Making Our Blogs Conversation Corners In One, Limitless Building

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Scott Gould

I love our blog. We had a wonderful discussion this week about the reformation of this blog into “Scott Gould and Friends” as a place of collaboration, where comments and equal to blog posts, and where regular contributors can have a voice.

One of my thoughts around this is that this blog is only part of the conversation. If I’m on James Poulter’s blog, I’ll be discussing the recommendation economy, whereas if I’m on Jeff Hurt’s blog, I’m discussing event design. It’s one big conversation that I’m having with similar people, but the topics at Scott Gould and Friends are different to the topics elsewhere.

If I think like this, then I realise this is just one a many corners for conversation. But the best most blogs come to realising this fact is a blog roll or aggregating posts – neither of which are a particularly meaningful way to join conversations together.

In the comments on Tuesday, Robin said so truly that “the currently available blog templates are designed around the self-centric web-logging.” That means we need to address how our blogs work from a design standpoint if we want to adopt the idea that conversations are happening across multiple blogs, not just in one place.

What I Want

I want to provide every regular contributor here, every Friend, a profile on the WordPress installation. Then they could have a profile so you can find out about the main people adding to the conversation here. That would also mean that their posts are pulled into this site (but linking to their sites), meaning that the homepage on this blog is more about showing the best conversations across multiple places.

It would mean that these Friends can also write posts for this site and add to the conversation. This would go hand in hand with a new way to display comments, ideally, as just as important as posts themselves, with the ability to tag those posts.

This is just the beginning, but I think it gets in moving in the right direction towards the future of blogging – collaboration and sharing.

I then like the idea of having a digital book club, whereby we have conversations about a particular book say every Friday, where people can read up before hand and come to the conversation prepared. This could subsequently ooze into video interviews and such.

Your Leading Thoughts

What do you want here on your blog? Speak up and be bold.
Where do you think the future of blogging lies?

Photo credit

What Is Social? Well…

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Scott Gould

What with starting work this week on a manuscript for a book – “Social” being the working title – I want to share some of the content that I will make up the backbone of the book that I haven’t made public until now, as it’s been reserved for paying clients only.

[slideshare id=5063806&doc=whatissocial-100826163537-phpapp02]

If you can’t see the above slideshow, click here, or see it directly on Slideshare.

This is a short 12 slide presentation that explains succinctly what the difference between social and broadcast as – as mindsets before they are media – and then three lessons that we draw that help us understand social.

Social is a big topic for me. Everything I do keeps coming back to it – whether it’s learning, event design, social media, marketing, church, relationships – social is right in there. And it’s not that social is a new thing. Far from it. Social is our original and default method of communication. As our default method, it also is ruled by our default physical limitations (how loud we can speak, etc), and it is from these limitations that we create broadcast, which is a one way extension of what is socially created, for wider reach.

My basic premise is that we have social innovation and broadcast duplication. Social is the fluid conversation that is a real-time co-crated product. Broadcast is the recording of that conversation and duplicating it so more people can hear it. In social, the conversation can change. In broadcast, it does not.

What the book will then lead into is a discussion of the Social / Broadcast Matrix, and the three social strategies. And true to these three strategies, the book will function on one: socialised channels, socialised content and socialised culture. In other words, it’ll be available everywhere you’ll want to consume it, it’ll be full of UGC (i.e. YOU), and it’ll be open for you to use and build upon.

(You can watch a video of me discussing Social on a larger scale here)

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you see holes in my premise? Given I’m basing a book on this, I need you input!
How would you like to contribute to the creation of ‘Social’?

A Conversation With Me and Andrew Pickering

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Scott Gould

I had the pleasure last month of having a conversation with Professor Andrew Pickering from Exeter University, on the subject of “where do good ideas come from?”

The conversation was the latest in a range of interviews at Imperica, a smart new project by the renowed Paul Squires which “tracks a number of disciplines, wraps them all together, finds the interesting angles, then talks to the people behind them.”

The conversation began with a discussion of how accesible ideas are today, which made me say that I think ideas are harder to actualise because of the false confidence that an abundance of them creates, and ended up touching on many things including education. Here’s an extract:

Are we seeing a shift from intellectual rigour to the more technical display of “doing things”?

AP: During my lifetime, the number of young people that go through university has increased enormously. When I was an undergraduate, it was 10% of the population. Now, the target is 50%. That change implies a change in what university education, is. So, if you pick the cleverest 10% and tell them to sit around for three years, they can very probably go deeply into something. I studied Physics. If you just pick half of the population and say that “We’ll give you an education”, then education is going to be something else. The ratio of students to teaching is much higher, so you can’t give people that kind of personal attention and engagement.

Education itself has been reconceived since Mrs. Thatcher’s day. Now, it is seen as a way to fit people into the economy – to produce useful cogs for the industrial machine. Learning for itself is not a priority of the Government. So, higher education becomes industrialised, and produces an industrial product.

SG: The irony in that, is that we’re a knowledge economy – we’re not even in an industrial economy. And, yet, you’re right, the industrialised approach, turning out people who then become knowledge workers…

AP: It’s an industrialised conception of knowledge… not for its own sake, but “useful knowledge”. Physics isn’t all that useful, but engineering is. I don’t think that’s anything to do with the Internet, but the Internet feeds into this trend that already exists. The same goes for research; funding is made increasingly conditional on producing useful knowledge. How are “users” going to benefit from this knowledge?

Read the whole interview between Andrew and I here.

Your Leading Thoughts

Are ideas more accessible today, in your option? And if so, what are the repercussions of that?

Using Social Media to Extend and Enhance Offline Events and Experiences

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Scott Gould

Wow, that’s a mouthful. And that’s exactly what I’ll be discussing at the unGeeked Elite Retreat in Chicago on May 12 – 14, 2011.

How does Social Media extend offline experiences? Sure, you can get a long list of resources that will make your event what is called a ‘hybrid’ (a virtual and physical event), but how do you know which ones are the priority for you, and what is the strategy behind those tactics anyway?

In 2004 I was running a youth organisation that I started called Feedback. We’d already discovered that by putting bands in the show they’d bring their fans along, and that would increase our numbers, but it was when we latched onto MySpace that we discovered the ability to increase participation virtually, aside from the physical limitations of our monthly events. (You can see some old footage on our old MySpace profile still today!)

This really is the benefit of Social Media as an extension of an offline offering. An offline event or experience is typically a single point in space, time and matter, but through Social Media, it can be extended in all three of these areas.

We then need to know how to extend those three in a way that is meaningful and relevant to ‘the why‘ of the offline event in the first place. Perhaps the most helpful element in this is Joe Pine’s model on The Multiverse (For a fuller discussion of this, you read our discussion on ‘virtually present‘)

There are 8 possible configurations of merging time, space, matter with non-time, non-space, non-matter. Joe presents a video on it here, which I would recommend you watch should you have a spare 50 minutes to get acquainted with the future.

Space: virtual / physical. This is the mix between being physically there, and being virtually there. Being virtually there means that you don’t have to be restricted by:
Time: linear / non-linear. This means that I be at the event before the event, during the event, after the event. You get the idea. This also means that I lift the restriction of:
Matter: real / bits. This is about what things are made from. You can be in the same physical space but then still still experience bits – digital data – with which you can then contact those who are virtually present.

It can get very complex, which is what my talk certainly won’t be. I’ll be keeping things simple by getting back to the three core Social strategies that we’ve talked about recently, namely Socialising Channels, Socialising Content, and Socialising Culture. (I think things are easier to remember in threes, don’t you?)

I don’t want to share much more, but there’s a good taster for you here, and I’ll be sharing more of the content over the months, as we’ve got quite a bit of time until May!

Your Leading Thoughts

What’s the best example that you know of, of Social Media extending an event?
What would be you dream usage of Social Media as an enhancing of an offline experience?

Legendary photo courtesy of Benjamin Ellis

Understanding Value In A Share-Economy

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Scott Gould

We had a discussion recently on sharing and creating content, and I asked the question “are you afraid to give it away?” There were some exceptional comments, but this one from Malcolm Sleath opened up a whole lot of understanding for me on what value really is in a share-economy.

I think share-economy is also the operative term, at least for now. Certainly a large portion of my work, with Like Minds and the River Dream Centre in particular (a community around a conference, and a church, respectively) is about sharing, and I feel the need to better understand what the real value is here.

I trust you’ll start thinking on Malcolm’s thoughts as much as I have. Enjoy:

Scott, I think you have put your finger on something that many people are wrestling with – but my hunch is that much of the agonising is misplaced. If people are clear about their own value, and what they value, then decisions become much more straightforward.

It comes down to understanding where your true added-value lies, understanding the value in sharing, and sharing on the basis of enlightened self-interest and personal values.

1 Understand where your true added-value lies.

For me, the first step in resolving the sharing dilemma was to understand where my true value-added lay. This understanding came from the free exchange of ideas with other people, and the slow realisation of what made my offering different and special. For me, sharing was inseparable from realising my own value.

To those who are reluctant to share, I would say that if your idea is so good that it changes the game it’s probably going to be rejected and not stolen – ask James Dyson. Simplifying slightly, Dyson found that people were reluctant to take up his game changing idea, so he took a huge financial risk and made the idea real – suddenly the idea had value and all the money he had earlier spent on patents proved to be a good investment. As Thomas Edison said, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”

In my experience it is really hard to ‘give away’ my true added-value. The value is in enabling people to use my ideas, not in the idea itself. Delivering the process takes know-how, work, resources and mutual commitment.

But, to get to a level of trust where I can begin the process of gaining commitment, I need a way to engage with people, which brings me to the other aspects of sharing.

2 Understand the value in sharing.

Sharing makes it easier to earn a share of mind. My IP is not diminished by suggesting how people can do some small but important thing better in an article that I don’t even get paid for.

In reality, many of the things experts ‘give away’ are intended to educate people in the value of what they do. The other things they offer in the mix keep people interested in them as a source. If only a few people make the transition from passive consumers to active clients, they are still winning. Ideas are seeds. Nature is wasteful. In the end it doesn’t matter because we all return to the earth.

True experts know stuff they don’t even know they know – so there is no way they are going to be able to tell you everything. And anyway, you would have to have achieved a certain level of understanding to make proper use of what they are telling you.

In other words, by helping you they are not losing. They still have their competitive advantage and can afford to be generous. In sharing, they are gaining in reputation and becoming known, liked and trusted. This does not mean that others suddenly want to start sending them dollar bills. There is no place for Twitter followers in the company balance sheet. But the perceived value of their activities earns a bigger share of attention/mind, they become an authority by default, and the value of their brand is enhanced – which means that people are more prepared to pay for their advice and services.

So when I share ideas with others, I am hoping to earn a bigger share of their mind. When, in return, I give others a bigger share of my mind, I am rewarded with access to resources, contacts, ideas, inspiration, and opportunities that I simply did not know about before. My current personal example is the #likeminds club and all that flows from that.

3 Share on the basis of enlightened self-interest and personal values.

Having achieved some confidence in my value, it then becomes relatively easy to decide whether my interest lies in (a) giving away an idea to help others or for mutual benefit (b) sharing it with relatively few people for money, or (c) keeping it to myself and gloating over it.

If you want to give an idea away, then treat the satisfaction of giving as its own reward. Don’t agonise about the selfishness of other people in not giving you credit. It is very hard to predict what others will value and you will become richer emotionally and financially by learning what they do value.

If you are really worried that giving ideas away will affect your financial or commercial well-being, then consult an intellectual property lawyer.

Your Leading Thoughts

Read over Malcom’s points: how do you rank on each of his three points? Where are you in this journey?
Like a trailer is the pitch for a movie, how much do you think sharing value before the sale will increase and become a part of the game in your industry?

Old Spice: Put All The Kids In The Show, and…

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Scott Gould

… and all the parents come to see them perform.

It’s a trick as old as time, and a trick that schools have been using for years. When it comes to getting people to attend the school play, there is no better way than making sure you give every kid a part – because then the whole family comes to watch them.

That’s what Old Spice did with their campaign last month. If you haven’t heard about, to save me writing all about it, you can read this post at ReadWriteWeb. The gist of it is that they created YouTube clips based on what people said on Twitter, in near-realtime fashion. You can see all the videos here. Below is one that they did to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ive3vXv-XRk

According to the guys at We Are Social, the Old Spice videos were watched 11 million times in the space of 48 hours (plus other stats here). I don’t know how much product Old Spice have shipped as a result, but they got more views that Obama’s victory speech in the same span of time, and their PR and awareness goals have no doubt been met and exceeded.

Putting The Kids In The Show

So now everyone asks “How do we do it? What was its success?” John Bell wrote a very good post on the real time nature of the campaign, John Cass wrote on its transparent inauthenticity, and Molly Flatt on the power of brand anthropomorphism. They all agree however that this isn’t something that can be replicated successfully because this is a market that rewards uniqueness just once. A clone won’t get the attention this campaign did.

For me, the takeaway lesson must be in the power of putting all the kids in the show, doing it in a real time fashion that was unique, and targeted key influencers.

Putting the kds in the show is about socialising your content. Consider threadless.com, who are a community who design and rate t-shirts by the community. Each t-shirt is always bound to have at least one customer – the person who designed it. But as their community has grown, and the average level of participation has deepened, more and more of their content has been socially created and incentives of purchasing these items has increased. People buy the t-shirts and support the company because they are emotionally invested in it, because they have co-created it.

This is the same thing I did in 2003 when I started Feedback, a youth organisation that was run by youth, for the youth. When we started out, we found it really hard to fill up our venue. Putting up posters and handing out leaflets was time consuming and largely ineffective. I remember our first event had 35 people, and we slowly increased in numbers until we jumped to 89 in March 2004 when we got a popular band from our college to perform. We jumped then again to 250 when we had our Battle of the Bands later that year.

We quickly learned that the best way to market our event and fill our venue was put people in the show who had existing followings – the same thing that Old Spice did by targeting Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lisa Barone, etc.

Skip to Like Minds in October last year, and it was the same tactic with those who we asked to partner with us on the event. By having local companies as partners, they brought in their clients to see them perform.

This is why Social Media is so powerful. You are invested in it, because you’ve co-created it. And because you are invested in, you bring people to see it and you can’t get away from it.

Your Leading Thoughts

When you look at a group photo, which is the first face you look for?
How have you socialised content to put kids in the show?
Where have you seen this tactic NOT work?

Photo courtesy of Brave Heart

Using A Community

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’m really enjoying Dan Blank’s blog at the moment. I first caught onto him through my close friend Andrew Davies at idio, and I’ve been following him for a while, but it seems these past few weeks I’ve really caught onto his writing a lot more.

Last week he wrote a post that I knew I’d love the moment I saw the title: “You Don’t Sell To A Community. You Support A Community“. You guys know I love a good strap line, especially when there’s aliteration. The great thing was that the post delivered.

It’s hard to pick a central quote (you can guess what the post was about), as it was one of those almost poetic pieces where each paragraph builds incrementally on the previous one, but perhaps the best part to me is this very accurate description of the latest marketing fad which is “build community”:

A brand should be careful about approaching social media as a sales funnel: to establish connections, build ‘trust,’ encourage a ‘community,’ and then market products and services to them. That’s not a community strategy, that is a marketing plan. And there is a difference.

This really rings home because recently I was having a leadership discussion in a venture that I’m involved in, and the painful point came up that whilst I was trying to explain we needed to build community in order to serve the community, the reality was that we were more interested in building the community in order to serve ourselves.

Turning it around is hard – we’re still in the process of doing it – and I’m learning some key lessons as I go.

Dan goes on to say that “building a community” for business is furthermore a hard and an expensive thing to do. It seems a stock answer at the moment to tell publishers in particular that they should “build community”, but I watch the people who say it and often they have never built one themselves. Dan actually argues that you don’t build them anyway – they already exist, and you help it grow.

My Experience with Community

I’ve nurtured many a community in the last 13 years that I’ve been ‘doing this’, but I think my most pertinent example would come from Like Minds.

I’ve said many times that my original intention for Like Minds was to show the local businesses that I was good at marketing, so that they’d hire me as a consultant. I was desperate to be accepted (many of the people who support me now didn’t back then), and I thought that if I could pull off a good event, they’d see.

After the success of the first Like Minds in October 09, a community – a tribe – was born in a day, but I still in mind saw that as a means to an end for getting work. Sure, I supported the community, but I didn’t see it as being a place that would be my main focus and income. I wasn’t selling to them – it’s important to clarify that – but I did see them as a way for me to secure more consulting.

It wasn’t until April this year that I realised how dearly I loved the community that was growing, and that if I focussed on serving that community, that would be far more fulfilling and rewarding. The irony is since I made that decision to not pursue consulting, consulting work has started to come in, and I turn a lot of it down in order to focus more fully on Like Minds because that’s where I’m seeing people really effected, which has always been my aim in the beginning anyway.

When a community really clicks (which I’ve been a part of many times), you know there’s no way that you can sell to them anyway. The things that they need from you, they’ll get without you blowing your horn, and you won’t given them anything but the things they need anyway, even if it’s not your thing that they need.

Your Experience with Community

Have you been on the receiving end of support and/or selling in a community?
Are you aware of any communities that actually grow based on a ‘selling’ mindset? (I don’t)
If supporting is what you do, how have you monetized that if you are nurturing a community?

Photo of Like Minds 2010 courtesy of Paul Clarke