Category Archive

Suw & Leisa and I are putting together a series of events this summer under the banner of Fruitful Seminars - Suw was the bravest and is doing hers on Friday 27th and now I’m ready to come out with my offering.

UPDATE: Due to a little misunderstanding the seminar will take place one week later, on Weds 16th July, same time, same place, just a different day.

Here’s the blurb:

Social Media and Online Social Networking are transforming our business and personal lives. Few people can have escaped entirely from some exposure to the power and benefits of this revolution in how we communicate and collaborate. But even fewer can claim mastery over the tools and techniques or fully understand how to apply them to achieve specific business goals. Anyway, how on earth can you find the time? What about your “real work”?

In this masterclass you’ll get to work with Lloyd Davis, one of London’s most popular and experienced social media experts. Lloyd will help you understand what social media’s really all about and how to build rich and productive online relationships using simple tools. You will also gain some practical experience of creating some social media and get help with applying what you’ve learned to your personal business context.

The day is designed for marketing and communications professionals who want to understand better just how social media and online social networking can work for them. With no more than 9 participants, you’ll be assured of individual attention. Most participants will already have some experience of at least one aspect of social media, but will want to become more comfortable and confident with a wider range of tools. You should bring along an example of a business issue that you’d like help with.

We’re deliberately keeping these small so that they’re good value and participants can get to learn from each other as well as from me.

You all know someone who will benefit from spending a day in One Alfred Place with me - so kindly escort them (and their credit card) to the button above which will convey them, by means of the magical hypertext transfer protocol, to the booking page.

Photo by Ewan McIntosh

Light on blogging but writing a lot and making stuff happen, though currently in a Pimlico basement instead of the 7th Floor.

Just wanted to say, ‘cos I know there are lovely people who worry when I go quiet here

My personal heady mix of pride, stubbornness and avoidance combine to make this a difficult thing to write, but I need some pretty specific help over the next week.

I have to move out of my flat by next Sunday 18th May. I have a couple of options on where I can stay after that but none of them are ideal or sustainable for longer than a couple of weeks tops. I also have very little in liquid assets, which is why I’m not able to just walk into an estate agents and plop 10 weeks rent on the table for anywhere I like. Another bit of background is that I also don’t drive and don’t own a car.

So. In the coming week:

I need someone with a van to help take my bed from Pimlico to Wimbledon for storage. The double mattress of course is the largest part, but apart from that the headboard is 1.4m x 1.4m so I’m guessing most people carriers won’t be up to it, but am willing to be proved wrong.

More manageably, I need help getting all my worldly goods (in boxes) from Pimlico to my ex-wife’s place in Epsom where I can store stuff in the attic.

And I need somewhere to live for little or no rent while I get back on my feet financially.

People are kindly helping with getting work and cash flowing, but I expect it to take quite a bit more than a couple of weeks.

e-mail, phone & twitter are all great ways of getting hold of me.

btw - my chin is up, I am still breathing, and smiling, just in need of practical assistance

Update: Thanks for all the messages of love & support. You all rock. Am piecing together a plan from the various bits of help offered. I’ve had two people offer cars & driving, someone who’ll hire a van if I can find a driver and two offers of places to stay through the last week in May. Very grateful…

Oh yes and some careers advice from Adrian Phillips… thanks Ade

I’ve been reflecting on some of the social media work I’ve done over the last year and seeing where I might improve my offering. The model piece of work that I’ve sold to people has gone as follows: “You tell me you want to have a go at this new fangled social media mularkey, but you don’t know where to start. So I’ll start for you and show your people what I’m doing. We’ll start off with me doing everything but my involvement will taper off as your team’s involvement increases and by the end of the project, you’re folk will be doing it all for themselves.”

Great. Sold. But….

What has actually happened is that people have had some great blogs from me (natch) but there hasn’t actually been much change in what they do, the comms teams I’ve worked with have liked the idea but as long as I was doing it *for* them it was too easy to sit back and continue to say “Yes, that’s nice, I wish I was able to do that”. I think there’s still a space for doing live-blogs of events as discrete pieces of work, but more ongoing stuff needs to be done differently.

So I’m looking for a better model. And over coffee with Jonathan Laventhol of Imagination I understood what it might be. He said to me “You need to sit on your hands more” And he’s absolutely right. Just as when you’re helping someone to learn to drive it’s not good to keep grabbing the steering wheel, I think there’s much more value that I can offer as a non-doing coach or catalyst for action.

In their excellent book on decentralised networks, The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom talk about the difference between two roles that Julie Andrews made famous.

“In The Sound of Music, Maria enters a dysfunctional family, teaches the children a valuable lesson, convinces the father to pay attention to his kids, and shows the family how to get along. Likewise, Mary Poppins visits an equally (albeit charmingly) dysfunctional family, gets equally adorable children to behave, urges equally clueless parents to pay attention to their kids, finds equally effective ways for everyone to get along, and sings equally catchy tunes.”

“At the end of The Sound of Music, though, Maria, after falling in love with the children and the father, sticks around. It’s obvious that from now on she’ll be the one running the show. Mary Poppins, on the other hand, chim-chim-in-eys right out of London. It’s not that Mary Poppins has a fear of commitment. From the very beginning, it’s clear that she’s come to do a job. Her job is complete when the family can thrive on its own. Once she accomplishes her goal, she rides her umbrella into the sunset.”

I’ve tried both models, but like Mary Poppins, I’m much better as a catalyst. Going in, making change happening and moving on to where I’m needed more, rather than working my way up, establishing an empire and sticking around for the long haul.

Then I saw Seth Godin writing about Digital Coaches

“What’s a digital coach? A freelancer (individual) who usually works with entrepreneurs, small groups or companies to teach them how to dramatically improve productivity or market presence using technology. For example, a digital coach might hook up your cell phone to be more powerful or teach you how to use blogs and Facebook to connect to your audience.”

I think for me it’s a totally bottom-up approach - aimed at individuals inside and outside organisations who want to beef up their personal productivity using web 2.0 and social media tools. They might have a social media project hat they need to contribute to, but would also generally benefit from catching up with what’s arrived in the last year or so and someone to help them think it through in their own personal or business context. The focus is on enhancing productivity, preferable in simple, measurable ways.

When I’ve mentioned this to people, some have said “Wow, yes please” and others have said “Oh, I kind of thought that’s what you did already” So I think it’s probably right.

Photo credit: conner395 on Flickr licenced with cc-attribution

Our first little flashmob was quite a success in my view. It certainly showed me that there were people ready to turn up and talk about stuff. It also suggested to me that we need to follow a two-track approach for now.

I’m going to continue to write (as and when I have the space and time) a formal business plan to help communicate more clearly and completely what it is we are doing and to help people understand why they might want to put money into it. I want to get as much feedback and input from others into that as possible so I’ll be blogging about it more regularly from now on as well as organising face to face sessions.

In addition, I think it’s worth trying to keep prototyping and move slowly from the dormobile model towards the travelling circus model. For those who haven’t seen my presentation on this, I characterised the first phase of prototyping as a VW camper van where we just hang out essentially wherever we can find somewhere to park for the afternoon. The travelling circus is a bit more formal - it’s where we would have a venue that remained the same for a period, perhaps up to a month, before we moved on. So how might we do that? From the start people have been suggesting that we should just find somewhere to “squat” but ideas for actual places to do this have been thin on the ground.

Now, though, courtesy of the sterling persistence of Lee Thomas (londonfilmgeek) we’ve got a couple of initial sessions booked in the upstairs dining-room at (Norman’s) Coach and Horses in Greek Street (corner of Romilly St, opposite Kettners). To say the least, the place does have some media history. Far less significantly it was where we had the recent Seesmic Dinner.

We’ll be there from 10.00 to 13.00 on Friday 1st February though the landlord would no doubt welcome you staying on for a later lunch and drinking in the bar for the rest of the afternoon if you really can’t tear yourselves away

I’ve put a simple page on the wiki for sign-ups - just so that people know who else is coming.

Right, so I’m now on the look out for more places like this and I thought I’d blog the requirements and what’s in it for the venue and see who out there might have have somewhere we can use or at least see whether you can come up with suggestions of places to approach.

What the venue gets - people, punters, customers, you know, dosh-givers - especially at those times that are usually a bit slow. More people drinking coffee and eating cakes, sandwiches and other geek comestibles (erm… I suppose I mean beer here, especially on a Friday lunchtime). Moreover the people it brings in are well-connected and quite influential in their own circles. And we’re generous - if you give us nice things like wifi and electrickery, we will say nice things about you. Don’t forget that when we say nice things, we say them quite loudly on the internet (a global network of interconnected computing devices), where they stick around forever getting clumped together with other nice things and thus bringing you warm fuzzy goodness - the kind of warm fuzzy goodness that encourages cash out of people’s wallets and into your till.

Our requirements - we’d like a space please that we can, however temporarily, call our own. It’s great if it can be demarcated in some way (a separate room, those three tables, etc.) and we need free open wifi (if you don’t have this, we can talk about how we can help you set it up) and access to electricity points. Errr.. that’s about it, really. Anything else, I think we can work around.

Know anywhere like this? Own anywhere like this. Let me know - my contact details are up at the top of this page.

Want to blog today but no can do as the Perfect Path editing suite is at capacity working on the rest of the videos from Second Chance Tuesday and a top-secret super hush-hush and really quite evil thing which may or may not be related to this.

Very nice Social Media Club meetup last night, not least because I met Rupert Howe, who rocks.

Prolly see you after the weekend.

When I’m bragging (yes, I’m generally too modest, but occasionally it happens!) that the things I was talking feverishly about 2 years ago are now what make me a living, people often ask “So what are you talking feverishly about now” When I tell them “face-to-face ” they sometimes look a bit disappointed, but that’s really where I think the exciting stuff is going to happen in the next period.

What I’m particularly frisky about is the bootstrap effect - we’ve built a bit of a relationship online, then we enrich that relationship offline and face to face, then when we go back online it’s all been taken forward and we do more new and interesting things together… and so on… and so on… and so on….

So the must-do meatspace convergence points in my diary so far are:

NMK Forum

VNU Blogs & Social Media Forum

Anything by Policy Unplugged

Chinwag Live

Second Chance Tuesday

Interesting2007

Disclosure: each of these events is either giving me a press pass to come and blog or are paying me serious wonga for creating rich records of the day (all except for Interesting2007 for which I’d gladly pay twice the entry fee and possibly don an adult-sized romper suit - but that’s another story)

I’ve been invited to a screening of Surveillance this Saturday (14th April) at midday at the NFT but I have a prior commitment.

According to the blurb the film was well received at the Berlin Film Festival recently and I just spoke to Paul the Director who tells me that it’ll be going to Seattle and Chicago later in the year. I have been given a DVD copy (and watched the first 20 minutes, which hooked me) so I’m going to blog about it when I’ve had a proper look.

If you’d like to go see it (and if you blog about it that would be lovely too) then give me a shout and I’ll put you in touch with the production team.

Moderated by Mike Butcher of mbites.com and vecosys.com
Simon McDermott - CEO Attentio
Heather Hopkins - Head of Research, Hitwise
Kris Hoet - Marketing Manager, EMEA Consumer Marketing, Microsoft Online Services Group
Scott Thomson - Analytics Director, Starcom

SMc: Monitoring conversations to evaluate for example campaign impact, identifying what influencers are saying about your products, monitoring reputation and understanding consumer behaviour. So the big questions are “Are we discussed?”, if so then “What are the issues that are being raised” and “What do they think?” We do some benchmarking and look at trends as well as understanding who the influencers are and how you can communicate wth them. for example we worked with a consumer eletronics player that had a lower momentum than other products.

MB: what’s the technology that you use?

SMc: we use a proprietary time-based search technology looking at buzz together with staff who look at what it all means. We’ve been doing it for 3 years.

MB: is Hitwise going to cede the market to these guys or are you doing something else?

HH: well I’m really here to talk about monitoring blogs and we don’t compete with Attentio.
So comparing Sony Rootkit with Diet Coke & Mentos - the Sony story resonated wildly with the tech community but it wasn’t such a big story elsewhere. At Hitwise we have some people who like data and a lot of data. We’re blogging and it makes our life a lot easier dealing with journalists, but also our engagement with our customers has gone up.

MB: so if you monitor your own brand using free tools why would anyone pay for a service
HH: well we can’t justify it given how small we are - it’s for larger brands really

MB: why not just give people laptops and let them get on with it?
KH: Well we did that but we also do a lot going out to the community and meeting people face to face, building a relationship with bloggers. For all that we need to track who’s using what so we can focus on the right people. We use Attentio, but we also use lots of free tools too. We use comment tracking and we get good results out of that. The best way of tracking is of course to be reading everything

This week we launched an update on maps but there’s no big launch around it, but because we’ve been engaging and tracking some of the people in the cities covered and we can then talk to them and then that gets picked up by mainstream media - also is good for getting feedback.

MB: interesting that comments are very important.

KH: everybody changes their opinion because of comments. Also comments are the easiest way for people to connect with each other - you don’t have to have a blog yourself. “Everybody is a customer” It’s a kind of early warning system. And people are still often quite thrilled to get a reply.

MB: what feedback do you get?
ST: there’s a difference between just listening and then trying to change people or affect their behaviour. So we use a number of services to provide contextual information about online conversations.

MB: so trying to influence the conversation can be dangerous? (ref Cillit Bang vs Tom Coates)
ST: yes it’s about finding the influencers and then treading very very carefully.

MB: So a replacement for focus groups?
ST: Yes, but I think that research industry is eager for revolution. We’re all interested in understanding online behaviour better and although you can do it yourself it helps to get help.

MB: how can you iron out differences in the results from different blog tracking methods?
SMc: we offer companies granular insights into the brand eg French blogosphere reaction vs German - we don’t have much demand for standardisation with other markets - what people want is a quick read of what’s going on but yeah, you have to tread carefully.

Q: Any research into the social profile of bloggers and whether they are representative.
A: HH: we can do this with blog audiences - slightly male skew, all social grades represented, but tends to be urban people under 35.
SMc: younger people are more involved in social networks and don’t blog as much but there are studies that show that people move into blogging more in their twenties.
ST: our focus is less on who is saying it and more on what is being said as the former is too much to ask at the moment.
HH: also demographics are very dependent on the types of blogs visited and the type of conversation going on

Q: After my Dell guarantee lapsed it went wrong. I blogged about it. 2 months later I got a comment from Dell apologising and putting someone in touch the next day, collected laptop and repaired it free of charge. So tracking does work.

SMc: if they’d been monitoring a while ago they’d have got a better response from Jeff Jarvis

Q: international tracking - how mature are the offerings? How close are we to saying “These are the 3 most influential” in this geography.
SMc: Quite a long way on the breakdown. We’re focusing on Europe and we’re getting there.
KH: we tried this for the launch of Windows Live. I think it’s a very human thing - the tools don’t really work, but getting in touch with people and talking to them is much better at pulling out who the most influential are. It’s not just about links, it can be just as much about community activities in real life as much as online.

Q: So once you know them, how do you start a conversation without them getting suspicious.
A: people have lots of ways of getting in touch. Be humble. Explain what you’re doing. Ask for help. Invite people to events. It doesn’t always work but we keep trying.

Q: There are very good metrics in academic circles for measuring influence - SNA is probably the way we should go.
HH: I think this is absolutely the way to go for larger brands.

Lee Bryant - Headshift
David Fitch - Simmons & Simmons
Olivier Creiche - six apart
Adam Tinworth - reed

Lee’s telling us about some of the cases and then looking real world perspectives of what is being done.

We’ve got mature well-developed products now and we have some good external services for getting people started without involving IT and then you can build your own mashups and services using things like Ning.

But it ain’t what you do…

So just putting in blogs isn’t enough, you need concrete business use cases, engagement and people support and (at least a degree of ) a connected infrastructure.

We’re just about to release a library of use-cases that might be useful for people to look at info & knowledge sharing, innovation & R&D, internal comms as well as Marketing & PR.

So here’s some cases.

OC: We just deliver bricks, the important stuff gets done by these guys who build interesting and useful houses. Last year we were still just explaining what blogs are and how we thought they might be used. Bob Lutz: “No better opportunity exists to engage”.

Web publishing is way ahead in this country (Adam’s going to talk about Reed’s experience) Most of the creative stuff starts with smaller businesses and that then gets picked up by bigger players EG Serious Eats, Huffington Post vs Washington Post.

Internal Communications eg Citrix were very fast growing and had new employees not staying very long so they wanted to hold on to a bit of that knowledge while they were there, across dozens of projects and going very fast. AEP is a much bigger company but with the same story - trying to stop e-mail becoming the central repository for knowledge. They start small, they experiment, nobody *knows* how it will work but one of the success factors is having a champion someone who has a better idea than anyone else which shows the way for others.

Marketing and Community types of blogs eg Arcelor and Mittal merger raises a lot of anxiety among various stakeholders. Launched a blog/2.0 site because they wanted to be very open about what they were doing and how they were going about it and they let people go out with cameras and interview people around the world about what they felt about it. still being evaluated, but they are very happy and the press coverage has been excellent.

David Fitch:

What’s key to us is providing an infrastructure for lawyers to share knowledge and expertise across practice areas but also offices, knowing what’s going on inside the firm and outside.
We’ve been experimenting for about 3 years pushing a group of conservative people towards using new ways of operating. Blogs RSS Wikis are words that frighten lawyers so we’ve been giving them new tools and our experience is that people are able to use the lighter tools very easily - especially like bringing the time to publish down.

Our business case - the investment was zero - we used open source and tested it internally, but once we started, other people followed very quickly. so we didn’t have to justify an investment decision but we now have good evidence for new investment.

AT: we got into social media entirely by accident. We set up a small team and started out blogging and suddenly got requests to provide it internally. Publishing firms tend to be quite balkanised but as we started moving into a new business of interacting with our readers, we had a lot to learn and this raised a hunger for people to share what they’re learning and keep conversations going.

We have a number of problems - education - we’re not dictating any solution and we bring people together who (aaaagh contact lens emergency…)

Q: Does it actually work?
A: LB: it devolves things down to the level of the basic unit of work which is the person. What has happened with enterprise knowledge sharing is that people get the pain without any payback, but the lightweight tools give you power to organise your stuff and your contacts with other people and work with it all better. What’s also interesting is putting it on top

Q: do you see this as the end of employee communications as we know it?
A: LB: I don’t think so - every generation sees itself as Luke Skywalker, but it’s silly really because it actually just gets layered over the next one so now that we’re at the human scale where things really do work - people can publish and develop some sort of collective intelligence.
AT: No as it’s a way of taking away the more mundane bits of internal comms work and lets people focus on face to face

Q: MB: Lots of companies have huge intranets - should we just wipe them away?
DF: very familiar with this - there’s a huge wealth of material that’s useful but just couldn’t be found - so we did some work about improving search and findability but also looking at using lighter infrastructure to start again, which will involve some pain, people will have to go back and look at relevance for example, but that change is going to deliver the benefit that we’re moving towards creating communities and connecting people rather than just producing static content.

Q: GC: How do you deal with info that becomes out of date?
A:LB: different approaches - the most interesting is that in a mature implementation anything acquires its own context, tags etc so out of date stuff falls down as sediment in these systems. So then you need some sort of review system, but it’s more about letting more timely stuff come to the fore.
DF: it’s also so much easier to keep your stuff up to date, even for lawyers so just using lighter tools helps a lot.

Rough notes without comment from me - if you disagree with anything said, leave it in the comments

Stephen now talking about Sainsbury’s sponsorship of the food & drink category on Answers. A bit sticky for them because they couldn’t control the conversation - some people were rude about them, but when that happened other people chimed in and supported the retailer. Sainsbury’s was the first and a bit of an experiment, but the response overall is very positive - so the challenge for Yahoo! is to scale this sort of activity.

Look at the US Presidential Campaign sites (and compare perhaps with those in the French election) Hilary Clinton putting herself out there capturing quality feedback from citizens and engaging with it.

Providing Answers badges and widgets customised for small publishers and bloggers. So taking both those ideas further forward, we’re introducing “Knowledge Partners” - to allow businesses to participate overtly in the dialogue - not pretending that you’re Joe Bloggs with an answer that happens to be favourable to you, but being honest about the context in which you’re answering questions. So this becomes a channel for customer care, a way of answering real questions.

Now talking about the Wii tag debacle - businesses will make mistakes and upset the community occasionally.

Q: Do you have any ways of helping us monitoring the conversation?
A: Well that’s the idea behind Knowledge Partners - giving you tools to see what’s being said. Giving you the opportunity to share your “expert knowledge” as a brand owner. But people are going to talk about you, so get used to it

Q: [Playstation] How representative is your audience compared with say Sainsbury’s
A: It is the online audience, we haven’t seen any skewing. In any particular area, you may get a knowledge or interest skew, but not in terms of demographics. The interface is really simple and that helps. The new video version might skew things.

Q:[Playboy] How do you see this merging with online qualititative research?
A: Have to be very conscious that this service is firstly for consumers to share and exchange knowledge and we won’t do anything to stand in the way of that. That said, of course it can be a great way to do unstructured research on what is important to users rather than what’s important to the brand. We’ve already seen some of the researchy type of question “what’s your favourite movie?” but that sort of chat room stuff is sinking to the bottom.

Q: Blurring between PR & Marketing - where’s the driver for that?
A: I don’t know yet, it’s too early - Sainsbury’s was Marketing led - engaging in topics around how can you have discussions with your customers. They were looking for ways to have a conversation and this seemed quite a good way. Clearly for Clinton it’s more of a PR thing, but we don’t have a definitive answer yet. The challenge of PR is not just protecting and promoting the brand but really how you engage with people. I run the audience group for Yahoo, which is a new cross-functional team marketing, pr, community outreach and it’s less and less about pushing out messages and more about engaging with the community, so more and more I can’t make the distinction between all of these activities.

I’m at the Marriott in Grosvenor Square again at the second Blogging 4 Business conference, courtesy of Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner.

Right now we’re listening to Stephen Taylor from Yahoo! talking about how social media is for everyone, not just for kids. He’s taking us through flickr as the perfect example of a social media tool.

Already in Matthew’s intro there was an emphasis on just how much has changed since last year - especially that last year, we were very focused on what the possibilities were, but this year we’re going to talk about what people have actually done since then.

Shows of hands are so last year, but we’ve already had one on flickr, though he didn’t ask how many of us were oldskool I may try keeping count.

Now he’s talking about social search and specifically Answers. Btw in related news, I saw this nice AFDJ from metafilter. Had me spluttering in my cornflakes anyway.

Steph has just sat next to me, Yay! But she can’t get on the limited free wi-fi. Boo!

And I’ve forgotten my USB cable for my camera so no pics on the day, sorry folks.

Wow. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Pimlico any more…

I realised today that my Monday mornings are not that bad normally - I was out early and saw a lot of people looking like they really didn’t want to go to work this morning.

I was particularly happy and excited because I was on my way to Gatwick to take a flight to Barcelona as I’m working with the very nice guys at corante.com to live-blog the World Healthcare Congress through to Wednesday. I’ve never been to Spain before so it’s really cool and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get some sunshine and walk down to the sea at least once before I go back to London.

I’m amazed that I’m sitting here now blogging this when pretty much all I’ve done this afternoon is sit and type. It’s a really interesting conference with a very diverse bunch of participants. Today the afternoon was mainly introduction - we got a welcome from the Minister for Health in Catalonia before a session on improving performance which raised for me two main lines of interest - how to improve quality while reducing cost and how to deal with the chronic illnesses that consume the most money.

I’m writing at http://www.worldhealthcareblog.org/ - do go over and have a look. Perhaps those of my readers with a public policy bent would like to join in the conversation too when I get into the swing of writing, tomorrow. I’m hoping to get some podcasts and videoblogs done too.

I really must slope off to bed now as there’s a breakfast meeting at 0730, which of course is 0630 BST but since my body’s still really on GMT will feel like 0530

I’m trying today to get my dns records sorted out so that I get my mail for lloyd at perfectpath.co.uk and www.perfectpath.co.uk pointing here to the blog.

Apologies to all those who have been bounced of late. For now, the best way to e-mail me is still lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com, to see the blog come to perfectpath.wordpress.com (rss from http://feeds.feedburner.com/perfectpath ) skype me as perfectpath or telephone +447919182825

David points to the RSA/Policy Unplugged Conference that’s taking place on Thursday morning. I’m going to be there too, doubtless with recording equipment again - though I share David’s scepticism about how easy it will be to get a word in edgeways with the impressive list of people who are coming to speak about the heady mix of democracy, politics, policy and web-enabled mass collaboration.

It’s free, and it seems there are places left, but you need to register

At the uploading conference today I was with Oli Barrett when he got described as a “Media Tart”. On Twitter, I have as my description “Social Media Tart”. I like that this means I don’t take what I do too seriously. I’m also remind myself that Tart is a contraction of Sweetheart. There are of course less salubrious connotations, but let’s not linger on what they mean in this context.

Yes, I already have a bunch of lovely clients. No, I’ve never had so much on that I couldn’t squeeze another piece of work in somewhere. So YES, I’m for hire, folks! To move to a more tasteful metaphor than tartery, let’s see if there are any tasty morsels on this platter that you’d like to nibble on, or you’d recommend to friends.

Richer Records
I get hired by conference organisers to write a blog with audio, video and still photography for a one-day or two-day event. This includes live-blogging sessions and interviews with participants and speakers throughout the day. We also do pre-conference podcasts to help build interest and buzz before the event.

Blogging for Theatres
I’ve recently taken on my first theatre client to help them with their strategy for engaging with the community online. There are so many stories to be told about what’s going on in any theatre day-to-day and so many people who are passionately interested in hearing about it, but the bulk of theatrical marketing is still about print-based advertising.

Blogging in Blue Chips
At the end of last year I helped out on a global knowledge management exercise within a huge international company. I wrote a blog about a range of marketing initiatives and illustrated it with podcasts of phone conversations with project teams and videos of senior managers, talking about why this sort of sharing was of paramount strategic importance.

Social Media Club
I’m getting Social Media Club up and running in London. This is a global loosely-joined confederation of like-minded people. In London so far, we’ve had monthly round-table chats, but this month we’re branching out into weekly meetups with the motto “Thursday Night is Social Media Night”

Making daft videos
Peruse my YouTube stream for examples of my work. Firm favourites are “Let’s go Mento”, and the All This… And Brains Too! series but steer clear of certain elements of the G-Room Review Videoblog unless you are actively seeking accidental nudity.

Facilitation
Yeah, I still like to pull my faciliation trousers on from time to time. I prefer to work in an open space or cafe style, but can do more structured sessions as required. Hey! How long is it since you had a good old PinPoint session?

Blog Coaching & Seminars
I do one-to-one coaching on how to improve your blog (both in terms of using the software more effectively and by improving your writing). I’m also working with Suw Charman on some small-ish (8-10 people) seminars on “What is Social Software?”, “Moderation and Nurturing Community”, and “Encouraging Adoption of Social Tools”. We’re planning on doing public versions of these as well as in-house for individual organisations.

I’d like to carry on doing any and all of these so give me a call if you want to talk about how I can help you +44(0)7919182825 or e-mail lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com

Social Media Club is set for every third Thursday of the month and so the next one will be 15th February.

One of the ideas is that there’ll be a subject discussed in all chapters around the world each month. I think that would be nifty, as long as it doesn’t come to dominate the whole thing. This month we’re going to try some speed networking (must polish whistle) and I’d like us to decide on some club projects so that we can get some hands on activity into the meetings.

Do leave suggestions on the wiki [hint: I struggled for a longtime to understand what 'PWD is media' meant on the wikipage title. At the same time I got disgruntled that I couldn't work out what the PassWorD was to get in and edit. Some social media geek!]

tags: smclondon & socialmediaclub & london

photo from the very cool Ben Reyes’s flickr photostream

It’s a stormy day here in London town, so I stuck my camera out of the window to capture the effect on the normally millpond-like Thames.

Nothing spectacular, no flying tree branches, no-one falling in the river, no Hasselhof-esque rescue scenes, but startlingly different from what I’m used to.

[update: heh - you'll notice that either i've turned German (i haven't) or else the y in January got clipped off the end and i didn't notice before uploading]

[update 2: I should point out that there may be spectacular things going on but just not in *this* video thanks Rachel]

I’m leading the meeting of Social Media Club in London this coming Thursday. It’s free and refreshments will be provided.

Of course the first rule of Social Media Club is TALK about Social Media Club.

All are welcome. If you don’t know whether you’ll fit in, this is what the SMC about page says:

Social Media Club will bring together journalists, publishers, communications professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaboraters. Essentially the people who create and consume media who have an interest in seeing the ‘media industry’ evolve for everyone’s benefit. We are more than just USERS, we are the reason the tools exist - we are the people who communicate our thoughts and ideas near and far. Join us and let’s shape the future together!

Excusing the gushing uplift (americans… bless!) at the end, if you see yourself described in the earlier part of the paragraph and you’re in the Greater London area in the evening of Thursday 18th Jan then come along to the offices of Fleishmann Hillard at 40 Long Acre. For those not in the know, Long Acre is the street that runs (roughly) along the top side of Covent Garden and is where Covent Garden Tube station is. Nearest tubes are Leicester Square and Covent Garden.

We’ll kick off at 6pm and be done by 8.30. No doubt some of the more sociable types will continue conversations in the local bars, eateries or strip joints.

Please let us know you are coming by registering here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/43902313 46 people already have!

This is the third meeting - to see reports of the previous meetings search technorati for social media club london

The agenda for Thursday is on the wiki - it’s your meeting, so if you think this is a load of rabbit droppings, get in there and make some other suggestions.

tag: smclondon & smc & london & social media & events

If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.

It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.

So if you’re pining for Lloyd-related updates, come and join me here: http://www.twitter.com/LloydDavis sign-up, add me as a friend and wa-hey! Xmas 2006 will be remembered as “that time we’d just started twittering”.

[ha ha! Just got back and realised i hadn't switched from 'draft' to 'publish' now that's what i call *quiet*]

It seems it’s my time to go conference bananas this month.

On Saturday 18th I’m doing one of my trademark open space lite sessions at Podcastcon UK which is being held quite inappropriately, I’m sure you’ll agree in an old meat market (it’s actually really nice, I have had a look).

I had hoped to go to VLOG Europe in Milan just for Sunday, but poor planning and bad cashflow management put paid to that (luckily I have alternative activities lined up…)

Then Tuesday 21st I’m speaking at The Data Show at Earls Court on “Getting into the Heads of Customers - how to understand, engage and participate in the online environment… the sphere that belongs to the customer” - personally I find the image of getting into people’s heads somewhat distasteful, but I’ll try to avoid the more unpleasant double-entendres! It’s part of a bigger direct marketing show - here’s the programme, it doesn’t look like there’ll be anyone else talking about this stuff there.

The month closes with Online Information 2006 up at Olympia where I am:

• running a half-day open space on Monday 27th which I expect to be similar in tone to the one I did at the Blogs & Social Media Forum in May, only longer. If you think any of your clients or colleagues would benefit from talking freely and learning loads about Blogging and Social Media, get them to come along - the more the merrier!
• moderating a panel on the Wednesday on The Risk & Reward of Social Software.
• recording some of the sessions (audio, for release only to attendees I’m afraid)
• running around in between doing my usual Rich Records schtick

Yay!

tags: london & conferences & open space & podcastconuk & online information & the data show & rich records & podcasting & workshops & post geek

I was always told “You don’t go looking in ladies’ handbags, you never know what you might find” which seemed more of a temptation to me than a discouragement. And in that spirit, today I’m going to open up my one-man social media empire bag and let you know exactly what’s in it.

First an explanation for those who haven’t been following. I’ve been talking about having a one-man social media empire for some time now. I often stand up at events, lift up my green canvas bag and show off about how it contains a newspaper, radio station, tv station and film production company. I don’t understand why more people aren’t doing it - or maybe they are and I’m too busy bragging about my own stuff that I fail to notice everyone else smirking and tittering behind my back - it has been known. Anyway a large proportion of my time is now taken up creating what I call “Rich Records“

I’m tempted to make a video of me emptying the bag, but I’ve decided against it as it wouldn’t actually tell you a great deal more than the following, other than to give you a realistic view of what a ridiculous proportion of cable to kit there really is.

I have to admit that I’ve never been one for splashing out on kit. Ever since I started podcasting I’ve only used what came to hand, stuff that I’d already got - and while I’ve had to replace some items, I’m much more interested in what I can do with them, rather than how much they cost or how funky the spec-sheet is. But this might be useful to those sad souls out there who would like to emulate my empire. Calculating the cost of replicating the kit here is left as an exercise for the reader.

So then, the contents of my bag:

Laptop

OK, so you need something that can connect to the interwebnets, preferably wirelessly and with a battery that holds a charge for a long time. I had to get a cheap and heavier than I’d like Toshiba after my lovely (but stupidly uninsured) Acer Tablet got nicked. Obviously the lighter the better - needs a sizeable HDD to cope with the amount of video and audio that ends up getting stored and plenty of USB ports. I couldn’t find one at the time that fit my budget and came with a built-in firewire port (for transferring video), so I had to get one on a PCMCIA card - fiddly but workable. Some people will tell you that you really need a Mac in order to do podcasting and videoblogging well. In my experience they are the same people who will always tell you that you really need a Mac. I haven’t used a Mac in anger since 1996 so I don’t really know.

Audio recording

For podcasting and recording an audio track for the more formal (snicker) video stuff I do, I use a Sony Minidisc because that’s what I had lying around in 2004 when I met Adam Curry and saw the podcasting light shining from his podfatherly halo. I have improved on the original (which would only transfer audio to a PC in real time down an audio line) by splashing out on a Sony Hi-MD model MZ-NH700. The Hi-MD disks hold 1GB or “quite a long recording time” Note that they don’t talk to Macs at all.

I have no “cans”. I prefer to look stupid for only having little earbuds rather than looking stupid for looking like Phones out of Stingray.

I have two microphones, both cheap and from Maplin I think, but both do the job.

My stick mic is an SBC MD650 from Phillips - came with it’s own cable and I have a phono to mini-jack converter to plug it into the minidisc. I then have a stereo clip on mic for wandering around stuff. This is a Yoga (I consider myself more of an intermediate ) EM-8 which has far too much cable but does give a really cool stereo vibe, especially weird when listening to me walking in traffic.

Video recording

I have a JVC GR D200 which I picked up in Dixons a couple of years ago for domestic use. I chose it because it was cheap and it fits nicely in my hand and those are the technical criteria I would recommend :-). It records on MiniDV and transfers to PC via a Firewire cable. When I need to buy another one, I’d like quicker transfer to PC and an external mic input. I don’t have a functioning stills camera at the moment but will get a digital SLR when funds allow - I grab stills from video I’ve shot or use my cameraphone.

Tripods

I have two, one is a mini one that sits on a table top and has a mic clip too. I usually use this as a mic stand but have to be wary when interviewing thrusting corporate execs who like to punctuate their speech with thumps on the table. The other is a bit of a cheat as as it doesn’t actually fit into the bag. But especially when I’m doing one-man stuff, it’s good to be able to the put the camera down and walk into the shot or just hold it still for a while several feet above the ground. Not essential, but useful.

Software

Partly a function of the hardware I use but I stick with freebie stuff wherever possible.

I have to use SonicStage to transfer audio from the minidisc - it does however now automatically create .wav files for me so that’s a lot less of a hassle than it used to be. I use Audacity to then edit the audio and produce mp3’s.

For video I just use Windows Movie Maker - it’s fine, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but they usually confuse me anyway and it does what I need it to do. If I need to convert to Quicktime I use the AVS video conversion suite which set me back something like 15 quid - a useful feature of this is that it will also strip a wav audio file from a video soundtrack for manipulation in Audacity.

Hosting

Obviously this doesn’t fit in my bag…. but it popped into my head that this might be useful information too. I put my videos on YouTube now - may switch if they start to get evil. I also have a couple of libsyn accounts which are useful because they have unlimited download bandwidth but they’re used primarily for podcasts and audio files. I blog here using MovableType but use wordpress.com for freebie blogs.

Cables

Don’t get me started. Separate power cables (with transformers) for each bit of hardware (laptop, minidisc, camera); mic cables; firewire cable from camera to laptop; USB cable from minidisc to laptop; stereo audio line for carrying an audio signal from minidisk to laptop when doing Skype recording (whole other post)

The bag itself came from a very excellent NMK event at the ICA last year - funkiest conference bag ever.

I’m at the Novotel in Hammersmith at the Unicom conference on Social Tools and their business applications. This morning we heard from Euan Semple, Lee Bryant and Sarah Prag from the BBC. Up now is Duncan Brown from Influencer 50 talking about the influence of blogs.

I’m on first thing tomorrow morning, talking about building an in-house social media empire.

Chris

Originally uploaded by matlock.

Just because I always do what I’m told here’s a picture of Matt Locke’s brother Chris whom he teases by saying that he looks like either Ray Winstone or David Cameron depending on how much weight he’s carrying. Matt’s just encouraged us to link to the picture to push up his interestingness on flickr.

tags: content2.0 & london

Jamie Kantrowitz says Myspace page views haven’t dipped recently. This graph seems to say something different to me, but what do I know?

PS that graph is probably dynamically generated, so in a year’s time I may look even more of a dick… whichever way it goes.

tags: content2.0 & london

Oh we’re having such a jolly time at Content 2.0

Pics are coming through on flickr with the tag content20

tags: content2.0 & london

I’m at the RSA recording the sessions for NMK’s Content 2.0 conference.

Marc Canter’s up first of all with another big energy performance. Not sure how much I’ll get to blog today, but Mike Butcher’s also live-blogging on the conference site.

tags: content2.0 & london

I’m here at Blogs & Social Media in London today. Right now JP Rangaswami from DrKW is onstage engaging with the participants. In a minute we’ll have Ray Jordan from Johnson & Johnson and then after coffee I’ll be “running” an open space. It certainly feels to me a little more open than most blog conferences and a good mix of people with experience and those with none or very little.

tag: bsmf0506

Next Wednesday sees the Blogs & Social Media Forum, organised by VNU, at the London Hilton Metropole in Edgware Road. (eeek! scarily it’s the same date and location as this) I’ve been on the advisory panel for the forum and am running one of the sessions. I’m also really pleased that VNU have commissioned us to podcast the conference and to do some pre-conference interviews - more of this below….

While accepting that people come for clear information and practical examples of how this technology is actually working, we are also pushing the networking element of the day and trying to get away from the chalk and talk, death by powerpoint approach. The trouble is, that although many have tried, no-one seems to have found a format that works for everyone, so again, I don’t think we’ve cracked it yet, but we’re trying out some new ideas to see how they work. For example, in the middle of the day Johnnie Moore and I will be running an Open Space session to give people the chance to mix up and talk to the speakers on a more egalitarian level.

Naturally, there’s a conference blog and wiki. We’ve tried to soften up the format a little - so comfy armchairs for the panel, rather than a tressle table for them to hide behind, pictures and video from the day (and more informal stuff about speakers) projected in the breaks and hopefully some funky sounds - perhaps some podsafe music and other podcast samples. Participants will be sitting cafe-style but hopefully we’ll manage to make it a bit more Starbucks than Politburo Canteen (I suggested beanbags at the last on-site meeting we had, but I’m not sure whether that one will be taken up!).

The first pre-conference podcast is over on the conference blog. I went and had a chat with Lee Bryant of Headshift. What I love about their work is the way that they’re bringing the tools together in packages that make sense to users - which Lee touches on in our short conversation.

tags: bsmf06 & events & london & VNU & podcasts & rich records & social conferences

Today, I was walking through here and later, after a couple of phone calls went to have a look around Crocker’s Folly, a Grade II* listed building which is up for sale. It has a special place in my heart as it was one of the first places in London I performed after leaving drama school in 1984 (long story) and where I met my (future ex-)wife (even longer story).
Even that aside, it is a stunningly beautiful interior with enormous potential.

The folklore behind the building is that one Frank Crocker built the place in the late part of the 19th Century based on a mistaken belief that Marylebone station would be built nearby and that there would be a need for a large hotel and hostelry. The film Georgy Girl was shot in the surrounding area of Little Venice and I have a feeling the pub is featured in a scene.

It is a crying shame that it has stood empty and boarded up for the last three or four years. My vision would be to create an alternative music venue there: Victorian Music Hall, 1930s Variety, Burlesque, Cockney & Western, etc…

I would naturally love to blog about what goes on there once opened, but it would also make a really cool blog in the meantime talking about raising the money to buy it and the restoration and other work that needs to be done to make it habitable and sea-worthy.

I shot some footage in the most interesting bit, the pub downstairs, but there are three floors of residential opportunities above the pub as well which could provide some serious rental income if refurbished right.

The owner is asking for bids by this Friday (21st April 2006) in the region of £3million but even my untrained eye could see that one would need several hundred thousand more to restore it to a going concern. My reading between the estate agent’s lines was also that there was no big unavoidable rush, but that the deadline had been set to focus the minds of potential purchasers.

Sadly, this is too short a period for me to get a few million nicker all by myself, and anyway Debbie & I are going to Birmingham for the day. But it occurred to me that to two or three degrees of separation, I do know or am known by an awful lot of people around the world and I would really like to see how possible this is. So I throw it open to you inkernet webizens. How could we put a deal together quickly to secure this lovely space (subject naturally to acceptance of such a bid by the current owners) and make reasonable returns for investors if they want them - preferably somewhere manageable and suitably long-tail ranging from 1 investor who stumps up £3m+ and 3m investors who each stump up £1.

This does not form a prospectus or any such blah blah blah.

TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS. NO, REALLY. TELL *ALL* YOUR FRIENDS

FAQ

You’re joking, right. This is one of Lloyd’s mad ideas Half right - it is one of my mad ideas, but I’m not joking. Can I put you down for say £1.50?

Are you drunk? No, nor am I on drugs. I may be otherwise mentally twisted, but not seriously so. Can I put you down for £100 then?

Don’t you realise what a stupid idea this is? No, so can I put you down for £1,000?

Do you know anything about what you’re doing… at all? No, but that’s never stopped me in the past. Can I put you down for £10,000?

Isn’t this illegal? I don’t know. I promise not to do anything illegal in the event that any of this comes off. I am not a lawyer and I don’t even play one on TV, but I’m not doing anything at the moment except talk about it. Of course one way you could contribute is if you happen to be a lawyer. So can I put you down for £100,000?

tags: crazy idea & london & NW8 & crockers & restoration & investment opportunity & blogging

Groovy event corner: look out for the Blogs & Social Media Forum organised by VNU in London on May 17th.

Check out the programme and you’ll see the reason I’m talking about it. I’m facilitating an Open Space session with m’colleague Johnnie Moore during the day as an antidote to powerpoint pain and panel proliferation. But of course there’ll be interesting things going on as well. Booom! Booom!

The whole thing will be masterfully chaired by the newly liberated Euan Semple and we’re going to try as hard as possible to make this event stand out from the crowd and not be another dreary procession of the usual suspects.

Sign up via the booking form on the site.

Disclosure: as well as running the session, I am on the advisory panel for the conference.

See you there!

Tags: London & events & blogs & social media & open space & facilitation

[I feel the need to put this post straight a little. The following two paragraphs are not my view, I was one of those who disagreed with the tone and substance of Mena's speech, and I was active in the backchannel before and after (my handle was perfectpath - you can see what I said), but while she was actually speaking I was writing the two paragraphs in the live-blogging style I've adopted before - so they're now in quotes.

I'm writing something about civility and my experience of this episode to post later but this post is getting so much traffic from tara's post that I thought it worth clarifying.]

“Mena knows that bloggers have a lot to say and we’re always looking for what they’re saying so the best way to be found is to have a strong voice online. But this has it’s ups and downs. If it bleeds, it leads can work wonders for your google ranking, but it has it’s dangers.”

“Civility and blogging - so finding an attitude of civility in blogging is difficult, but can we as bloggers be more civil? Someone will criticize Mena today - it’s just a part of what she does. What she’s really scared about is the IRC backchannel - it’s disturbing - you see things there that you’d never say to people’s face. The difference is that blogging is much more permanent. This is one of the reasons people are afraid of bloggers.”

“Jeremy Zawodny & the KTA spam episode” - OK this is where I zoned out. I felt like I was being told to be nice but more worryingly *how* to be nice and I don’t like that.

Oooh then it got hairy when Mena didn’t like being talked about on the backchannel and got into a skirmish with Ben (yeah, not that Ben, our Ben)

FrankMaarten Schenk has video yeah, who is Frank anyway?

tag: lesblogs & mena trott

I’m sure my literal translations of English idiom into French are amusing too, but I had to snigger when Gilles Klein introduced Adriana yesterday thus:

“The Lady, it’s a blogger”

This was before the pictures were shown of her out shooting commies in the forest.

tag: lesblogs & language

Finding it hard to concentrate - I have a stiff neck and a headache (bloody french food) and I’m struggling to keep up with the backchannel, the panel speakers and my own brain - now Loic just put up the pictures of Adriana shooting in Pennsylvania so I’m giving up on even trying to pay attention.

Moderated by Gilles Klein, Journalist, France

* Philippe Borremans,
Public Relations Manager, IBM, Belgium
* Georges-Edouard Dias,
Director of Internet & E-business, L’Oreal, France
* Michel-Edouard Leclerc, France
* Jaanus Kase, Skype, U.K.
* Adriana Cronin-Lukas, U.K.
* Martin Varsavsky, Fon

Settled into my seat at Les Blogs II, wifi working - the unofficial irc just became the official backchannel and made it up on the screen. Sadly, I can’t bluetooth my phone to my pc to post pictures immediately.

I’ve Rachel to the left of me and Nicole on the other side of Rachel.

Right now Scoble & Israel are wandering around the room having a Naked Conversation - make of that what you will.

tags: lesblogs

I’m speaking next week at Online Information, the huge VNU information management conference and show at Olympia. I’m going to be speaking on wikis in a session on Wednesday led off by Jimbo Wales. So, nervous and unconfident about what I’m going to have to say to add to the wisdom of His Worshipful Wikipedianess? Ha! Moi?

I’ve titled my presentation Why Wiki? Breaking barriers and Building bridges I shall probably blog a little more about it on the conference blog - but I shall be talking about the need that wikis fill - the collaboration imperative in the knowledge economy and showing how wikis have wider applications than the online reference book (however fabulous they may be).

I shall be taking the opportunity though, while I’m hanging around Olympia and have a speaker’s pass, to do as much live-blogging, podcasting and videoblogging as I can manage without in-room wifi (it’s in the lobby apparently). So be prepared for the usual spurts of binge-bloggery. The blogs and wikis stream will be fun, but I’m also looking forward to David Weinberger’s opening keynote.

tags: online information 2005 & london & wiki

Suw has drafted me in to facilitate an evening of discussion about digital rights and ORG.  Apparently there’ll be networking and wine too!

ORG is the Open Rights Group, the outcome of a long conversation that culminated with Danny O’Brien from the EFF starting a pledge drive for an EFF-like organisation in the UK on PledgeBank thusly:

“I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1000 other people will too.”

The evening will begin with a short presentation by special guest speaker Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and then we’ll get chatting in an open space style. So though I have ideas about how best to capture what needs to be captured for those people who believe you have to capture something, I’m tending towards letting the group of 100 incredibly bright people decide for themselves what gets captured.

We’ll be at 01ZeroOne in Soho (corner of Peter St & Hopkins St) on Tuesday 29th November from 6pm to 9pm.  Numbers are strictly limited, so if you’d like to be one of the coolest 100 people talking about digital rights in London on that particular night, you should reserve a place by e-mail to: events@openrightsgroup.org

Incidentally, the above pledge still requires another 45 signatures to reach the magic 1,000 “other people” so if you believe this is a good thing and are willing to part with a fiver a month to make it a reality, you know what to do.

technorati tags: ORG, London, Suw Charman, Zittrain, EFF, Danny O’Brien, Soho, 01ZeroOne, digital rights, open space

If you want to gain trust in your profession, conversation is the best way to achieve it.

Nowadays we do much more talking than we did in the past but we haven’t studied conversation. Talk is different from conversation. In the beginning, people were scared to talk, it was dangerous to say the wrong thing, or to say what you think. But if you look at how people did talk when they started, you find that they are influenced by their social context. So people said what they thought other people would want to hear, which of course meant that nobody actually knew what you thought. We’ve now invented different types of talk: scientific talk - a pared down, unemotional, rational talk; academic talk - essentially argumentative a battle in which one side won and the other shut up; separation of the sexes - women encouraged not to talk to eat separately. So this is not something that we’ve always done, it is something new that we’re developing. The americans revolted against etiquette talk in favour of plain talking or straight talk. Of course this became ritualised and hypcritical over time. We have also proscribed some types of talk, racist, sexist.

Now a new kind of conversation - who it is you keep company with - a social activity not just the exchange of words. Now another kind is needed what a person is like, what they think and what we think too an exploration and a self-examination - a conversation about what is important in your life. Not only do you build trust by letting people in, you also borrow from that person some of the experience that they share with you and you then emerge a different person. So the big revolution of the last century has been the arrival of women in the public sphere and they have introduced stuff that previously were considered too intimate and emotional and conversation can never be the same as a result. His proposal then is that the things you think you can talk about are not enough for you to talk about and if you wish to be treated as an interesting trustworthy person you have to learn how to talk in what was previously considered a more private way.

You’re in corporations not only to make money but to bring people together to do things that they could not do alone. The new conversation is a method of creating a network and you can therefore see that the role of experts in conversation is not just transmitting information but creating something new.

Public opinion polls show that people don’t trust business to tell the truth. This has gone on for a long time - advertising has not worked and charity has not worked. The philanthropic activities which comprise a small section of the budget of corporations will be rethought and corps will see that they need to engage with the community in a very different way. The role of business leaders is the construction of new networkd - what is missing in people’s lives is networks. Survey question - if you got into real trouble who could you rely on for help? Only 55% said their parents would help them - a sign of the disintegration of the family networks. New ones are needed to supplement what is disappearing.

The new relationship between public work and private life. People are going to increasingly complain that they are not happy to do horrible jobs, doing work that does not enhance them as humans. The young recruits are demanding that the corporation change and engage with the community in more diverse ways. People want to expand in life not just be an instrument of others. So what we say about conversation is as applicable to our private lives as it is to our public lives. Moving towards harmonizing public and private, become more like a family. Of course, families are changing too, still learning to be honest and for men and women to talk, for fathers and children to talk and be friends.

Give the same attention to conversation as you do to looking after your body (!) We’re in a process of disintegration unless we do something about it. Studies show that conversation is a very powerful way of maintaining the brain.

It is not enough to know a lot and be able to talk narrowly about your stuff, you have to be able to communicate with people from different backgrounds in different contexts. So you hav