicum of marketing savvy and take responsibility for their own success; opening up and breaking down walls can make amazing things happen; be listening so you can take advantage of the golden moment when someone mentions you in order to build a relationship. But honestly, I could have spent 20 minutes just watching Amanda Palmer talk about what she alone has done.
Julien Smith gave a simple but profound talk about how Twitter can connect people, but it can’t sustain relationships. Real relationships come from suffering together, eating together and playing together. Essentially, relationships thrive on interaction, intimacy and vulnerability.
Some talks were better than others, but what I particularly appreciated (as someone who benefited from it) was the low barrier to entry to get on the podium. You don’t need to be a Chris Brogan to speak on the #140conf stage, and you can even speak alongside him.
As an aside, I was very aware throughout the day that while I was furiously taking notes for this planned blog post, others were tweeting updates live. I think it is valuable for events like #140conf, to the point of context in the real-time web, to be covered both ways — reported and experienced live, but contextualized after the fact. In fact, I’d love to see a meta session of sorts exploring event/conference coverage in that light… hmm…
So, yes, wifi and water were in short supply, but two things we did not lack were ideas and voices. We need to keep thinking about the web as it becomes an increasingly real-time entity, and to Jeff Pulver’s point, this affects everyone whether they realize it or not.
Two weeks from today, I will speak at #140conf Boston. What is #140conf, you ask?
[#140conf] will provide the attending delegates knowledge, perspectives and insights to the effects the real-time internet will have on both “we” the people, business and society.
That’s a fancy way of saying, “The internet is now. So how do we deal with it?”
Jeff Pulver, a self-described “communications visionary” (who is also unafraid to jump into a pool with his clothes on), is the powerhouse behind #140conf, an event he has taken (or will take) to New York, Tel Aviv, Detroit, LA and elsewhere. Jeff is a really nice, genuinely helpful guy, and #140conf promises to be full of good vibes and great ideas.
Check out the schedule for the daylong event. Some amazing speakers are lined up, including Steve Garfield, Julien Smith, CC Chapman and Christopher Penn (who, as the schedule currently stands, speaks right after me). There are also some incredible panels, such as the New England Media Panel featuring Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub and the Music Panel featuring none other than Amanda F—ing Palmer.
I’m honored and humbled to be part of such a stellar lineup. My topic is “Higher Ed in the Now: Building Our Brands in Real-Time.”
Here is a video I shot at the #140conf tweetup on June 22 of Jeff explaining what #140conf is all about. (You can also read my blog post recapping the tweetup and watch my video interviews with some social media notables talking about what they feel will be the big impact of the real-time web.)
The #140conf is only $140 (or perhaps cheaper), and for that amount you get to spend a day listening to some of the brightest minds on the web (plus me) talking about what real-time means for us all. It’s going to be special. I hope to see you there.
When my friend Lis implored me to come to TEDxBoston, I demurred. Sure, I’d already requested the day off of work and TED talks are pretty great, but I’m busy with a ton of projects. Plus, did I really want to spend a summer day off inside a convention center listening to speeches?
Eventually, I caved. With somespeakinggigs of my own coming up this fall, I figured it couldn’t hurt to do some homework.
Well. At TEDxBoston, I got a lot more than I bargained for.
The tagline for the event was “Revolutionary Ideas Start Here.” This plays off of both my city’s history and its present, as much hype is made of the “innovation economy” and Boston’s new Innovation District, to which TEDxBoston’s location was adjacent. And there is a lot of innovative stuff and revolutionary thinking going on in Boston. But it has little to do with the hype. The real innovation and revolutions that matter come from the empowerment of a single idea, of connecting someone’s vision to the resources and people that can help it grow. That was the recurring lesson I heard at TEDxBoston.
There were a lot of powerful moments and compelling insights at TEDxBoston. Some of my favorites:
Designer Eric Mongeon, author of 4 by Poe, talked about fear and the creative process. The root of fear, he explained, is uncertainty, and uncertainty is created when our picture of reality of upset by the experience of reality.
He cited The Vortex: a vicious cycle of research, rejection and refinement that helps us feel busy all the time, but doesn’t actually move us closer to our goal. Doing != making
Why do we allow ourselves to get caught in The Vortex? Because we are afraid to risk being wrong, so we end up “hiding in the homework.”
There are three ways we deal with fear: maintaining the picture, protecting the picture and ultimately modifying the picture.
Bringing a commercial element into the project can create accountability, and the involvement of others’ forces us to face our fear. It may not alleviate the anxiety, but it does make us move forward in spite of it.
Author and Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen was supposed to speak, but he suffered a stroke very recently. Bravely, his daughter Ann took his place, choking back tears almost the entire time. She discussed deliberate versus emergent (or cumulative) strategies. A deliberate strategy is a set of guiding principles for both small and large life decisions. Does our emergent strategy — how all of our cumulative decisions add up — align with this, or get in the way of it? If we haven’t already, we should establish a deliberate strategy for our lives. Don’t wait to do the things that matter, Christensen said. “The future doesn’t get easier.” It’s up to us to take control of our own lives.
Some of the other amazing ideas discussed at TEDxBoston:
Dave McLaughlin of Boston World Partnerships got us started by talking about how establishing horizontal relationships between vertical groupings can help build idea infrastructures. He drew the distinction between kittens and railroads. One is nice, and one is essential. Do we want a kitten infrastructure or a rail infrastructure. Ideas, thus, are essential.
Seth Priebatsch, CEO of geosocial gaming company SCVNGR, talked about how the past decade saw the development the social (connective) layer, while this new decade is seeing the beginning of development for the game (influential) layer. He shared four of the seven game dynamics that, combined with mindshare, are the building blocks for the construction of this new layer:
Appointment dynamic: performing at action at a predefined time (e.g. happy hour)
Influence and status (e.g. American Express black card, report card grades; he joked that if a valedictorian was instead called a “white knight paladin level 20,” people would work harder)
Progression dynamic (e.g. LinkedIn profile progress bar, SCVNGR)
Communal discovery: working together to achieve something (e.g. the old Digg model, McDonald’s Monopoly challenge)
John Harthorne of the MassChallenge startup competition had one of the best lines of the day: “Why Massachusetts? Because we’re awesome… When Massachusetts gets sad, we stop being sad and start being awesome again.”
In just ten minutes, Cesar Hidalgo of the MIT Media Lab almost got me to understand economic theory. He spoke in terms of Legos, putty and monkeys hopping from tree to tree to explain global economic development.
Muhan Zhang, a recent Boston Latin High graduate and musician who plays the erhu (a traditional Chinese string instrument), talked about blending the best ideas of our ancestors with our brand new ideas in order to innovate the past.
John Werner of Citizen Schools made the case for finding more ways to bring citizens into the schools and have everyone become an educator (like jury duty, but education duty), sharing their knowledge in order to enrich and inspire kids and show them where their ideas and talents can take them.
Bill Walczak of the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester talked about the history of the organization and how it has redefined what success means for its organization over the years. The real disease to combat, he said, is poverty. Poverty is the root of teen pregnancy, drugs, violence, diabetes, and so much more.
Architect Sapir Ng discussed his vision for turning an abandoned, historic railway tunnel into an underground theater space that would connect various parts of the city, both vertically (above and below ground) and horizontally (the Theater District, the Boston Common and other areas around Tremont Street). The Boston Globe covered the project in April.
Scott Kirsner, a technology writer for The Boston Globe and author of Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age, talked about the need to keep all the smart young people we recruit to New England for school in New England. Those smart young people, he said, are the great renewable resource in the region, and we have to do more for them. What can we do? Work harder to connect them to the innovation happening in the city and help them build their dreams right here.
Frank Reynolds, founder of InVivo Therapeutics, recovered from paralysis (in part by teaching himself neuroscience from his bed) and founded a company that is pioneering new therapies for people with spinal cord injuries.
Larry Lessig of Harvard Law School delivered a powerful presentation that drew the connection between the corruption of government with rampant influxes of campaign cash and the corruption of our kids’ bodies by childhood obesity.
By getting connected to a world outside their own, Vibha Pingel of Ubuntu at Work talked about how women living in poverty in India are gaining skills, running businesses and getting better opportunities for themselves and their children. She talked about two kinds of “small worlds” — the good kind, where we learn about mutual acquaintances we never knew we shared, and the bad kind, inhabited by these women in India where without initiatives like Ubuntu at Work they may never find a path to a better life.
At the end of the day, I felt several things:
Pride for my city and all of the amazing things happening in it
Enlightenment for gaining exposure to ideas and topics outside of my normal circuit of interests
Affirmation in the value of connecting and empowering people and their ideas
Revolutionary ideas may start here, as the tagline goes, but they require all of us to help bring them to fruition.
On June 22, I attended the Boston #140conf tweetup at the Seaport Hotel’s Tamo Bar. It was an opportunity to connect with folks and build buzz ahead of the upcoming Boston #140conf conference on September 14. I had attended the Jan. 14 Boston #140conf meetup, which was essentially a mini-conference, and it was an excellent event.
#140conf, headed by technology entrepreneur Jeff Pulver, focuses on “the effects of the real-time Internet on both business and ‘we’ the people.” Over the past year, the movement has grown exponentially, with events in New York and Washington D.C., with more #140conf conferences coming up this year in Tel Aviv, Nairobi, LA and Detroit.
If there’s one thing that makes me itchy, it’s a meetup without structure. So I decided to create some and give myself a creative challenge, to boot. I took out my Kodak Zi8 and began interviewing people to get their thoughts on the big impact of the emergence of the real-time web. I got a wide range of thoughtful answers, compiled in the video below:
Why was this a creative challenge? I’ve never edited a video in my life! Much less shot one with the intention to publish and disseminate it in a somewhat formal fashion. And the only editing software I have is what came with the camera. But Bruce K. Garber, who I chatted with a bunch at the event, was great at encouraging me to give it a shot, limitations be damned. So thanks, Bruce. I’m fairly happy with the result and was excited to hear so many great thoughts about the real-time web.
I appreciate Pulver’s approach toward organizing #140conf events — giving voice to passionate people who have compelling thoughts and ideas and thereby empowering them to effect change in an evolving web world. Dropping a term from his music industry past, he likened organizing a #140conf to doing “high tech A&R” (artist and repertoire) to scout the talent that will shape what’s next. I’m really looking forward to the Sept. 14 #140conf event in Boston and getting a glimpse of the big “what’s next.”
Here is Jeff Pulver hyping the Sept. 14 Boston #140conf and talking about the #140conf initiative:
Funny sidenote: Bruce mentioned at one point that if I wanted to shoot a video about the real-time web, I should have used the mobile livestreaming platform Qik. True enough. But then, of course, I wouldn’t have had my little creative challenge to play with.
“I believe that we form our lives, that we create our own reality, and that everything works out for the best.” – Jim Henson
I grew up watching “The Muppet Show,” “Sesame Street,” “Fraggle Rock” and the like. Much of my childhood and the childhoods of my peers were shaped by Jim Henson.
On Saturday, my husband and I went to the National Heritage Museum in Lexington where we caught the traveling “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” exhibit. It closes June 27, and if you live around Boston, I strongly urge you to go see it.
I enjoyed not only seeing the familiar characters of my youth and getting glimpses of Henson’s earlier work with which I was less familiar, but also seeing the ideas that never came to fruition, and getting a look at the creative process that fueled it all. I was in awe of his boundless creativity and initiative, his neverending pursuit of the fullest realization of his vision, whether it was illustrating the concept of “visual thinking” or creating a kids’ show that focused on harmonious living.
I had been hoping to blog about the exhibit, but I expected it to be on Safe Digression, not here. I took away, however, several observations that I thought were applicable in the context of communications and creativity:
Henson grew up in a culture centered around storytelling, and that permeated his work, whether it was Muppetized reproductions of fairytales or his own worlds that he created. His legacy is testimony to its effectiveness.
Humor formed the core of these worlds and the stories therein. There are tales to be told and lessons to be learned, for sure, and humor is an extremely powerful and effective way to convey them.
I did not know just how many creative endeavors he had a hand in. Looking at it all in one place over the span of an hour made me realize just how hard-working and ingenious he was, how fruitful were his mind and imagination, and how significant an impact he had on television, film and education. He never stopped thinking up ideas and pushing them to see where they would go.
In that vein, he was constantly — CONSTANTLY — creating content, whether it was a TV series or a short film or a cartoon. All throughout his life, the exhibit illustrated, he was churning out creative work. No matter how famous he got, he always kept one foot in the creative trenches.
Henson’s creations aimed to capture several dimensions of human character, which is probably why so many people have been captivated by the Muppets and their brethren over the years — in them, we see ourselves. But Kermit, Henson said, was like himself, “trying to get a bunch of crazies to actually get the job done.”
I was continually impressed with how he captured his thoughts and ideas to paper, scripting and doodling and storyboarding and outlining all the many visions that came to his mind. Some lived to see their time on screen or page, others did not, but of the ones that did not, many of those informed future successes. No idea was really ever truly discarded.
Henson was a creative force and a leader, but he worked with a dedicated team of collaborators who brought his ideas to life. He could not have done it alone.
Henson grew up, but he never outgrew the world of fantasy. Instead, he tried to permeate our hardened realities with healthy doses of fantasy, opening our imaginations. “As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy,” Henson said, “and for some of us, that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.”
Walking around the exhibit and seeing the puppets of Bert and Ernie, Rowlf, Kermit, Mahna Mahna and others, I didn’t think of them as puppets. Like almost all who enjoyed these characters, I saw them as just that — characters — not amalgamations of fleece and foam. They greater than the sum of their parts, by virtue of the character afforded them by Henson and his collaborators, and the emotional attachments we formed with them.
Henson was unyieldingly optimistic, and much of his art focusing on being positive and overcoming adversity. This was simply who he was, but it also proved key to his success. Because he held those convictions so essentially, they were believable, not contrived. I particularly enjoyed an earlier sketch called “Girl and Monster” that depicted a squiggly monster about to consume a small girl until the girl craftily got the monster to pursue its own tail. “Sesame Street,” which has often featured characters with disabilities or other challenges, comes to mind as most obviously embodying that point of view.
We can all learn something from the way Jim Henson pursued his creative passion and brought it to life, pushing the boundaries of belief while never losing the human connection. While the world is a less fanciful place without him, we all have the ability to create, educate and inspire. And, no matter how entrenched we are in the mundane day-to-day, I believe we all still have the ability to make a little magic.
EDIT: The traveling exhibit comes to Chicago in the fall and Lakeview, IL, in the spring.
The key points of Scott’s talk were as follows:
Last summer, when Amazon yanked George Orwell’s “1984″ and other titles off of Kindle users’ bookshelves, the community went ballistic. 
) to help the discussion go where it needs to. Thanks, 
