Zack Exley

Which marketing guru to have with you in a fight (PDF 2007 report) 21 May, 2007

Seth Godin, Purple Pitt Bull

I really enjoyed the Personal Democracy Forum conference this year. Unfortunately I missed Larry Lessig’s morning talk, but heard it was great. I arrived during the second session, a conversation between Eric Schmidt, of Google, and Thomas Friedman, who believes the world is flat. That talk was not interesting. However, it sparked a ton of stimulating hallway discussion and debate for the rest of the day. More on that in a second.

I was sitting in the back row of the balcony during the Schmidt/Friedman session. At these sorts of conferences, there are always tons of laptops open and we’ve all gotten used to it. But I was still surprised to see almost literally every single person tapping away during the keynote session. Because of the steep angle of balcony, I could see a dozen or so screens pretty clearly. Most people were working on things that I just can’t believe could allow them them to pay any attention to the speakers. Many were twittering. (I haven’t understood the appeal of twitter until now.) Other people were coding, reading the news, checking email, IMing and one person was browsing new themes for his IM client.

Witnessing such astounding inattention made me think: People are going to have to make conferences MUCH more exciting and snappy or we should just stop having them.

And then I looked at the PDF program and noticed that planners Micah and Andrew had already done that! Most of the day in the main hall was scheduled for 20, 10 and even 5 minute sessions. The 10 and 5 minute sessions were the best. People got up, said their most important stuff, and got off the stage. It was great! Yochai Benkler had a 20 minute slot, but apparently didn’t know that. There was a red LED timer counting down on the front of the stage. When, in mid sentence, he noticed it, he said, “Can this timer be right?” Someone yelled out, “Don’t worry about it.” But to his credit, he stuck to his time and squeezed the basic argument of his Wealth of Networks (which takes five years to actually read) into his alloted time by strategically skipping chunks of his powerpoint presentation.

By the way, Yochai Benkler/2008 is the new George Lakoff/2004. During Benkler’s session, I was sitting next to Robert Greenwald. When Yochai wrapped up, we noticed a few guys trying to get a standing ovation going–almost with tears in their eyes. One of them asked a question sounding choked up, “Wow, man, that was awesome…” or something to that effect. I said to Greenwald, “Half of this crowd has Benkler’s book on their shelves, but none have actually read it.” He confessed to being one of them and then pointed out the Lakoff parallelism.

For the record though, I want to make clear I am with the crowd on the conclusion that Benkler and his book are brilliant. And I was really lucky to grab him in the corner later and ask him some questions about it.

On Friedman and Schmidt. It was so interesting, because they are two people of the generation that generally “does not get the Internet.” Now, plenty of people of that generation actually do get the Internet and Friedman and Schmidt should certainly be two of them. But the consensus among all seemed to be that the gist of their entire conversation was:

“Wow, the Internet is so new.”
“Yeah, like…SO new.”
“Too bad about China.”
“Eh…no worries.”
“OK.”
“My kids do stuff on the Internet that I don’t get.”
“We couldn’t have had this conversation 15 years ago.”
“Totally…that’s cuz the Internet is SO NEW.”

So, one reason that it was interesting to listen to the reaction to Friedman and Schmidt throughout the day was that, though many people had a very negative reaction to views and ideas (or lack thereof) of these two dominating figures, people generally were not frustrated or angry about it. You know what I mean? There is now an incredible confidence among this community of lesser Interneterati in their own ability to contribute to and shape the dominant paradigm. In one conversation circle over lunch that included Chris Hughes, Amanda Michel, Eli Pariser, Kenn Herman and others, there was a strong sentiment that the world is not actually flat. Friedman’s blockbuster/bestselling voice counts more than others. Google counts more than others. Haliburton counts more than others. Whatever wackos happen to be in charge of U.S. foreign policy count more than others. Western/Northern workers count more than others.

And yet, of course, something profound HAS changed over the last handful of years. Amanda suggested we start a website called TheWorldIsRound.com to take Friedman to task. If we all didn’t have more important stuff to do, the people in that little circle definitely had the power to do it and to make it a big deal. That is new. The world isn’t flat. Maybe it’s lumpy.

I co-moderated a panel at the end of the day with Michael Turk, who ran the Bush-Cheney ’04 Internet campaign. I’ll never get over what a strange thing it is to speak to a large audience. As you speak each sentence, you can feel the hundreds of different interpretations being drawn among the audience. Some people have the art of choosing their words carefully–as if they can think through all the implications in advance. I haven’t gotten there yet. One example was the ribbing I got from several in the audience (especially my friend Ari Melber) for saying to Obama staffer Josh Orton, of their emails, “I’m not feeling Obama…I want to feel Obama!”

Finally, perhaps the most important thing I learned at the conference is which best-selling marketing guru would be the best to have with you in a street fight: hands down, Seth Godin. I was talking with him in a hallway when an over-zealous security guard came up and started yelling at me to clear the hallway because of some building regulation. (I was the one in the hallway, Seth was next to the wall and therefore not hypothetically blocking anyone’s passage.) The security guard had yelled at us a couple of times and made us move already. Seth, fed up, immediately took a stance of angry resistance on my behalf and started angrily challenging the armed guard. “Why don’t you just leave him alone?! He’s not blocking anyone!” The guard was about 3 times my size and a little more than 3 times Seth’s size. Seth Godin the Fearless! I used to see that kind of enthused, instant resistance to arbitrary power among labor organizers and union leaders when I worked in the labor movement. One union I worked with was notoriously barred from holding their conferences at a dozen hotels because of confrontations that started out that way and escalated far beyond. Anyways, forget Gladwell. Never mind Weinberger. If you need real back up, Godin’s your man.