Blogworldexpo Keynote (Brogan)
Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs blogworldexpo: keynote, closing Day 1 [disclaimer: liveblogging]
Addresing the audience as people committed to, and expert in, blogging; reminds us to be humble of this new ‘street religion’ and to stop criticising people who ‘don’t get it’; nor claim everyone needs to get it. Focus should be on moving out from the inner-circled wagons of the blogging community and exploring and developing the world beyond. Calling on people to lead, to push and force the pace of development. “take what you learn at this event and move it forward.”
So, what is next? How does human business work? – Social Media is one part; it’s more about human business. It’s about avoiding avatars, and doing bad stuff online; focusing on the human dimensions. Exemplifies this approach by calling for a refusal of the switch of business cards; shake hands instead. Restructuring the geekiness and inward-looking nature of the blogging world. Emmphasis on social tie building via giving. “love everyone like you mean it” but…get out of the business if it is not your business; commitment.
Blogging is not about yourself; the audience is more important than YOU. Audiences need to turn into communities; the key term Brogan is using here is commitment – communities are committed to you (and what you say) – audiences are not.
Don’t keep secrets; share ideas; share data [again mobilising strong ideas from opensource movement]. Also share resouces and abilities; let others do your work (in a good sense), move on to a new place. equip the people with ‘how to’ and they will want to do business with you. Brogan extends this later to emphasise the blog as spreading good ideas around far wider than one can do personally.
Finishing with a twist on the meaning of money: money is a currency of regard. Money, in our society, generates the deep recognition of the value you might bring; if you want to make ideas work, they do need to work for money, but money is just a superficial – it signifies regard when your acts make money for others.
Takeaways:
- “having friends you can move and mobilise matters” – “actionable people to rise to a cause”
- tune your business, “work on quality” “amateur hour is over”
- focus on “holistic human business”
Quotables:
“Social media is not a channel; it’s a tool to develop channels”
“You are excited about your awesome startup; but we are not”
“Social media doesn’t fix everything”
Side notes
A reprise of the strong evangelism from this morning’s session (‘Awesome’). Calling out to a particular, connected almost religiously committed group of people, creating the community of bloggers (which is not all bloggers but those who reflexively identify as such, in a similar manner to the hackers of 90s) through this mode of address. Indeed, bloggers are the new hackers, not a community of all bloggers, nor a community of something, but a grouping which commits to ideals, values, and ethics – eg don’t be stupid online – which are articulated through the language of social media development and deployment and articulated with the world through the subjects which ‘bloggers’ touch. The blogosphere labels, inadequately, the totality of the blogging enterprises; what then is the totality of this smallish, but powerful community and the people who dynamically engage within and with it? Perhaps the blogorg? Later in the keynote, the thematics return – giving, open source and so on; in a way, the blogorg if we can term it that, the blogger community, is teetering on the edge of the divide between commercialisation in a traditional mode, and new forms of economics. Brogan’s keynote, to a large extent, is a call to arms against the former and to push the new political economy of opensourceThe moral dimension of the social media advocates is important. Brogan refers to it, in several ways, throughout his talk – giving, don’t be stupid, do good things. There’s a reason for this: dissent. Blogging involves and should require dissent, according to Brogan, as well as commitment to change. The legitimacy of social action by bloggers stems, in this discourse, from the commitment to a different kind of ethical action in the world. Is this sustainable? Can it rewrite the Internet in ways which rebuild some of the originating openness? And this is not just a call for a cool internet, it’s a call for a new kind of political economy, a rebuilding of the basis of economics in relationships, not numbers.
One of the key things which resonated with audience, reading the twitter feed behind the speaker as evidence, was the claim for the difference between audiences and communities and the value for social change, and self benefit, of turning an audience into a community. Community holds deep resonance with people as a place of commitment and care; audiences are fickle and cool; while the development of community is in everyone’s interests, it does nevertheless reflect a selfish desire from the originator for acclaim and regard and belonging. Communities, which we normatively think of belonging to, are now something we can create.
Social media involves,