Some Presentations Coming Up – IndyHall Town Hall, Facebook Garage Philly, SXSW Interactive
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.
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3 Guidelines for Business you can learn from Who's Line is it Anyway
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.
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Centernetworks Startup Tips Month: Revisited
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:
- Bootstrap
- Organize and “polish” your resume and portfolio
- Start Blogging
- Get out in the field
- Don’t underestimate the value of word of mouth
- 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.
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Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: 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.
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?
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Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."
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.
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