Most of what I write here, I write with Web 2.0 Expo attendees in mind. A big part of my job is developing content and programs for our attendees, hoping to be in tune enough with this industry and community to help make something worth coming to. But I spend a fair amount of my time working with our exhibitors and sponsors as well, and I’m always on the lookout for ways to include them in the event that brings them value without creeping the attendees out. In fact, I work for two audiences of marketers: the one in our Marketing & Community track in the conference, and the one building booths and rolling out programs aimed at winning you over while you’re at the show. Both are struggling to find what works as the ground shifts beneath us.

I found myself the target of one particularly effective marketing strategy this weekend. I’m training to run a half marathon through Team In Training, a program that benefits the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and we had our send-off meeting this Saturday, the one where they tell you you’re ready, hand you your race day jersey, and wish you good luck. They also remind you to run with electrolytes, gels, a bandana, a stopwatch, a shoe wallet with $20 in it (for hailing a cab, natch!) and about thirty other things that I’ve made it all the way through training without acquiring. Which is why it was handy they held the meeting in a Sports Basement. And handed out 20% off cards to everyone for their shopping convenience. If it sounds a little heavy-handed, it wasn’t, and here’s why: this Sports Basement (and maybe others, I don’t know) featured a large meeting area furnished with old but insanely comfortable couches and overstuffed chairs, a whiteboard, and sideboard for serving food and drinks. We’d all just come from a seven mile run, so the cushy seating was pure heaven. I didn’t question it as I grabbed my coffee and bagel and put my sore feet up on the chair in front of me, but as I sat there it occurred to me that someone had had the forethought to set aside a significant chunk of space (and right near the front of the store, too) for us. Isn’t floor space the most valuable commodity in retail? Especially when you’re catering to every sport under the sun? Whatever their planner’s calculus, it paid off. Not only were 30 well-rested, well-fed runners let loose in the store with shopping lists, but we each felt like much more than a customer, we felt like honored guests of a host who shared our values.

Maybe it’s a small thing, but not as small as it seems. Someone had to decide that Sports Basement was going to be in the community business. Besides the initial decision to set aside the space, whose job is it to furnish it and to coordinate use of it? Who cleans up? These are tasks not often found on marketing job descriptions. And yet over time it’s probably won them more brand loyalty than most of their paid efforts.

As much as I live on the web, most of my work culminates in the creation of temporary IRL spaces, and I can pretty easily mimic this effect strategy at our events. I’m looking forward to working with some of the top brands on the web to create sponsored spaces for you to enjoy at Web 2.0 Expo. Other retailers are doing the same; one I know of is Design Within Reach, which has been hosting Biz Ladies meetups (yes, I’m outing myself as a DesignSponge fan.) Corporations do it too, when they lend meeting space for user groups and interest groups. Creating community on the web, on the other hand, is both easier (no couches needed) and much harder (30,000 members instead of 30 means a lot more clean up, even if the crumbs are digital). You start with the decision to be in the community business. You set aside the space, and find the tools. Then you find it’s more work than you thought, and you hire a community manager. If Micki Krimmel is right, this is when the fun starts:

Sure, the Community Manager can edit comments and moderate inappropriate forum posts but what else can she do? She can change the entire culture of your company. She can advocate for your community. She can keep you one step ahead of your competitors. She can help you build a sustainable business… if you let her.

Then you’re really in the community business.

Come hear Micki opine on What Would the Community Manager Do? On Wednesday April 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Continuing my Power of Less theme, I recently received an email message that seemed to me to be the wave of the future. I sent a note to someone about speaking at our conference and received an automated response (in the voice of her email bot) telling me that the person is off on vacation without the Internet or email. Pretty normal, but then this:

She will be gone until January 19 and decided to take an email sabbatical. This means that no emails received during her vacation will be stored, including your message. In other words, she will NOT receive your message. It won’t be waiting for her because I’ve been instructed to throw everything away so that she can come home to a little less stress.

Why didn’t I think of this? Or even if I had, would it cause a ruckus at my company? Would it be seen as unprofessional? I’ve already set my outgoing voicemail message on my desk phone to explain that I will not listen to messages left here (it gives my cell phone number; I do listen to those messages, usually), and I think that might be the extent of the tolerance for my communication pickiness. But seriously, what’s worse, telling someone who really wants to contact you to try back when you’ve returned, or spending all your time sorting through irrelevant, outdated threads instead of actually returning important messages?

Luis Suarez, speaking at Web 2.0 Expo Europe last year, encouraged the audience to give up completely on corporate email, as he has done (here’s the video). What he’s selling, I’m buying, but from the people I spoke to, I’m in the minority. Okay, to be fair, I’m not taking him literally. There’s a place for email, but it’s abused. As Luis said, “It doesn’t make me more productive.” I’m sure it depends wildly on the nature of your job, but at the end of the day I often look back and see that I got through a lot of my email, but not my to do list. Email is so reactive, and so rarely closes the loop.

Possibly irrationally, I credit Twitter with what might be called a trend here. Twitter reminded us that you can be in communication with others without creating a backlog of messages every time you’re away from the computer. Luis says:

You wake up and go on Twitter and ask “Anything happen since last night?” And your community says no, nothing really, move on.

This is kind of how things were before email. You went on vacation and you came back and asked what happened. It took 10 minutes, not two days. It’s the sane way to live. I’m in.

Mashable has a good post today perfectly mirroring our theme for 2009: The Power of Less. The author, Leo Babauta, seems to have been thinking along the same lines as we’ve been; he’s the author of a book called (wait for it): The Power of Less. I find some of his advice a bit rigid, and it’s targeted specifically at start ups, but much of the advice will fit for enterprises as well and he’s applied this concept to a wide variety of areas of your business, which mirrors some of the facets of our program this year. He encourages entrepreneurs to narrow your focus, be more discriminating in your choice of projects, reduce processes and costs, and cut bureaucracy, but he also applies it to design, appealing for uncluttered interfaces. All good advice, but the devil’s in the details. The first choices will be what to focus on, followed by closely by the how.

Incidentally, Loic Le Meur has recently added his voice to the chorus of business leaders reminding us all that a recession is actually a great time to start a new venture, with a post filled with bit of his advice for any economic climate. Remember what was born the last time no one had any money? Companies like Flickr and SixApart. Take advantage of the lack of froth now, when talent is available, resources are cheap, and you can hear yourself think. If you’re so inspired, that is.

Fur has been flying this weekend about the nature of celebrity on the internet, more specifically on Twitter. It began as a discussion of authority, when Loic Le Meur wrote a post entitled “Twitter: We Need Search By Authority” and within about a day Jon Wheatley and some other developers had created Twitority, which filters Twitter searches based on the number of followers. That’s a pretty impressive development time, but even faster to arrive was the hue and cry pointing out that popularity does not equal authority. Most proponents of the value of “authority,” including Loic himself, quickly conceded that influence was probably a better word to describe what the number of followers measures, and then that word was picked apart as well as being off the mark. Indeed, labels aside, the idea of filtering in this way bothers many who value the democratic nature of Web 2.0. Robert Scoble decried the idea as patently idiotic, and Charlie O’Donnell had this to say:

It’s laughable…the idea that someone has “authority” because a lot of people pay attention to it. Isn’t that the most anti-Web 2.0 thing you’ve ever heard? Did we forget about the long tail? Wasn’t that the whole point? Level playing field… hear the small voices… excuse me, is this thing on?

Charlie (who is also on advisory board for Web 2.0 Expo New York, by the way) has a point. And at first I thought Loic’s unspoken point might be “don’t judge my need for filter until you’re as popular as I am; see if you can handle the deluge when you have upwards of 15,000 followers,” but as many thoughtful bloggers have discussed over the recent months, Twitter solved the filter problem in its architecture with the idea of asymmetric follow. James Governor defined asymmetric follow here (touched off by some thoughts from JP Rangaswami over a year ago and egged on by Tim O’Reilly). Basically the idea is that by allowing others to follow you without following them, you can maintain a manageable volume of input while still engaging in a conversation that reaches beyond your personal network, because the @user function allows anyone on the network to reach you in context at anytime. What’s at stake here, as James points out, is exactly what Charlie is ranting about: conversation or broadcast? When you become a celebrity in the world of Web 2.0, do you only listen to other celebrities, thereby corrupting the democratic nature of the Web? Or do you actively engage with the interesting but unknown voices? Have the revolutionaries become the establishment?

Perhaps it’s the symmetric followers who are having the most trouble here; those who’ve followed back every follower they’ve gained (as Loic seems to have) find their twitter stream a fire hose. It would be pretty ironic if the seemingly democratic policy of reciprocation is what’s driven this desire for a feature many see as elitist. Of course there are those who would say that symmetric followers have a less than democratic motive; if you’re not reading your tweetstream because it’s overloaded, then why follow back? Is it a tactic to attract and retain followers yourself? I’m sure that every symmetric follower has a different reason for their policy; this is truly an open question.

On the other end of the spectrum are folks like Kara Swisher, who follows only 16 people and has over 4000 followers. Kara’s been getting beaten up lately for using the medium for broadcasting, not listening. First she downplayed Twitter’s importance, saying

With only about six million registered users (with a much lower number of active ones), Twitter gets written about as if it were a mover and shaker extraordinaire, instead of just being what it is: An interesting status-alert start-up that makes zero revenues …

Which garnered replies like these from @stuartcfoster:

Maybe if you actually followed back more than 16 people…you might get want Twitter was about.
and
Twitter doesn’t really become useful until you follow more people. It’s useless if the conversation has only one side. Not hype.

(BTW, another twitterer, @JPWP, points out to Kara that a client such as Tweetdeck would do wonders for her appreciation of Twitter, advice with which I wholeheartedly agree. The way you interact with the service fundamentally changes when you have it open on your desktop, and in my experience, it’s not until shortly after one installs a client and sets it to automatically launch upon start-up does the user start to “get” Twitter and its value.) [Update: Kara wrote to say she does use several Twitter clients; only her recents updates had been from the Web. I should have looked further back.]

I must admit that my first reaction to Kara’s post was along the same lines as @stuartcfoster and the many others who took her to task. But looking through her tweetstream, at least recently, Kara actually seems to do a good job of replying to messages directed at her. She does appear to be engaged in a conversation, though mostly with those who engage her directly, since the universe she scans remains tiny by Twitter standards.

Perhaps a better measure of how democratic a Twitter celebrity is isn’t the number of people s/he follows, but how often s/he replies to @messages. But in the end it’s difficult and potentially dangerous to draw conclusions about someone’s elitism or lack thereof from just his/her behavior on Twitter. I have no objection to the existence of an influence-based filter, but I personally fall into the camp of those who would be unlikely to use it, at least for some of the examples Loic gave. If I want to figure out if people are having problems with an iPhone upgrade, for instance, I want everyone’s thoughts, not Scoble’s and O’Reilly’s and Loic’s. The point is to get a wide range of opinions, and what’s more, I’m likely to be having more plebian problems. In an apparent non-sequiter, Loic explains in his post that when he complains about a product on Twitter (in this case the absence of the new BlackBerry on Sprint), he is contacted by the company and provided with VIP customer service, whereas a friend with fewer followers did the same with no results. He provides within his own post a good reason for folks like me NOT to use an influence-based filter; his solutions won’t fix my problems. I don’t mean this snarkily; I think Loic means well, and clearly, he’s a good guy to know.

Okay, when I started writing this post I had a totally different point. I had not intended to give my own rant on the issue, but rather to say that this is exactly the kind of topic I would love to see addressed at Web 2.0 Expo in a format I will borrow from the GDC: The Rants Panel. I find this debate interesting, but its true business value, particularly to an enterprise Web 2.0 advocate striving to demonstrate ROI, is limited. We often get proposals for sessions at the conference that are interesting in a “what’s at stake” kind of way, but can be a little “inside baseball.” I love the passion of this community, in fact, it’s truly why I’m here, so I’d like to give topics like this a home, but in a way that leaves more room for the meat and potatoes of how to turn constraints into opportunities. At GDC, the organizers put aside at least one session for 5 or 6 panelists to simply rant, uncensored, on a topic they feel is important. (In the first couple of years, it was often developers ranting about how publishers and the industry at large kill creativity). It’s entertaining, informative, and it spurs debate in the hallways. I think there’s an excellent rant about filters vs. level playing field to be given at Web 2.0, but the question is, what are some other rants that would fit in, and who should give them?

DeWitt Clinton’s post On Fighting the Web Itself seems like a good candidate to me. A discussion of the role of women in the industry as well as at conferences could be another candidate (here I’d love to hear from Kathy Sierra.) Got any other ideas for me? Please add them in comments or hit me up on Twitter. I’m @pahlkadot.

Unless you’ve been doing nothing but holiday shopping (and we know you haven’t, because the economy would not be howling in pain if you had), you’ve heard by now that MacWorld will be sans Apple after this year. John Paczkowski’s headline is my favorite: Macworld Without Steve? That’s Like “Baywatch” Without Hasselhoff. Two major theories have emerged: Apple execs are sadists and enjoy watching IDG execs howl as loud as the economy, or Steve Jobs is sick again. Neither is a pretty picture. And of course, it’s always possible that it’s both. Either way, I’m sorry for the IDG employees who must be terrified, and sorry for the city of San Francisco for the lost revenue. I’m especially sorry for Jobs and his family if he’s sick; while I’m sure the stock price is a concern, I can’t help but feel that if he is battling cancer, he ought to be able to do it with some degree of privacy if that’s what he wants.

Whether Jobs’ health is an issue or not, the announcement has prompted some to speculate about the health of the events industry generally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think this is a bit of a disconnect. Events come and go for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with their actual value to a community, and I think this is one of the cases where the circumstances are rather unique. The economy is going to take its toll on pretty much all forms of media as advertising budgets shrink, but forward-thinking companies are not going to abandon their efforts to evolve towards more conversational, multi-directional approaches, and events are the original (and most proven) form of conversational marketing. The Cluetrain Manifesto posited that the Internet had reenabled the dynamics of a classic bazaar, with all the attendant chaos, debate and overlapping voices; it doesn’t take much imagination to see that conferences and tradeshows embody that archetype literally. Events give companies a way to go beyond message to engagement, to listen as well as promote, to express themselves as a collection of human beings. As marketers increasingly prioritize these goals, they tend to see participation in live events as a cornerstone of their marketing strategies.

So is Apple making a statement about live marketing? Are they once again bucking the trend? My colleague Lenny Heymann said it best

I think the point is they love live marketing so much, they built stores to do it every day.

The fact is, Apple never really engaged in the bazaar in the way the Cluetrain authors imagined; for many years now they have not participated in events they did not either dominate or outright control, and they’ve managed their message with a degree of discipline Karl Rove would envy. But with both their live events and their tightly choreographed retail strategy, they’ve shown that while they can’t stand the heat of the public marketplace (or see no need to), they very much get the importance of connecting with their customers IRL, through humans who express the company’s value and values. I got a reminder of that when I ducked into an Apple store on this week. The experience was perfect, as it’s been pretty much every time I’ve been in an Apple store. I was in and out within minutes, impressed that the door greeter knew the exact location of the item I needed, but another woman camped comfortably at the Genius Bar might have been there for hours, sorting through her various issues with helpful and responsive staff; we each got what we came for and left satisfied and once again impressed. We weren’t sold things we didn’t need, but I happily paid $20 for a cable that probably cost $1 to produce. It’s a minor thing, but there’s something about a live human interaction that cements a relationship with a brand in a way that no other form of interaction can do.

So is there a lesson in Apple’s recent moves? I’m not sure I see one. But for marketers using events as a platform, I would take note of Apple’s ongoing commitment to customer experience in all their live marketing. Forge your own path, but borrow what works. Make the most of your live marketing, wherever you do it.

The power of limits has always been an underpinning of Web 2.0. Consider Twitter, which opened up a whole new world by constraining users to 140 characters. But there are many other examples. Our “small pieces loosely joined” have allowed us to embrace a simplicity that’s changed the landscape.

And now it’s almost 2009 and many of us find ourselves coping with limits imposed not by design but by circumstance. Whether it’s fewer people, smaller budgets, or just less time, we’re being thrown a curve ball just when we were ready to hit it out of the park. How we respond will depend, at least in part, on how we see the opportunity presented by the web as a platform. We see it as a deeply powerful force, the effect of which continues to create opportunity, both in spite of, and in some cases, because of, our economic troubles.

These are some of our thoughts as we roll out the foundations of the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009. The community that will convene in San Francisco this April will be under renewed pressure to do more with less, to show return on their efforts, to truly innovate. With this in mind, the program will focus on concrete, real-world examples and useful insights into what’s worked for your colleagues, and what’s on the horizon. We’ll hear from people like Scott Monty at Ford, feverishly working to change the culture of this large and troubled organization and its relationship with its market through social media. At the other end of the spectrum, we have Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless, which has built a t-shirt empire on the ideas of community, creativity, and co-creation.

Innovation cuts across organizational size and industry; it also cuts across function. That’s why Web 2.0 Expo is for designers to developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, business strategists, and everyone in the web community. While our main conference tracks target the major roles represented in Web 2.0, our mini-tracks devote attention to some key industries and platforms where we see significant opportunities: mobile, entertainment, security, and web operations. Look for more details on these tracks in the coming weeks.

Speaking of the power of less, we have an incentive for you. Be one of the first 100 people to register by Dec. 31 and take $300 off any conference package. Just copy and paste websf09emp51 into the discount code field on the registration form. We also have an invitation; let us know what you think of this direction and the program by adding your comments here and also on the individual session pages for more specific feedback. We look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
Jennifer Pahlka and Brady Forrest, co-chairs, Web 2.0 Expo

Yesterday, the team kicked off Web 2.0 Summit, Expo’s executive companion event. So far, awfully impressive. I’ll try to provide what tidbits I can between meetings and production duties over the next couple of days. First off, John Doerr just offered a great list: 10 things a start up should do in the economy:

Act now – get a loan or secure more. Make cuts if you need to.

Protect the vital core of business – do not take a meat axe to your core. Cut once and be done with it.

Make sure you have 18 months worth of cash and know where you stand

Defer facilities expansion or new tech/software infrastructure

Review R&D

Renegotiate all contracts you have

Everyone ought to be selling – even the receptionist

Pay in equity bonus not cash bonuses

Put money in security backed loans

Figure out what the leading indicators are and listen to them so you can react quickly

Over communicate. Do not sugar coat where you are.

Great advice for start-ups and established businesses alike. More soon.

What a perfect way to kick off the week! Ignite NYC II at New World Stages was funny, thought-provoking, quirky and surprising. Kati Londons diatribe against the plants (maybe slightly Michael Pollan Botany of Desire-inspired?) was my favorite, though all the presentations were excellent (even my own, I add modestly). Even more delightful, in many ways, was the cupcake decorating contest. I could not believe the stuff people came up with, including the winners, who made an entire iPhone screen in cupcakes. Check out Bre Pettis’s blog for the winners. Thanks to the New York Television Festival folks for hosting us!

Deb Schultz has her feet in both worlds in a couple of different ways. She can talk tech, but shes a marketer at heart. Though she lives most of the time in San Francisco now, Deb is a true New Yorker. Shes known for leading marketing at Six Apart from start-up phase, but she serves as an advisor and strategist to large organizations, including a current gig at Proctor & Gamble. Shes passionate and articulate about where marketing is going, and she makes new ideas accessible, no matter what your fluency in social media.

We asked Deb to set the stage for the marketers in our audience with a high order bit on Wednesday, and we asked her to share her thoughts on next weeks event. Enjoy.

1) What are the biggest differences between the east coast and west coast web communities?

The clothes….OK, seriously. As a New Yorker living in the Valley – the biggest difference I see is the west coast approaches tech from the “big idea first and worries about the business angle second. The east coast looks for the business opportunity before they go all in – both sides could learn from each other.

2) What’s the most important, cool, scary, or useful product or technology that’s recently arrived or on the horizon?

Anything that helps me make sense of the fire hose of contacts and content in my life in a useful way. This applies whether you are a family of 5 or a web 2.0 uber-connected geek. We do not have enough tools that are helping me manage this cacophony in ways that are meaningful to me and not just based on a chronological order. Semantic web and smart AI will definitely play a greater role in our lives.

3) Aside from your own talk, what’s the most interesting / entertaining speaker, talk or panel happening at Web 2.0 Expo?

Clay – I could listen to him all day. He has a unique ability to observe and synthesize how tech is impacting culture and business in way that resonates with me.
Genevieve Bell – as tools become ever more social it is the ethnographic part that always fascinates me – understanding what makes people tick and why they are drawn to new tools and how they adopt and use them
As for Panels – I am going to step into anything that has to do with growing a start-up in the Alley – I am excited to see the “alley scene” really picking up again – and I want to shake hands with some old and new faces!

Im sorry to announce that Marc Benioff, who was scheduled to keynote on the Thursday of Web 2.0 Expo New York, has had to cancel due to a family commitment. We wish him well and are working with his staff on our spring San Francisco dates so we hope to have the chance to sit down with him on stage soon. Because we are welcoming the Interop audience at Thursdays keynote (the rest of the keynotes are for Web 2.0 attendees only), Tim OReilly is moving his talk to Marcs old slot on Thursday, and will give an enterprise version of his traditional Radar talk. For those of you whove been at previous Expos, then you know that Tims radar picks up and interprets the faintest signals; its always a fabulous talk.

The other good news is that theres now some extra time in our Wednesday keynote line up, and Jason Fried of 37 Signals has agreed to follow up his popular breakout session with a short keynote bit. I first saw Jason speak three years ago at an enterprise event, and he was cheeky and thought-provoking, a real breath of fresh air. At that event, he followed an executive from a major enterprise software company talking about new meeting technologies, and he talked about how meetings are a waste of time. And a sign that youre doing something wrong. Three years later I havent managed to banish meetings, but I know in my heart he was right. He certainly got everyones attention.

One other unfortunate change is that Joshua Schacter, the creator of del.icio.us, can’t join us. He was scheduled for a “High Order Bit” on Wendesday. We dont know of any other changes to our line up at this point, but Ill post anything here, and as always, check the schedule for the latest.