The Mesh, an old word meaning the “opening between the threads of a net” got its technology flavor with the concept of mesh networking generally defined as “a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router.” For Lisa Gansky, in her book The Mesh, Why the future of business is sharing, “the Mesh is the new way of doing business.” It is made possible by the increasingly sophisticated understanding of consumers’ behavior patterns, as well as multiple technologies that matured over the last fifteen years, ranging from RFID, broadband management, GPS-enabled mobile web devices, to social media networks or data processing.

Described in chapter 1, “Getting to know the Mesh,” the Zipcar experience provides a foundational example from which Gansky presents the “Mesh business” that has fleshed out over the last ten years. It is defined through five main attributes:

• Shareability: Products or services can be shared within a community (whatever it is);
• Advanced Web and mobile networks, and information infrastructures: They allow real-time tracking of what is shared;
• Immediate availability: Users can access the shared goods wherever they are physically;
• Evangelization through social networking: Happy users spread the word about their experience;
• Global service networks: Any Mesh service can come with a network of ancillary services through partnerships.

Gansky ends up adopting/adapting the technology definition of mesh networks: “A mesh describes a type of network that allows any node to link in any direction with any other node in the system.”

The advantages and the meaning of the Mesh economy are spelled out throughout the following eight chapters for both the users and the providers of Mesh services. The on-demand availability of physical goods creates a new type of cooperative and trust-based environment as well as, ultimately, a cultural shift that points toward the new aspects of our liberal economy. This includes:

Usage-based consumption models: Why not take advantage of shareable goods when they are easily available? How many cars do we really need in a family? Do we need to buy new clothes all the time? Why not swap children’s clothing and toys through ThredUp, for example? The Mesh economy provides us access to many goods while sparing us from the constraints and superfluous expenses of ownership, as well as the depreciative process of accumulating things. The throwaway economy is disappearing quickly.

Global anti-waste approaches:  While many anti-waste measures in our life are still primarily corrective, the Mesh is designed to structurally reduce the amount of garbage in the first place. Continued participation in the Mesh requires goods that hold up to repeated uses, i.e. that are durable and reparable. On the production side, this entails demand-driven and tightly integrated distributed supply chains that also provision “reverse supply chains,” as the goal is not only to sell products, but also to repair them or recycle and “upcycle” parts.

Marketplace-driven overhead reduction principles: Remember the noise ten years ago about how Internet was removing the middleman and how we were entering the disintermediation age (strikingly enough, a word that was coined in the sixties and originally referred to the ability for consumers to invest directly in securities)? This is actually happening. Tellingly, to defend itself in 2008, Prosper, a p2p financial company, had to argue that that it was not a bank, but a marketplace, which the SEC’s investigators admitted. Great news. Structures do not build the economy, consumers do… and they do so precisely in a marketplace where they expect transparency.

My summary: The Mesh, a consumer-driven free economy: Mesh businesses address people and send them recommendations and/or advertizing messages based on their personal behavioral patterns: that’s why they are winning at a fast pace. While traditional liberalism mandates the right to undertake from the entrepreneur’s standpoint and is predicated on mechanisms pushing products to consumers, the Mesh liberalism factors in the consumers’ pull and their ability to transform any company into a service company delivering services to which they may or may not subscribe, depending on the quality of the offering and assistance they get.

Netflix slayed the “movie dragon,” because consumers are the ones who make or break companies (more so than ever). They are free social animals, choosing with whom they interact and to whom they want to listen, and are moving away from business institutions that do not hear their conversations. In many respects, the world of the Mesh is the expression of a consumer-driven free economy as well as the market incarnation of Rousseau’s social contract “by which every person, while uniting himself with all, shall obey only himself and remain as free as before.

A very interesting book, which also includes an extensive “Mesh directory.”

Thanks to Seth Godin for attracting my attention to this book!

Note: This book will be published in French by Diateino in January 2011. As a reminder, Diateino is also the French publisher of Seth Godin’s and Guy Kawasaki’s most recent books. To read my French version of this preface, please go to the Diateino blog.

***

I’m a cartoonist – This is how Hugh MacLeod introduces himself on his blog, www.gapingvoid.com.

In France, the word “cartoonist” generally refers to the creators of American animated cartoons. In English, the term applies to any person who draws cartoons in a variety of formats — such as editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, or animation. The word comes from the Italian “cartone” that started to designate preliminary drawings and sketches for paintings, stained glass windows, and tapestries early in the sixteenth century. Even though the Webster reports that the first known use of “cartoon” in English dates back to 1671, Punch Magazine is the publication that gave the word its modern meaning in 1843 by labeling one of its illustrations, “Cartoon, No.1: Substance and Shadow,” a satirical drawing where caricaturist John Leech (1817-1864) was deriding the preliminary drawings of the paintings that were to decorate the Houses of Parliament under reconstruction because of the 1834 fire. From then on, “cartoons” started to brand humorous drawings that often had social and political undertones. During the same period, France also has its “cartoonists”, of course, such as J.J. Grandville, Honoré Daumier, or Charles Philipon; however the French press never went into a similar intensive marketing of cartoons as its Anglo-Saxon counterpart did. As indicated by Jean-Paul Gabilliet, one of the rare French specialists of American cartoons, “the democratic mythologizing of press illustrations in France only happened in the nineteenth century and faded after WWI, with images being treated as a mere additive to writings.” Nonetheless, Gabilliet does not fail to mention contemporary notable exceptions, such as Cabu or Pétillon.

A cartoonist, a writer, an entrepreneur, whatever! A creative mind…

Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist in the pure sense of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. He is a writer: this is clear from his book’s climb onto the Wall Street Journal’s Best Sellers list. He is an entrepreneur: in 2006 he became the CEO of Stormhoek USA that markets South-African wines in the United States. He worked in advertising intermittently until 2004, starting right after college, needing a job to pay for his bills.  All such activities anchor him in what he calls “the real world,” as he deems living as an “artist” to be too unpredictable.  Is this too much of a compromise when you are an artist? It’s a matter of vantage point. In fact, it’s by securing a revenue stream that MacLeod was able to do what he wanted to do as an artist – and ultimately without compromising. “The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do from what you are not. It is this red line that demarcates your sovereignty; that defines your own private creative domain.”

In this book, which reads like an autobiographic essay, Hugh MacLeod shares his experience and his perspective. Whether you are an artist or an entrepreneur, your personal obligation is to protect your freedom and your sovereignty: this is what will enable you to constantly more forward, pushing you to innovate as well as find the self-sufficiency that frees you from the tyranny of others — friends who see you a certain way, always the same over the years, or colleagues who box you in categories based on what is professionally convenient to them or on what fits with the stereotypes with which they comply. So, if you are an artist, don’t get trapped into the romantic clichés of the misunderstood genius ready to starve for the sake of Art; if you are an entrepreneur, keep away from buzzwords and sing in your own voice. Your goal is certainly to be recognized, but your chances of succeeding are higher if you accept solitude and beaver away. Yes, “Ignore everybody, but also “Just shut the hell up and get on with it. Time waits for no one.”

For MacLeod, success didn’t come overnight. He crafted it. It’s a success earned through work, patience, and his ability to leverage the platform of expression that the Web offers. MacLeod could have waited to be recognized through traditional means. Instead, he chose to create his luck. His free spirit made him choose self-publication in his own “magazine,” his blog. Hugh Macleod is a cartoonist, yes, but on his own terms, and on a ubiquitous tribune.

An artist…

Ignore Everybody contains two books in one. It’s a text, of course. But it’s also a collection of cartoons to be appreciated separately, that tell a slightly different story even as they illustrate the narrative. They display a whole different dynamics, capturing the precariousness of ideas, feelings and impressions, as well as the fleetingness of viewpoints: “One of the reasons I got into drawing cartoons on the back of business cards was that I could carry them around with me (…) So if I was walking down the street and I suddenly got hit with the itch to draw something, I could just nip over to the nearest park bench or coffee shop, pull out a blank card from my bag and get busy doing my thing. Seamless. Effortless. No fuss. I like it. Before, when I was doing larger works, every time I got an idea while walking down the street I’d have to quit what I was doing and schlep back to my studio while the inspiration was still buzzing around in my head. Nine times out of ten the inspired moment would have passed by the time I got back.”

These cartoons are a world in and of themselves. While the text of the book sometimes gives the impression that words thwart the communication of the message, the vignettes express the moment with vividness and perceptiveness, instantly revealing how MacLeod sees the world around him, be it personal or professional, what he likes as well as what he detests, humorously or ironically, yet almost always with an iconoclast and libertarian resonance. While the book compulsively hammers how urgent it is to resurrect in oneself personal leadership and creative energy free from constraints and conventions, the drawings accurately reflect that impulse, as does the laconic style of the comments that accompany them. MacLeod’s drawings have something of a Lettrist Hypergraphy manner à la Isidore Isou and a situationist energy à la Guy Debord. The cartoons of Ignore Everybody, as well as some if his drawings for a number of books, such as Seth Godin’s Linchpin, Nilofer Merchant’s The New How, or Barrie Hopson’s and Katie Ledger’s And What Do You Do?: 10 Steps to Creating a Portfolio Career carry the same clear message: Get away from what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”, take charge of your own destiny, be constructive and innovate: “The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.”

… Or follow a great tradition by making it yours and enriching it with your own idioms, as is the case for MacLeod. He calls himself a Texan, but his father is Scottish, and he has spent part of his life in Great Britain. As a matter of fact, there is something quite European about his style. At times, you will think of Paul Klee’s pencil strokes, of entanglements in the style of Hundertwasser, of postures à la Ronald Searle, or of proliferations like Sempé (for whom “nothing is simple” and “everything gets complicated”). At times, the metal-wire-like lines surmounted with a black ball, a while circle, or a spiral may remind you of the tension, attraction and repulsion effects of some of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. In all cases, though, you will still discover a very personal style and, on the minuscule area of a business card, the large space of the experiences and fancies of an artist, expressed with the insolence and the cynical benevolence of the best cartoonists in history.

Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as and Seth Godin’s Tribes, will release the French translation of Seth Godin’s Linchpin on May 2o. This time, I was not the translator, but I wrote a preface that is available on the Diateino blog. Here below is the English translation of my text.

Seth Godin has written a dozen books within the last ten years, that read like epistles of sorts – short conversational treatises in which he urges company founders, managers, and marketers in simple terms to create and promote out-of-the-ordinary products, to select their targets insightfully, turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. Book after book, his message has become more personal, more humanist. This has lead to Linchpin, which the author said in an interview in Anvers is his last book. Even more than in Tribes, his tone is that of an exhortation, and in the “last word” conclusion of the book, he sounds like a facilitator for a conversation where the Buddhist prajña meets Kabbalistic balance. “The result of getting back in touch with our pre-commercial selves will actually create a post-commercial world that feeds us, enriches us, and gives us the stability we’ve been seeking for so long.” 

“Is it really the ‘last word’ of one of the biggest marketing gurus?” you might ask, “and is it what marketing is about?” Yes it is. For there are two types of marketing:

1) Mass marketing that harps prosaic messages for insignificant products offered to ordinary people, and for which schools train legions of average students whose personal goal is to do what they are told to do and then get back home, put on their slippers and watch TV.

2) Inspired marketing that addresses early adopters, plugged-in folks, geeks, and enthusiasts, and that tells stories about products or people you feel like discovering and events in which you want to participate.

Mass marketing doesn’t inspire. But inspired marketing can generate massive success. That’s the case of Seth Godin himself, actually. His blog is one of the most read marketing blogs in the world. Several million people have bought or downloaded one or more of his books. If you have never heard him in public, just go to YouTube and click on any video. Even a non-English-speaker will immediately get a feel of what an inspired marketer is about: someone who emboldens you to act, whatever you had in mind to do – buy or sell a product, or invite your neighbors to join a fundraising for a sick child. Inspired marketing is transformational; it makes you find out about new things and new people – as well as find about your own self. It urges you to ask yourself the right questions, as unsettling as they may be, such as, for instance: “Am I indispensable?” 

This book is for people who want to be more than “faceless cog[s] in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as executives who understand that they need more than “two teams” (”management and labor”) to make an impact on people’s lives, those who intend to create “a third team, composed of “linchpins.” That is, a group of people who, through their leadership and their drive, “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” “Linchpins are the essential blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual and interpersonal development, and a call for a new workplace.

The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is an available set of compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people, because you can’t be a linchpin alone in your corner. Inspire. Be pragmatic with artistry, and invent new rules that will make you succeed, and with you, the colleagues and the companies that leverage your talent.

Linchpin is for those whose aspirations can be invigorated, who want to rebuild a sort of personal unity and express a positive energy through a job they like or a cause in which they believe. If you want to be a linchpin, if you are a linchpin, if you can firmly say that you are indispensable, if dozens, thousands are like you, people wanting to connect to make things happen, if you are one of the linchpins within a generalized insurrection of talents… what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”

Seth Godin’s contagious optimism and fervent iconoclasm remind me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again The Wealth of Nations‘ first chapter, in his Fields, Factories and Workshops. Their ultimate goal is quite similar: revive the artist in you, or something of “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands,” but was replaced by a “human slave of an iron slave.” Both advocate novel “integral education” to help reshape a different future. This future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, the future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” because they will build a world where “dignity, humanity, and generosity” intersect. 

This book is not a theorist’s work. It’s the book of a man who calls for action without cluttering your brain with literary references. Don’t get it wrong, though! This is also the book of an extraordinarily cultivated author, who has obviously read and analyzed with a modern perspective the masterpieces he mentions in his remarkable bibliography.

Note on earlier posts:

About Dominique Gibert, the CEO of Diateino in December 2009.

About Seth Godin: For an Insurrection of Talents: Seth Godin’s New Book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? 

English translation of my French preface for Tribes that includes three parts:

- Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon. French version on the Diateino blog.

- Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena. French version on the Diateino blog.

- The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign. French version on the Diateino blog.

And it so happened that coming back home, I found my early copy of Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? in my mailbox. This book is for the people who want to be more than a “faceless cog in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as any company who understands that it needs more than “two teams (”management and labor”) and intends to create “a third team, the linchpins,” i.e. people who “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual development, and a call to a new workplace.

The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people. Inspire. Expose your artistry, and invent new rules. In many respects, Linchpin is a sermon in the original sense of the term, a speech addressed to believers whose hopes can be rekindled, and whose beliefs can be linked together. If you are a linchpin – if you can answer “yes” to the question “Are you indispensable?” – and if dozens, thousands, hundreds of thousands do the same… in other words, if there is an insurrection of talents, what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”

Seth Godin’s bibliography at the end of the book is quite remarkable. He refers to real books with real messages. His diehard optimism and his fervent iconoclasm, however, also reminded me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again the Wealth of Nations’ first chapter, in Fields, Factories and Workshops. He added that “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave,” and advocated for a novel “integral education” to help reshape the future. Such future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, this future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” i.e. people who want to make a difference and for whom “dignity, humanity and generosity” can transparently intersect. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

 Twitter: @mddelphis

Dominique is the founder of Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as of Seth Godin’s Tribes, three books that I translated for her. She had asked Guy to help her find the “best translator” for The Art of the Start. Guy having known me for a long time (we co-founded ACIUS – now 4D – in 1987), I was to be the designee. Writing books had been my favorite occupation until I started 4D in France, but sometimes Friendship oblige, and although I had the hectic schedule of running a company in full swing (Brixlogic), I agreed to undertake my first translation as a night-and-week-end activity.

What you “lose in translation” is made up for by what you actually gain: Dominique’s style on the phone (I only met her in person after the book was actually published) was a big part in my decision. She loved the book for the right reasons. She had attended the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and Guy Kawasaki had presented The Art of the Start. Of course, this was a “wow” experience for her, and when I asked her what impressed her the most about Guy, she responded that it was the ability of “a unique personality to deliver a truly universal message.” She was speaking of a dear friend in terms that resonated with me. She was not telling me “Guy is Guy,” a tautological statement that I have sometimes heard from clueless groupies or self-declared thought-leaders. Instead, she was positioning in just a few words Guy’s “competitive advantage” against the dozens of regular Joe’s who go at great lengths to be special and only end up spinning their personal idiosyncrasies. On top of that, I liked the fact that immediately after the speech, she had bought the book, read it and was advocating for its translation for a valid reason. She told me something around the following lines: “I understand English reasonably well. I believe I can say that I understood everything, except, maybe, for a few idioms or jokes here and there, but I also believe that even if many French entrepreneurs understand English, they can’t own the message as well in a foreign language as they would if they could read it in French. There is a difference between ‘understanding’ the words and being able to really ‘feel’ what they mean.” She was so right! We are so accustomed to think that many things are “lost in translation” that we often forget what we may also miss when reading a text in a foreign language: we don’t memorize quite as much or as easily as in  our native tongue; it takes us more time to extrapolate from what we read, connect the dots, adapt the message to our daily environment and eventually act upon that message. Yes, understanding a message is one thing, being able to live it is a whole different story.

Entrepreneurship, a business and a cause: Making the decision to acquire the rights of The Art of the Start was an entrepreneurial act in itself. Dominique had been a legal analyst and consultant for twenty years, as well as the CEO of a legal publishing company when she decided to create a company to publish the books that she wanted to read. She already had a few titles in her catalogue, including a bestseller, Les Techniques du Succès (available in China and India), but “it so happened,” she said, “that The Art of the Start was something I needed as an entrepreneur myself. And I couldn’t possibly be the only person with such a need. Sure, there were a lot of books ‘made in France’ about creating a company, but there was nothing, similar to The Art of the Start– or to Reality Check. We have good books here, but somehow the entrepreneurship spirit is often missing or all the reasons why you can be enthusiastic about starting a business seem to be crushed by piles of warnings and explanations about French regulations, and tons academic recommendations.” Guy’s books are straightforward and uplifting. Dominique was well aware that she might face some challenge promoting an American book in a country inclined to wonder if words from the Silicon Valley could truly be heard in Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux or Brest – in short, in a country that invented the word “entrepreneur” in the 18^th century, yet also fathered Chauvin, a soldier in the Napoleon’s “Grande Armée,” whose existence is associated to the word “chauvinism.”

Dominique did win her fight and Kawasaki’s books have become the vademecums of thousands and thousands of French entrepreneurs who realize that they have the same dreams and the same needs as any entrepreneur anywhere in the world. Entrepreneurship is Dominique’s cause and helping others her goal – and because of her, I end up looking at translating a few great books as a way to give back to the country where I was born.

If you read French, take a look at Diateino’s interesting catalogue: http://www.diateino.com. If you do not read French, are a francophile or want to make a lovely gift, Diateino published a book in English Say Chic to Say it in French (published in the United States by Simon and Schuster).

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

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.” 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information about Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

French version of the book: http://www.diateino.com/livres.php?livre=120

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.

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

Given that Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us came 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). 

Published in French by Diateino (http://www.diateino.com). Available for pre-order. Hardcover – Sept 1, 2009; eBook available at http://izibook.eyrolles.com (July 22, 2008).

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 Urban Music 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 Dead made 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 Dead made 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.

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of the matter is Twitter is still very new – and significantly enough, TWTRCON SF09 that took place on May 31, 2009, was the first conference focusing on Twitter as a business tool for marketing, customer service, PR, or to make money. Quite a few companies explained how they already use Twitter today. The conference was very well organized, very well attended and had great speakers and panelists. Here are some of the highlights for me (for a more complete survey, you may want to check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TWTRCON).

Operation Smile: Let’s start with a NPO. A great sign (albeit rare) is when a business conference starts with an inaugural party to help a humanitarian cause and provides updates on the money raised throughout the day. Presented as a live case study of a twitter-centric marketing initiative, Operation Smile launched a Twitter 140 Smiles with the goal of raising money to help fund 140 reconstructive surgeries to repair childhood facial deformities, including cleft lips and cleft palates. Check out http://www.140smiles.org and http://twitter.com/operationsmile! Twitter is not just an American thing! It helps change the life of people thousands miles away from the Silicon Valley.

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen). 

Great speakers: The main characteristic of the major individual speakers was their authentic spontaneity.  

Laura Fitton started with a pre-conference keynote, Twitter for Business 101. The first time I heard about Laura Fitton was when I read Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us . In less than two years, she has become a real social media guru (although she views herself more as a “Twitter student” than an expert), and her company, Pistachio Consulting (http://pistachioconsulting.com) focuses on ways to connect businesses to new ideas and innovations using microsharing platforms. So, find the right followers, leverage this huge opportunity to connect to customers, and integrate Twitter into your operations – just as Salesforce is integrating Twitter. Her book Twitter For Dummies  (coauthored with Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston, to be published in July) will certainly convince even the most skeptical.

Twitlebrity is not the point. Efficiency is. Guy Kawasaki is a most famous twitterer, not for the sake of fame, but for business. His interview by Gina Smith was a great moment of humor and honesty. “I’m not on Twitter to make friends,” he acknowledged unambiguously, “but to promote Alltop.” View this as spam (but, you willingly subscribed!) but do not forget that Spam is a delicacy for Hawaiians. And what is perceived as ghostwriting by twittering lone-riders is teamwork potency in business. We knew that already: Kawasaki is no macho. His team: four women who have real names and are real people.

Shel Israel announced his future book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, to be published in September. His speech featured the stories of like-minded people, who assemble through Twitter, build personal global neighborhoods – in other words, a diverse Twitterville population, ranging from business folks to Janis Krums, who sent an image of the US Airways plane moments after it plunged landed on the Hudson River. “If the Pulitzer judges don’t consider an iPhone photo next year,” he comments, “I’ll eat my hat.”

The last individual speaker was Steve Rubel. He created a life chart using Mind Note, a mind mapping program, of where Twitter stands in the industry ecosystem and the directions the product might possibly take as a social OS that enables to a site to make social or a marketing OS. The diagram, inspired by Brian Solis’s Twitterverse, is now published at http://www.micropersuasion.com. Here below is a zoomable version of it:

Steve Rubel was definitely more exciting than the conversation with Anamitra Banerji, from the Twitter Product Management team, who rehashed that Twitter’s corporate motto is “We don’t know” for about 30 minutes. I truly wondered if I was watching the Silicon Valley aesthetization of cluelessness, a repeat of the “no-business model” snobbishness of the Internet bubble – only adapted to social media, or the elaborate staging of a revolution-to-come. Strange when there were a number of companies eager to discuss the viability of Twitter for their businesses.

Great panelists: The various representatives from large corporations were significantly more eloquent and enthusiastic about Twitter than the Twitter representative that appeared. What some of them do is already quite remarkable. Virgin America, Intuit, Phoenix Suns, PR Newswire, Boingo Wireless, Well Fargo, Comcast, Carl’s Jr,. Kogi BBQ, Dell Outlet, eBay, Cisco, and FutureWorks see Twitter as a platform: companies can strengthen their brand by engaging with their customers in real time, inform and support them better, create user communities, and generate more revenue. In doing so, each of them insisted on the necessity of defining clear strategies and measure actual results using different methodologies and various products (Radian6 was the most frequently mentioned), define rules of engagement and ways to personalize their brands, and eventually manage potential liabilities (while taking into account that the Twitter universe already has its own codes of conduct and is in many respects governed by its members — as is the case for most social tools). Even though many of these efforts are still at a fairly early stage, it is obvious to them that Twitter has the potential to drive real business, as was clear from the remarks of Stefanie Nelson at Dell, or Beth Mansfield, from Carl’s Jr. Beth has a real strategy on when is best time to tweet (the tweetspot), and she made a few people smile when she described herself as “a chubby 42-year-old wife and mother” interacting with her followers, “18-35 young hungry males.”

They are also all aware that “Twitter is dramatically changing the era of top-down management of corporate communications in real time,” as Brian Solis said at some point, and that if Twitter is a great environment to turn customers into evangelists, it also enables them to scream when they are unhappy — which turns out not to be such a big deal, as it enables marketing to better escalade problems and solve them faster. Forward-looking companies understand that the era of hidden dirty secrets is over, anyway. With platforms such as Twitter, customer-centricity is more than the one-to-one deal of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. It’s a public commitment in a world that has morphed into a public tribunal: When a first class passenger on Virgin writes a tweet to say that he is hungry, you have to feed him!

Most of these companies are also looking at leveraging Twitter within a global social media perspective and working at the its integration with not only their Web sites using products such as Hootsuite, but their overall operations and IT environment. (We can only hope that Twitter will be able to hire the right folks to address their reliability and availability problems).

On the lighter business use side, “Your Brand is a Person,” I can’t help mentioning MC Hammer on the stage with Stefanie Michaels (http://www.adventuregirl.com). While agents try shield to shield entertainers and athletes and build their mystery persona, the life of celebrities is so exposed in the media and sometimes beyond recognition, that MC Hammer doesn’t see the risk he tales. “There was socializing before there was a platform,” MC Hammer said plainly; “embarrassing yourself on Twitter is not a new risk.”

Let’s Cut to the Chase: This was the title of the last topic of the day. The Twitter concept is here to last one way or the other. How big will Twitter is going to be? That’s everybody’s guess. I believe that Jeremiah Owyang (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/) could be quite right in assuming that the approach will turn into a universal protocol that will make it normal stuff. As far I am concerned, I tend to believe that the company’s somewhat complacent procrastination about defining its business model (even if it’s to find out the best practices nuggets, which is often absurd in a startup) may accelerate the commoditization of the concept. I hope this does not jeopardize the business prospects of the multiple — and often bootstrapped — companies that have created beautiful, interesting and useful products around Twitter. Here are some of the ones featured at the Conference: ObjectiveMarketer, PeopleBrowsr, UserVoice, ThumbFight, Jobaba.com, or Twitfunnel.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis ( http://twitter.com/mddelphis)