There is often a very special high energy about startups — all types of startups. That’s what I felt when I arrived at the RESONANZ opening gala. A non-profit organization, RESONANZ is starting its first year as a new three-weeks program for young singers in Albany, N.Y.
How do you start something in the midst of recession times, in a domain that’s not the most popular genre on the planet, in a city that’s not a destination for tourists, in a Summer season where the town has been emptied from its regular students and retinues of the State’s elected officials? How can you even think of doing this when performing arts in the region essentially means the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires, the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, the Bard College Summerscape… to name just a few famous centrifugal forces? “Well, when you want to do something,” says Heidi Skok, the founder and Artistic Director of RESONANZ, “you don’t sit on all the reasons not to do something, you look at all the reasons to do it, and for me, all these reasons boil down to one: I live in this community, I am happy to live here, and I want to contribute to the life of this community as meaningfully as I can. My thing is music, and more specifically opera. So, I can do two things: bring people to Albany, both students and faculty, who would have never known how great this town is on the one hand, and bring opera through young voices to people who don’t know they could enjoy it. After years of performing in various places, years of teaching voices, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people don’t like opera simply because they know nothing about it, but the minute you bring it to them, they readily admit that they didn’t realize they could enjoy it. If every classically trained singer were to bring opera back to his/her community, the performing arts wouldn’t be in any form of crisis whatsoever. I completely agree with what Russell Willis Taylor said in an interview you posted on your blog earlier this year. Just as any professional, we have to do a better job of showing the unique value we add, and reach out to our own communities if we want them to come to us.”
The project started as a an idea in Heidi’s kitchen, in Glenmont, just seven miles away from downtown Albany, as she was speaking with a student, Katherine McDaniel who had come from Texas for private lessons last Summer. The idea matured quickly and by February, the company was incorporated as a non-profit, had a Board of Directors, an Executive Director, Diana Hernandez, a budget and a fully-fledged program, and a Web site — created by another student, Jessica Utset. Think of the rush to get students, build up a faculty, find a place and a few grants to be up and running on July 19th! The result is that students signed up from various parts of the country (and not simply students Heidi knew from before, as was the case for my daughter, Sophie, whom she taught at the New England Conservatory). Heidi and Diana found a great location: The College of Saint Rose (how many voice programs have access to an Olympic swimming pool?), and were able to attract the interest of the Albany community on a definitely short notice. What I saw at the gala is that the donors had already made the program theirs. Heidi has assembled a remarkable faculty, including Susan Harwood, Sheryl Woods, Bill Neill, Jeremy Frank, Martin Hennessy, Roger Malouf, Arlene Shrut, as well a meditation guru, Lance Brunner (also Associate Professor of Musicology), MaryBeth D. Smith from the Feldenkrais Center of Houston, and local yoga instructor Susan Hoffman. Incidentally, William (Bill) Neill, who has traveled the world, taught and coached many well-known singers (including Ben Heppner), a Don José who spoke to Carmen in multiple languages, did admit to me that he had never visited Albany… and not yet its most famous restaurant, Angelo’s 677!
A few students backstage (photo MaryBeth Smith)
The program, coupled with a Concert Series of seven performances open to the public, is noticeably different from what is most customarily offered to young singers. “Young singers, singers altogether, aren’t just machines that you crank up and bang! they sing. They have a body, they have a soul, they are human beings, and the voice is the expression of who they are as a person. It’s unfortunate that schools and conservatories rarely include meditation, yoga, Feldenkrais, and sports as part of the curriculum as I believe they should. I want the students to be in a situation where they can give the best of themselves at any stage of their personal development. It’s just as hard to be a singer as it is to be an athlete. We have to help them build a personal discipline, care for them.” And it’s clear that RESONANZ cares. In fact, I was very surprised to find out that the site doesn’t only provide bios for the Faculty, but also for the students! In short, they are not simply anonymous entities paying for tuition fees.
Heidi Skok and Diana Hernandez are already outlining their strategy for the months to come and definitely plan to continue this Summer program.
Lance Armstrong gave lots of interviews, all showing Armstrong’s matter-of-fact leadership qualities. I liked the CNN — I guess it’s a teaser — video where Sanjay Gupta speaks with him. Sure, he wanted to come in first, but he has no problem admitting that what’s great about the Tour, is that “the best man always wins.”
Yesterday, I attended the monthly meeting of the Ethos Roundtable (Cambridge, MA), a discussion group that focuses on initiatives aimed at holding a culture together, improving social connectedness as well as leveraging social capital, and was co-founded by Deborah Finn and Josh Shortlidge. The featured speaker was Peter Deitz, co-founder of a non-profit organization, Social Actions (http://www.socialactions.com) that provides an open, searchable database for actions that you can take on issues that interest you. Instead of checking over the web sites of 50+ foundations, go to Social Actions, type in your key words, and run your search.
When the sense of a mission enables entrepreneurs to build a real company in no time… Quite a few established commercial corporations are now intent upon seizing the field of social entrepreneurship and social actions to enhance their ideological standing or to create new sources of profits given that social causes can also be a huge money-making business. When you hear Peter Deitz speak, though, you are transported into a whole different world that’s by no means an extension of today’s e-commerce Web. His heart-felt sense of being on a mission to become a major orchestrating voice of the social, meaning-oriented, philanthropic Web is unmistakable — so much so that he and his team have been able to bootstrap Social Actions with just a few grants and prizes. In less than two years, Social Actions has become visible player in the field. Started in August 2007, with fiscal sponsorship from Mobilize.org, Social Actions already aggregates over 50 foundations, many of them famous institutions (such as Kiva, PledgeBank, ChangingthePresent, Idealist.org, SixDegrees, VolunteerMatch, Modest Needs, Care2Petition Site, Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, DemocracyInAction, GlobalGiving, Twitter to name a few), mostoperating as hubs for smaller organizations; some others initiatives are lesser known and only vetted (as much as they could) by the Social Actions team. For a complete list of these organizations: http://www.socialactions.com/meet-the-platforms
In order to identify the causes that are of interest to you and the actions you can take (everything from volunteer opportunities to micro credit loans), you can make a search and you are presented with the list of the opportunities matching your criteria (in my example, I looked for all the new actions related to teaching children created last week).
Viral Open Source Strategy… Social Actions is all about making it easy to everybody (and not simply rich people) to spread the word, and make a difference. So instead of expecting people to come to their site only, Social Actions is doing everything to go to the people: Social Actions is not simply a destination site, but an Open Source Social Action Platform that any company, nonprofit, social network, blog, news media, or individual can leverage and embed on its site. Building up the Philanthropic Web is all about providing Social Actions capabilities everywhere and offering the ability for people to act where they already are. This year, the company created its own “Change the Web” competition to encourage social tech programmers to develop web applications that distribute the actions stored in the Social Actions database across the blogs, websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. As you can very well imagine, the Social Actions’ approach is truly in line with all the Open Source strategies aimed at giving the Web back to the people and reinventing its purpose and meaning – i.e. enabling people to collaborate. The company is actively advocating for open standards for publishing and sharing actions, and proposed a format called Open Actions.
More about Peter Deitz… Peter holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto. His passion is unambiguously philanthropy and when he landed in a large organization to pursue his dream, he experienced the same frustrations as lots of passionate entrepreneurs watching the inefficiencies of top-down organizations, however well-intentioned they may be. So, he left and went for a grassroots approach — which, in turn, revitalizes large organizations by transparently integrating them into the Philanthropic Web. He is a blogger at Social Actions, of course, and has also written multiple contributions on several other blogs, including Social Edge (http://www.socialedge.org), the Stanford Social Innovation Review (http://www.ssireview.org), or The Pop!Tech Blog (https://poptech.com/blog). A real expert in philanthropy-oriented initiatives and in social media, he also offers highly valued consulting services: “Over the last six months, Social Actions has been involved in a range of innovative consulting projects, trainings, and events. Our most notable paid consulting projects to date are the Social Entrepreneur API (Launching on August, 31, 2009) and Mozilla Service Week (September 14-22, 2009). We’ve also been doing work with Social Capital Markets 2009, The Case Foundation, The Skoll Foundation, TakePart, NABUUR, Music National Service, Consulting Within Reach, and Small Change Fund, ” Peter indicates on the site (http://my.socialactions.com/profiles/blogs/the-future-of-social-actions-1). His low-key style makes him a remarkable public speaker that you simply want to listen to. No need to say that although he officially lives in Montreal, he is all over the place — and a lot in the United States. I haven’t met the rest of the team, but the little I know about them makes me think that they are amazing folks too!
The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign… While analog and digital tribes appeared independently at the same period, they converged about ten years ago, and are now increasingly hard to dissociate. Even though the expansion of digital tribes does not change the definition of what a tribe is, it certainly modifies the fabric of our social environment. When individuals seem to belong to one given urban tribe only, it is easier to categorize them. When they belong to several tribes, it is much harder. Which is the tribe or combination of tribes that best characterizes any given person? For example, what’s the best way to address that person as a voter?
Godin wrote before the election of Obama, and therefore only indicates that “in today’s world, Barack Obama can raise $50 million in twenty-eight days.”In fact, Obama raised $500 million over his twenty-one month campaign. A record amount, for sure. How is it that Obama was so extraordinarily efficient, and that neither Hillary Clinton (during the Democrat primaries) nor John McCain (during the presidential campaign) could benefit from the Internet in similar proportions? Such a question is all the more worth asking as the Internet has long been an important tool for electoral campaigns: John McCain was the first candidate to raise $500,000 online in one day in 2000, and the 2004 Democrat candidate for the primaries, Howard Dean, already leveraged social networks – Meetup in particular. All these politicians being leaders in their own rights, we can’t simply assume that Internet miraculously served Obama: after all, Obama had to create his Internet presence for the 2008 elections, while Clinton and McCain already had one. To win a national election, Obama had a lot playing against him: his color, his age, his name, his short time as a senator, a limited influence within the Democrat apparatus, and his lack of funds. It is not because of the Internet in general that Obama was able to compensate for his shortcomings and shatter the political establishment, but because of the way he used Internet. David Plouffe, his campaign manager, ascribes the success of his candidate to the candidate himself, of course, but also and unambiguously, to the innovating management of three linked components: people, data, and technology.
The Obama campaign proved successful at building up the levers that Seth Godin speaks about — and taking advantage of them. Until 2006, the Internet was primarily a medium whose function was to inform and reach masses, with the assumption that the larger the net, the better. With Obama, it operated as a platform to target differentiated networks of fans, micro-movements of activists, very dissimilar tribes, but, in the end, as the means to interconnect them all around one message. This message, expressed through real-time pieces of information, has worked as a sort of communication protocol establishing a common language. The Internet users addressed by the Obama campaign were not only millions of eye-balls, but a myriad of small tribes within each of the 50 states in the United States, each tribe having the ability to identify one way or another with the Obama global tribe.
In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in April 2009, Plouffe provides details about his methodology. During the primaries, and contrary to what had been customary in both parties for decades (“organizations that destroy the status quo win,” Godin says), the Obama campaign focused on one single state, Iowa for almost a year, in order to establish a technology strategy and an organizational model that could be replicated in all the other States. They didn’t try to reach everybody simply because the Internet is a universal platform: “What we did differently,” Plouffe says, “was based on the belief that it would allow people to organize on their own and that they could move a message […] As we spent the entire year on Iowa, in the rest of the country, our supporters were organizing on their own. By the time we placed staff in the other states in the fall of 2007, these states were already working because these states, these people were already doing it through MyBarackObama.com. We empowered them in a way”. In other words, the Obama campaign implemented the key principles described by Godin to create and orchestrate micro-movements: “Our online organization,” Plouffe continues, “became a home for people. We gave them the tools to succeed, and hundreds of thousands people were spending hours on our site.” Tools of all kinds, ranging from the technology to register voters to the ability to forward a message to your entire address book in order to instantly address any attack coming from adversaries.
This approach, Plouffe adds, “unleashed the imagination and talent of millions of Americans to help shape the outcome.” These millions of Americans made the Obama message their own. The Internet was not simply a means to broadcast a directive to everybody, but a message for people to translate into their own words on the field, which is quite different. As Godin writes: “What leaders do: they give people stories that they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and change.” The Obama campaign addressed people as they are in their real world with their ideals, their prejudice, and their personal way of expressing their beliefs:“We have a crisis of trust out there,” Plouffe says. “People don’t accept information like they used to, from their media, from their government, from their businesses; what they trust is what their neighbors and family members have to say. They live the same kind of life. And we put a huge premium on this in our campaign. Nothing is more important that Gary talking to the six or seven people he might talk to on any given day.” In the end, the Internet was not so much a net to catch millions of fish at once, but rather what I called in a conversation with a group of entrepreneurs, a Local Impact Positioning System (LIPS), enabling people to tell the right story to the right public at the right time. In short, the Internet is the ideal tool to scale traditional grassroots marketing.
Neither the Internet nor the social networks changed the American electoral map by themselves: it’s the people who leveraged these tools to get heard. By establishing a complementary relationship between the analog and digital realms, a geocentric Web, Obama was able to attract younger voters as well as older ones in a different way. As reminded by David Plouffe, had Obama addressed the same pool of voters in the same way – those who had participated in the Bush-Kerry duel in 2004 – he would have won over McCain by only one percent. Which means that Obama might not have won at all. This one percent might not have even existed, because the opponent to McCain would have most likely been Hillary Clinton.
What’s important may not so much be that a tribe is always a tribe, whether analog or digital; what matters may be the type of cooperation that a leader establishes between his/her tribe in the physical world on the one hand, and the Internet representation of that tribe on the other. The Internet side of a tribe is its organizational architecture, allowing everybody to know what to do and enabling immediate communication at all times: the Internet enables a type of dynamic responsiveness simply impossible to imagine off-line. As a result, it can drastically change the impact of any given tribe. The physical side of the tribe is where people execute, which, in turn, enables corrections and adaptations on the organizational side. In the end, and well apart from the current Web numbering efforts that primarily serve marketing purposes, this geocentric Web (a Web with its feet on the ground) made the Obama tribe the fastest profitable start-up ever. In any case, it was the most efficient fund-raising apparatus since the beginning of the Internet and drew the largest number of fully engaged users in the shortest timeframe – a level of performance that could inspire the business model of many entrepreneurs.
The Web –a world of differences…The Web connects people. That’s a truism, yet a complex one. The Web connects people who, at a given time, and showing a given facet of their identity, agree to connect to others. The Internet connects people who belong to a same tribe. As much as it is a participative architecture, the Web is equally a differentiating platform, a place where myriad of tribes of all types and sizes want to affirm their uniqueness. In 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the browser that popularized the World Wide Web, Mosaic, the Web had only 200 sites. Today, the fragments – the tessellae as specialists call them – that constitute the Web mosaic are also an infinite and changing mirror of the extraordinary social and human complexity, of a galaxy of tribes that each wants to have a say, sometimes at expense of others. So, how is it possible to fill the space between compatible (or loosely compatible) tribes, and eventually give some of them a common purpose? That’s when leaders are needed, leaders that able to not only lead one tribe, but able to coordinate multiple tribes at once.
The diversity and heterogeneity of digital tribes may not necessarily lead to a new War of the Worlds. The simple fact that each of us is well aware that as individuals we are also a collection of characteristics that we can express by joining distinct digital tribes may also be the best way for us to prepare to join a complex tribe in the real world, even when it does not reflect us entirely. After all, gays in San Francisco massively voted for a president who never claimed he was in favor of gay marriage; African-Americans massively voted for a man who didn’t have their history, and for many American Christians “Barack” ended up meaning “blessed” and “Hussein,” “elegant.” Ultimately, the digital tribalism detour that enables people to speak their mind may reveal itself to be more efficient than any direct democracy at reflecting the American diversity and multiculturalism, eventually dispelling many preconceived ideas about the Unites States and accelerating history. Who would have been able to seriously predict that the United States would have a black President only forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King? “It seems that we rarely get to see leadership in action. We tend to notice it after the fact or after it’s gathered steam. That’s because it starts where we least expect it,” Seth Godin notes in a section that he titles “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can exist without digital support — and generally speaking the definition of a postmodern tribe is pretty close to definitions provided by anthropologists and historians. A tribe is first and foremost a connected group on a mission championed by a chief/leader. Therefore, the best technologies in the world are downright irrelevant if there is no leadership, and proficient facilitators that can be leveraged by a leader. This is where the Internet becomes such a powerful factor: “There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn’t exist a generation ago.”
Meanwhile, it so happened that postmodern tribes in music, cities, and fashion (I myself explored the non-aligned looks of the late seventies/early eighties in one of my books of the history of fashion), emerged at the same time as digital tribes, even though there is no correlation between them. In the eighties, tribes are obviously part of the Zeitgeist, and since then, we have all witnessed the growing tie between analog and digital tribes.
Digital tribes have their own history. In the early eighties, efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real digital tribes appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two American students from Duke University (Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis). Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.
Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, or you could favor the Apple route via AppleLink, for example. Then, in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroup. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks: Friendster and Meetup created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, Tribe.net, Hot or Not, Yafro in 2003, Facebook in 2004. Dozens of others appeared at the same time and more later, from Advogato to Zoo.gr, including Ning, imeem, Last.fm, Classmates, Flixster Twitter, Ning, Odnoklassniki, Orkut, YouKu, Tudou, ou 56.com, Tagged.com, Plaxo, Habbo, BlackPlanet, MyHeritage… the list is nearly infinite.
These days, there are digital tribes for every possible domain of interest, addressing virtually all the aspects of who we are personally and professionally. As Michel Serres said in his lecture at Stanford(May 20, 2009), “our identity is the fuzzy intersection of all the places we belong,” and it is by no means a homogeneous reality – no more than we are an individual in the strict sense of the term, that is, an indivisible entity. Our “identity” is distributed across multiple environments, defined by multiple factors and scattered across multiple activities. The Latin word tribuere (of which the word “tribe” is derived) means to divide, share, assign, allocate (and the Latin “tribe” is the arrangement of people into groups). In short, each of us, to paraphrase Michel Serres, is the fuzzy intersection of tribes. This, by itself, is not new; what is new, though, is that each of us is now able to easily express this multiplicity via the Internet — to choose to belong to several tribes either as leaders or as followers. While it is true that tribes, as well as the motivations that lead us to create or join them do exist outside the digital world, the digital world has allowed people to express themselves more easily and freely (with the added bonus of pseudonyms) and to strengthen connections with peers in real time. Today, the Internet amplifies tribalism in huge proportions.
Given that Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Uscame out at the end of last year, the book has been reviewed extensively, and if you haven’t read it yet, I can only recommend that you do. I recently translated it into French and wrote a foreword for it — of which I made the English adaptation (three posts).
Seth Godin’s Tribes has been an Amazon.com best-seller in the Leadership et Business & Investing categories since it came out (October 2008). This is not surprising. The book is short, easy to read and, like all of Seth Godin’s books, both entertaining and educational.
A book that wakes you up… The book sounds like a motivational speech meant to shake up anyone who “would like” to start something – anything, a restaurant, a musical group, a company, a new product line, whatever – but who doesn’t feel up to the task, either afraid to jump in or terrorized at the idea of failing. Seth Godin passionately urges you to rid yourself of your fears and get going. To stimulate rather than reassure you (you are not allowed to do nothing), Godin slays a number of preconceived ideas regarding what constitutes an ideal leader. You don’t have to be a stud, a social butterfly, or a fashion plate. You can speak softly, even be somewhat reserved, like Meghan McDonald, a Team Rock coach in New Rochelle, NY; you can have a big ego like Steve Jobs if your creativity offsets its negative side effects; you can be low in a company’s totem pole, like Jim Deligatti, the third-tier McDonald franchisee who invented the Big Mac. Anybody can become a leader.
Leaders have no common traits, except for these: a constructive rejection of the status quo, the drive that enables them to change things, and optimism that provides a platform for people eager to go their way – to follow them. Because you won’t be a leader alone: you need a tribe, i.e. “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” So, create your tribe – or find a tribe that needs you. Opportunities are endless. Godin gives a multitude of examples as he writes, often randomly, in unstructured sections that flow in and out of each other. His message, however, remains unwavering: to stimulate his reader’s desire to get out of the business-as-usual mentality — when you pretend for days on end that everything is fine and dandy, yet are bored to tears.
You can read this book in several ways. At its simplest level, it sounds like an eloquent marketer’s declaration of faith sparklingly presenting the facets of two trendy words, “tribe” and “leadership.” Yet do not discount the value of the book by thinking “that’s sheer marketing” … or revise your opinions about marketing. If you have mixed feelings about public speakers paid to deliver motivational lectures, a pep talk of sorts, remember that the world that surrounds us is full of depressed masses who don’t know where to start to break free from the doldrums. So why not boost them a bit? ” Yes, you can,” was Obama’s slogan, sure, but also the 1972 rallying slogan popularized by César Chávez et Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, a California farm workers union: “Sí, se puede”. After all, fervor is contagious before being pestilential! But there is more.
Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon… More than a trendy phenomenon that can be grabbed to provide a book with a catchy title, tribes are a societal reality, most patently epitomized today by the popularity of social networks everywhere in the world, and of course, in France. Last February, a study performed by comScore, Inc. “showed that 22 million French Internet users visited at least one social networking site in December 2008, reaching 64 percent of the total French Internet audience.” This is up 45 percent from the previous year – even though the social media reach is still lower in France than in the UK (79.8 %) or Spain (74.6 %). Of all the social networks, Facebook is now the most visited, followed by Skyrock, and then Copains d’Avant, MySpace, FlickR, Trombi, hi5, Netlog, MySpace, Viadeo, and Badoo… to name a few.
Skyrock is a somewhat special case. Although apparently toppled from the top spot by Facebook as a social network, Skyrock is still ahead of Overblog and Blogger as a blog platform, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also because of the time spent by those visitors (54 minutes in average versus 10 minutes and 7 minutes for Overblog and Blogger respectively). Worth mentioning also is Skyrock’s unique position in the history of social networks in France. Created in 1986 by Pierre Bellanger (one of the most notorious contributors to the “free radio” movement who started Radio Paris 80, an early symbol of the media tribalism),Skyrock embraced the various forms on UrbanMusic in the 1990’s, then followed its audience to the Internet, created a blog platform in 2002, and positioned itself as a social network in 2007. In fact, Skyrock exemplary evolution illustrates both the diversity and the continuity of the notion of tribes since the 1980’s — that is, when the use of the word“tribe” spread massively outside the sphere of anthropologists.
Why, though, did people revive a word – or maybe a metaphor – that evokes a social connection predating the industrial era? Because it symbolizes a type of emotional, social bond that is smothered by abstract political institutions and national and international economic organizations that frame our daily lives. It expresses a need that Michel Maffesoli analyzed in a landmark book in 1988, The Time of the Tribes, The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. At the time, Maffesoli described the emergence of what he called a “post-modern archaism,” showing how individuals were evolving from the position of being functional entities within contractual groups towards emotion-based communities, “affectual” tribes, where they could see themselves as persons with a meaningful, fundamental role. This trend was described by Maffesoli as a shift from a primarily mechanistic social order to a complex and predominantly organic structure, and was illustrated by a simple, yet forceful diagram:
What people are looking for is not participating in a democracy where they are asked to vote once in a while, but be part of an environment where they can have an active role as leaders or as followers, dynamically sharing goals and emotions with others.As an alternative to an overly rationalized society, people are tempted to choose the empathic atmosphere of tribes.
As Maffesoli noted in the very early 80’s, these micro-movements primarily started as urban tribes – and, since then, the notion has been discussed in a number of books, one of the most recent being Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (2003). While various factors have triggered the formation of these initial micro-movements, the influence of music has always been the most noteworthy. It’s no wonder, then, that Seth Godin mentions the Grateful Dead’s pioneering importance early in his book: “ Forty years ago, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Deadmade some decisions that changed the music industry for ever. You might not be in the music business and you may never have been to a Dead concert, but the impact the Deadmade affects almost every industry, including yours.” The Grateful Dead’s emblematic power encompasses multiple aspects. In the mid 60’s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. The Grateful Dead broke away from music styles for the masses supported by the media, but also from the cliquey structures of counter-cultural, underground, or bohemian circles – instead, they moved music into the street. Street parties and open-air park events enabled the Dead to connect with their fans as well as have their fans connect among themselves. They also removed the barriers between musical genres, and developed a composite style that associated psychedelic rock, progressive bluegrass, country, blues, classical music composition structures, traditional and electronic instrumentation, and improvisation. By the end of the 70’s, the Grateful Dead following had solidified as Deadheads, one of most loyal, yet most diverse, fan clubs that has ever existed on the musical scene. (Patrick Leahy, elected to the Senate at 34 in 1974, and the current Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was, and remains, a Deadhead!)
The picture is clear: tribes, big and small, are among us. Twenty years ago, Maffesoli had to overcome the skepticism of a significant number of established European scholars when discussing the decline of individualism. He therefore burdened his analysis with rhetorical schemes that no longer sound relevant. Today, the collapse of ideologies and corporate organizations primarily worries those who are paid to maintain them, those who live off the status quo that Seth Godin slams throughout his book. The postmodern tribes that Godin addresses do not generate chaos; instead, they express creativity and entrepreneurial drive. His message is simple: stop getting hankered down with a factory mentality, waiting for a manager (who isn’t any more motivated than you are, but is merely following the motions) to give you orders. Stop wearing yourself away in a bureaucratic world where you are only meant to follow abstract instructions. Become a leader and win the support of others by creating your tribe, or find the leader capable of rekindling your enthusiasm. Be ready to turn into a “heretic” or to follow one, to initiate change, break rules, and question conventional wisdom. Outside companies, but also within. Tribal entrepreneurship is both a haven and a springboard for innovation, and grassroots initiatives do fuel change: “In an era of grassroots change, the top of the pyramid is too far away from where the action is to make much of a difference. It takes too long and it lacks impact. The top isn’t the top anymore because the streets are where the action is.”
However enthused he may be about the rejuvenating power of tribes, Godin still acknowledges the repressiveness of older tribes — tribes that have grown too big, become too bureaucratic, whose mission diluted over time. That’s what makes the difference, according to him, between the American Automobile Association (AAA), with its millions of members, and the much smaller National Rifle Association (NRA). The challenge for a tribe is to keep its focus, keep an active leadership capable of dynamically updating its purpose in a world that moves quickly –this differentiates the postmodern tribes that Godin describes from interest groups, feudalisms, cliques, and casts that mainly cater to maintaining their image or their statutory advantages. Yet, the latter are also tribes, like it or not. As true as it is that any tribe tries to foster a sense of brother/sisterhood, fraternity between tribes is a whole different story.
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/2/Social_Networking_France Le Temps des tribus – le déclin de l’individualisme dans les sociétés de masse) was published in France en 1988 and again in 2000. The book was translated in 1996 (Sage Publications).
Just finished Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg (http://www.wordyard.com) the co-founder of Salon.com. It is definitely a must read. Writing present or quasi-present history is a difficult genre and any author will always be suspected of lacking the distance necessary to separate out the wheat from the chaff, especially in a world where everybody craves for celebrity status. Scott Rosenberg largely and skillfully avoids this pitfall — although it’s almost certain that some will have a different opinion: Welcome to the blogosphere!
Over the last 25 years, digital technologies have empowered people a little bit more each time, but blogging has brought a new type empowerment, not simply the ability to do more things better and faster, but to say and share things differently. The three main sections of the book describe the progressive expansion of the art of blogging from pioneering individuals to the build-up of the massive blogosphere that has reshaped our connection to what’s happening around us and to the news media altogether. As noted by Rosenberg in his introduction, September 9/11 was a turning point in both the history and the meaning of blogs: “at that moment of crisis, many of us looked to the Web for a sense of connection an a dose of truth. The surrogate lamentations of the broadcast media’s talking heads sounded manufactured and inadequate. […] Now for the first time, the nation and the world could talk with itself, doing what humans do when the innocent suffer, cry, comfort, inform, and most important, tell the story together.”
Pioneers: The book starts with the portraits of pioneers between 1994 and 1999: Justin Hall, Dave Winer, and many others such as Jorn Barger, Matt Drudge, Jesse Garrett, Rebecca Blood, to name a few. Although all very different people with very different agendas, they all speak their mind. Until 1994, the Web was primarily an information repository — a system of interlinked hypertext documents. Even though Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau were changing the communication process between engineers at the CERN, the focus was on the documents exchanged, not on the actual messenger, the human voice behind the message (Berners-Lee started a blog only in 2005). Blogs brought that voice to the forefront.
Rosenberg’s first three chapters read like short stories: the Dada-style diary of Justin Hall in a Puritan world; the technology journey of Dave Winer (http://dave.scripting.com), who sent out a DaveNet essay titled “Billions of Websites” in 1995 and became the tribune defending the rights of all individuals by letting anyone start a weblog in Userland; the eccentric trip of Jorn Barger who published his first post using Winer’s Frontier NewsPage, ended up coining the term weblog for his Robot Wisdom Weblog that focused on links to articles that he found interesting, thus establishing “the idea,” Rosenberg says, “of the blogger as a human filter of the Web’s overwhelming bounty.” Incidentally, it’s by clicking on a link that Rebecca Blood (who wrote the first history of weblogs in 2000) met her husband, Jesse Garrett. The early days of blogging are complex, and identifying who was “first” is sometimes tricky, except for the technology side, but by 1998, it was already clear that traditional news media had lost their monopoly on the newness of news and their ability to control how long any event would stay in the spotlight: in 1998 the Matt Drudge site launched the Monica Lewinsky story.
Scaling up: The process started around 2000. The word “weblog” progressively became obsolete and the word “blog” picked up: “I’ve decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as wee’–blog. Or ‘blog’ for short,” Peter Merholz posted on Peterme.com. As the word shortens, the numbers of blogs and the “blogosphere” (William Quick) increased dramatically. Numbers may vary, but here is a sample scale: “in 2003, Technorati reported tracking 100,000 blogs and by October 2006, the figure had leaped to 67 million.” New platforms and technologies had made it easier to blog. Here are a few reminders: Blogger (read the stormy life of Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan) was created in 2000, Typepad in 2002 (by Six Apart, founded in 2001), WordPress in 2003; in 2001 Movable Type (from Six Apart) made it easy to leave comments; in 2002, RSS 2.0 became a widely adopted standard supported by most blogging tools — and Rosenberg reminds us that while building out the infrastructure, Dave Winer also created what came to be known as a ping server at Weblogs.com. As the technologies for mass adoption got fine-tuned, the blogosphere turned into a vast jungle with a huge number of new actors and a lot at stake — so ideological debates and rivalries escalated: liberal and republican blogs tore each other to pieces, but both did shoot at the traditional news media. Monetization of the new “media” was now on the agenda. VCs got involved and “blogging for bucks” put in practice the 1999 The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual stating that “market are conversations:” Robert Scoble who had once worked for Dave Winer’s Userland and was famous for his own blog (http://scobleizer.com) gave Microsoft a humanized face between 2003 and 2006. Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton were to enter into their colorful business duel. Meanwhile, in addition to getting a Whuffie score (Cory Doctorow’s reputation-based currency), a new measure in the popularity contest had appeared: the anti-media medium now had the Technorati Top 100 (2002), a Nielsen rating of sorts. Controversies raged around the meaning of “unpublish” at Boing Boing, and Heather Armstrong experienced the torments to being “dooced,” which contributed to her success (http://www.dooce.com). This section of the book is as epic as the first one — and incidentally, you will find out that there may be lots of commonalities between the blogosphere and the micro-blogosphere.
What have blogs wrought: This last section is a three-part conclusion. Rosenberg summarizes the interminable debate “Journalists vs. Bloggers,” which unfolds throughout the book, and boils down to a desperate attempt by traditional media to rescue itself from the wreckage of print, as well as from the shortcomings of its self-professed objectivity and self-declared professionalism. The Ancient scribes, faithful servants of the pharaonic bureaucracy didn’t want anybody else to write. Guess what? They disappeared or jumped ship. The reality is that skepticism and righteousness have never stopped the course of history and blogging under one form or another will stay and prevail. “The anarchic, energetic Web I fell in love with fifteen years ago had indeed lasted,” Rosenberg concludes. “It continues to provide people of meager credentials and little means with a home for their idiosyncratic ideas and unlikely innovations. Their ideas will continue to flow in a profusion of unpredictable courses.” After all, the idealist, “Utopian fervor” of the pioneers may still be around — just kind of spruced up.
As I said in the beginning, this book is fantastic. It reads like a novel, and contrary to most “business” books, it is very well written. The only thing that’s missing may be a summary map of the technologies from which products and enabling platforms were derived and subsequently leveraged by bloggers. Yes, Dave Winer may very well illustrate ‘the unedited voice of a person,” in the end, though, his unique technology insight, influence and persistence also made him one of the most prominent crystallizers of just anybody’s voice.
One of the email addresses that intrigued me the most a while ago was the one I received from Whoisylvia@aol.com. I immediately thought of Schubert’s song based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (“Who is Silvia”) and this is the only reason why I opened the message. Good that my love for music saved me from discarding an email from somebody I only knew by her real name, Sylvia Paull. She is a “Silicon Valley Public Relations Icon,” as Alan Deutschman puts it in an article for Fast Company: “One of the most effective behind-the-scenes connectors in the Valley, Sylvia Paull, started out throwing some of the hottest parties at computer-industry conventions in the ’80s. Now she links the hard-core geeks, entrepreneurs, media insiders, and the political activists, too (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-innovation-scouts-who-is-sylvia.html). She landed “accidentally,” as she says, in the high-tech industry in 1986 at Software Ventures, the provider of MicroPhone, a best-selling telecom software for Macintosh, became their Marketing Director of Software, co-produced Science Editor, a CBS radio show about science, freelanced for Wired — until she started Berkeley Ventures in 1994, an umbrella company hosting the amazingly varied PR, party-organizing and connecting activities for which she had already become famous. She is, just by herself, a huge organization. She knows everybody in the high-tech industry and while, for most, PR is about skillful schmoozing and opportunistic networking, Sylvia genuinely loves people, remembers them with a stunning precision — and is equally excited whether she speaks of a still unknown entrepreneur (even Halsey Minor used to be one of them), a celebrity or a cause. Granted. She doesn’t like everybody — in fact, she dislikes impostors (and successfully avoids them).
Be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public…I had a ” catch up” lunch with Sylvia at Eccolo in Berkeley a few days ago. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year — suffice to say that it’s an eternity in her life. She quickly took a sip of sparkling water and started full speed on the Meridian International Sports Cafe’s next event, a big gathering on the 4th of July: “They have a great place with seven big screens. We’ll look at the 15km trial race of the Tour de France. Lance Amstrong is back in the Tour. He supports Levi Leipheimer, a Santa Rosa resident… The Tour starts from Monaco, goes through gorgeous places such as La Turbie or Roquebrune-Cap Martin to come back to Monaco. I have invited every single East Bay bicycle club to come, and then the Berkeley Fireworks starts at 9:30 P.M. It’s on the same street. So I am going to lead all the cyclists on a promenade down University to the Berkeley Marina where we are going to all watch the Fireworks. We want to make it an annual event.” Yes, Sylvia is “crazy about bicycling.” She even used to race competitively. “This year I did the PR for Bike to Work Day. Got big story about it in the East Bay Express. Any bicycling advocacy, I do for free.” And her son, Evan, currently working towards his Ph.D, in Bioinformatics is an experienced cyclist amateur bicycle racer for the Palo Alto/Webcor team too!
Fifteen years ago, she decided that she would have one major pro bono client. The reality is that, fortuitous serendipity, she often has more than one at a time — for they overlap. One day, Richard Stallman who had launched the GNU Project in 1983 and set up the Free Software Foundation two years later (http://www.fsf.org), walked in the Cybersalon that she started in 1994 and has since welcomed dozens of industry pioneers (Marc Pincus, Philip Rosedale, Garrett Gruener, Ray Ozzie, Rick Falkvinge, Esther Dyson to name a few). “I asked him: ‘Who are you?’ ‘How come you haven’t heard of me,’ he responded. I told him: ‘You need more publicity!” He hired me, but he didn’t pay me anything and I have been doing his PR on and off for over 10 years.”
Sylvia is as entrepreneurial as the entrepreneurs she represents and as dedicated and devoted to their mission as the entrepreneurs themselves. But if your company doesn’t know what it stands for, don’t expect her to act as an ersatz. Great PRs and communicators help companies stage their story, but won’t make it up — unless they have no credibility as PRs in the first place. “I often ask entrepreneurs why they think they need more money than they have right now. And most of the time, they don’t know. They just say ‘Oh well we need a few millions just in case, because, you know, if the product doesn’t work or doesn’t sell, we need a backup, we need a cushion.’ A cushion to do what? No one else thinks that way. It’s a strange mentality. So, I sort of have of preview of what VCs are going to see before agreeing to represent them. I challenge them. I ask ‘Why would any one care about your product, who would want it, who’s the competition. Why is it any different than what’s out there on the market’. Some people resent that. That’s good. My whole premise is that you have to be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public.” You only get the PR you deserve and if you want Sylvia, get your act together: “I recently spoke to a freshman class at UC Berkeley entitled Entrepreneurship 101,” she wrote on her blog last April. “They all asked me questions in an attempt to figure out why some of my high-tech clients were successful, as if there were a magic formula they could follow. I told them basically what the Austrian author Robert Musil told all of us: check out what you really want to do and what you’re good at. That’s all you need to know, and the rest will follow. (http://whoisylvia.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/the-human-condition-parallax.html).
Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen).
Sylvia’s Magic… There may not be a magic formula for success per se, yet, there is some magic somewhere, Sylvia’s magic. The unusual breath and depth of her culture enables her to understand an amazing range of domains, get into and to the mind of the most diverse set of people — and identify the real innovators, those who do not reinvent the wheel. Her personal style, a uncommon cocktail of baroque and minimalism, laid-back sophistication and go-getter DIY, as well as her down to Mars and down to earth traits, makes her feel comfortable anywhere she wants to be — and makes people around her feel comfortable. Plus, no matter how serious she has to be, her ability to laugh and her witty commonsense brighten up the most high-strung faces.
She is the ultimate Berkeleyan in two ways. She is hyperlocal; the Hillside Club (http://www.hillsideclub.org), founded by a group of Berkeley women at the end of the 19th century is where she hosts her Cybersalon; deeply involved in her community, she is a typical representative of the InBerkeley life (http://www.inberkeley.com), a site that that Lance Knobel and Dave Winer started a few weeks ago. Look at the title of her own blog: “Berkeley Blog, a sane place within an insane society.” She is hyperglobal too, as Berkeley has always been, thus attracting people whose heart can be anywhere in the world. Sylvia was the first US citizen born in a US Army hospital in Germany after WW II. Her father, Oliver Margolin, a Jew from Long Island who had graduated from Oberlin in viola and become a conductor, had joined the Army to make a living and was then Eisenhower’s band conductor (he met her mother, a German Jew born in Poland and a Holocaust survivor in Frankfurt). She fondly recounts the family’s trip with the band throughout Northern Europe when she was a child, before settling in Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the t-shirt she thought up, A Woman’s Place Is on Top, to help finance the first American all-women’s climb to Annapurna I, led by Arlene Blum, her roommate at Reed College, dangles in her memory — which leads her to tell me of another Berkeley event. She is still thrilled by the success of the first Multicultural Women’s Leadership Conference she helped publicize for EngageHer (http://engageher.org) last March, and for which they had legends of feminism such as Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta. Yes, no matter how ubiquitous the Web, Berkeley remains a place of choice for people with causes — and Sylvia, as she tells their story, becomes part of the story. She supported Move on (http://www.moveon.org), co-founded by Joan Blades, who also created MomsRising (http://www.momsrising.org ) in 2006; she founded Gracenet, a networking group for women in tech that launched the successful “disgraceful award in advertising” campaign to eliminate sexist advertising; she helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), co-founded by John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor in the 90’s and living unabatedly with our time, she is hosting a Cybersalon on July 29th for Scott Rosenberg’s book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, to be released on July 7.
Time goes so fast when you chat with Sylvia! Her reserve of enthusiasm seems infinite. As we were finishing our beignets with a chocolate sauce, she told me about the Big Ideas Fest that she helps organize for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (http://www.iskme.org) in Half Moon Bay on December 6-8… and a few minutes later, I found out that her father, who after 20 years in the Army and after working toward a Ph.D. in musical education became a music therapist, and had one of the most remarkable violinists of the 20th century as his client, Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987). I asked Sylvia if she had ever met him: “Of course!” she responded cheerfully.
Coverage of the situation in Iran may be a significant turning point in the overall recognition of the importance of social media by a larger public. Over the last few months, social media has got a head start for promptness over media networks on several occasions. How many times have we heard that Twitter broadcasted information about the Sichuan earthquake 45 minutes before CNN reported! So, no wonder that “Twitterverse spoke-out in exasperation and opposition against traditional media networks (CNN specifically) and the absence of instantaneous coverage of the Iranian election”, as indicated by Brian Solis in his report of the 140 Character Conference (http://www.140conf.com/) that took place in New York City on June 16/17. Does our love for social media makes us slam traditional media too much (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/17/is-twitter-the-cnn-of-the-new-media-generation)?
Real-time responsiveness is definitely what we want. Yet, what does failure to show such ability primarily prove? Maybe that TV channels don’t “break news” and that any claim to the contrary is a deceiving form of advertisement. For truth’s sake, traditional media should only speak of “update,” “ongoing coverage,” “developing story,” or whatever. So, they may only get flak for setting wrong expectations — or continuing to hope to get by with a claim that was never really accurate in the first place.
Traditional media cannot compete with social media as far as up-to-minute and continuous information is concerned. How could they? Do we expect large corporations to mobilize as quickly as startups? Can we hope the RedCross to be on site as quickly as locals? On top of this, traditional media produce shows with a specific focus for a defined audience. Sure, it’s kind of odd to zap through channels and come across “Girls in Trouble” on MSNBC when somebody is severely injured on a street in Tehran. But this is the way TV stations were designed to be. In addition, what is pressing news for some isn’t necessarily a priority for them, or even for the entirety of the world. Families with relatives in Afghanistan may also want to have real time coverage about soldiers killed in attack on an Afghan base… Can’t we simply admit that TV is just TV, and be pleased with the fact that if we want something else, we have lots of choices, ranging from buzztrackers to sites whose mission was to reflect “global voices?”
If you want real-time information about anything, use one of the best Twitter search engines, Twazzup! http://iran.twazzup.com provides all the real-time, unfiltered tweets related to Iran? It’s now commonplace to admit that citizen journalism is a reality and that TV channels still have to figure out how to factor in grassroots reporting. It’s also annoying to hear them issue disclaimers about information that they could not “authenticate,” did not “independently verify,” or must be handled with a ‘pinch of salt.” We all know that timeliness does not mean quality, that not all messages are equal, that word-of-mouth can be manipulated by activists and cynical propagandists — and that actual tweets by real eye-witnesses could even become a minority after some time. We all admit that great journalists are first and foremost great investigators. Is all of this the right debate, though?
Even if all TVs had fully mobilized to report on Iran, there would have been no way for them to beat a Twazzup approach. One-third of TV time is advertising. So here is what we should demand:
1) That news feeds be displayed at the bottom of our the screen even during advertising time, and
2) That we have the ability to customize such news feeds with tweet streams of our choice at any time.
Instead of complaining about TV channels and sinking into an irrelevant debate, we should simply request providers to make multi-play a simple and free service — and more than a marketing package to make us buy TV, broadband Internet, telephony and wireless in one subscription. We should ask providers to deliver on their “Grand Slam” claims — and make technological and media convergence part of our daily life.
Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back starts with a telling anecdote: the author, Douglas Rushkoff got mugged on Christmas Eve in from of his Brooklyn apartment, and instead of getting sympathy, he was basically urged to shut up by local residents, afraid as they were that the incident would damage the reputation of their neighborhood, i.e. reduce the value of their home. “When faced with a local mugging, the community of Park Slope first thought to protect its brand instead of its people,” Rushkoff writes. The anecdote is Rushkoff’s starting point to analyze how, since the Renaissance, “the market and its logic have insinuated themselves into every area of our lives.” He argues that they mediate every single aspect of our existence, disconnecting us from everything that surrounds us. The book is quite expectedly somewhat controversial — yet may also be one of the most inspiring recent books for entrepreneurs and innovative marketers.
The Age of Simulacra: Chapter after chapter, the author recounts how charters disconnected us from commerce, how by mistaking the map for the territory, we got disconnected from place, how the real estate business disconnected us from home, public relations from one another, consumer empowerment from choice, a unified financial architecture from the meaning of currency, big business from the creation of value – and how many of our attempts to combat corporate power are likely to disconnect us even more. “Brands were invented to substitute for the real connections we had to people, places and values.”
The system that we have created for ourselves through a “six-hundred-year-old-business-deal” is a “progress” that translates into a loss. The book reads like an inexorable dispossession of connectedness to people and our environment, and like a sobering appendix to the five ages of man that Hesiod outlined in Works and Days in 700 BC. From one tectonic shift to the other, we have landed ourselves in the Age of Simulacra: “Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and mortgages became derivative instruments;” we depend on brands and ad-agencies for our self-presentation and identity; our “positive thinking” and self-confidence result from intense packaging efforts and “corporate-enabled self-improvement.” We can buy Disneyland souvenirs in any shopping mall without ever having been to LA. Spiritual centers, from Esalen to the Omega Institute, are well-oiled businesses, and our speculative economy has deprived us from the ability to perceive the value we create or to even create value. Even the buzz and word-of-mouth is now mediated: “In Apple’s earlier days, Macintosh enthusiasts could be counted on to go into CompUSA stores when new products were released and demonstrate their benefits to consumers. But today’s brand enthusiasts are paid spokespeople, faking their loyalty for money. It’s big economy. New firms such as Buzz Marketing and industry groups like WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association now conduct word-of-mouth campaigns on a scale unimaginable before. A study by PQ Media, which collects econometric data and researches alternative media, estimates that companies paid outside agencies $1.4 billlion for word-of-mouth marketing in 2007, up from less than $100 million in 2001.” So much for our friendly social sites — also an ideal arena for marketers to leverage the advice of scholars, marketers themselves! Rushkoff appropriately reminds us that in 1923, a group of academic psychologists formed the Psychological Corporation to apply their behavioral research to American business interests: “Like the newly-minted George Gallup and Elmo Roper, they used ‘electronic tabulating machines’ to record and analyze the purchasing behavior of individuals.”
An inspiring book for entrepreneurs and … marketers: The book is phenomenally well documented and provides fantastic insights into some of the roots of the current financial debacle. The way the story is recounted is fascinating — even if you may have questions about the angle taken by Rushkoff. One can argue that while it may be true that local trade using local currencies did foster more interactions between people and a thriving economy between the eleventh and thirteenth century, and that “real people did the best when prosperity was a bottom-up approach,” the idea that the corporatist economy initiated by the Renaissance also initiated a downward spiral that all subsequent innovations only enhanced feels somewhat simplistic at times — along with the assumption that mankind has somehow strayed from a better stage to a worse one. After all, the fact that Paris Hilton is a highly successful brand today does not mean that she would have been more than that in the Antiquity or Medieval times. In the end, the evaluation of what connected/disconnectedness may depend on the frame of reference. Plato/Socrates fought the Sophists’s ability to brand anything as a result of their disconnectedness from the essential, the realm of Forms and Ideas.
The book is also an insightful approach to the history of the United States, full of interesting reminders. Mirroring the techniques of the railroad barons of the century before, GM crafted the legislation that made highways federally funded and controlled – and idealized suburbs. Yes, Teddy Roosevelt, fighting corporations, may have been more progressive than FDR when the latter endorsed the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) that changed the perception of mortgages (from a stigma to a plus), but ended up empowering appraisers as they assessed the quality of neighborhoods (and this to the detriment of Jews and blacks). The magic of PRs in the country has a unique ability to reframe or gloss over history. PR artists such as George Creel and Edward Bernays enabled Woodrow Wilson, who had run for reelection in 1916 on the platform that “he kept us out of the war,” to persuade everybody “to make the world safe for democracy” a year later. In the same fashion, it’s stunning how fast we forgot that IBM sold punch-card tabulators to the Nazis, that GE partnered with Krupp (a German munition firm) and that GM and Ford, which already controlled 70 percent of the German automobile market, retooled their factories to supply Nazis with war vehicles. As I say that, I can only suggest that you read a few foundational books in the history of marketing persuasion (of which many currently successful marketing books are spin derivatives), mentioned by Rushkoff, especially Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion, Public Relationsor Propaganda. While at it, also read Larry Tye’s book, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations. Also consider another classic: Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders or The Status Seekers. Also, Douglas Rushkoff has written several other interesting books. One of them,MEDIA VIRUS – Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, is the origin of the expression “viral marketing.”
The last chapter of the book, “Here and Now,” subtitled “The Opportunity to Reconnect,” is in fact better than any marketing book, and may give you great ideas of companies that can make a difference. As the author reminds us in the previous chapter, PayPal’s original plan was to offer an alternative payment service. True, the business model changed as Paypal activity was perceived as a violation of the banking laws. But you may have other ideas… and it’s when they read scouring, abrasive books that entrepreneurs invent new rules — and eventually might pave the way towards a new economy, or creatively revisit Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. “Like the founders of America, who may have differed on almost everything else but this,” notes Rushkoff, “Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another.”
There is often a very special high energy about startups — all types of startups. That’s what I felt when I arrived at the RESONANZ opening gala. A non-profit organization, RESONANZ is starting its first year as a new three-weeks program for young singers in Albany, N.Y.
