Month: March 2007

My co-workers went to this conference in Vegas…

…and all I got were these two autographs from David Weinberger.

Weinberger’s autograph on my copy of ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’.
Weinberger’s autograph on The Cluetrain Manifesto.

David Weinberger’s autograph on ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined’
And here’s Weinberger’s autograph on Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Far, far better than a lousy T-shirt, though. Wouldn’t you say?

The back story:

One co-worker pleaded and cajoled to go to the New Communications Forum. I relented, found some money for her and another co-worker (who is smart enough to not post her bio on the web) to attend, gave them each a lucky quarter to play the slots for me, and entrusted co-worker No. 1 with my copies of Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined and the seminal work he quad-authored, The Cluetrain Manifesto with instructions that they be autographed. Co-worker No. 1 called early Thursday a.m. to tell me “mission accomplished.” She approached Weinberger before he spoke, procured the autographs and sent photographic proof via camera phone. Ain’t technology grand?

She also told me about the University of Alabama-Birmingham’s blogging project from Antarctica, which Weinberger also mentions on his blog.

From the Global Marketing Summit: David Houle on ‘The Shift Age’

Strategist and marketing consultant David Houle (who has a nice futuristic blog called Evolution Shift) pulled double duty at last month’s Global Marketing Summit — as the ringmaster who got to introduce speakers and make housekeeping announcements, and as a last-minute fill-in for one of the scheduled speakers who got waylaid by a snowstorm.

But Houle was up for the task and presented a broad view of the trends that are changing how we all work, play and exist in this current age (which he’s dubbed the Shift Age).

Houle’s presentation was not as focused on marketing as the other presentations, but that was fine with me. I thought his presentation helped to put in place a context for the shifts facing the marketing and communications world, and helped to set the stage for the rest of the conference. Drawing together ideas popularized by Tom Friedman (The World Is Flat), Marshall McLuhan and others, and intermixing PowerPoint graphs and charts to support his points (and a reference to the forecasts of the Mayan calendar to boot), Houle provided a broad but comprehensive overview of this new era. Personally, I’d love to sit down with the guy over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee to talk more about this stuff. But it wasn’t to be at this conference. Maybe another time.

Houle pointed out three fundamental forces of the Shift Age:

  • The flow to global. Economics have led the way to globalization, followed by politics, then culture.
  • The flow to the individual. The nation-state is becoming an anachronism, and other traditional social institutions — “the pillars of society” such as governments, religious organizations and, yes, even educational institutions — are “being diminished in terms of social impact.” People see themselves more as “global citizens.”
  • Accelerated connectedness. “For the first time in human history, we have a self-awareness of what’s going on around the world.” Expanding on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village, Houle discussed the notion of the Internet as a “neurosphere” (which is also the title of a book that ponders similar ideas).

Next, Houle presented the current realities of the Shift Age as they relate to marketing communications:

  • No gatekeepers. Individuals decide when and where they watch, read, listen. The age of mobile communication, iPods, TiVo and the Slingbox have given individuals more control over when, how and where they will get their information and entertainment.
  • Faster and faster. Everything’s speeding up. Nothing is slowing down.
  • Disintermediation. This term has fallen out of vogue, but Houle would like to see it make a comeback. It means the end of the middleman. It’s happened to the insurance industry (witness the rise of Geico, Progressive, Esurance, etc.), and Houle says it’s about to happen to the residential real estate business. [In some sense, it’s happening in education, too. – ed] To thrive in the era of disintermediation, organizations must either 1.) add value or 2.) lower rates.
  • Power to the people.
  • Say goodbye to long-range planning. Given the current pace of change, who can plan three to five years into the future? Even 18 months out seems like an eternity, and so much can change between now and then.

Anyone interested in this kind of stuff should check out Houle’s blog, Evolution Shift. If you read only one post on his site (but I doubt you can read just one), I recommend it be the one titled New and Threatening Becomes Acceptable and Mainstream.