About my New Forbes.com Column

February 22, 2012 · 3 comments in Forbes

I am thrilled to announce I have started writing a column at Forbes.com It’s called ItSeemstoMe, which was the name of my first blog. While my original blog was about anything I wanted it to be, this new column is about issues, trends and news in the tech sector.

I’ve already posted my first and second columns.

As always, I’ll be writing for business audiences about social media and web companies as well as the events surrounding them. I am also still very much interested in startups that have a shot at changing the world. I would also like to profile some of the original thinkers in the technology industry. ItSeemstoMe will be more issue oriented than I have been, looking deeper into issues that are likely to shape how today will become tomorrow.

Above all, I am a sucker for a good story, so please tell me one, so long as it touches on technology and it’s nonfiction.

If you think you have something that fits in, please let me know. The best way is via good old retro email. Put the word Forbes in the subject line and send me 2-3 paragraphs on why you think it would work in my column and some links you think I should see.

I ask you to do only two things first: 1. Read some of my stuff, and 2. Tell me me, don’t sell me.

Stellar Presentations: A Sample

February 21, 2012 · 0 comments in Stellar Presentations

Earlier this month, I published my fourth book, Stellar Presentations, an Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks on Kindle. The paperback is due out by March 1.  It is a very short book designed to help anyone who needs to make a public presentation, but particularly it is for entrepreneurs at conferences, with the media and investors. While it is a “How-To” book, I wrote it as a story-teller with over 35 years experience.

It is an extremely short book. It will take you a mere two hours to read it. But it took me 25 years of attending media interviews and conferences to gather the wisdom that I share in the book.

Here’s a sample:

Introduction:   But What if I Suck?

I was standing in front of a room filled with Indian entrepreneurs. The event was the annual NASSCOM Product Conclave, that country’s largest gathering of startups and the people who care about them.

It looked like I’d be speaking to a half-empty room, but it turned out that Vinod Khosla, the luminary billionaire Indian-born American venture capitalist was speaking in the room next door. When his session filled up, the overflow drifted in to the next closest venue where I was about to speak.

I was a bit apprehensive.  This was my first visit to India. While, I have Indian friends in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, this was different.

I was not yet sure I understood the culture of India. I had hoped to have a few days to glimpse the country before speaking there, but I had missed my original flight and barely got to Bangalore in time for my scheduled appearance.

So there I was in front of a room filled mostly with people who’d rather be listening to the hometown hero next door, covering a topic I had not previously talked about.

The lights were dimmed. A moderator said a few kind words and all eyes turned to me. A few seconds passed as we checked each other out.

I began by sharing a thought that had occurred to me as the room had filled up: “I’ve been assigned to talk about how to give a great presentation. This is scary. What if my presentation on great presentations sucks?”

A few people laughed. Then almost everyone joined in.  Their faces went from neutral but curious to a look that said they were interested in what else I had to say.

I had made it to first base—or wherever Indians go when they get a hit in cricket, their sport of choice.

My talk went very well. When it was over, a small crowd gathered around me asking me questions. Some followed me out into the hallway. A few inquired about hiring me to consult or coach them.

I am still enjoying online conversations with people who saw that presentation and I’ve been invited to speak again next year. This is important because succeeding at a business-related presentation is merely a first step. The furthest you get is first base. I’ll explain more about that later.

One outcome of that talk is this book.  I realized that the majority of the people who came to see me speak were technology entrepreneurs. They were very well-educated as engineers, but they knew little about the communications issues I covered.

The invitation to speak to startups about how to give great presentations made me realize how much I have learned on the topic over the past 30 years.

I came home to America thinking about the strategic importance of skillful presentations to startups, particularly at the critical moment when they are launching their company or flagship products.

So I decided to write Stellar Presentations, a small book for a niche market that I know and love. This is a book for tech entrepreneurs who need to present at conferences. I hope you find it useful.

I also hope that you find it fun. As I will explain, I believe fun is among the most vastly underrated of all business tools.

Throughout Stellar Presentations, I will share stories about speakers I have known, and why some of them remain fresh in my memory after many years and why some of them, well, memorably sucked.

Please tell me what you think: email: shelisrael1@gmail.com. On Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, I’m shelisrael.

How Social Media Helps Me Write & Sell Books

February 9, 2012 · 2 comments in GNTV,Naked Conversations,Social Media,Stellar Presentations,Twitterville

I have often felt that publishing a book is the closest I–as a male–can come to experience what it’s like to have a baby. Earlier this week, I delivered my fourth, but you would think it was my first because the experience has made me jittery to say the least.

So yesterday, when someone on Twitter pointed me to Jane Friedman’s  Please Don’t Blog Your Book and I was , I was crankier in my tweet response than I should have been. I apologize for the argumentative tone I adopted, but at the core of it, I believe her advice was really bad. I think she  displayed more ignorance than wisdom in her piece and I mean that in the politest of ways.

It’s a subject that I have a good deal of experience exploring and I doubt that I would be enjoying the success that I have– had it not been for how I used social media to interact with people.

My first book was Naked Conversations, co-authored with Robert Scoble. Robert had the heretical idea that we would blog our book as we wrote it. I humored him, reasonably no publisher would allow it. But some smart risk-taking people at John Wiley like Jim Minatel who was instrument in getting our publisher to allow us to publish interview notes and the first drafts of every chapter. This had never been done before, and it has never been repeated, so it may have been that Robert and I went through a brief window that slammed shut after we were done.

I don’t have the stats, but I am willing to bet that most people who followed the book online bought the final product. I know I signed hundreds of copies from people I got to know while blogging the early drafts.

Then all sorts of people from all over the world jumped in. Some corrected facts. Others pruned typos. Still others suggested stories to add and a few of them were the best in the whole book. One follower led a campaign to stop us from calling the book “Blog or Die,” which would have likely hurt us with the corporate readers we targeted.

So first off, bloggers helped us write a better book, far better than if we had worked under the cloak of silence that most traditional publishers required.

But wait, there’s more. When Naked came out, bloggers became our champions. Most of those who were consulting in the enterprise knew most of what we had written, but they loved how we said it and the brought the book into the enterprise where it did quite well. It is often called a seminal blog for business blogging and that would not have happened without the collaboration we enjoyed with hundreds of bloggers all over the world, as we wrote the book.

By the time I wrote Twitterville, social media had changed dramatically. Much of the conversation had moved from blogs onto social networks. My new publisher, Portfolio, was unwilling to let me post early chapters, but they were willing to let me maintain an ongoing conversation about the book and what I was writing about on Twitter.

The result was that over 50% of the stories I wrote about in Twitterville were delivered to me by tweeters. When the book was published, Portfolio did a remarkable job of traditional PR. I got interviewed by almost every major business publication I can think of. But I remain convinced that the word-of-mouth of people on Twitter made my book among the two-or-three most successful of the 43 books published with some derivative of Twitter in  the title.

I didn’t make as much noise in social media with Stellar Presentations, which launched two days ago as a Kindle-only book. This was because, I had originally planned it as a Kindle Single, which requires nothing be published in advance. Now that I’ve changed courses, I will post selected sections in the coming weeks.

But on this the second day, the only way anyone as ever heard of Stellar is on one previous blog post and a few dozen tweets that I have posted. To my surprise and relief, the book is doing quite well, thanks to the support of social media people who are spreading the word–not to benefit me so much–as to tell their friends about something they like.

Friedman noted in our tweeted conversation that she doesn’t acquire books to publish in social media. That explains why she wasn’t a pioneer. But to advise authors of any subject not to blog all or part of their books is pretty backward thinking or so it seems to me.

She knows as does just about everyone else that traditional publishing is in deep trouble. By now she should realize that online distribution and conversations have a great deal to do with the disruption of her profession. My advice to any aspiring author is to follow your reader who now is likely to hang out in social venues, who now is likely to buy books recommended by online peers.

Five times in the last two days I have offered to send my book to people for free. Five times they have refused saying they would prefer to support me by purchasing the book on Kindle.

Has anyone ever said something like that to a publisher? I don’t think so,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Announcing my new book ‘Stellar Presentations’

February 7, 2012 · 7 comments in Stellar Presentations

I am thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks has gone live on Kindle. A paperback version should be available by Feb. 22. It is not a social media book.

Stellar Presentations is a brief but deep look at the craft and strategy of presentation. While I focus on startups and conferences, I believe that the book contains useful content for anyone who needs to speak in public.

It is based on my many years experience as a presentation coach, a conference reporter and as a keynote speaker.

It is a very brief book–I guess it will take you about two hours to read. Startups are at their most frantic when preparing to introduce their products, so I’ve tried to cut to the chase and to not waste anyone’s time.

Simultaneously, it covers a lot of ground. Stellar explains the three key questions that starts your preparation process on the right track. It tells you what attendees want from you and what you should expect from them. It explains why credibility is like virginity and why that matters to you as a speaker and it tells you about the secrets of cantaloupe.

It analyzes Powerpoint versus Storytelling, the two most common approaches to a presentation’s structure and it looks at the advantages of being small as a company. It also explains why Steve Jobs was the best presenter in tech history, but why you should ignore what he did on stage.

This is my first self-publishing effort and I had a lot of fun writing Stellar Presentations. To buy, just click on the book cover icon to your right. I’ve tried to make it a fun read as well. Fun makes serious points more memorable as I point out in the book as well.

As a self-publishing project, your feedback is more important to me than it has ever been. And your comments on Amazon will help thers decide if this book is right for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newt Gingrich and the Moon Colony

February 4, 2012 · 5 comments in Miscellaneous,Personal & off-the-wall,Politics

Don’t get me wrong. Hell will freeze over before I would ever vote for Newt Gingrich. First, off the man was named for a lizard. Secondly–and more seriously–you can directly track the origins of the current polarization between the two major US political parties on Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker of the House.

And like every candidate in this the most mud-slinging president primary campaign in history, he has been made to look bad in a great many ways. It is hard for me and others to recognize what sometimes happens and that is good ideas come from bad people.

A few weeks back, Gingrich proposed that we build a space colony on the moon and that has been the subject of a great deal of ridicule. Comedians are still having their fun with that one and Tweeters still wonder what Gingrich was smoking.

But wait a minute. Forget who the source is. Think about the idea. We elected the current incumbent because we thought he had a vision for America, because his eloquence fooled us into thinking he could lead better than he has led. And among his early actions was to shut down NASA’s manned space program. Too expensive he said. These are tough times.

So a bunch of our nation’s brightest scientists got laid off and a whole supply chain of human’s got financially hurt in the name of this great frugality.

Years ago, a young visionary president who made great speeches was elected president. In his first, special address to Congress, in his first of three springtimes in office Jack Kennedy said, “Before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

And, as I recall, their was a landslide of comic parody, as well as editorial columns explaining why man could never walk on the moon and besides what would he do once he got there?

The answer, of course, is the reason people should walk on the moon is the same reason why humpback whales jump completely out of the ocean: Because they can.

It seems to me, that what makes us unique from other animals is that our entire history is based on going beyond what we have done. Before we consider the benefits or catastrophes, we simply have to see if we can do it.

Why should man walk on the moon? Because some day, we can build a colony on it? What will we do then? Look around and see what else we can do, where else we can go, we can learn more about the moon, and thus about the earth and our universe and how life got to here and anywhere else that it might exist.

And yes the cost is huge at a time when people are losing their homes. But to me, the cost is an investment, one that will create a great many new jobs that may be more appealing than the manufacturing our current president seems to be focused upon.

What we learn along the way will give the world new technology that is likely to pervade into computing, science, medecine, earth sciences, the classroom and places that we cannot yet imagine.

It seems to me that Newt’s Moon Colony is the only idea I’ve heard from any candidate for president, and what we need more than business managers, speechmakers and ideologues in the White House is someone with vision and leadership capabilities.

No I do not want Newt to be president. But I do think he should be commended–not ridiculed–for this idea which s entirely worthy of consideration and intelligent debate.

Don’t you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yahoo CEOs: less vision than Ray Charles

January 4, 2012 · 1 comment in tech business

Yahoo! has announced appointment of a new CEO: Scott Thompson. Who, you might ask? Well he’s a guy who lifted PayPal from a billion-dollar subsidiary of eBay into a multibillion dollar entity. What does he plan to do, you might ask. Well, he doesn’t yet. In a conference call with press and analysts he kept emphasizing that he just got there and he needs time.

That’s precisely what Carol Bartz said for the years during which she was at the helm, watching the Yahoo ship slowly and steadily sink below the sea of change that the company has ignored for more than a decade.

How will Yahoo under Thompson be different from Yahoo under Thompson? He doesn’t know he needs time and thus the once-magnificent Yahoo, once a flagship of online consumerism continues to sink–perhaps just little faster.

Yahoo used to be filled with young, bright, irreverent determined talent. They were part of the culture that moved people’s habits online. It was where we began to talk with each other, shopped, got our news, stored and shared our photos. It is one of the fountainheads from which sprung the ideas and entities that dominate online today.

It’s survival has been in question for a long time and before that it’s direction as well as it’s decision-making. It’s founder declared search to be worthless, which turned out to be a bit short-sighted. His replacement had a vision to Hollywood and Silicon Valley cultures.  That seemed like it would be as daunting as getting sheep and cattle to graze on the same land. It proved to be harder than mating them.

The talent in the company remained for many years at the middle of the company. They did not start leaving the ship when the leaks began. They only started leaving–reluctantly when they realized that the decision-making level was clueless on how to stem the leaks and adjust course.

In short, Yahoo is one big directionless mess, lacking mission, vision, talent and a constituency that includes, early adopters, social strategists and a compelling reason for any adviser to choose them over companies like Google who thought search had some chance of being worthwhile.

Into this steps Scott Thompson. I never heard of him before today, which says nothing about his ability to lead and inspire a foundering and demoralized team. I’ve read a bit about him today and could find not a single quality in his past to make me feel any more confident today than I did yesterday in terms of Yahoo’s future.

What I see is someone who managed PayPal during a period of organic growth. He replaced the innovators and disrupters who started the company and made it valuable, and he made PayPal dull but valuable.  Yahoo is already dull. It loses more value every day.

What had I hoped would happen? Who would I have looked for to replace the acerbic Carol Bartz?

Well, I would have looked for someone very different from Bartz. The only difference I see is that the new captain does not swear like a sailor. Other than that, they are both visionless managers who understand operating margins and SEC regulations and none of the stuff that goes to the soul of a living corporation.

Yahoo needs a visionary leader. Instead, they chose someone who seems to have less vision than Ray Charles, and I doubt he can sing or play the piano with any unique style.

Yahoo needed as Steve Jobs. Instead they got something that is quieter and grayer. They need to find and excite new, younger

customers. Instead they have someone who understands operational efficiencies. They needed a showman of  Nolan Bushnell qualities. Instead they have selected someone with all the charisma of a tax auditor. They need someone who can present a vision to a new generation of users, rather than faire well at a shareholders’ meeting.

Yahoo needs to join the social conversation. Bartz eschewed it completely. She thought that Yahoo’s customers were the advertisers, when in fact they are the people advertisers want to reach and we have left Yahoo in droves over the years. Yahoo’s constituency is now older, slower to adopt new technology, has less disposable income and is likely to live [and spend] for a shorter time than his or her grandchildren in college.

Is it too late for Yahoo? probably. Is there still hope? Of course there is.

But the appointment Thompson gives me less of it, not more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Favorite Books of 2011

December 31, 2011 · 2 comments in Personal & off-the-wall

It’s the last day of an odd year and many people are reflecting on life. Some of my friends are using blogs to write about the death of the blog. Others are reviewing the great moments in technology or social media in 2011. But too me, there were very few truly great moments in technology. We have as an industry evolved from a period of great disruption and are now focused on refinement.

This may be good for users and business, but it is pretty boring for writers, or so it seems to me.

So, I thought I would dedicate my last post of the old year to one of my great passions: books. I read a lot–almost entirely nonfiction.  I like action/adventure, biography and history, which dominates this list of my 2011 favorites.

So, in order of my preference, here’s my list

  • Unbroken by Laura Hilenbrand. This is my 2011 Shel Book Award winner, perhaps the only great book of the past year. Hilenbrand’s last book was about Seabiscuit, a homely and unwanted horse that turn out to be the world’s fastest. Unbroken is about Louis Zamperini, a juvenile delinquent to emerge into possibly the world’s fastest human. But his competing career was interrupted by World War II where he joined the Air Core. That in turn got interrupted by his plane crashing, where he drifted with others for an epic length of time in shark-infested waters, before the Japanese picked him up. That began a sage of abuse in interment camps.  If you only read one book on this list, choose this.
  • The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. This book examines how Online Companies watch your habits and choose what you get to see in social networks, search, purchasing and even movie rentals. The book opened my eyes to the impact of data personalization practiced by Facebook, Google and virtually all major online businesses. It made personalization my top concern in technology.
  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson This is currently Amazon’s top seller. An authorized biography by perhaps the best current biographer, this book gives you an inside view of Jobs and what happened along the way of his piloting the company from start up into the world’s most valuable company. I already knew a fair amount of Jobs in the early years and found Isaacson’s depiction completely accurate. I learned a great deal that I did not know about recent years. While this book is definitely worth a read, I somehow found myself disappointed in a few ways. While it is a balanced look at one of technology’s great genius/assholes, I felt the hard-to-reach soul of Jobs remained out-of-reach to the author and as compensation, he gave a little too much redundant information on Jobs obsessions with control.
  • On China, by Henry Kissinger. I am no great lover of Henry Kissinger, but I cannot deny his brilliance. I am not certain he actually wrote this deep and comprehensive work, but whoever did is one Hell of a good writer. Kissinger looks far, far back then brings us into the times where he was a player and then into China today. It is my 7th book on China and in my view the best. There are a few slightly self-serving sections, but Kissinger manages overall, keeps his significant ego under control.
  •  Fire on the Horizon by journalist Tom Shroder and oil rig captain John Konrad takes you inside the events leading up to and including the BP Gulf oil rig disaster. It lets you understand–but certainly not condone–how people who were not idiots could have made a string of decisions that led to the worst oil spill disaster in history. Very well written. You get to see the humanity in the players.
  • In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce. In preparation for my first visit to India this year, I read three books, each dealing with modern India [after the death of Gandhi.  In my view this one, written by a Financial Times editor who lived there was clearly the best. It gave me great insights into the experiences I had during my brief visit.
  • Rawhide Down by Del Quentin Wilber tells the story of the near assassination of Ronald Reagan by one of the secret service agents who was there. It is a surprisingly candid, human and gripping narrative. Quite well-written.
  • Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann. Is a Kindle Single–essentially a long magazine article by a journalist who visited north Japan after it was walloped by a tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster. He paints a bleak picture that educated me far beyond the news accounts I had read. It got me to understand and appreciate the potential for the new Kindle Single publications that Amazon has been pushing.
  • David Suskind by Stephen Battaglio. There was a time when television could have stirred a Renaissance of culture, news reporting and shared information. It obviously lost. Susskind, along with NBC’s David Sarnoff was a giant in trying to bring quality to TV when it was still new. I find Suskind’s story–and  the whole issue of what happened to TV to be of great relevance to those of us concerned with the future of social media. A good read.
May the new year bring you joy. If 2011 was a bit odd, I hope 2012 will be more even for you no matter what you do.

 

 

Is EMail Dead?

December 20, 2011 · 5 comments in Social Media,tech business

John Naughton, writing in the Guardian has a good piece based on email he received from Mark Zuckerberg, forecasting the death of email. It will be replaced, if Zuck has his way, with Facebook’s new Messenger service. Naughton does a good job of refuting the self-serving prophesy, but I think there are more reason why the imminent death of email is less vision and more hallucination.

Naughhton is wrong on one point. Predicting the death of email is not new. I’ve been hearing such forecasts ever since blogging and social media started gaining momentum. Dr. Danah Boyd, the a professor at UC Berkeley researching the impact of social media on youth, made the prediction at a 2004 conference, and she built her case on the same premise that Zuckerberg uses: Young people are using less and less email.

Seven years have gone by. Many of the youth Boyd studied are now college graduates and in the workplace where I’m betting most of them now have to use email and see the wisdom of that requirement. Dr. Boyd herself is now at Microsoft Research, where I’m betting the company requires her to use email for her confidential business communications.

And that word “confidential” hits a nerve when we discuss Facebook Messenger eclipsing email. I can think of no company to trust less than Facebook with your confidential business information. Facebook has a much-noted and hopefully, long-remembered disdain for user privacy. They seem to think that if you post content there, then they own it, and they just might elect to reuse it in collaboration with advertisers.

There are other reasons that email will endure. For example:

  • The archiving is better and more searchable.
  • Managing and downloading attachments remain superior to Facebook
  • It’s easier to review long threads that take place over lengthy periods of time
  • It’s often easier to find a specific conversation in email
  • With GMail, it is easier to manage and delete spam than it is in Facebook
Don’t get me wrong. I remain an early and passionate champion of social media in work and life. I could write a book about why I think you should use social media. In fact I did–twice. But I do not think social media will replace email any more than Rock music replaced the symphony.
Yes, I probably use less email than I would if social had not come along. But then, I’d probably listen to more symphonies if Rock had not come along.

But at the end of the day, with all the social networking we use, there is a time to communicate online in private. EMail remains an excellent choice in many, many situations, and for me, when Facebook and privacy are mentioned in the same sentence, I find myself becoming immediately uncomfortable.

I tend to avoid predictions, because the neat thing about the future is it always brings surprises when it becomes the present. But I will predict that email will outlive Facebook. Don’t get me wrong. I recognize that Facebook is the great success story of the first decade of this century.

Today the conventional wisdom is that the company is unstoppable in its attempt to transform the Web into one huge walled megalopolis called Facebook.

The tech cemeteries and old age homes are filled with other companies that held similar aspirations and positions in their times, companies that took down giants to become giants then, in turn, got taken down by some disruptive upstart that they had disdained.

Facebook is just a company. Like those before it will flourish, grow fat and old and be replaced. On the other hand email is a generic thing and in one form or another is likely to last a much longer time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Jew’s View of Christmas

December 17, 2011 · 31 comments in Personal & off-the-wall

Wife Paula, dog Brewster & some bearded guy. Photo by Shel

[Note: I first posted this in December 2003 and have reposted it almost every December since. I hope you enjoy it.]

I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., an overwhelmingly Christian city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year.  Schools were closed. Parents enjoyed rare paid days off. Often, snow coated the ground. Churches stood in every neighborhood and their bell towers would chime carols all day long.

I was a Jewish kid and I knew this day was not for me, But, I just couldn’t help feel the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be simultaneously European and Jewish, were ambivalent.  They loved the decorations and the excitement they saw in their younger son, but still, they kept reminding us that we were merely observers of someone else’s special day.

But we were active observers. We could not resist.

Our family would drive to gentile neighborhoods where we admire the lights, decorations and even manger scenes. One year, we  ventured all the way to Boston–in those days a two-hour drive. There we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons. If you looked from one side, you could see the Golden Dome of the Massachusetts, state house, a symbol of our government. If you looked the other way, there was the venerable Park Street Church. Beside our reindeer, was a huge, illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas Day and aunts, uncles and cousins family came for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room. It was just “the Holiday.”

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy.

As a Jewish kid, we celebrated Chanukah. There were gifts, and cholesterol/carb-soaked latkas. We Chanukah songs and played with toy tops called dreydle and it was fun.

But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed to pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere: in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Chanukah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, and my brother and I looked forward to it long in advance.

But grandfather gelt wasn’t the main event.  How could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit toy-making elves, and flying reindeer?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if most were  only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality of day.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow Elementary School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how my Christian friends had awakened Dec. 25 to find living rooms, like Cornucopias, overflowing with great stuff like Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer sleds, red wagons and Erector sets. All they had to do was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before for some strange guy named Santa Claus.

I wondered about Santa. He looked too fat for the chimneys he allegedly used for entry. He never seemed to land on burning embers and his suit never looked sooty. But still, the proof was there that the guy delivered.

 

But beyond the gifts and Santa mystery, there were the miracles. The Christian holiday was about the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” We had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era– latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against Assyrian invaders, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. At a time when the stereotyped Jewish male was a bit of a wimp, Maccabee made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, our Jackie Robinson. He was Jewish, tough and if you didn’t like it, he could kick your butt.

I started remembering all this while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had boasted the highest murder rate in the country–outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and the Sun Microsystems campus [now Oracle].

But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long leather coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.” There wasn’t space I guess, for the tagline, which of course is, “Good will toward men.”

Tomorrow will be my 68th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Assyrian butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants–Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus,  atheists, Confucians and even Republicans. In my travels, I’ve come to know people of many faiths and hues and I always marvel at how very much alike we are when we sit down and try to know each other.

I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come true and I will be grateful to you if your prayers deliver the dream.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening–albeit without ribbons on my head. Monday our home will filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth.”

Needed: An Annual Tech Conference Calendar

December 12, 2011 · 7 comments in tech business

It’s December and like a great many professionals in the tech industry, I’m trying to determine what events to plan and budget what I do for next year. There are a great many people looking at the same time/place/budget issues, ranging from home office folk like me, to C-elevel global enterprise executives.

It surprises me how incredibly difficult it is to gather what I need. I asked about this on my social networks, and three sites were frequently recommended: Plancast, Upcoming.com and Gary’s Guide. Each of these sites is useful if you want to find a meetup, tweetup or greetup in a specific major city, in the next 30 days or so.

But they are useless in letting you look at the country or the world over the next year and they are even worse at letting you slice by industry segment, rather than geographic megalopolis.

What I did earlier today is exactly what I did last December. I went to various sites to see what dates have been set for Techcrunch Launch SF & NYC, SxSW, Launch, SxSW, MacWorld Expo, PopTech, TED, Gnomedex, Web 2.0, BlogWorld Expo and DEMO. There’s also an international element. I want to know when Les Web is taking place in Paris, when Nasscom Conclave will be held in India and what’s big and promising in China or Japan.

I won’t go to all of these. But knowing when and where they are being held is useful to me in many ways. To make my decision, I don’t want a week-by-week list, I want to see 2012 on a single screen [scrolldown permitted].

If you stop right there, you will make me happy. If you want to start there then continue tp the point where you could make revenue for your effort, I see quite a few cool ways to expand:

  • Drill-down by segments for social web, technologists, B2B, etc. indepth
  • Offer links to all the sites where we can see details and register.
  • Provide space for citizen reviews.
  • Hire professionals to give reviews available just on your site.

It surprises me that this does not seem to exist. If I overlooked something please let me know. If you would like to start something like this in your spare time, I will be happy to help you figure out how to build and market it.

I’m convinced it is a mousetrap worth building.

 

Raising the Dead on Social Networks

December 11, 2011 · 8 comments in Social Media,tech business

Marc Orchant was my friend. He made a single statement that may have saved Global Neighbourhoods from becoming yet another failed book project. In March 2005, Scoble and I talked our publisher, Jon Wiley into hiring Marc as our editor.

Thirty days later, Robert and I had not yet produced a single chapter to edit. In fact, we had not filed a single word. We were too busy fighting like Oscar and Felix in the Odd Couple. We disagreed on everything about the book, including the title, the language the writing process and inadvertently, we had placed Marc in between us like a ping pong ball between two paddles.

Marc called me late on a Sunday afternoon to inform me that he was resigning from the project. “You guys don’t need an editor,” he told me. “You need a marriage counsellor.” Marc’s resignation jarred Robert and I into the reality of our situation and we started collaborating in earnest. We produced a pretty good book and I told Marc that we owed him a debt of gratitude for the wake up call.

Marc died suddenly on Dec. 2, leaving a wonderful wife and two kids. I think of Marc from time-to-time, as most people remember friends who have gone, but I had no plans to share this story, until Twitter today, recommend that I follow Marc. I clicked on it, and saw that his last tweet is still in December 2009.  As I thought about it, I realized that I almost certainly still follow Marc. It shouldn’t matter because he is not posting and most of us don’t think to unfriend and unfollow people we care about when they die.

I did mention the incident on Twitter and Facebook and received several comments on people who have had similar experiences. Deb McAllister mentioned she had received a similar invite from Facebook on the first anniversary of her friend’s death.

Deb and I and other people who share similar experiences will survive the little twinges of sorrow that such macabre reminders cause. The question is why should we?

It should be a pretty simple process to take down all accounts that remain inactive for a period of time–let’s say 90 days. The social networks do not need to investigate why an account goes inactive, but if someone does not use their account for 90 days, it should be classified as inactive and not be counted.  Accounts that have gone dormant should certainly not be recommended to active users at any time for any reason.

So why doesn’t Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other socnets exercise the good taste and sensitivity to quietly de-active aging dormant accounts?

I don’t know the answer but I suspect it is headcount. There is news value and ad revenue attached to headcount. It can impact investment dollars and company valuations. For us users, such practices may be sad reminders of people who we’ve lost for some company decision makers, it can be a case of the more the merrier–or least the more lucrative.

They used to call Chicago’s election day “Resurrection Day,” because it was when the dead would rise to vote–often several times. It explains such mismatches that have Twitter claiming 200 million users, while others estimate those who are active at closer to 80 million.

It might also explain why Facebook claims the incredible number of 800 million accounts, or about one in seven people on Earth. The percentage grows higher very fast when you start deducting people who have no electricity, are illiterate, old, infirm, under the age of 10 or perhaps just, plain dead.

With Facebook’s estimates being generally regarded as true, I begin to wonder when they will have more users, than the Earth has people.

As for me, I have to admit, I’m just a bit thankful. I was reminded of someone who I really liked and how his one-liner very likely changed the course of my life while demonstrating a great example of what we would soon call a naked conversation.

 

My take on the $2.5 million blog libel judgement

December 8, 2011 · 11 comments in Braided Journalism,Social Media

A few days ago, I posted a piece about the Pepper Spray incident at UC Davis. When people saw the original video clip, they overwhelmingly supported students and felt the police had acted harshly and without justification. When I posted a longer video clip, those who commented on my blog, on Twitter and Facebook were about evenly divided on whether police actions were justified or not.

The point of my post seems to have gotten a little lost. I was calling for a need for balance in citizen-generated news content. I was emphasizing that when we see content from sources we don’t know, we need to keep an open mind on what we see.

Yesterday, an Oregon Judge ruled that Crystal L. Cox, had to fork up $2.5 million in libel damages because she was not a journalist, and therefore not protected by Oregon Shield Laws. This ruling, in my view, is hogwash. It goes against at least two previous rulings and I am reasonably certain that if Ms. Cox stops trying to defend herself in court, a decent lawyer will win her case on appeal.

Social media and traditional media is all media. Every company is now a media company and every person who posts on Facebook–or anywhere else–is now a journalist. And as has always been the case, there is a chasm of difference in the quality of reporting in the media–all of the media.

So while I think Cox deserves to be called a journalist, protected by Shield Laws, I don’t think she is a very good one. Take a second to read the post that got her into trouble. It is more name-calling than it is a report. The names that could be considered libelous are: “Thug, thief and liar.” Those terms can certainly be considered defamatory, a key issue in any libel suit. Her tone of writing seems intended to hold an executive up to public scorn, another component of libel.

In reading the Cox blog post, I am unsure whether or not what she wrote is true, and truth is the ultimate defense of libel.

In short, while I absolutely defend Cox’s right to be a journalist, I do not defend a blogger’s right to slander someone. The content is justifiably challengeable, if you ask me, whether the publisher is Crystal Cox or the NY Times.

To me this case and the Pepper Spray Videos are two closely related issues. It is self-evident that we are now the media. But what needs to evolve is that we need to behave with the same level of responsibility that professional journalists have been expected to use since long before the first blog was posted to the internet.

What I cover for @OpenForum

December 6, 2011 · 0 comments in Public Relations,story telling,tech business

I write a regular column for OpenForum, the American Express small business community forum. I am always interested in story leads from small businesses, companies targeting small businesses, or their PR representatives.

But we will both save time if you take a few moments to read my stuff–just a few columns to see what interests my readers and me.

To summarize, I look for:

  • Case studies of how a new mobile, web or social app is allowing small businesses to succeed in ways that is interesting or useful to to small businesses
  • People who have useful tips on some aspect of social or mobile apps–but they have to be unique and valuable. We all keep seeing the same advice over-and-over again.
  • A company to profile who uses social or mobile for highly localized or niche-focused communications
  • Launches of new products or companies that break new ground. Another social network does not interest me. A new service that helps people deal with healthcare insurance companies, or provides advanced analytics to small businesses does.

I do not cover products that do not exist. I am not interested in how great it will be until it can be downloaded. I am not interested in reporting on another restaurant, coffee shop or law office, real estate office because I already have covered those topics. I am looking for new and different.

I find a majority of my stories through social media. I regularly ask for story ideas on Twitter and Facebook all the time. Those networks are a good way for starting a conversation, but the best way to pitch me in any detail is to send me a few paragraphs by email at shelisrael1@gmail.com.  A good subject line is “OpenForum story idea,” or something of that nature.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Apple Computer’s Social Media Deficiency

December 6, 2011 · 11 comments in Social Media,tech business

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple Computer and its steadfast, top-down policy of avoiding online conversations. As an Apple product enthusiast who spends much of most waking hours following and evangelizing social media, the issue has been a nagging thorn in my side.

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by a Hebrew language blogger/journalist about social media. I talked about the extremely cool things being done by Dell Computer, SAP, Ford Motors and IBM, when he dropped the “A question.”

“What about Apple. They don’t do anything in social media, and they are doing just great. If social media is so important why is Apple doing so well?”

Good question. I’ll try to answer below.

Simultaneously, I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s brilliantly balanced authorized biography of Steve Jobs. This is a book, the Jobs, knowing the secret that the cancer that had attacked him was going to kill him, repeatedly urged Isaacson to write a book that would remind us of all the Apple founder’s many character flaws and inform readers of some previous unknown. It puzzles me, that Mr. Command-and-Control, would authorize and encourage such a tell-it-all biography.

Now, yesterday, my friend and namesake Shel Holtz wrote a blistering condemnation of Apple Computer, for it’s lack of transparency. I agree with almost every observation that Shel makes in his broadside. Where he and I differ is that because of Apple’s refusal to join the conversation, Shel refuses to buy the company’s products.

Conversely, I swim in Apple Products. I’m currently sitting at a desk, looking at no less than six Apple products [MacbookPro, Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, iPad & iPhone 4S].  I have consistently underestimated the quality and brilliance of them. Perhaps my worst all-time call was when I called the iPad “an oversized cellphone that doesn’t allow calling and generally an ugly puppy.”

I also wrote scathingly several years back about a company arrogant enough to call its product support staff “geniuses” and a company so foolish as to rent expensive retail space and leave the square footage so dramatically sparse.

Since then, I have spent my share of time leaning over the Genius Bars of several Apple stores. I have found the quality of staff to be consistently excellent. I have never walked away without my problem being solved. In fact, it is probably the best retail support I have ever experienced.  Likewise, I have learned what Apple planned to do with all the “Zenly” open floor space–they have filled it with customers–almost all of them happy.

So how do I reconcile my argument that all businesses need to join the conversation, while simultaneously being an Apple products and support zealot.

Well, let me take a step back. Since 2005, I’ve consulted about 100 companies on some aspect of social media strategy. I’ve also written about another 300-400 companies. I’ve covered all sizes and many categories of companies and I am convinced that online conversation is becoming a universal, valuable and mandatory way of doing business and providing support solutions. It is essential for recruiting the best and brightest of people, particularly of  newest generation to enter the workplace. Social media allows companies to bring new and improved products to market faster, at lower cost and with reduced marketing expenses.

So why does Apple Computer get away with ignoring it?

Well, one of the few common threads in these hundreds of companies I’ve talked with is that each had a problem, an turned to social media as a solution or at least part of it. Apple did not. Apple has been under the thumb of one of the most brilliant command and control people of industrial history.

The brilliant part is a key. He seems to have known what we customers wanted before we did. There are few industrialists who have had this talent. One was Henry Ford. Ford, supported Adolph Hitler for many years, published America’s leading anti-semitic newspaper, hired professional thugs to bash the heads of strikers, had far more contemptuous traits than did Steve Jobs.

Yet he created the automotive industry as we know it. For better or worse, his own mind created the first mass-produced automobile for everyday people and thus changed the world. He too, did not listen to customers, abused employees and kept his cards so close to his vest that they might have been tattoos. He is famously quoted as saying that customers can have any color car they choose “so long as it is black.”

What happened next is often overlooked. A startup that would eventually be called General Motors [GM]  started producing cars in multiple colors–even two-tones. Henry Ford lived far longer than did Steve Jobs. He lived to see the decline and fall of his political views and the decline from pre-eminence of his car company.

Steve Jobs did not. He left a legacy of great products and services that will be remembered for a very long time. But sooner or later–as happens to all leaders–Apple will stumble. And when it does, it will not be in position to join the online conversation and it’s failure to be a social company will be a factor in it’s downfall–or so it seems to me.

As far as social media, Apple Computer and the choices I make. My loyalty doesn’t stay with any company. It stays with users. I will favor the company that offers the best product and the best service–until it is replaced by a new company doing a better job. My next car is likely to be a Ford, because I like their new products and and am convinced that the people who run the company today do not adhere to the founding Ford’s political views. My next computer is likely to be an Apple product–unless of course another company comes up with something better.

 

 

 

Pepper Spray & Distorting the News

December 4, 2011 · 8 comments in Braided Journalism,Personal & off-the-wall,Politics

 

You’ve probably have already seen the UC Davis Pepper Spray Video. You probably already have an opinion and its likely you have strong feelings about it. The problem is what you saw was severely edited to give one perspective of a series of events that are not as simple and straight-forward as that short clip would have you believe.

Watch this long version. Yep, it’s all of 15-minutes long, about the length of 30 Fox news clips. But if you do it this one time, you may start to understand how news editors can snip out balance to promote agendas.

In fact, after watching the long version, my opinion did not change. But my concerns that the new citizen journalism can present through a lens that is as filtered as the shoddiest of traditional news organizations have been known to give us.

It is obvious, that the original pepper spray video was shortened to promote a point of view and to me that lessens the credibility of students who risked arrest and pepper spray for a cause that many of us do not understand–but they passionately believe in.

Did the police act rightfully or wrongly? You and I may continue to disagree. But we cannot intelligently decide unless those reporting the incident are responsible to give us a reasonably ba;lanced report on what happened.

Distortion of the truth in the name of a cause damages the credibility of that cause if you ask me.

Let us understand that non-violent protest is designed to provoke authorities to further a cause. Leaders through the years have suffered arrests, beatings and gas. This raises public awareness and sympathy. It is very powerful and has brought down governments, ended wars, destroyed unjust and discriminating causes.

The essence of it is to reveal that truth is on your side. That’s what giants of protest Like King and Gandhi did. That’s why in America, students in the 6os sometimes died to end an unjust war or Jim Crow segregation.

Lying doesn’t get you there; nor does distortion. All that does is make you the citizen version of Fox News, grinding the facts through distorted lenses and filters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Redefine PR? No, just learn to Listen.

November 21, 2011 · 2 comments in Public Relations,Social Media


[Dell SM Listening Command Center. Dell File Photo]

I just read a New York Times item announcing that the Public Relations Society of America [PRSA] is launching a campaign to redefine the term “public relations” to make it more current in the 21st century.

I pointed to the article on Twitter and immediately got new jokes about the “spinners spinning their spin.” I see the humor, but it makes me sad. PR has so many true values to a company. One way or another every organization practices PR and it shapes who they are and how they fare in the marketplace.

The definition has remained the same for centuries. “Public Relations” is a self-defining term. It is the relationship between organizations of any size and people who make a difference to them.”

This has not changed, it is also highly unlikely to change moving forward.

What has changed are the tools of communications and the venues. The tools are now social and the venue is increasingly online. These two facts have upended virtually every profession and institution. They have forced the enterprise and corner store, governments and those who wish to overthrow them. It has changed advertising, news, religions, white-collar crime and just about all things–including public relations.

I can tell you the essential difference for the PR industry. People can now talk back at you and about you. They can do it with great speed and what they say can spread like wildfire faster than you can call a conference room meeting t discuss messaging or damage control.

I commend PRSA for understanding that something is broken. But I think they are trying to fix the wrong thing.

PR, for the past 60 years, has focused on broadcasting. They send messages out. When one approach doesn’t work, they try a new way to send the same messages in different forms. When talking doesn’t work, they shout.

In fact, what PRSA needs to teach its members is that they must learn to listen. They can now talk with customers, prospects, investors, potential employees and bring back the wisdom of vital crowds to organizational decision makers.

This is not touchy-feely thinking. This is serious business strategy. Dell Computer spent many millions of dollars to build a listening center. A staff listen to what is said about the company online every day. They monitor about 150,000 comments a week.

This listening engine fixes product flaws faster and less expensively than was previously possible. It turns ranting customers into ravers. It reduces time to market for new products and vastly lessens the burdens of customer support.

At Ford Motors, Scott Monty, the company’s top social media officer answers directly to the CEO. Ford has no desire to appear cool. But it understands that social media is where you spot problems and trends first and how you get the word out fastest.

If you don’t think these two cases are connected to public relations, then I just don’t know what to tell you.

My advice to public relations practitioners is that we live in a new, still-forming Conversational Age. It has replaced the Age of Broadcast. You need to join the conversation. It is where your customers are going and it is also where you should really shine.

After all, professional PR people are outstanding communicators, right?

PRSA is right that something is broken. The PR industry sees itself as being in he image business, yet they collectively have a truly awful image.

Has social media gone the way of the fax machine?

October 31, 2011 · 20 comments in Social Media,tech business

When I started speaking about social media in 2005, I used to joke that someday, conferences discussing social media will be about as relevant and well-attended as conferences on the business uses of the Fax machine.

I’m wondering if that day has come.

About a month ago I attended TC Disrupt, one of the biggest startup conferences and one dedicated to spotlighting companies that are likely to change the way we live and work. I noticed two terms that were never mentioned:

Web 2.0. Lots of us did not like the term to begin with, but it was needed to show the move from static sites into a new conversational web. Most of the world’s leading software developers have shifted their focus in this direction. We have entered a period where mobile apps are the focal point of innovation. It is no longer Web 2. It is just the web.

Social Media.I did not hear this term used once during the entire Disrupt conference. Yet every company presenting or exhibiting used social media as a vital component to their new companies. Some uses were unique and unprecedented. But social media has evolved as an obvious part of any app, certainly any mobile app.

Of course, I live in the San Francisco Bay area. I am exposed to early adopters wherever I turn. I have a focus on what’s new and what gets changed. Including social media has become obvious. What this enables has become far more relevant to the conversation.

However, this is Silicon Valley myopia. If you throw a rock into a large lake, where the rock plunks into the water is Silicon Valley. The ripples that roll out concentrically from that center are the rest of the world.

Much of the world is still struggling with social media issues, with how to shift from broadcast to conversational online engagement with customers, partners, investors and so on. This is certainly true in the parts of the world where everyday business has nothing to do with online conversations.

So social media is certainly not dead. Then neither is the fax machine. Both are essential to modern businesses, and in both cases the novelty has worn off. So has the disruption.

Social media has disrupted a great deal of everything in the last ten years. I call that the Decade of Disruption. Social media is now an essential ingredient to every modern marketplace. We have entered a new Age of Conversation. I think it will be around for a very long time.

But as for disruption and what’s new in the minds of the bright, irreverent, urgent culture that is Silicon Valley, I would turn attention to mobile apps and that is where I would look if I were a conference producer.

 

 

Occupy Movement, Howard Beale & Lessons from Estonia

October 30, 2011 · 4 comments in Personal & off-the-wall,Politics

Whenever I read or watch the offshoots of Occupy Wall Street, I am reminded of Howard Beale, the newscaster-gone-mad in the 1976 movie classic “Network.”  He got everyone to go to their windows and shout into the night air: “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to stand for it anymore.”

People say there is no point to the Occupy movement, but I think there is. People say that the spontaneous worldwide protests against … well, against the status quo, against politicians and banks and authorities who talk in homilies while abusing office, the banks, the foreclosures, the rich getting richer and the homeless getting hungrier … .

Most of us do not know what to do about all of these things, but over time, we have grown mad as hell at our leaders who are supposed to do something about it but they either are unwilling or unable.

People say it started on Wall Street, but ironically, I think what is happening started earlier than that. The Occupy people are generally perceived to be on the left side of the political spectrum, but the issues seem to me to be the same issues that led the right-wing Tea Party Protest.

I chatted on Twitter about Occupy with a few Tea Party protesters yesterday. The dismissed the more than 30,000 leaderless and segmented Americans who have so far assembled in protest in more than 20 American cities and in larger numbers all over the world. They talked about health, and one rape incident and even shabby clothing. One speculated that the protesters are unlikely to vote.

But no one from the Tea Party I spoke with disagreed with the issues that the Occupy people are shouting about.

Me too. I tend to be in the center politically. I find myself as uncomfortable with the Occupy folk as I do the Tea Party people. But, I find myself mad and frustrated as hell on the same issues. I don’t like the solutions the Tea Party offers, and I ave an essential fear of large and leaderless mobs because they have a tendency to turn violent.

Occupy, it seems to me, needs a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King to succeed. If one does not soon emerge, then I fear it will either turn violent or dissolve with the winter colds that have come early to a large portion of the US.

But Occupy is no longer just a US movement. It is worldwide. Perhaps, it is a descendent of Arab spring, which did turn violent. Diverse people with conflicting agenda found a common ground. They wanted regime change–and as we have seen, they got it in unexpected places.

In fact, we may have entered into a new era of global, grassroots citizen protest. Issues and approaches vary from place-to-place, but in every case, people are mad as Hell and they want to do something about it-even when there’s difficulty defining “it.”

I’ve traveled a lot in recent years. I have spoken to people in about 20 countries about their lives and countries. When I ask people what they think of their government, they almost always role their eyes and then speak with passion about how screwed up the people in power are when it comes to solving the needs of everyday people.

The one exception is Estonia, of all places. And I think I know why. Estonia is the second smallest democracy I have visited, with 1.3 million people. My hosts managed to arrange for me to have coffee with the president, then meet up in a public cafe with the former prime minister. We were interrupted every few minutes with people who came up to chat with him.

Estonia, it turns out, has been a world leader in e-government. Most Estonians pay taxes online and few people seem upset by the amount they pay or by what government does with the money. The reason is they feel they have access to government. They feel they are being heard and people get a lot less pissed off when they feel you are listening.

Being small and accessible let citizens engage in effective ways with government, or so it seems to me. We just can’t have that in large countries like the US, China, India, the EU, Indonesia and elsewhere. Maybe someday, we will use the internet to make our public officials engage with us and be accountable to us as is supposed to happen in a democracy.

If we did, people might not be mad as Hell like Howard Beale.

 

 

New Journalism & Old Vows of Poverty

October 24, 2011 · 4 comments in Braided Journalism,tech business

I have always, always preferred writing to all the other things I do for money. It’s the vow of poverty that I have troubles with.

This has always been true. In 1963, I got my first newspaper job, as a copy boy for the old Boston Herald. In order to support myself and go to college, I had to get a second job selling shoes in a department store.

These days I consult to support my writing habit. It pays better than selling shoes and there is less squatting before customers.

Later, in college, I became a reporter and could work one job, rent an apartment with two roommates and buy a ten-year-old Ford Falcon. Dinner out was usually pizza and Arby’s bad beef barbecue.

More recently, I’ve written a couple of books and several articles about the death of the printed word. This turned out to be unfortunately prophetic. The printed word will never actually die, but it is in atrophy. I am working on a new book and am considering the economics of making it an ebook-only edition. They look pretty good.

But in death there is new life. Online only news publications have been born in great numbers and about a dozen in the tech industry appear to be flourishing. Plus, many traditional content publishers have successfully swum through the wormhole that connects the printing press to the mobile and are once again doing well enough to ensure survival.

So, you would think that this new trend would be good-to-great for freelancers like me. At least I did–but I was wrong.

Recently, I started looking around for new places to write freelance columns. Between the books and other credentials I thought I might be in demand. The answer is that I am–but only if I will amplify my vow of poverty.

I did my first freelance work for Time Magazine in 1967, when I covered campus unrest in Boston. There was no byline, and much of what I contributed was rewritten into the magazine inimitable style. I was paid 50 cents a word. Later, I ghost wrote columns for prominent people and got paid as high as $2 word–for 1000 word articles.

So recently, I started talking to online publications. Many editors sounded very interested in my contributions. But then we talked about price. I got offers for freelance news/analysis pieces ranging from $100 for a 1000-word piece down to free, for the prestige.

At $100, that is a 95% pay cut from the best I’ve previously done as a freelancer. Free was offered for the prestige of submitting content to a publication. Since I’ve already established credentials with  Dow Jones,BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Forbes, Business Insider and elsewhere, I have prestige up the yin-yang. What I need is rent money.

Editors seemed embarrassed by their offers to me. One explained  how the economics have changed:

Back in the day of the mighty weekly news magazine, an advertiser could buy a page column for about $20,000 in a trade publication or $200,000 in a national news magazine. Freelance compensation was based on that.

Nowadays, a big brand buys virtual space for about $200 per insert. They now go for volume in a great many places. Successful publications focus on quantity–more pages for you to view and for advertisers to place inserts.

But one writer, filling space next to an ad on one page, is not going to make chopped liver.

Writers like me are welcome, but if we take a pass, the pages will continue to be filled by recent grads, eager to write and any price, eager to gain credentials so they can make more money. It’s why so many of the great names of journalists and traditional magazines got laid off–while the entry-level neophyte got retained.

I’m not going to bemoan the injustice of all this. I am hopeful, that a few publications will determine that quality may have its value when selling ads to brands who wish to be equated with quality.

I do many times better than $100 in my freelance contributions at Open Forum, but still it is not a ton of money, certainly not sufficient to support anybody fulltime, who does not choose to live in a tent in the woods.

But elsewhere, I’ll take a pass on offers for $100-a-column. I’ll just continue to give  my content away for free in this column and I’ll be grateful that I have applicable business experience that lets me consult for people and companies I enjoy.

It’s the next thing to writing, or so it seems to me.

 

 

 

 

12 Tips for giving great presentations

October 20, 2011 · 11 comments in Social Media,story telling,tech business

In the next few weeks I’ll be talking to a group of Spanish entrepreneurs in San Francisco at a StepOne event and then  participating in Nasscom, India’s largest startup conference.

In both cases, I’ve been asked to speak about how to make a great business presentation. The irony is that these two deals were cut just as Steve Jobs died. Jobs, without question was the best presenter the tech industry has produced to date.

He dressed in a uniform that was decidedly different from others. Thirty years of presentations followed a certain cadence and format, yet almost each of them was memorable, powerful and exciting.

Jobs was one of a kind and not one of you can emulate him. Jobs was one of a kind and the best parts of who he was came out in how he presented.

So my first advice to anyone planning a business presentation is to look, not at Jobs, but at yourself. What are your best presentation qualities? Are you funny? Eloquent? Creative? Whatever qualities you have, you should capture and exploit the way Jobs did.

There are certain tips that I think fit for most presenters. And that is what I will focus on advising these two roomfuls of entrepreneurs. This is a work-in-progress, so please tell me what I might add or remove:

1. Rehearse like crazy. Malcolm Gladwell noted that what most of the world’s most successful people–artists and entrepreneurs share in common is that they rehearse like crazy. If you didn’t have time to rehearse, then you are not ready to present. If you did not prepare the audience will see it. Your lack of readiness will reflect on their perceptions of your product and company.

2. Your product is your star. Almost every tech startup by definition is about a new and hopefully disruptive startup. Introduce your product as early into the presentation that you can. Build everything else: position, opportunity, model, team around product.

3. Simple is best.  Use the fewest, clearest and least ambiguous language you can use. Say as little as you can while still covering all key points. Do not show how hard it was to make. Show how easy it is to use.

In ”Good to Great” by Jim Collins, he tells the 1987 story of Jerry  Kaplan who pitched his idea for Go Corp, the first pen input device. The VCs “Good to Great” by Jim Collins expected to see a prototype, or at least a PowerPoint slide of the photo along with artist renderings. Instead, Kaplan took a notebook portfolio he was holding tossed it into the air and watch as it landed with a loud clap in the middle of the conference table.

“This is my model for the future of personal computing,” he told the stunned investors. It was a move that Jobs would have admired.

He got the money.

The drama was great, but more important he demonstrated in a way so simple and clear, that no one could miss that a wireless mobile small computer was the right direction. It turned out he was right. It just took longer than he figured.

4. Be very aware of who your audience is and what they want from you. Investors wants to hear about how you’ll make them rich. Journalists want a great story. Potential employees want a good home in a friendly neighborhood. Structure what you say for them and not for you.

5. Leave drilling to miners and dentists. The objective of a good presentation is to start a conversation, not end it. Keep your presentation at a high level, customizing it for what your audience wants. Let the details come in questions after you have completed your monolog and get into dialogue. Let your listeners do the drilling on the topics they choose.

5. Cut the crap. In “Naked Conversations,” my book with Robert Scoble, we coined the word “Corpspeak,” referring to the adjective-packed hubris put out by a great many marketing and PR teams. We have all become jaundiced to inflated claims  and overstated claims can cause you lasting damage. Credibility is like virginity: once you lose it, it is extremely difficult to get back.

6. Show your team, culture & spirit. Many VCs tell me that they invest in team more than technology. Team does not mean an impressive list of resumes. It means people who work together, play together and help each other win. You show team by style. It is almost impossible to capture in a PowerPoint. But your apparel–and the words you use–reveal your culture. The components I look for when interviewing or consulting a start up includes:

  • Optimism. In the US, I’ve read that 90% of all startups fail. I like to see a team that really believes they will succeed where everyone else has failed
  • Urgency. All startups have to deal with constraints. Yet, with limited time and money they need to beat competitors to the market and prevail. I just don’t trust entrepreneurs who do not somehow reveal a sense of urgency.
  • Attitude. I can’t tell you just what the right attitude is. But I’m pretty sure I know it when I see it.

7. Paint both a grand picture and a detailed miniature.  When I still had my PR agency, I represented Homestead Technologies. It’s founder/CEO Justin Kitsch started his presentations with: “We are building a company to last 100 years. Now let me tell you what we are doing this quarter.” Brilliant move.

8. Disrupt something. If you are a startup, you need to wedge your way onto a crowded playing field. Your presentation should make it clear how you are going to change the world and why won’t the incumbent can’t stop you.

9. Tell a story. People have told stories in just five minutes that have endured 5,000 years. By contrast, I have seen entrepreneurs spend five minutes on a PowerPoint slide and it felt like 5,000 years. We humans are addicted to story telling and good ones, that illustrate your points, are far more memorable and enduring than all the analytics, metrics, charts and graphs you can jam into a presentation.

10. Personalize. The best presentation story-telling almost always personal. When Robert Carr introduced Framework, an integrated software package of the 1980s, he began with, “I developed Framework so that I could work on a computer they way I work in real life.” The line is much imitated over the years. In fact, variations of it have well outlasted the product.

I consulted Munjal Shah in 2006, when he founded a company called Riya, a photo recognition company, sold eventually to Google. He launched it by describing his difficulty of finding his baby’s photo among thousands in his digital collection. Into his formal launch presentation, he posted the baby picture and stated: “There’s my baby! Isn’t she a cutie?”

For the remainder of the conference people talked about Riya and how you can find photos of people you love. The technology breakthroughs were faded to background, which immensely helped the product.

11. Lighten up. Even seasoned serial entrepreneurs get jittery and intense in planning a presentation. That’s fine, but never let your audience see you sweat. Actors, I imagine, are nervous  before a play opens. But when you start, lighten up. Almost no audience is out to get you. They want to see-and-hear something useful and interesting to them. They didn’t pay the admission price to see you suck. Have fun when you present. It seems to me that in business, fun is vastly underrated for it’s value.

12. Finish early. I have rehearsed a great many companies before they presented to investors, the press and at conferences. I absolutely insist that they finish well short of the allotted time. When you present it will invariably take longer than when you rehearse. You want to talk at an easy, comfortable pace. Rushing will ruin it.

I am only speaking for a short while at both events and 12 points seem like the most I can get in while adhering to my own advice of finishing early. What am I leaving out? What should I add in? Got a case study for me to illustrate any of these points?

 

 

Is Google+ the New Hula Hoop?

October 12, 2011 · 5 comments in Online privacy,Social Media

 

 

To me, the Grand Canyon of Social Media is the ability to be social in private.

I want to be able to talk to my fellow Red Sox Fans without a Yankee booster jumping in and without a spammer telling me where I can buy a sports tee-shirt online. I want to learn from friends who know more about China, India, Israel or South Africa than I do, and I don’t want intruders hijacking our conversations away from cultural and into political paths.

I can’t get this on Twitter or Facebook. I thought Google was taking me there but now almost a half year later, this has not happened. My Circle are not cozy nooks for me to chat with friends. Google is evolving into yet another place where broadcast seems more appealing than conversation and where privacy is really not assured.

I had thought that Google+ broke new ground, but all it seems to have done is make a neater path to get where you already get, crossing ground you’ve already traversed.

I didn’t make a conscious effort to  abandon Google+. I just found myself going there less and less. I waited to hear about what I was missing, but I never really heard much in that area. I found myself back at Twitter, using it just about the same way I’ve been using it for years. If there were any lasting change, it was over at Facebook, where I find myself liking the changes that they have made… at least for now.

But yesterday, when news reports asserted that 60% of Google+ users had abandoned the platform, I was surprised, but not shocked. But then, Computerworld’s Mike Elgan, a journalist I greatly respect, showed why that number was probably greatly inflated.

But, for me, social network is not really about massive trends and big numbers. I want to hang out where my friends hang out. I want to have interesting and useful conversations. I want to give when I can and I appreciate that I meet people who do the same for me.

I asked the folks who follow me on Twitter about Google+ and ket a tally. The count is continuing, but the trend is clear. Some 34 people told me they have abandoned or greatly reduced their use of Google+. Only two–both early adopters, are still using and loving it.

Mike Elgan’s math may be right, but I’m pretty sure that my friends and colleagues are trending sharply away from Google+

And they are doing it for the same reasons:

  • Not enough new-and-different for them to switch established habits
  • Their friends and colleagues are not hanging out there
  • The only dominating conversation is about Google+ itself.
Back in the 50s, someone invented a toy called the Hula Hoop.  Made out of plastic, and originally marketed to children, it went viral as we now see. Everyone started using them. People figured out all sorts of cool, clever, fun and sexy things you could do with a Hula Hoop.
It was a memorable rage. TV, movies, newspapers, magazines, campuses and playgrounds were filled with them. People taught each other the neat things you can do with them.
Then one day, there seemed to be this spontaneous, global yawn. People got bored. The hoops found their way into the garages and eventually into landfills, where they proved more endurable than was desirable.
Then they were gone. Perhaps this is the fate of Google+. Perhaps not. Perhaps Google, will prove that it has become a more social company and start asking people why they are leaving and what would get them to stay.
If they get around to asking me, I have a few ideas for them.

 

 

 

 

We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’

September 28, 2011 · 4 comments in Miscellaneous,Public Relations

Chris Abraham is one of a large handful of PR professionals, who in my view, gets it about social media and PR. Yesterday , he had a decent post on tips for PR operatives trying to comprehend blogger outreach.

What he wrote, makes sense and is good advice for inexperienced swimmers in the Ocean of Clueless smilers-and-dialers who seem to plague those of us who write about topics of interest.

But there is something about the term, blogger outreach, that bothers me. When Chris asked me for feedback, I tweeted: “My condensed view: 1. read my stuff  b4 you pitch me & 2. Treat me like any other media pro.”

Seems simple enough. But, in fact, there’s a lot of issues going on here. With all these conferences, blogs and articles about how to pitch the press, PR people just don’t seem to read the editors they pitch.

I told Chris that my most frequent conversation with a PR person goes a bit like this:

PR Person: “Your readers will love to hear what my client has to say about [fill in the blank]!!!”

Me: “Sorry, I don’t cover that.”

PR Person: “No? Then, what do you cover?”

Me: “READ MY STUFF!!!!”

My stuff sometimes appears as a blog; in the form of  an online column and in a few rare examples, it appears on paper in books or magazine articles.

To the client, it really doesn’t matter where I write, so much as what I write and who reads it.

When someone pitches a story to me, I am attentive and curious if the story sounds like it’s interesting to my readers. If not, I have learned to be less friendly and more cryptic than is my usual nature. There are just too many swimmers in the Ocean of Clueless.

Blogger Outreach implies that bloggers should be treated as different or separate than plain old-fashioned press. But we are not. All of us are just media, and if you are in PR you will do better if you think of us that way.

Chances are if you read the NY Times you do it online–just like if you were reading Robert Scoble. The difference is that Scoble is probably more accessible and if you need a tech audience, more valuable.

We are all media. We play by the same rules or should be expected to do so. What we want from people who pitch us is a good story in the category where we report, opine or analyze. As a blogger, I want to be treated precisely as I want to be treated as an editor. As a PR professional, you should expect–and require–that I play by the same ethical rules.

My advice to PR folk is to consider us your customers. Your clients will come and go. Consider them manufacturers that give you something that some of your customers might like. You need to understand who in the media will find which  products useful or interesting.

If the last time you talked to an editor, you had something he or she used, chances are high they will listen to you next time.

If the last time you talked to a tech editor, you pitched toy fire trucks for Christmas, then chances are the editor will not respond warmly to your new effort to get their attention and time.

In 2006, I was invited by a PR operative to attend a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Sounded titillating, I thought, but what does it have to do with my focus of social media for business?

Their PR person, sounded confused. “But you wrote Naked Conversations, didn’t you,” she asked.

It was clear she saw my name on a list. She saw the single word “Naked,” and went after me, without going to Amazon and reading two sentences of book description. She saved two minutes and wasted ten of mine.

I get about five pitches a day. There are those who receive many times that number. Multiply each bad pitch times ten minutes and you see the basic problem. Treat me as an outreach blogger and you’ll compound the problem by insulting me with offers for free tee shirts or that you can drive traffic to my site.

Chris Abraham would never do such a thing. He uses social media to connect with a great number of professional writers. He seems to understand that his first step is to establish a credible relationship long before he has to pitch.

He is well-suited to teach others how to practice his profession right. But I wish he would just call it “editorial relationships.”  Somehow “blogger outreach” makes me think of social workers helping lost people find help.

 

 

 

Dear NY Times: Forget the Device. Think of the Cloud.

September 21, 2011 · 1 comment in Braided Journalism,tech business

I have always been an ardent fan of the NY Times. Early in my life, it showed me a world that was far larger than the part I occupied. When I was a journalism student, the times, we were taught, was the standard for excellence to which all journalists should aspire.

Simultaneously, I have never been a fan of freeware. Long before the web went social, content started to be given away. Now, 20 years later, there is a generation of web users who expect all content to be free forever, all of it sponsored by ads that ours eyes have learned to ignore.

So, when the Times, a few months announced that after view 100 articles each month, it would block content, unless you were a free subscriber, I was among the few social media enthusiasts who publicly endorsed it. I have a vested interest in seeing that those who pay writers get paid for the writing.

It also seemed fair. It takes talent and work to produce anything that has the quality that the times has. I tweeted on the day of the Times announcement: “Sign me up!”

But I didn’t sign up, not until today. What stopped me was that the Times wanted me to select where I would consume their news: desktop, iPad or iPhone. If I wanted all three, this would be $39 a month or $468 a year. This was 400% what I used to pay for home delivery, before the web whisked me away from paper-based news.

This didn’t seem fair on two counts. First, the Times is saving enormous costs by going paperless, by not needing coin machines on corners and delivery trucks. Online subscriptions, I would guess would be about twice as profitable if they charged half as much as formerly.

Second, is that they are viewing my iPhone, iPad and MacBook as three addresses, which independently they’d charge $19 month. They are seeing it as though I have a San Francisco address, a Tahoe address and a little chalet in the So of France, I guess. But if that were the case, I would simply have one subscription and inform them when my address changed.

On the web, my address changes several times on most days. It should not matter to the NYTimes. I am one person and I go to the cloud on multiple devices. This doesn’t increase their costs by a penny, but they want it to increase mine by over $300 a year.

It just doesn’t seem fair to me.

So I’ve held out. I’ve read the Times free for the first 10-15 days each month. Then when the “PAY UP!” screen blocks my content, I’ve gotten my content from the myriad of other quality web sources.

In the back half of the month, I have missed the Times. It remains my favorite news source, but I just hate being unfairly charged. The Times, it seems to me, has mechanically moved to the internet but spiritually, it still seems to be an old-time newspaper with circulation managers getting paid that missed houses get their papers on the same day.

Today, I broke down. I got a special email offer allowing me to get eight weeks of the NY Times anywhere online for 99 cents per week. This, was an offer I could not refuse.

But what happens two months from now? Their thought is that I will be so addicted to getting my Times fix whenever I wanted one and will then allow my costs to jump from $50 yr to nearly $500.

Perhaps I will. Perhaps not, we shall see.

Over at the Times, I picture a bunch of guys in white shorts and spectacles crunching numbers, trying to figure out how many more readers they could have if they charged less. I urge them to do that. I also urge them to understand that there should be on set fee for receiving their content via the Internet, and stop forcing readers to consider where and when in the day, the Times will be available to them.

I would never argue that a bad subscription policy would kill the Times. But I do argue that the current bad policy is costing them readers, many of them younger readers who may find their lives are just fine if they get their news of the world from places more myopic than the Times such as TechCrunch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Techcrunch Disrupt–The controversy & the event

September 16, 2011 · 3 comments in Miscellaneous,Social Media,tech business

If size matter, then TechCrunch Disrupt [TC Disrupt] wins the prize. With 2600 attendees, it is arguably the largest US-based tech industry conference. With 200 companies exhibiting–often for  just one of three days–it often took on the characteristics of a trade show.

I just love the promise and excitement in young start-ups exploding with grand visions. While many of these visions will turn out to have been hallucinations, but others will be real and will disrupt something large and institutional who will disdain them until it is too late.

For companies showing the ability to disrupt this was just about the best show I’ve attended in more than 25 years in the tech industry.

That should be what this column is about, and it part it is. But the the conversation going in and coming out of this event was more directed at the drama and trauma that is Michael Arrington and his hand-picked TechCrunch team.

If you like controversy, well this one was juicier than crushed peaches in your pocket.

At the very core of it, of course, was Michael Arrington, the charismatic, controversial former lawyer, turned startup founder, turned  TechCrunch founder turned angel investor. The fact that these serial entrepreneurial endeavors have overlapped are at the root of all this controversy.

TechCrunch covers startups. Arrington has long invested in them in the earliest phases and TechCrunch writes about them. While there have been some utterances of there being no conflict, no one seems to be able to recall an incident where an Arrington company has not been favorably covered in the TechCrunch newsletter that enjoys two million unique visits each month.

I have previously described Arrington  as the Rupert Murdoch of our industry. Both have incredible power and influence over publications that reach mass audiences all over the world. Both influence investors and other media. Both have been called bullies, and in my view, for good reason. And most recently both have been called to rask for questionable ethical practices particularly the venerable New York Times.

For all these reasons,  Arrington, like Murdoch, seems to make enemies by the truckload.

Arrington’s controversies reached something of a crescendo the week before TC Disrupt opening Sept. 12.

The week prior, usually is filled with editorial speculations on what new media and web-based apps and trends would be unveiled. Instead it was filled with fast-breaking news of Arrington’s abrupt and dramatic termination from AOL who had bought TechCrunch for $30 million last year, a deal that disrupted a prior Disrupt event.

Each of these incidents seem to me to be a distraction. Journalists are taught in 101 courses never to get in the way of your story. Yet Arrington seems to be a persistant roadblock of his own production, this time featuring 200 very promising companies exhibiting and 30 presenting on the stage;  2600 people gathered in the vast, dark San Francisco Design Center and tens of thousands more watching the livestream worldwide.

TechCrunch was born in controversy. Arrington and erstwhile founding

partner Jason Calacanis, had attended a DEMO conference. DEMO has been around for 21 years and was a consistent success, until Arrington and Calacanis–sitting at a bar at the DEMO conference–announced they would start Disrupt to directly compete with the well-established IDG production.  By no coincidence, would be held on the same dates as a future DEMO.

Calacanis had previously started two tech news organizations. He sold Silicon Alley Reporter to Murdoch’s Dow Jones Company , which promptly bungled it to death. Then Calacanis sold founded the controversy-loving Engadget, which he sold to AOL who has done rather well with it.

At last year’s San Francisco Disrupt event, Calacanis suddenly disappeared. Arrington went on the dais to announce the couple had gotten a surprise divorce. A court will decide the terms of desolution in a saga that may take a few years and mud wrestling matches to resolve.

Calacanis has since started his own product-intro conference, Launch, which has a similar format and was held in March in the same SF Design Center. Calacanis has announced plans to start a newsletter of its own and few doubt it will compete against TechCrunch.

So, it seemed to me that TechCrunch’s brief history had already become steeped in controversy going into this fall edition. For the 200 companies who hope to build awareness and win customers by strutting their stuff on the stage or in the exhibition hallways, there was some hope that this yer, unlike previous years, there might be some hope that the spotlight would remain on them, without the eruption of a sideshow that would diminish  and divert focus.

But then it hit the fan.

This year’s trauma eclipsed all the traumas that have come before it.  A while back, Arrington announced he was starting an early phase investment fund, calling it CrunchFund. This would mean that CrunchFund could invest in startups that TechCrunch would write about and who could also be stars in TechCrunch events such as Disrupt.

It wasn’t really anything all that new. Arrington has been investing in companies for years. Many have fared well at TechCrunch events–as have other companies in which he did not invest.

I was an early critic of this practice. Other newsletter impresarios of earlier years had gone into investing and immediately divested themselves of any editorial interests to avoid conflict or even the appearance of it. But back then I was hollering in a hurricane. Some people grumbled privately, but no one wanted to take on Arrington whose TechCrunch has proven to be a powerful bully pulpit a great many times.

And for the sake of my own transparency: Michael Arrington and I were once friends. We no longer are. We do not wish each other well. For precisely these reasons, I rarely cover his activities, and when I do, I try to give a balanced view, but advise you to keep in mind my personal perspective.

What had changed for Arrington was that he was no longer a private investor running a privately held company. He was employed by AOL, a publicly held and closely watched company struggling to make a comeback on ground it had previously lost. AOL, it was disclosed, was a major investor in the new CrunchFund.

On Sept. 1, 11 days before Disrupt, Arrington & AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. “TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards… we have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch.”

There are many ways that TechCrunch could have been positioned at that point. It seems to me that Armstrong picked about the lamest approach. Other possible positioning was discussed by TechCrunch’s Paul Carr, who played much of the host role at this year’s conference and is clearly loyal to Arrington.

The response was instant and mostly negative. The lofty, New York Times, which in itself competes with AOL and TechCrunch in the media business hit hard to the negative side challenging the ethics of both Arrington and AOL.

Traveling through Brazil at the time, Arrington’s boss Ariana Huffington, no stranger to controversy herself,decided she couldn’t stand the heat so she threw Arrington out of the kitchen. She unceremoniously sacked Arrington.

And the saga of drama continued into the days immediately preceding the conference, there were all sorts of speculations: the TechCrunch team would resign en mass. Arrington would assemble them to start a new online media organization; Arrington would buy TechCrunch back from AOL; the whole thing was just a stunt to fan fires and grab attention.

Then came the conference. All seats were filled for many reasons. The opening remarks often set the tone for an entire conference. Their was mystery and speculation on who would deliver them and how the issue of Arrington would be folded into it.

Then, none other than Michael  Arrington strode onto the dais.There were murmurs of surprise. He waited until the room became entirely still and then spoke for less than five minutes.

His tone was calm and his style was gracious. He explained that he was an AOL employee for four more days and he was on stage in that light. He talked of his life being filled with personal drama, and urged attendees to focus more on the 30 presenting companies as well as the other startups exhibiting in the StartUp Alley exhibition area.

In my view, it was one of his finest moments.

And for the most part, attendees abided by Arrington’s recommendation. While there was much talk on the controversy, most of the people I talked with were talking about the startups they represented or the ones they enjoyed.

The TechCrunch teams gets to see most industry companies in their earliest phases. They have a good eye for quality, for tech trends and yes companies with the potential of disrupting the status quo where disruption is much needed.

This year showed a couple of companies who promise to make healthcare issues easier for people. One of the Cake Health was a finalist. Another couple were making it easier for people to get organic food from local sources. One of them Farmigo, was a finalist and I’ll be writing about both of them in the future.

My personal favorite was a mobile app from Vocre of San Jose that lets you instantly translate via a mobile app in 13 languages. It won the people’s choice award and is available in beta for iPhone users.

There were at least 15 companies who were focused on small business. This was a pleasant surprise. I’ve long been a champion of social products for small business and this conference showed me that there’s a fast-forming trend to help small business with programs that are more sophisticated and useful than Facebook fan pages.

Also I was at the conference representing American Express Open Forum, and I found a wealth of material there for my columns in the form of some exceptionally fine companies.

Everyone–yes everyone–I spoke with said they were happy they attended and were getting as much or more than they had expected from the conference which filled the large and unfortunately dark San Francisco Design Center to it’s walls.

But elements of controversy seemed to pervade far too much:

  • The actual start ups presentations–the real stars of the show did not get to present until the closing hours of each day. Most of the primetime morning stage events were interviews with prominent VCs, many of them are apparently doing business with Arrington.  The quality of these conversations and interviews was not bad–although the questions were often disappointingly softball.
  • The winner of TC Disrupt, which receives a $50,000 cash award, and the first runner up were both companies Arrington had invested in–it was disclosed.
  • Pressly, a presenting company with visually beautiful graphics for reading media content on a  mobile device did a great presentation then got hammered by two judges who just happened, it turned out, to have investments in Flipbook an obvious competitor of Pressly.
  • Robert Scoble was banned from attending. Arrington had told him his crime was that he had favorably covered Calacanis Launch conference earlier in the year. Scoble held court in a small bar across the where many presenting companies went to be video interviewed by him. To bar presenting companies access to Scoble, one of the most influential voices on new technologies seemed to me to be particularly petty and unfair to entrepreneurs.
  • The Techcrunch team is clearly pissed that their leader has been taken out of the game. Little shots from the dais were fired at varying intervals for the three days. Arrington, was less gracious then earlier when he pointed out that Om Malik heads a newsletter, yet is part of an investment fund. In my view the comment did not help Arrington, but probably hurt Malik.
I started writing this with the intention of reviewing the conference. It seems I ended up with a very long piece reviewing the controversy. To that end, I would predict that Arrington will remain a powerful influence in the entrepreneurial side of technology for many years to come. He will survive unscathed in that light. But his baby has been taken from him.
In my view TechCrunch is better off. The ongoing sagas have started to distract from the fact that Arrington has assembled a high-quality team of journalists. Right now there’s apparent danger of defection and this would be a shame. The TechCrunch brand and Michael Arrington are not the same thing–as Arrington recently declared they were.
And it is now time for this publication to evolve into something new and perhaps stronger under whoever takes the reigns in coming weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Common Ground

August 22, 2011 · 5 comments in Personal & off-the-wall,Politics

 

 

I am reading On China by Henry Kissinger. It is far more informative and less self-serving than I suspected it would be, and I am learning a great deal about the nuances and key players in the China-US relationship.

For 20 years the US and China could not begin to discuss friendship because of their diametrically opposing views on a few subjects. But in early talks, China’s premier suggested they set aside any discussion of Vietnam and Taiwan, the two issues of greatest difference, and see whether they could come together on other issues, issues of common interest.

The results have changed the world for the better. Most people are aware of the enormous flaws in Richard Nixon and Mao Tze Tzung, the two principal players. Yet these two giants of the last century have made the world a better, safer place by finding a path two friendship, trust and collaboration at a time when most people feared the countries would go to war.

For a fleeting moment in the last century, it appeared that there would be enduring peace in the Middle East. Yitzak Rabin, the Israeli President was criticized for sitting down with Yasser Arafat, the former terrorist who became head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Rabin explained, “We make peace with our enemies, not with our friends.”

In the US right now, our government has become so polarized as to be rendered inoperable. Most Americans are worried. In fact, the entire world is now concerned with our inability to proceed through compromise, as our government has done since it was formed.

It seems to me, that our elected officials have lost the ability to find a common ground. And that has led to a feeling that our ground is sinking beneath our feet.

My point is quite simple: If Nixon and Mao could put differences aside and find common ground so can American elected officials. If Arafat and Rabin could make peace with our enemies, than so can our elected representatives.

The whole world will feel safer if we could find that ground and build a framework for progress on what we have in common. We had another president, at another divisive point in history note that divided houses don’t stand.

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