We held our second MobileMonday Miami event last week!

Thanks to those who participated and thanks to Myk Willis, CEO and Founder of Myxer, who gave an awesome presentation of this fast-growing  mobile startup. Mobile Monday Miami co-organizer and co-founder Jeffrey Sass (pictured) graciously hosted the event at Myxer’s offices in Deerfield Beach.

MobileMonday is a global community fostering cooperation and business development through networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends in the mobile industry. We’re excited to create a mobile community in Miami and look forward to its continued growth. If you’re into mobile, you’re invited to attend and participate in our free events.

The next one will be on June 9th, 2008 at Nokia’s offices by the Miami Airport. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP on the Facebook event page, or just get in touch with me.

I’m giving back my Mac today.

The contract unequivocally requires property to be returned and so it is that I’m giving the Mac back at some point today. Mind you, about six months ago I’d never used a Mac before and the almost prohibitive price had always kept me at bay. I was the proverbial die-hard PC guy. So when I was offered the Mac — after I’d burned through one and a half of my own personal PCs at work — I gladly accepted it out of sheer curiosity.

In the six months since I’ve had this Mac, I’ve turned on my PC exactly two times; and both times, it was to try out PC-only software. Suffice it to say the MacBook Pro is sublime. What’s not to like? Once you get past the stuff that works differently, you won’t imagine how you ever worked on anything else. I think this applies to more than the creative professions: the Mac has not really improved my photography workflow. Rather, I feel like my productivity’s been boosted across the board. Maybe it’s the more logical OS and UI (and I prefer Tiger to Leopard). Maybe it’s because it crashes much less frequently. Maybe it’s because you can have close to a gazillion tabs open of Firefox and a bunch of other stuff running at the same time and everything still works. Maybe it’s the 3 hour battery life. And maybe it’s also “Spaces”. The combination of these things and more made it a pleasure to open up the Mac in the morning.

As a quick sidenote, I’ve often heard it said that Mac would convert most PC users if they gave 30-day trials.

Besides the obvious reluctance of going back to a Vista machine (ie, “Once you go Mac, you can’t go back”, etc.), I’m now also faced with the time-consuming hassle involved in setting up a workflow that had been perfected on the Mac. Some of it relates to the time it takes to find and install the right extensions for Firefox. Part of it has to do with giving up software that exists only for Mac, like the excellent Skitch. And the other part has to do with software that I had bought and installed, like OmniFocus, and will be unable to use until I get another Mac.

So when will I get another Mac? As soon as I can … and utimately, a brand new Mac trumps a depreciated one.

“… you’ve left me with nothing but I have worked with less.” -Ani Difranco.

Update: My PC laptop won’t start for some reason, I’ll have to get that fixed now and maybe reinstall Vista. I’ll lose a bunch of nice software I had installed, though.

Update 2: I got a new MacBook, which is performing better than the MacBook Pro I was using. Maybe it’s the clean install. I had considered getting a 20″ iMac — they’re amazing — but I really do need something mobile. The MacBook is even more convenient to carry around than the MacBook Pro.

Note: It’s worth clarifying that I’m not associated with Apple or any distributor. Also, I realize in the relative scheme of things, there are many worse things …

Continuing what has been a stellar year in Miami in terms of online conferences, the The Word of Mouth Marketing University came to town. To welcome some our friends from out of town who came to speak at the event, including Rohit Bhargava, Joseph Jaffe, JC Hutchins and Jason Anello, we organized a blogger dinner last night:

Brian Breslin of infinimedia

Joseph Jaffe of Crayon

Jay Berkowitz of Ten Goden Rules

By the way, Josh Hallett snapped some great photos at WOMMU, some of which appear on WOMMU’s good live blog. Have a look!

On Wednesday, May 2nd, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of RefreshMiami! When a few of us first met at a Starbuck’s in South Beach on May 5th, 2006 (Brian Breslin, Chris and Rebecca Saylor, Robert Murray and I), little did we know how significantly the RefreshMiami community would impact our lives. As Brian writes on the RefreshMiami blog:

"So its been 2 years. Wow. In the last 2 years I have either met or interacted with hundreds of great people in the south florida tech community. Lots of people have gotten jobs, made friends, and had a great time. So with that in mind, I think its time we celebrate."

Celebrate we did! Here are some photos. Michael Tangeman compares RefreshMiami to the First Tuesdays and such of the early dot.com days (see also comments on his post):

"It is so refreshingly unlike the dot.com days here in Miami. No suits, no VCs just flown in from the Valley, no investment bankers looking to take somebody public, no lawyers handing out cards and wanting to get in on the deals. The talk is about technology and apps and projects and what people are up to, not about shares and options and exit strategies."

If you’re new to Miami and looking to meet and connect with other web entrepreneurs, developers and designers in South Florida, here’s how to participate:

1) join the 220 member strong RefreshMiami Google Group for discussion on local tech issues, job postings and more;

2) join our group on Facebook;

3) if you’re on LinkedIn, we just started a group there. Here’s the link to join;

4) Subscribe to the RefreshMiami blog;

5) Come to our next meetup! Our next event is on May 28th in Coconut Grove … see you there!

Blogging about not blogging …

So I haven’t blogged in a while … or rather I’ve been on Twitter alot.  As it turns out, to rephrase Hugh MacLeod, "Blogging Tweeting is a great way to make things happen indirectlydirectly."

David Berkowitz blogged how Twitter makes blogging better … and in one way worse:

"One prominent blogger, who I won’t call out here, includes a daily summary of his Twitter posts on his blog. Very few of those posts are worth syndicating. They only make sense if you follow him. I find myself reading his blog less now because of it."

I’m not the "prominent" blogger in question   but as those of you reading the feed know, I’m equally guilty of reposting daily tweets here. The postings were archived and did not show up on the front page of this blog, but were regularly shipped out on the feed. This served a few purposes, including:

• Using the blog as a journaling and archiving system so that years from now I could look back and find what I was doing on any particular day, through the archived daily tweets here. Twitter has no archiving mechanism and it’s currently very difficult to find your tweets from any single day: you have to scroll back in your twitterstream to do so.
• Posting daily tweets to my blog helped keep this blog going at a time when I’ve been particularly busy and haven’t found the time to blog. The last three months have been very hectic, starting from before organizing  BarCampMiami, to leaving Scrapblog, to the various things I’m doing today and which I’ll describe in upcoming posts.
• In addition to keeping the blog alive with content, the daily postings kept Google’s spiders crawling and indexing this site for these past few months.

However, daily postings of tweets are difficult and/or boring to read and as David points out, they only make sense if you’re following them on Twitter as they occur, in which case it’s redundant to see them on Twitter, on the blog and aggregated with my other activity on socialthing! and FriendFeed.

I’ve been active elsewhere

Speaking of which, I’ve been active on many other services as well. I’ve added the social networks and sharing services I use most to my blog’s navigation and sidebar and have thus reclaimed my blog as a central identity hub from which to find me online. These services are listed under my picture on the sidebar, and are reposted below. If you’d like to connect on any of these services, please leave a brief comment describing how we know each other or why you’d like to be connected (see note below*):

Updates on Twitter
Facebook profile
Flickr photos
LinkedIn profile
del.icio.us links
Upcoming events
Tumblr lifestream
Trips on Dopplr
Dugg items
Shared on Google Reader
LastFM radio
Jaiku lifestream
Skitch screenshots
Presentations on Slideshare
MyBlogLog communities
Friendfeed lifestream
Technorati profile
ClaimID identity
Netvibes universe

*Note: I accept most friend requests, although I connect mostly with people I already know or have met on Facebook, Dopplr, Tumblr, Jaiku Google Reader, NetVibes, ClaimID, LastFM, SlideShare, del.icio.us and Upcoming. I’m more open with connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and Flickr, although I reserve the right to not connect for whatever reason – please don’t take it personally if I don’t reciprocate a connection request.

Having said all that …

… I’m blogging again

Sergeant Jalonen must have spent his childhood in a concrete sandbox

After I graduated from college, I completed mandatory military service in the Finnish Army. The year-long experience yielded intense experiences, lifelong friendships and lots of stories. One of them comes to mind: Jalonen and I were the first two soldiers from our company to be promoted to the rank of Sergeant. While I was promoted for technical skills in field operations, Jalonen was chosen because he was a strict disciplinarian, as tough as nails. So tough was he, that our company’s soldiers concluded among themselves that he must have spent his childhood in a concrete sandbox!

Surroundings and situations affect your behavior

I never gave this story much thought except to joke about it with my friends.  Aside from the humor, however, the suggestion is that a childhood spent playing in concrete sandbox will toughen you up. Were they too quick to judge? What part of Jalonen’s personality is attributable to a difficult childhood, and what part is attributable to the situation of being in the army?

In “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell describes how people tend to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors and disregard situational ones (see fundamental attribution error). For instance, it’s tempting to stereotype a work colleague by saying “she’s tough negotiator.” However, that same person may be seen differently by friends and family, who might describe the same person by aspects not necessarily shown at work: “fun-loving, caring, generous, etc.” University of Oslo professor Ole Hanseth further explains,

You do not go about doing your business in a total vacuum but rather under the influence of a wide range of surrounding factors. The act you are carrying out and all of these influencing factors should be considered together. This is exactly what the term actor network accomplishes. An actor network, then, is the act linked together with all of its influencing factors (which again are linked), producing a network.

Can your physical surroundings act as an influencing factor on your behavior? Social Scientist Roger Barker extensively researched see Architectural Psychology and found that, quite obviously, “In a store, people assume their roles as customers; in school and church, proper behavior somehow already resides coded in the place“.

The object-centered environment

A store and a wedding are social objects (because they’re conversation starters and topics for people). They are also object-centered environments. You step into a situation that structures your behavior. Both physical structures like stores, churches and public parks and situational events like weddings, soccer games and flashmobs condition the participants’ behavior to perform a certain objective collectively with like-minded others.

Work is a common form of social object as well as an object-centered environment. When you go to work, you “plug-in” to an environment where you then socialize with your colleagues and customers, because you work at the same place. If you telecommute, you’re still “plugged in” to the work you do with your colleagues. For instance, traders around the world plug in to financial markets. Such environments are rich social objects, both positively and negatively. Think about the number of varied work-related conversations you’ve had over the years!

Moulding your environment

In Roger Barker’s research, the places were clearly identified with a set location and purpose, like a hardware store, a high school, a denominational church or a financial market, like the Chicago Board of Trade (see Karin Knorr-Cetina’s paper on “The Market as an Object of Attachment“). But what about when you perform a different activity in a location generally meant for something else? For example, a wedding may be performed nearly anywhere. In Hawaii, Florida and the many other coastal areas, weddings may be carried out on a beach. In this case, the wedding supersedes the beach-going activity and conditions the guests’ behavior. The wedding ritual is generally standard within cultures, and everyone knows what to expect: gathering, union, blessing, and celebration. Other examples include a birthday party in a playground, public manifestations in city streets, flashmobs in a store, doing work inside a Starbuck’s, TupperWare dinners in someone’s living room, street soccer games, rock concerts inside Second Life, classical concerts inside a church and a BarCamp in a concert hall. Each of these activities bring people together around a shared object or objective, they include their own rituals, and they are performed in a certain way. The objective of the gathering supersedes the purpose of the location and the environment is molded to suit the gathering’s purpose. Chairs are placed, tables are setup, goalposts are erected in a field, and so on (see “Placemaking, the way in which all human beings transform the places they find themselves into the places where they live”).

Bernard Hunt, Managing Director of HTA Architects Ltd, talks about life in physical spaces:

The physical form of a place is only one side [of the coin]. The way life is lived in it, and the common purpose around which that life revolves, is the other. And from cave dwellers to loft livers human beings have always used places to achieve their common purpose …. Somehow things were easier when that purpose was protection against the elements, defence from attack and control of disease. Successful placemaking seemed to happen when what was built was in direct response to imperatives like defence and topography and also when it was done unselfconsciously by different people at different times.

Barry Smith, Department of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo, writes:

A physical-behavioural unit such as a religious meeting, a tennis championship or a sea battle is an intricate complex of times, places, actions, and things. Its constituents can include both man-made elements (buildings, streets, cricket fields, books, pianos, libraries, the bridges and engine-rooms of battleships) and also natural features (hills, lakes, waves, particular climatic features, patterns of light and sound). These features and elements may be further restricted to a highly specific combination of, say, a particular room in a particular building at a particular time with particular persons and particular objects distributed in a particular pattern. In general, however, it is a form of generic dependence which prevails in the realm of physical-behavioural units; a judge must hear and decide the case, but it need not be this judge; the capital city must be located somewhere, but it need not be located in this spot (and in time of war it may be relocated).

So whether the situation is dictated by the purpose of the location or the purpose of the gathering, you behave according to the appropriate culturally established rules you’ve learned. You have learned how to behave in a store and how to behave in a wedding.

What role for space in online community building?

In a discussion thread in Jeremiah Owyang’s Community Strategists group in Facebook, Jonathan Trenn mentions:

“I think this is an excellent question, but what concerns me is that we are not talking about communities here…we’re talking community platforms. Important distinction.”

This begs the question: to what extent is the platform an integral part of the community? To what extent does the platform foster or condition community behavior? Offline, a basketball court may be an integral part of a local community, just like a bingo hall, church, community center, grocery store, etc. If you take away such spaces, you would expect the community to change, because you would restrict the different areas and reasons for people to find each other and interact based on their shared interests. Does this same dynamic play online? To what degree does the architecture, features and tools of the community spaces you provide foster or restrict community interaction? (see Karin Knorr-Cetina’s work on “The Market as an Object of Attachment” is worth further reading for the notions of “wants and lacks”, “attachment” and “embeddedness” in community.)

The way the online space is designed has wide ranging implications for community interaction. “Social Design” decisions include whether to allow people to create a profile page, upload a picture, write a bio, tag their content, add bookmarks on content and people, comment on others’ creations, add friends, determine privacy settings, invite friends, publish to other platforms, create and moderate groups, browse profiles and content, “pivot” from one page to another, have personalized URLs, receive email notifications of activity, vote and rate content, engage in phatic communication, receive a mini-feed of friends’ activity after login, classify friends, participate in public forums, and so on. These design decisions affect space, because each of these actions and activities have a placeholder on the website.

Unlike a media like TV, magazines and other traditional media, social media is highly participatory and created through the active contribution and collaboration of people interacting with each other. Each design decision and how it is expressed on the website, leads to far-reaching implications for the community. And if these decisions are not made and certain features are not provided, the community will find a way to either adapt their space or to find other spaces where they may engage in conversation and activity.

Back to Jalonen’s concrete sandbox

To tell you the truth, military service is not such a pleasant experience. There are thousands of constraints on space, time and privacy. Your identity is formed daily in front of others through your behavior and actions. Heroics are performed and tiny hacks are found to break the rigidity. We found a way to build friendships and community, regardless of the hardships. Overall, however, relatively few cherish the environment enough to want to make a career of it. It is not so much that Jalonen’s youth was spent in a concrete sandbox, but that the army situation itself was a figurative concrete sandbox.

Are your service’s users stuck in a concrete sandbox? How do your website’s features foster or hinder identity formation, personal expression, profile discovery, and community interaction between people? Can the community appropriate and form the space to fit their needs? How might different cultures appropriate the same website?

This post highlights the importance of design decisions in online community building. Answering these and similar questions with an eye to community-building, and before the first trace is drawn, determines to a large extent the community-building and word-of-mouth potential of your web service.

There’s a packed house to watch Mark Cuban interview Michael Eisner: two billionaires in the room:

"This is a joint panel session for both SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive registrants, and will be a one-on-one interview with the founder of The Tornante Company and new media studio Vuguru, will feature the former head of Disney turned media mogul discussing his past, present and future endeavors, as he builds new companies and models for entertainment consumption. Interviewing Eisner will be former SXSW Interactive Festival keynote speaker Mark Cuban."

Michael wanted to see if the time had come for story-driven professional content to be monetized on the Internet. Can contnt owners make money from content? It’s almost the time, but pretty soon this distribution channel will explode and it will be like what’s happened before: one plus one will equal three. He has seen this numerous time in his career. For example, the addtion of movies and television was bigger than either one alone.

Michael would like to say he has a research group figuring out what to do; he doesn’t. They’re trying things out. For example, he talked to Chrysler, who put him in a Nitro and said "go to SXSW and look young"!

The people working in online video will be the Spielbergs of the future. Michael says he has a talent for finding such talent.

Why do we see so many changes in business models by content producers on the net? Partly it’s because they know it will be huge and they want to get as big a slice of the pie as they can. This happened to Prom Queen, where distribution deals were renegotiated after it went big. There is no unique business model. That’s why all you can do is to find the people who are doing interesting things and raised $5 from family and friends to make their video.

What type of approach should content producers take? For one thing, Michael says, "Stay away from media moguls like me". Those who get in a band with two other people, stay in a Day’s Inn and work on a shoestring see media moguls as a last resort. Then there’s the 12 year olds in the user generated arena, and you can sometimes see something pretty good. Michael is not interested. But the group that’s very interesting are those youth studying film production in schools: they are educated, smart and professional.

Of what you see online, 99% is awful and 1% is good. The intention is not to do crap, but it’s hard to know this before the fact. Lots of bad movies are made, but no one intended them to be bad.

Michael thinks that within 5 years, content on the Internet will be as important as content on television or cable. Already, content is a huge deal.

Will this be primary content or secondary content? It will be both. Nothing will be different, just the distribution channel. This will be media over broadband. Mark Cuban disagrees, though. People are rushing out to buy HDTV more than they are PCs. There are no standards. (Michael agrees that 90% of America that has TV on their PC are sitting in this room). Eisner says he doesn’t dwell on the technology. If there’s a story that makes you laugh or makes you cry, somebody else will want to see it and there will be a way to distribute it online. If you have the patience and you are interested in dealing with new people and new ideas, this is the place to be.

Question and answer

How will Eisner acquire a large volume of cool content? How will Michael upgrade the quality of content in volume? The point is to make a good show and you can have millions to perhaps a billion people watching it. If you know how to monetize this, then you have a business. Michael’s skill is in identifying good content. But talent agencies are looking for talent as well. This is becoming a business. As long as the cost is low enough, the talent acquisition and management business will grow.

Every new technology predicts the demise of the movie theater. Artistic decisions need to be made if you’re shooting something for HD … there’s way too much detail. Should content creators be making these decisions at the beginning of the process if they’re filming for the net? Yes and no. What’s hard to do is the emotion. If you have good emotional content with heart, it will work on any screen, including the big screen. So it’s a matter of cost and budget, during the production process. One of the best things of producing on the cheap is that you can redo it, if it works.

What’s Eisner’s take on Creative Commons and the remix culture? Michael says he’s conflicted, because he has a long history of defending copyrights. What sets this nation apart is paying people for intellectual work, which is just like paying people for physical work.

What about the growth of product placement as an advertising mechanism? It’s very important. In the creative process, it’s very important to have it done right, because bad product placement can ruin good content. Eisner objects to 30s pre-rolls. There’s a lot of experimentation going on, but the combination of sensitive insertions and voice overs can work. We’re used to advertising in entertainment, because most would prefers ads to paying a subscription. If you have common sense, you will understand what’s annoying.

Opinions about the added capabilities that digital brings to content (interactivity) and do these need to be integrated into the content creation process? This is the one thing that makes the internet totally unique. Eisner likes to have control over the content, but he likes the interactivity. It’s clever, compelling and works. He is adding interactivity to content, and admits he is not clever enough to think of all the ways to take advantage of interactivity. Mark mentions there are problems with interactivity. On the advertising side, there are no standards, so if you have different distribution channels, you need to encode each one specifically and think about how the players are different, so you can adapt the ads. Cables and satellite are gearing towards interactivity now. Mark is putting emphasis away from interactivity on the net and is moving to digital cable and satellites.

What about the published written word in the digital landscape? How do big media companies adapt? Michael says he has no idea. He says his Kindle died after about three days. He says the written word is the essence of everything he has ever done. It’s hard to go out and shoot and get lucky. He doesn’t believe the days of the written word is over. Mark thinks we’re approaching screen fatigue, and there will be a resurgence of book reading … rather than reading stuff on the screen. And there’s an excitement to getting out of the house and into the movies. So these media are not going away.

This turned out to be one of the more interesting sessions of the conference. Here’s a loose transcription of the bootstrapping your startup panel at SXSW. The points covered in this session are the nuts and bolts of the business, as important as the balance sheet.

Kevin Koym   Founder/CEO,   Enterprise Teaming LLC

Bruce Krysiak   Principal,   Leonid Consulting

Allen Beuershausen

Edward Cruz   Founder,   Melior Technologies

Nancy Schill   Founder,   Executive Intelligent Coaching

"Are you building a business, a non-profit, or artistic endeavor? Through building their businesses together, entrepreneurs can get to success faster. We will share examples of how entrepreneurs can use less financial capital and more social capital to make their businesses successful, drawing upon our experiences with BootstrapAustin.org, and other "enterprise tribes". Our panel’s diverse backgrounds will show how this way of building businesses is having an impact on artist, non-profits, and startup businesses."

 

Panel discussion

The basic phases are pre-ideation, ideation, Valley of Death and growth. The "inner path" are the changes you need to make at the relevant times as you grow.

In the pre-ideation phase, start to put into language what you like, what you don’t like, etc., in the spirit of "know thyself". Where will you spend your mental time to create something you will love.

In the ideation phase, you start to commit to the business. What you develop in the ideation phase is your commitment to your idea and its place in the world. The other aspects here are imagination and creativity.

When you’re in the "Valley of Death", your primary objective is to stay alive. Do whatever it takes, get consulting contracts, so you can sustain your project. During this time, you will learn alot about yourself, and this will give a good sense of your and your project’s identity. Ask yourself three questions:

- Are you trying to build a sustainable organization?
- Is your team willing to push the limits during this period?
- Are you ready to use everything in your disposal in order to make it?

Unless you’re Superman, you will face and live with fear. You must put the fear aside, because it paralizes you and keeps you from doing the things you need to do. It reduces your openness and flexibility. You must be open to everything that comes your way that will help you build a sustainable company.

"Growth is a biological unfolding of events involving changing an organism from simple to more complex." Growth is that place where you become more dangerous, because you are stretching in new directions. The most important thing right now is not to build your bank account, but to reinvest your profits. Teach and reinforce your purpose, your vision, your values and your strategies. So just feeding your business more capital doesn’t work. You have to do it based on your purpose, vision, values and strategies. No doing so can throw you back in the Valley of Death.

Dring growth, be careful of hubris and don’t get too full of yourself. Hubris reduces your openness and flexibility, because you think you know everything (ie., I did this all myself). Cultivate humility and gratitude.

Question and answer

How do you manage the transition from your day job to your project? To cross the threshold, you need to jump. There’s a point you’ll feel inside where you know you need to take a leap of faith. You will feel that push. It’s like going into labor. And when you make that leap, you will find resources, because you are looking for opportunities and because you’re hungry.

When do you stop bootstrapping and look for funding? You can take funding and still continue bootstrapping. It’s not mutually exclusive and it is part of the process. After growth, you re-boostrap. Even Apple does it. When you stop innovating, you stop being viable.

When do you get business and medical insurance? Do it when you can afford it. Here too there is a threshold that you’ll have to cross. You have to weigh the risks when you can afford it.

How do you know which opportunities to pursue while you work on your project? For as long as you possibly can, keep focussing on your core and growing that core. Keep feeding this core until it sprouts something you can’t avoid. During the ideation stage, don’t define the project too strictly. Keep considering new options. But when you’re in the Valley of Death or growth stages, then you have to focus and make your project work.

How many months should you have in the bank while you’re growing? A goal of four and a half months is good, but hard to achieve. The closer you get to four and a half months, the more your business will suffer. So a rule of thumb is to take your employee expense and double it.

When is it appropriate to start looking for talent? What are the best ways … should you use a recruiter? The recruiting process works best when you align values. Get someone that is curious, hard working and shares your values. These are more important than qualifications. Make it an objective to consistently interview people. For example, interview six people per week. You have to keep feeding that pipeline so you get choice selections for your organization.

How to manage work life balance? Should I get a partner or an employee? Look into getting an intern from local schools, they can be invaluable. Look for people with complementary energy, so they bring new talents to your organization. Regarding time management, scrap your todo lists and put what’s necessary into your calendar. This way you have a central place and a strict daily reminder of what needs to happen by the end of the day.

Secrets are powerful social objects: they connect and bind people in a unique way. Monday’s keynote at SXSW featured Frank Warren of PostSecret, who gave insights into the "unity we share, but often forget". During this presentation, a person walked on stage and proposed to his girlfriend.

"With postsecret, Frank Warren pioneered the idea that a website can serve as a an anonymous online confessional. Listen to his moving story about the trust his readers put in him, as well as his thoughts about how technology can help us overcome some of our darkest fears."

"There are two types of secrets, those we hyde from others, and those we hide from ourselves" – Frank

Has received over 200,000 secrets in three years. Has received secrets in all types of formats, including one on each side of a mixed-up Rubik’s Cube. Also on a Starbuck’s cup, that read "I serve decaf to customers who are rude to me":

- "My boyfriend is deaf and when we have sex I scream my ex’s name"
- "I put lipstick on my bosses shirt so his wife thinks we’re having an affair even if we’re not. This sounds crazy even to me"
- "I know my child is not mine, but I love her anyways"
- "You called me an idiot so I sent your bags to a wrong destination. Opps, I guess you were right!"
- Favorite one: "Dear Frank, when I wrote down my secret to send to you, I felt horrible reading it, and at that moment I decided I will no longer be that person who carries this secret inside for the rest of my life."
- "You told me your darkest secret, and my heart ached because I realized I could not possible love you ever more"
- "I’ve gone through dark periods in my life and I’ve learned to have patience, because hope does not always come on the time schedule we would like"
- "I know how to fix my life, I just chose not to"
- "He’s been in jail for something I did 10 years, 5 more to go"
- "The secret I mailed in last week was true when I mailed it, but it’s no longer true now"

SXSW secrets:

- "All these web celebs have never worked with clients"
- "Work paid for me to come here, but I actually came here to find another job"
- "My company, a large one, has sent me here to steal ideas from startups. I’m posing as a freelancer"

Presentation, discussion and question and answer

Three years ago printed and handed out 3,000 postcards with instructions on sharing a secret to an art project. "Hi, my name is Frank and I’m collecting secrets." The people who say they don’t have any, have the best ones. Secrets started pouring in, from all over the world and in many languages. So he started sharing these on a blog.

PostSecret is an online community that organizes itself as it develops. There are 10,000 or 100,000 other ideas like PostSecret out there waiting to be started. Projects that make us realize the greater unity that we all share, but that we often forget.

A rock band made a music video using secrets, and the project also evolved into a book. The project has also been used to raise money to support (and save) a suicide prevention hotline.

His father did not understand the project initially, but one day told Frank a secret that changed their relationship.

Frank had to grow up quickly when he was young and develop a rich interior life … and thought that everyone else also has a rich interior life that’s important to share. He also found the process of sharing a secret very therapeutic.

People are sharing secrets, but the truth is that similar secrets are shared, even by people sitting in the same room.

There is an intimacy revolution, an authenticity revolution going on. We post pictures on Facebook our employers shouldn’t see. Social media tools are driving this type of revolution and many new forms of authenticity will emerge.

There are secrets occurring in virtual worlds, too.

People share secrets about sexual identity, about abuse … When Frank gets difficult and emotional ones, he channels the emotion to support the suicide prevention hotline.

He thinks of the postcards as works of art.

It’s a false dichotomy to think secrets are either true or false.

"Free your secrets and become who you are"- Frank (to a standing ovation)

Here’s a transcription on community building by a panel of top social media consultants and bloggers. Since it’s transcribed, please excuse the grammar and run on sentences.

Chris Heuer, Partner, The Conversation Group

Tara Hunt, Co-Founder, Citizen Agency

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester

Deborah Schultz, Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com

David Parmet   Owner, Marketing Begins At Home LLC

Hugh MacLeod   Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com

"’Conversation’ & ‘community’, yes, yes. Of course. Given. But how, exactly? Do you want people to find out about and play with your awesome Web stuff without being skeevy about it? Serious about including your users in the long-term creation and evolution of your products? Together, we’ll divine the best ways to unmarket and create self-replicating awesomeness."

How can you uses social media to build communities around your projects?

Deb Schultz: None of this is about tools or technology, it’s about understanding your customers and bringing them into the fold.

Chris Heuer: What makes a community are the interpersonal connections within it. Social media fundamentally changes the way we interact with each other. It takes a shift to think about participation in a different way. We need to change people’s mindset from selling to people, to helping people buy. You need to have a genuine spirit of wanting to do good, or people will notice the "fakeness".

Jeremiah Owyang: Conducts research and most recently interviewed 17 companies on best practices for community building and management.

Tara Hunt: "Marketing is the price you pay for creating mediocre products." Tara found that the more she gave away, the more business she got. The more time she donates to the community, the more opportunities open up to her. Read Cory Doctorow’s "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." The book talks about if you do good things for the world, you get more "woofys" (ie., Karma).

Hugh MacLeod

Was unemployed 5 years ago and started drawing cartoons on the back of business cards and posted them to his website. This led to a gig with a small South African winery, Stormhoek, which was selling 50,000 cases per year at the time. Hugh then started talking about Stormhoek and sending free bottles to bloggers, without asking them to blog about it. Hugh then noticed geek dinners happening and offered to send a case of wine to these events. The only condition was to ask people to post pictures to Flickr. The result is that in a year and a half, Stormhoek went from 50k cases per year to 250k cases per year! Hugh and Jason [Korman, of Stormhoek] noticed that the wine was a social object. In fact, it was becoming a social marker, because it took territory and demarcated the conversation.

Discussion

If you are at a small startup and have some control over your marketing budget, get out of the ivory tower. Get a community manager or evangelist and go meet your customers. Go to conferences and start "weaving". Don’t put names on things, like "viral marketing".

Jeremiah mentions that he makes a lot of people at his own company nervous, because he gives out a lot of his knowledge for free.

However, by sharing your knowledge, people will understand that you have knowledge and this becomes your calling card.

Traditional marketing is about throwing the net out wide and hope you catch as many people as possible. What Hugh realized is that you can provide good service to small groups and the word will spread. "Blue Ocean Strategies" is a good book about these principles.

Question and Answer

How to find brand advocates? It’s pretty easy to find them by searching. You can also use paid services that will mine the net and find influencers.

What is Kula and what is the latest one? Kula are shells that people trade in South Sea islands. Islanders would paddle great distances to gift Kula to others. It’s not about the shell, it’s that people are wearing them and it creates a bond, an obligation, a conversation, an interaction. It’s all about people.

It’s ok to give away the little things, but what about giving away big stuff? For example, Audi is giving away dry cleaning, spa treatments and so on. Find related things that people you interact with will value. Also, break things down into smaller segments and go local. Start from the bottom up. Russel Davies said big brands don’t have big ideas, they have lots of small ideas. Starbuck’s is about the small things. Apple stores also. When you add lots and lots of little things done well, these add up. As a community manager for Hitachi, that sells products worth millions of dollars, Jeremiah set up a wiki that became a valued space for customers and represented a huge cultural shift for the company.

How to market a film? Start a blog and get people from the community to start telling their stories. The brands with the best storytellers win. Empower people and help them tell their stories.

What’s the rebuttal to the 1.0 Marketing pushback? There’s no such thing as viral marketing. Why not go right to the customers themselves, rather than going for yet another ad buy. Sometimes you shouldn’t give your products away, but it’s those things around it, the social gestures you make. For example, the Honda dealer has wifi, has bagels, has playground for kids … so some independent consultants go there to work! It’s not just about giving away stuff, it’s about creating relationships with the people you’re giving stuff to.

What’s the takeaway, the soundbite? Social objects are the future of marketing. Build social capital and find your higher purpose. Passion for people, put passion into product. Technology changes, human behavior doesn’t, don’t get lost in the shiny bling, don’t get lost in the ivory tower, nothing replaces listening. People are people.

What about nonprofits, what is free is the message … is pitching the message annoying or wrong or unethical? What you’re giving is a connection to a higher purpose, a sense of belonging. Cultivate this feeling, rather than sending a message to people. Find how to connect with people. When do you connect with people? Is it just on your own terms. Do you sell tupperware when you invite people to dinner? That’s a turn off. If you only talk to them when you need them, you will lose them. It’s more about the quality of the connections, one person at a time.

What if these tactics don’t work? How long does it take? Traditional execs want immediate results. They care about levers, not people. A lot of it has to do with people not getting it. It’s not campaigns, it’s programs. Get qualitative results, get the videos of the kids in the playgrounds and tell their stories.

Is this a fad or does it need to be done? Jeremiah believes there is a purpose to marketing. But marketing has become associated with sales, rather than associating the product with the value people get from them. For Deborah, it is a personal mission, not a fad. She considers herself a customer advocate, not a marketer. She loves bringing tools to people and enabling people to do cool stuff with it. It’s significant that everybody has a voice today. It boils down to, what’s your intention? People will notice fakeness.

Wrap-up: A story without love is not worth telling.

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