dangerouslyawesome

I’ve had a fair amount of travel in the last 2 months, but really only one public speaking event of note. Starting now, things get crazy.

First up,

IndyHall Town Hall.

From the IndyHall website:

We’ve come a really long way in just a year and a half. We’ve connected with so many new people in so many new ways, and welcomed lots of new friends to our community. The physical space, the clubhouse, for IndyHall has been at 32 Strawberry Street for 18 months and recently we’ve found ourselves running out of desks. Unlike a gym or an airline, who can oversell and bump users, we care about our members more than anything, and are going back to our roots to figure out how to deal with this issue. Next Tuesday, March 3rd, we’ll be meeting at 32 Strawberry St at 6pm to discuss what the future of the IndyHall workspace is. Geoff and I have been working really hard to distill this issue into some key points, and talking to a lot of people about it. But we didn’t get here without everyone else’s hard work and we certainly can’t see how it makes sense to continue to grow without you. This town hall meeting is open to all IndyHall members, but also the community at large. Are you on our waiting list? Don’t miss this meeting, we want you to come be a part of our next steps. Are you someone who’s been watching us all along and wants to see what our next move could be? You’ll want to be there. Please RSVP on Facebook or by leaving a comment. We hope to see you at IndyHall. Bring your A-game. This is going to be a fun night.

This event is really important to me, and to the community, and I hope to see a lot of our supporters there.

Philadelphia Facebook Garage

The Stuzo Group is hosting the second Philadelphia Facebook Developer Garage which will focus on methods to drive sales and brand interaction for companies within Facebook.  The Philadelphia Facebook Developers Garage will be held on March 9, 2009 from 6:00 to 10:00 PM at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse, 1426 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.   This event is open to the public and attendees are asked to RSVP at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=62898818432

Talking to Olivia and Gunter from Stuzo, I found out that the event is meant to be useful to agencies, developers and businesses alike. They’re going to be featuring case studies and presentations around Facebook Platform projects and businesses. There will be some news surrounding Facebook Platform (and I have to imagine Facebook Connect) from some folks from Facebook. The event is free.

Where do I fit in? Olivia and Gunter asked me to come in and be the closing keynote. The entire day will be very Facebook-focused, discussing techniques and tools, and they’ve asked me to come in and help zoom out after the day and talk about the large scope of social technology in business. I’m pretty stoked for this.

P.S. The venue at Del Frisco’s is a Bank Vault converted into a Wine Cellar. I hear it’s sick. The event will be worth coming to if only to see that, and let my awesome closing keynote be a bonus.

Watch out, Austin

It is nearly March, and that means SXSW is coming. This will be my 2nd year as a speaker at SXSW. I’m currently leading one core conversation and on one Panel.

Core Conversations: Working Alone Sucks: Join the Coworking Revolution – Saturday March 14th – 11:30am-12:30pm We’ll be holding a round table conversation with some leaders and members of the coworking community. If you’re a veteran, or a newb, this is going to be a great session to meet some folks and learn from them. Also, don’t miss the coworking meetup at the Hotel San Jose being organized by Julie Gommell of Launchpad Coworking in Austin.

Panels: You may also be interested in… – Monday March 16th – 5:30-6:30pm Drew Olanoff from Strands asked me to join Mike Hudack from Blip.tv and Trevor Legwinski from Strands on stage to talk about how recommendations online are changing how we make decisions offline. I didn’t know how I’d fit into this panel, but now that I’ve seen some of the talking points, I’m pretty excited about it. Plus, I finally get to meet Mike.

Also worth checking out is my partner-in-crime Geoff DiMasi’s panel, “Building Regional Whuffie” on Sunday, March 15th from 3:30-4:30pm. The panel ALSO features some of my other partners in various other crimes, including Tony Bacigalupo (karaoke crimes), Matthew Wettergreen (Sriracha crimes), as well as Susan Evans (from Office Nomads) and Julie Duryea (from Souk).

And that’s all in the first 2 weeks of March. Holy shit. Here goes nothing.

Last night I was at National Mechanics for the PANMA spring social, and fashionably late as usual. That didn’t keep me from staying late and having some great discussions. One of them was with Aaron “Shaggy” Hoffer-Perkins. Shaggy (best nickname ever. jinkies.) is a partner in a new startup here in Philly, and studying entrepreneurship at Temple. Turns out, Shaggy isn’t just an entrepreneur, he’s a geek who rivals my own geekdom: he’s part of a program called “The Wayfinder Experience“, which is basically a kid’s “gaming camp” that teaches team building, leadership, and communication skills through role playing games and improvisation. His tagline is “building community through play”.

LARPing meets summer camp, with a purpose. It’s ideas like this that are crazy enough to work.

Finding out more about Shaggy, he explained his background in theater, specifically improv, and that he teaches an improv class as well. I’ve always wanted to take an improv class, not that I think my communication and improvisational skills are poor, but I think it’d be a lot of fun. This is when things got interesting. Shaggy told me the 3 guidelines for improv, and how they’ve shaped him as an entrepreneur.

• Accept and Build (yes, and…)
• Make your partner look good
• Dare to be average

Accept and Build: The “yes, and…” principle is something I think I heard first from Jason Tremblay during a brainstorming session at IndyHall. The concept lets you get all of your ideas out in the open, without worrying about them being shot down or flopping. If everyone in the circle is using the “yes, and…” principle, you can be fairly confident that someone else’s riff can pick up your dud of an idea and make it a stud. This ties into the core value of openness and sharing: don’t be afraid your idea isn’t good enough to share yet. Every time I hear someone share an idea while being open to feedback, that idea comes back 10x better.

Make your partner look good: there’s a pretty obvious tie to guideline #1 here. In fact, one really doesn’t work without the other. Your partner needs to be open to being made look good, and you need to always be looking to utilize them as an out in a way that helps them look good. I also see this as a small but crucial social capital deposit: be it for your business partners, your vendors your clients, your new leads…everyone.

I don’t get the “sabotage” mentality in business. If you’re working to make everyone else look good instead of just yourself, you end up inherently look good and at the same time open the door for others to make you look good, too. Never point fingers.

Dare to be average: This one’s a bit tough to swallow, considering my mantras include “do epic shit” and “go big or go home”. But that’s not what this is about. This is about finding uniqueness in yourself, rather than going for the obvious thing that you’re 100% sure will get the laughs (or, the users, the funding, etc). By not waiting for the “perfect idea”, or for it to be “fully baked”, you let down your guard and expose some of yourself. People are mortified of having a piece of themselves in their business, and so they are reluctant to have this kind of fundamental bond with their idea. But it’s these ideas, the “first thing in your head” ideas, that will be unique because it’s you, your voice, based on your background and your experiences.

The counter-intuitiveness is that by letting yourself “be average”, you open the door to being extraordinary.

I’m a week behind on Cluetrain posts. I know. My bad.

Things have been pretty wacky at IndyHall the last few weeks, us hitting capacity on a regular basis and ultimately stressing me out about growth in a pretty big way.

I’ve been burying myself in work, partially to cope with that stress but also to get a bunch of things done, so I’m admittedly behind in the Cluetrain series again. I’ll binge again soon and get caught up, there’s no doubt about that.

In the mean time, I wanted to share a post that I wrote last year for Centernetworks.com’s Startup Tips Month. Allen had asked for some of my perspective on startup as an independent, and I got the chance to share some of my core philosophies that were born while forming and growing We Know HTML and have carried over into subsequent projects.

Allen is re-featuring the e-book he created from the month’s worth of posts from entrepreurs I’m proud to be featured among, including Tara Hunt, Pete Glyman, Shawn Ward, Ted Rheingold, and David Weekly. You can download the whole ebook, or just read my post about how to get started as an indie.

The tips I expound are:

1. Bootstrap
2. Organize and “polish” your resume and portfolio
3. Start Blogging
4. Get out in the field
5. Don’t underestimate the value of word of mouth
6. Stay horizontal for as long as it makes sense

While a lot of these tips may feel obvious, as I’ve lived them so long, I’m sure many people can benefit from my tips and the others in the series, so I’m glad Allen is re-publishing the ebook. If you’re “recently liberated”, “newly independent”, or considering a small entrepreneurial venture, I think all of these tips still apply.

Oh, and subscribe to Centernetworks.com if you dig honest, high quality content about technology and startups beyond the usual echo chambers. Allen doesn’t pay me to say nice things about him, I truly really appreciate his approach to tech journalism. Keep up the good work dude.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #30: Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

Brand loyalty. An interesting concept in itself, considering all along I’ve been purporting that people don’t identify with companies, they identify with other people.

Since we’re talking about companies here, and companies really suck at having relationships with their customers, I’d argue that a large portion of the “brand loyalty” in the marketplace has nothing to do with relationships at all.

I think that brand loyalty, however it’s being formed, really boils down to one thing:

Habit.

We’re human, we’re creatures of habit. The path of least resistance is always saught, and habit is often a contributor to that behavior. When companies are trying to build brand loyalty, they’re instantiating themselves as part of their customers’ habits.

But the path of least resistance has changed. It’s foolish for a company to become a part of a person’s habits, and then simply rest on their laurels. There needs to be regular reinforcement. Networked markets are constantly informing each other of new habits, and the perceived cost of changing habits is the only thing in their way.

Fighting this battle gets time consuming and costly for the companies, and to some customers…it’s irritating.

When a company is willing to embrace the forms of communication we’ve been talking about all along, and empower it’s customers and employees to interact like humans, that’s when brand loyalty starts to feel more like going steady.

There are emotions at stake. “Changing partners” has a high perceived emotional cost.

Is your brand a habit, or are we going steady?

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #29: Elvis said it best: “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.”

We’re caught in a trap I can’t walk out Because I love you too much baby Why can’t you see What you’re doing to me When you don’t believe a word I say? We can’t go on together With suspicious minds And we can’t build our dreams On suspicious minds So, if an old friend I know Drops by to say hello Would I still see suspicion in your eyes? Here we go again Asking where I’ve been You can’t see these tears are real I’m crying We can’t go on together With suspicious minds And be can’t build our dreams On suspicious minds Oh let our love survive Or dry the tears from your eyes Let’s don’t let a good thing die When honey, you know I’ve never lied to you Mmm yeah, yeah

Be it a relationship between Elvis and a lover, or between a company and it’s customer, relationships aren’t sustainable if you’re always wondering if the other’s been lying to you.

Trust is hard to earn, and even harder to earn back. Don’t make me suspicious, or I will walk out.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #28: Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what’s really going on inside the company.

Why is it that so many marketing initatives are designed around carefully constructed and controlled channels of communication?

Because everybody knows what everybody else is up to, thanks to the web. And worse: everybody thinks they know what everybody else is up to, thanks to the web.

Marketing and PR should not be damage control (that’s legal’s job, right?).

If something is going on inside your company that you’re worried about your customers knowing about, it shouldn’t be marketing’s job to keep that from spreading by obscuring it with a smiley marketing project.

Instead…maybe the company should stop doing that thing they don’t want their customers to know about?

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #27: By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

The Public Relations department (or a hired firm) is often the gatekeeper for communication in a business. I’ve always found that amusing, since the methods of communication chosen by most PR practitioners are designed to protect the business and it’s interests (and there’s more on that in our next thesis).

When I was in a fraternity in college, everyone was allowed to speak on behalf of the fraternity when it was good. We saved the “single point of contact for all communication” for when shit really hit the fan. You don’t want everyone talking to the cops. But during recruitment, it was everyone’s shared responsibility to share in the communication with our new potential members.

By limiting the number of people allowed to communicate with the pulic on behalf of the company, the company is doing what we tried to do when the cops showed up at the fraternity house: keep them at bay.

But by limiting the number of people allowed to communicate with the public on behalf of the company, something else happens: that communicator’s guard goes up. If they’re the bottleneck for communication, they can only field so much at any time. Any additional communication above their comfortable threshold, their instinctive reaction is to block new requests out, and a distant uninviting, and arrogant voice, is a highly effective way to alienate your customers and keep them at bay.

Furthermore, they’re excluding the communication that goes on outside of their carefully controlled communication channels, rather than using their momentum to their own benefit!

The lesson here: don’t just allow, empower your company’s employees as well as your customers to communicate, instead of relying on a single point of contact. Try to remove communication bottlenecks except when absolutely necessary. I believe that the arrogance and distance in the collective communication “voice” of the company will begin to fade away.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #26: Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

In the last post, we talked about how Yelp empowers Carrie Estok to effectively communicate with their users. The second takeaway from the conversation I had with Carrie and Phil relates to this thesis, and has to do with companies that get reviewed on Yelp.

At the end of the day, there are two kinds of reviews on Yelp: positive and negative. What business doesn’t want to hear positive reviews from their customers? The problem is, that’s the only kind of review that many businesses want to hear. There’s been lots of talk about businesses negatively reviewed on Yelp threatening to sue for defamation.

Now, I see where these businesses are coming from. And considering Penny Arcade’s “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory“, malicious defamation certainly increases in probability online. But Yelp is a community first. And when you’ve got a community contributing, there are checks and balances, and thoee sorts of intentionally malicious reviewers tend to be filtered out.

But here’s the kicker: if someone was poorly reviewing your business, offline, they’d be talking smack and you’d have no idea about it.

Yelp is providing a chance for users to talk about your business, and for you, as the business owners, to do something about it! For free! Stop being a knucklehead and realize how valuable that is for you!

Companies are petrified of what their customers have to say about them. The attitude of “What happens when someone says something bad about me online” is ridiculous. This should not be your cue to call out the legal team. It should be your cue to reflect, and go “hm, maybe they’re right. Let’s see if we can show ‘em what we’ve got”. And then, with the help of someone like Carrie, relate to that very real person having that very real problem.

You’ll never satisfy everyone, but that’s not the point. Carrie had some really great insight: the companies she’s made contact with that got negative reviews and at least tried to improve, won her (and other community members’) respect. Even if the service didn’t really improve, their ability to come down from their Ivory Tower, take criticism constructively, and at least recognize that there could be an issue and make an attempt to correct it is far better than ignoring the problem.

Coming down from your Ivory Tower to build relationships means letting down your guard, and being prepared to hear the things that you couldn’t from all the way up there.

Some will be good.

Some will be bad.

With the appropriate perspective, it’s all valuable.

You have nothing to be afraid of besides your own ignorance of what’s being talked about inside your marketplace.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #25: Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

The issue with companies coming down from their Ivory Towers, as we’ve discussed repeatedly, is that companies aren’t particularly good at talking to people.

Worse, is that the real people inside the company that are good at talking and building relationships aren’t empowered by the company to do so.

At the Twestival in Philadelphia this past week, I met Phil Baumann and Carrie Estok. We had a really awesome discussion about Carrie’s work with Yelp (one of my favorite companies) as a community advocate, and the real value that she’s able to provide to the Philadlephia community, as well as the businesses being reviewed on Yelp.

If you’re not familiar with Yelp, it’s a review site. But unlike Amazon, it reviews businesses. And more importantly, it’s local. As we’ve discussed before, people don’t trust marketing nearly as much as they trust their peers, so the recommendations shared on Yelp are authentic and peer-to-peer. They can be good, they can be bad. They’re all honest, from the perspective of the author. And Yelp continues to find ways to capture the customer-to-customer conversations and expose them for the benefit of other customers, and ultimately, for the businesses being talked about as well.

I think part of why I like Yelp so much because of how “Cluetrain-y” their model is.

There’s two things I took away from my conversation with Phil and Carrie related to this thesis:

First, Yelp as a company embraced a mechanism for coming down from their Ivory Tower: hiring and empowering community advocates. This type of job has been recognized as extremely important for any community oriented business, and increasingly, any business at all.

While Carrie and I didn’t discuss this explicitly, I’m fairly certain that she’s able to do her job best because Yelp empowers her (having carefully selected her) to be their representative, and to represent the community she’s a part of.

That’s the difference. It’s impossible for “Yelp”, the business, to be a part of every community that they service. But they knew the importance of building quality relationships with their users and the businesses that their users review, so they needed representation. Furthermore, that representation would be most effective if it came from within the community. There was no Ivory Tower for that person to have to come down from. That person, in this case Carrie, is able to continue being a member of the Philadelphia community and have the tools and facility that Yelp provides at her disposal. Yelp trusts her to be an ambassador for their communication. If they didn’t, there would be no point to having her on staff.

The second takeaway from our conversation will address the next thesis, Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

I did not forget about this series, I swear. Going offline for 9 days has taken a bit harder toll on my workflow than expected, so I’m a few days behind.

My promise to you is to be back on track before the end of this week, hell or high water.